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/ First CRISPR clinical trial gets green light from US panel
First CRISPR clinical trial gets green light from US panel
June 22, 2016 This article courtesy of Nature News.
The technique's first test in people could begin as early as the end of the year.
CRISPR, the genome-editing technology that has taken biomedical science by storm, is finally nearing human trials.
On 21 June, an advisory committee at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) approved a proposal to use CRISPR–Cas9 to help augment cancer therapies that rely on enlisting a patient’s T cells, a type of immune cell.
“Cell therapies [for cancer] are so promising but the majority of people who get these therapies have a disease that relapses,” says study leader Edward Stadtmauer, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Gene editing could improve such treatments and eliminate some of their vulnerabilities to cancer and the body’s immune system, he says.
This first trial is small and designed to test whether CRISPR is safe for use in people, rather than whether it effectively treats cancer or not. It will be funded by a US$250-million immunotherapy foundation formed in April by former Facebook president Sean Parker. The trial itself does not yet have a budget. The University of Pennsylvania will manufacture the edited cells, and will recruit and treat patients alongside centres in California and Texas.
The researchers will remove T cells from 18 patients with several types of cancers and perform three CRISPR edits on them. One edit will insert a gene for a protein engineered to detect cancer cells and instruct the T cells to target them, and a second edit removes a natural T-cell protein that could interfere with this process. The third is defensive: it will remove the gene for a protein that identifies the T cells as immune cells and prevent the cancer cells from disabling them. The researchers will then infuse the edited cells back into the patient.
“Last year’s excitement over CRISPR was in anticipation of this,” says Dean Anthony Lee, an immunologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, and a member of the NIH’s Recombinant DNA Research Advisory Committee (RAC), which reviewed the proposal. CRISPR, he says, makes genome engineering easy enough that such trials can move forward quickly.
The RAC reviews all proposals for human trials involving modified DNA that are conducted in the United States. Stadtmauer’s team will now have to convince US regulators and review boards at their own institutions to allow the trial. Immunologist Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania, who is a science adviser on the project, says that it could begin by the end of the year.
Other trials may not be far behind. Editas Biotechnologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, has said that it wants to use CRISPR in a clinical trial for a rare form of blindness as soon as 2017. However, RAC members say that they have not yet been approached about reviewing the trial.
Other techniques
CRISPR has courted most attention because of its ease of use, however the T-cell trial will not be the first test of the efficacy of using gene editing to fight diseases. In 2014, June led a trial using a different gene-editing system called zinc-finger nuclease.
His group took blood from 12 people with HIV and removed the gene that encodes a protein on T cells that the virus targets. They hoped that this would prevent infection of the cells. The results were encouraging, and the technique is now being used in clinical trials for several other conditions.
And last week, researchers at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London began a safety study with 10 children using a similar technique called TALENS. Instead of using a patient’s own cells, the system uses T cells from a donor that have been edited to remove genes that would cause the patient’s body to reject them. The gene editing then directs the T cells to attack the cancer and protects the cells from damage by other immunotherapy drugs.
Although CRISPR is easier to use than the other techniques, and better at editing multiple genes at once, June says that the main challenge will be overcoming CRISPR's propensity for ‘off-target’ edits. These are instances in which the system cuts or mutates unintended parts of the genome. And despite precautions, the immune system could still attack the edited cells.
Once bitten, twice shy
During the RAC meeting, one of the committee’s greatest concerns was a potential conflict of interest. Among other financial involvements, June has ties to the pharmaceutical company Novartis, holds patents on T-cell technologies, and could stand to benefit from the success of this trial. June declined to give details on the exact nature of his conflicts of interest, but says that his university is taking steps to manage it, such as preventing him from being involved in selecting patients.
Several RAC reviewers suggested that the University of Pennsylvania not be allowed to recruit patients at all and to leave it to other institutions: this language did not make it into their final approval.
However, the RAC members say they are being extra careful with this study. “Penn has a very extensive conflict and has a history,” says Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Looming over the discussion is the name Jesse Gelsinger, who died at age 18 while participating in an early gene-therapy trial conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.
A subsequent investigation found numerous problems with the study, including unreported animal data on the therapy’s ill effects and the fact that the investigators had a financial stake in the study’s outcome.
The incident is generally considered to have set gene therapy back by decades. “Any first use in humans we have to be extraordinarily careful,” Zoloth says. So a lot is riding on this trial.
But Mildred Cho, a bioethicist at Stanford University in California and an RAC member, says that safety work in animals for a new therapy will take researchers only so far. “Often we have to take the leap of faith.”
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2018 Pinstripe Preview: Jonathan Loaisiga
Probably the least household name amongst Yankees fans on the 40-man roster, Loaisiga is a 23-year-old right handed pitcher from Nicaragua. The Giants originally signed him when he was only 17, but injuries resulted in his eventual release. He pitched in the Yankees’ system in 2016, but saw his season end due to Tommy John Surgery. Now healthy, the Yankees decided to protect him from the Rule-5 Draft due to his high upside and solid performances in a small sample size.
2018 Pinstripe Preview: Luis Cessa
By Andrew Natalizio - January 30, 2018
Today's 2018 Pinstripe Preview features third year right-handed pitcher Luis Cessa. The young 25-year-old (26 in April) first came to the Yankees alongside bullpen stud Chad Green in the December 2015 trade that sent lefty Justin Wilson to the Detroit Tigers. Cessa had previously been a highly regarded prospect in the Mets' system and was a part of the Yoenis Cespedes trade along with 2016 American League Rookie of the Year Michael Fulmer. Luis Cessa made his major league debut on April 8th, 2016 in a relief effort against the Tigers and went on to play a swingman role for the 2016 Yankees the rest of the way.
MLB Trade Rumors: Yankees “checked in” on Jason Kipnis
Ken Rosenthal reported earlier yesterday that the Yankees had been in contact with the Cleveland Indians earlier in the offseason about two time All-Star second baseman, Jason Kipnis. However, the talks have “cooled.”
2018 Pinstripe Preview: Tyler Wade
In today’s installment of the Bronx Bomber Ball 2018 Pinstripe Previews, we will be looking at rookie infielder Tyler Wade. Wade was brought up last season after an injury landed Starlin Castro on the disabled list for a large portion of the summer. After a subpar first impression in the majors, Wade will go into spring training fighting for a spot in the Yankees' open infield.
2018 Pinstripe Preview: Jabari Blash
As part of the BBB’s ongoing lead-up to the 2018 Major League Baseball season we are previewing each member of the Yankees’ 40-man roster. Today’s preview features a new Yankee who has not yet donned the pinstripes, that being 28-year-old outfielder Jabari Blash.
2017 Review:
Acquired from San Diego in the December trade that sent third baseman Chase Headley and RHP Bryan Mitchell to the Padres, Blash is another imposing outfield specimen in the New York outfield that already includes monstrous sluggers Aaron Judge and 2017 National League Most Valuable Player Giancarlo Stanton. Blash comes in at 6’5”, 235 pounds.
Blash appeared in 61 games for the Padres in 2017 and produced a slash line of .213/.333/.341 with five home runs and 16 runs batted in over 164 at-bats. Certainly nothing mind-blowing, and nothing that indicates he’ll be a major factor for the Yankees next season, but he has raw ability and a huge frame that resembles an Aaron Hicks-Aaron Judge hybrid.
Blash struggles to make…
2018 Pinstripe Preview: Clint Frazier
By maxx - January 27, 2018
The Bronx Bomber Ball team is gearing up for the 2018 season by reviewing all the players on the 40-man roster. Here we look at where the player stands and what the 2018 season could mean for them. The first installment of the 2018 BBB Pinstripe Preview is former New York top prospect, Clint Jackson Frazier.
Six Yankees crack the MLB Top 100 Prospect Rankings
The top 100 prospect rankings for 2018 have been released, and, not surprisingly, the Baby Bombers are well represented. Here we will take a look at these players, how they are playing, and where you may see them in the near future.
A-Rod coming to the booth for ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball
By Matthew Luzzi - January 23, 2018
Alex Rodriguez has experienced quite the 180 in terms of his public image and perception ever since he retired from the sport of baseball. From presenting himself as a solid analyst on FOX during the postseason, to his love involvement with fellow celebrity J-Lo, A-Rod has been on a tear, and now it appears as if he has just landed yet another sweet deal.
2018 Bronx Bomber Ball mock Hall of Fame voting results
Along with being Yankee enthusiasts, the staff here at the BBB is comprised of avid baseball fans across the entirety of the sport. With that being said, we decided to complete a mock Hall of Fame voting using the 2018 candidates. Similar to the official voting, our ballots could only comprise of up to ten candidates, but choosing less than ten candidates was surely an option. Any player with a mark above 75% would be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, if the voting rested in our hands. Here are the results of the sixteen ballots casted:
Name Vote Percentage Vladimir Guerrero 100 Trevor Hoffman 100 Chipper Jones 100 Edgar Martinez 87.5 Mike Mussina 87.5 Roger Clemens 75 Jim Thome 75 Barry Bonds 56.25 Curt Schilling 43.75 Larry Walker
Yankees One Of Three Teams In On Julio Pablo Martinez
It's been a very slow going off-season Yankee fans the hot stove is more like the cold stove. Yesterday Ben Badler (Baseball America) broke the news that the New York Yankees are one of three teams (Texas and Miami) considered to be the favorites to sign top Cuban prospect outfielder Julio Pablo Martinez who's said to be 21-years-old.
Yankees come to terms with all arbitration-eligible players
Last week, the New York Yankees came to terms with all eight of their arbitration-eligible players, agreeing on one-year contracts with each and avoiding going to arbitration hearings, which are set to begin on January 29th.
Yankees sign lefty Wade LeBlanc to minors deal
By Alex Weir - January 16, 2018
The Yankees have signed LHP Wade LeBlanc to a minor league deal with an invitation to Spring Training. The deal also includes an opt out before the start of the regular season, and a guarantee of a $1 million salary if LeBlanc makes the Major League team. He also has an opt out on June 15, and would earn a salary of $32,000 per month in the minor leagues.
Former major league pitcher Ryan Dempster jokes about "pace of play" in regards to the death of the Trenton Thunder's bat dog, Derby
When the offseason is in a lull, major sports networks such as, MLB Network, need more stories to cover in order to fulfill the airtime requirement of television shows. On the MLB Network talk show, Intentional Talk, host Chris Rose asked guest co-host Ryan Dempster about Derby, the Trenton Thunder bat dog, who recently passed away at age 9 due to cancer.
Dempster started off by discussing that it is sad to lose a family member or loved one, but then decided to look on “the brighter side.”
“On the brighter side the pace of game will pick up in Trenton as they are working on that in the minor leagues,” Dempster said with an extremely straight face.
Rose immediately put his face into his hands in disbelief and asked Dempster to reiterate what he said in regards to pace of play.
Dempster went on to discuss how a person with two legs can retrieve a bat much faster than a bat dog who has four legs.
Pace of play is a focal issue in the sport right now, however, Dempster’s comments on the matt…
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Tag: background
September 27, 2018 at 9:18 pmCategory:General
Periodic system of elements (Mendeleev) – classification of chemical elements, allowing them to reveal the dependence of various properties on the atomic mass (more precisely, the number of protons in an atomic nucleus). The system is designed Russian chemist Mendeleev in the years 1869-1871 based on open them in 1869, the periodic law and is its graphic expression. Filed under: NY Museums . Total invited several hundred variants of the image of the periodic system (Analytical curves, tables, geometric figures, etc.). In the modern version of the system is assumed mixing elements in the two-dimensional table in which each column (number of columns is 8) determines the basic physico-chemical properties, and the rows represent the periods, to some extent similar to each other. The original work was titled Mendeleev as "Experience of elements based on their atomic weight and chemical similarity. According to legend, the idea of such a system came to him in a dream, but we know that once asked how he discovered the periodic system, Mendeleev said: "I'm over it, maybe twenty years of thought, and you think: sitting and suddenly Done. Click NY Museums to learn more.
German L. Meyer in 1864 on the basis of data on atomic weights suggested a table showing the ratio of atomic weights for several characteristic groups of elements. Many, especially in Germany, and believe it discoverer of the system – in 1870 he published his table of elements, developed, apparently independently of Mendeleev. Not to be confused with copyright, most students of the Western world are studying this system simply as "periodic system of elements", without mentioning the name of the discoverer. The essence of the discovery is that with increasing atomic weight of the chemical element of its properties do not change monotonically, but periodically. After a certain number of different properties of elements arranged in increasing atomic weight, the properties begin to repeat.
For example, sodium, like potassium, neon like argon, while gold is similar to silver and copper. Of course, the properties are not repeated exactly, are added to them and change. Subsequently, it became clear that the periodicity of the system elements is determined not by atomic weight, and the nuclear charge or atomic number of which depends on the structure and the filling of electronic shells of an atom of the element (atomic orbitals). Periodic system of elements
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Energy-Passive Groundwater Recharge Pump (EGRP)
New Technology in Basement Drainage
There is new technology to solve the problem of a wet basement.
Parjana, Inc. has developed a non-electric pump designed to relieve hydrostatic pressure and push the water down below the foundation and back into the natural water cycle.
The new Energy-Passive Groundwater Recharge Pump (EGRP) is powered by the energy created from the soil as it expands and contracts. "It is hard to understand a pump that doesn't run on electricity" says inventor and owner Andrew Niemczyk, Parjana Inc., Southfield, Michigan. "The pumps have to run on energy; it is true. We are just using the energy from Mother Nature."
The soil is constantly moving; expanding and contracting. When the soil gets wet it expands and as it dries it contracts. This pump is activated by that movement in the soil: hydrostatic pressure.
The hydrostatic pressure building up against the side of the foundation wall is what is pushing the water into your basement in the first place. If you relieve the hydrostatic pressure, you will resolve the cause of your water problem.
The Parjana system is a free-standing drainage system. It doesn't rely on a separate drainage system; it relies on the natural drainage system of the soil. The pumps are drilled straight down into the ground around the perimeter of the foundation. It punches through the layers of the soil and meets back up with the natural water table. "Often times, with other systems, the water is pumped into the sewer system or the storm drain where it has to be treated in order to use again" Niemczyk says. "With this system, the water is not lost. It is pushed back into Nature's water cycle and recharges the ground water."
In addition to the pump, Parjana has a water deflection panel. It is installed at the edge of the foundation. It is not nailed to the foundation so it can move with the soil. Together, the pump and the water deflection board make the complete Parjana waterproofing system.
This system replaces traditional waterproofing techniques for interior and exterior drainage applications. These pumps can be installed to solve almost every water problem. Stan Marko, Concrete Water Solutions, Columbiaville, Michigan was approached by the inventor to start installing Parjana products in 2010. "I have seen it work to solve Iron Algae, high water tables (or what is thought of as though as a high water table - when the water is trapped between two upper layers of the soil) and Artesian Wells, where the water is bubbling up from the ground" says Marko. Because it relieves hydrostatic pressure from the soil, it also solves humidity problems. Without dehumidifiers, this waterproofing system has created a 55% relative humidity level in many Michigan basements.
Because there is no need for full excavation or re-landscaping the cost is typically less than traditional exterior systems. "It costs less than a traditional exterior drainage system but it does cost more than the typical interior system" says Marko. "Unlike the interior systems, this system does not let the water come in at all. It keeps the water out and solves the cause."
Parjana's inventor has been testing this new technology since 2004. Seven years, before its release to the residential basement waterproofing market. This technology has been tested in all soil types and categories. It works on A, B, C and D soil classifications. It can be installed to relieve hydrostatic pressure around all different types of foundations (basements, crawlspaces or slabs) or even just bad drainage areas in the landscape.
One of the first pilot sites was a golf course in Michigan. Three areas of the golf course wouldn't drain properly and were constantly saturated. Niemczyk installed the EGR pumps around the perimeter of the problem areas and solved the problem. That was five years ago and the problem areas are still dry today.
The beauty of this system is that there is no maintenance. "Once it is done, it is done forever" says Niemczyk. There is no maintenance because it is self-cleaning. As the pump pulls the water through it siphons the water and cleans the pump.
Another example was a residential basement in Michigan. It had a major problem with water seepage. The homeowner had two previous waterproofing systems installed in his basement - an interior and exterior system - and the basement still leaked. The problem was too much water in the soil around his home. The hydrostatic pressure was building up and water was seeping through the walls. Marko says the soil was so saturated around the home that drilling for the EGR pumps was like drilling into mud. After one week since installing the EGR pumps, the homeowner reported his sump pumps have been running less each day. Progressively the water will dissipate and there won't be enough hydrostatic pressure for the water to penetrate the basement walls.
The EGR pumps can also be installed for new construction waterproofing. It removes the water from the soil preparing the ground for a new foundation, Niemczyk says. By removing the water from below the foundation, it will prevent future settlement; one of the typical causes of concrete cracks.
Tip #138. What is the main source for basement flooding, water saturation, or recurrent leaks?
About 90 to 95 percent of basements will experience some form of water penetration. The main source is usually caused by water not being carried far enough away from the foundation. Rainwater and snow melt saturating the ground against the foundation leaks in through fissures and cracks in the foundation, drain tiles, walls, and floors. Structural concerns are not as prevalent.
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Opinionations - Laying Our Gunn to Rest
Just short of a year ago, I wrote about the death of a beloved comedian who had come to call the Bay Area his home, but his passing impacted the entire globe. I was struck by the grief I experienced through the many who knew Robin Williams. It went deep because he was, by all accounts, an artist who gave of himself, perhaps too much so.
Today, my heart aches for another such artist, one who touched my life, just one is his vast galaxy. The Bay Area's art world has taken a major hit. Jimmy Gunn, actor and comedian and all sorts of other wonderful things, has left us. I don't know of another comic, actor, director, producer or friend who has nurtured so many others along not just in their careers, but their lives.
I met Jimmy decades ago when I worked for a comedy club. I don’t remember knowing him then, but Facebook came along and it was there we became friends. I have a soft spot for comedians, for so many reasons. They don’t only touch me with laughter, but I understand what drives them. I get it. I longed for all of my life to find that kind of bravery, standing on a stage and daring the world to take delight in their fallacies.
He wasn't a miserable comic. That's the perception, that the most brilliant comedy comes from pain. Jimmy didn't need to draw on such things; give him a paper bag and a stage, and he made us all fall hysterically in love. Next to Dr. Seuss himself, nobody gave Sam I Am more life than Jimmy Gunn.
One day Jimmy and I sat down to lunch together, just the two of us. I didn’t know how rare that was, finding out later that he found such close encounters difficult, and found comfort in groups, in bringing random people together. He was constantly springing new people on me with no warning. We sat that day for hours that seemed like a minute.
He was also a drama teacher, and we talked about acting, about the magic of the theatre. There is a feeling that one gets when walking on a stage, if it is where we're meant to be. The scent of dense velvet, the sound of well-trodden wood. It's the feeling of home.
“So, let me get this straight – you’re saying you are not an actor or a comedian? Didn’t you used to do stand up way back when?”
“No, I never did.” I told him how my acting career had stalled very early on, because I’d been traumatized with stage fright.
“Lots of us go through that. It’s really quite natural.” he admonished me.
“You’re not understanding. It was terrifying.”
“I do get it. But after you did a performance, or say, after that reading you just talked about where you read for the first time to a crowd… what happened?”
“They sat there staring at me.”
“Knowing what I do about you, it’s because you moved them. Left them speechless. Right? Did they applaud? And didn’t you feel wonderful after? Didn’t you think ‘look, I did it’?”
He stared at me with that quizzical look of his, the machine in his head trying to comprehend what did not make sense to him. “What were you thinking?”
“I thought, what the fuck did I just do?”
Jimmy never did understand that. As far as he knew, and believed, I was an actor, a comedian, a writer. I was someone who made the world feel.
“How would you know if I could move anyone?” I asked.
“I read your posts. I see how others react.”
“You read my posts?”
“All the time. And when you don’t post for a few days, I worry about you. Then, just when I think I need to check on you, you burst out with some long rant or some declaration of how you’re feeling, and I know that you’re okay for another day.”
That was it. Jimmy never liked to be questioned in his love for anyone, or of his faith in one’s abilities. We argued a lot about that over the next couple of years. “If I didn’t care, I simply wouldn’t respond. You are very far from that threshold, my dear.” He found it very troubling that I couldn’t embrace this.
I have always been enmeshed in the comedy world in some little way for the last 25 years. Jimmy brought me in as if I were one of them and never let me think that I wasn’t. Through him, I got to be where I loved to be; backstage. I wasn’t just somebody in the audience. I was on their side of the curtain, and I belonged as much as anyone else.
I’m going to really miss that. Of the hundreds of comics I know, nobody else has ever given that to me.
“As I have said that after the age of 12, everything else has been a bonus existence and not something to be taken lightly. One thing that has always remained, and that is take nothing too seriously and treat all others with equal or greater respect as I expect to be treated. Pretty much plain and simple, and remarkably easy to achieve. I honestly and without question love everyone who has ever loved me. So with these parts writ down in this chronicle, giving perhaps small insight into my philosophies about death and love and life, then at least there should be no more words after this. At least I know these words are here.” - Jimmy Gunn (July 30th, 2015)
A life of what could easily keep anyone down, Jimmy shone like the North Star. He told me often that the greatest joy in his life after marrying his best friend was mentoring others. The thing is he was so insanely great at it. That’s going to be bigger than my loss or anyone else’s.
The collective loss of Jimmy Gunn.
I met Jimmy while doing comedy, but I am not a comedian. Comedian is a title that has to be earned by hundreds if not thousands of gigs in places nobody knows exist (and in reality probably shouldn’t). When I met Jimmy I was, and I still am, a “showcase comic” to use Jimmy’s own vernacular. This is a nether world between being an “open micer” and being someone at least capable of earning a living performing live comedy. I have the utmost respect for the profession, a profession I will never truly be a part of because I waited until way to late in life to start. I act, play in a Grateful Dead cover band and perform comedy when I can, but never leave the house more than once or twice a week. My day job and family are my priority, and I am OK with that.
I say all this because it makes the way Jimmy and I became friends all that more amazing. My loftiest goal in comedy was (and is) to become capable of hosting a professional comedy show, and to that end a couple years ago I participated in the yearly comedy competition at Rooster T Feathers. Grand prize includes a week of hosting work at the club. I was already friends with Jimmy on Facebook, having seen him perform and knowing we had a lot of friends in common. We had a couple of exchanges before that competition, but our friendship truly began when I went off the rails on Facebook after failing to advance past the preliminary round. I said that if my results in that competition, which I had participated in three times before with similar results, were not improving then I was going to quite comedy. What was the point? I wasn’t getting any better.
Jimmy first responded to my post and then began sending me private messages, trying to talk me off the ledge. This is one of the great things about the Bay Area comedy scene…in LA, the collective response would have been “yeah, you go girl…quit comedy…(I’ll take yer stage time)”. Not only did Jimmy take the time to talk to me via Facebook, he suggested we have lunch the next day and talk about comedy. That took me aback initially…who would take the time to have lunch with a whiny open micer to talk them into continuing comedy? What’s the catch? I decided to go, and if I showed up and he was wearing a hockey mask and holding a baseball bat I would know I had made a mistake.
There was no hockey mask, only BBQ and talk of comedy. It was fabulous…then after I mentioned my daughter Siena he got that look on his face, one that was at the same time quizzical and mischievous. I was about to find out that he had mistaken me for another generic white Dad comic named Robert Forsythe. During the next break in the conversation he said “I have to be honest with you…you are not who I thought you were, and I only like to hang out with funny people so this may be the last lunch we have together.” Fortunately for me he liked my act, and we became pretty fast friends. A few months later I was visiting him in the hospital during one of those times he went in suddenly…I honestly forget why. He had a gig that night closing out a show I was also scheduled to be on. As we sat in the hospital he got that mischievous look on his face again and said “I am going to post on Facebook that, despite being in the hospital, I am still doing the gig…and I’d like you to go there and do my act. “ I was dumbfounded and terrified…so I did it. What an honor to be trusted with his act, and what a total 100% Jimmy thing it was to do. It was glorious, and I really doubt I’ll ever do anything in comedy to top that.
If you are friends with Jimmy you probably know that there are dozens (if not hundreds) of stories like mine. Jimmy was selfless with his time, and like me did comedy for the pure joy of it. That’s probably why we got along so well, or at least part of it. At that lunch he helped me realize what I already knew: I was doing comedy because it was fun. That’s the point. It’s supposed to be fun. He truly enjoyed helping others on their creative journeys, and for his consultations appeared to only want your company in return. There was, and is, nothing special about me…but he made me feel special. There is a comedian in the Bay Area, a real comedian, name Conor Kellicutt who pointed out quite correctly that there is now a void in Bay Area comedy and theater that each member of those communities should strive to fill. As he so aptly said none of us can be Jimmy…but we can be more Jimmy. Regardless of what we do we can freely give of ourselves to help those that come after us. We can be less competitive and more inclusive. We can do things we have never done before, and do them with courage we didn’t know we had. We can be more Jimmy.
What I did right to make a friend like that I will probably never know. The other night I was looking through our texts to get his address for someone who wished to send flowers. I had to wait a day after hearing the news because I couldn’t bear it. Jimmy and his wife Myra have become friends of my entire family, and my daughter adores them. Present tense, for that shall continue. It was too hard. When I got up the courage to look through them I found an exchange we had when he invited us all over for dinner. I was explaining that my daughter Siena only likes butter on her pasta. Jimmy was going to make mac and cheese....and wrote this:
"Tell her I will make a very light cheese pasta, and if that doesn't jive with her taste buds I'll whip up a quick batch of buttered noodles...and tell her Happy 95th Birthday"
It’s really a shame that the pain right now is too great for me to continue reading our chat history. It will never be OK that Jimmy’s gone, just like after 30 plus years it’s not OK that my brother is gone and after nine years it’s still not OK that my Dad is gone. It will never be OK but it will be…better. There are a lot of people out there that did not get to know him like I did, and I know I will be on the road to better when I can take joy in reliving the words we shared, rather than becoming sad and bitter over those we will never get to share.
Until then I will try to #BeMoreJimmy.
RIP my dear friend, Jimmy Gunn
~ Stephen Turner
Posted by Kymberlie ~ WriterOfTheStorm.com at 6:03 PM
Labels: bay area, bay area collective, cancer, comedy, dr seuss, green eggs and ham, grief, improve, jimmy gunn, kymberlie ingalls, loss, neuroticy, opinionations, rooster t feathers, san Francisco, stormy writer, theatre
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Peace or Violence?
It was a government official who said recently, that Christianity must be a violent religion because Jesus said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Many Christians were quick to challenge that - of course it’s not a violent religion, they replied, and Jesus never advocated anything but peace.
So how could they claim that, and what did Jesus mean by those puzzling words?
First of all, it’s important to realise that Jesus often used hyperbole - that is using exaggerated language to make an impact or to be memorable. For instance when Jesus talked about a camel going through the eye of a needle, it was a joke - of course it’s utterly impossible.
But a sword is no joke, nor is what he was talking about. When you look at the passage where these words are recorded (Matthew 10, verse 34), you quickly realise that Jesus is not talking about going to war with anybody. He is talking about the challenging effect he has, and will have, on families and friends. He does bring peace, but it is not an easy peace, but one that can divide families, setting children and parents against each other because of their different responses to the challenge of Jesus.
The point is that not everyone will accept him. There will be rejection, misunderstanding, even to the point of hatred and betrayal (see verses like Matthew 10: 21). It will be like a sword of division.
But those verses also make it clear that Jesus is not for one moment saying that anyone should take a sword and attack their attackers. He says things like - Don’t worry! Look out! Run away! Don’t be afraid!
There is another significant moment in the story of Jesus when swords are mentioned. When Jesus was about to be arrested, a great crowd came to the quiet orchard where he was praying, “armed with swords and clubs” (Matthew 26:47). At that point, one of Jesus’ followers pulled out a sword to defend him and injured one of the crowd. Jesus immediately responded with the command - “Put your sword away! Those who take the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). The sword was not his weapon, nor was violence his response.
Jesus himself, of course, faced violence. There was a moment when he was nearly stoned to death (John 8:59). In the end he faced the extreme violence of Roman punishment - scourging and crucifixion. But at no point did he advocate a violent uprising in his defence.
That strand of non-violence has often put Christians in a position of apparent weakness, as it still does in some parts of the world today. Sometimes, quite understandably, they have responded in self-defence. Either way, for followers of the Prince of Peace, aggression is not an option.
What we still have to face is how to explain the actions of Christians who have taken up arms and fought wars in the name of Christ and the Church. We hope to look at that next time.
Lord Jesus, you bring both comfort and discomfort, peace and challenge. Help me to receive your peace and to be ready to face its challenges.
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Environmentalists Say: Et Tu, RFK Jr.?
Elizabeth Benjamin
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s friends in the environmental movement felt blindsided by his New York Times OpEd, which was sharply critical of New York's newly expanded bottle-deposit law, Bill Hammond reports.
Kennedy penned the piece - and joined an industry-sponsored lawsuit against bill, which has successfully blocked its planned June 1 implementation - without so much as giving a heads-up to supporters who assumed he was an ally.
"He didn't have the courtesy of communicating with any of the groups that are part of the coalition," said Laura Haight of the New York Public Interest Research Group. Supporters include two groups that Kennedy has been affiliated with, Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Haight also sharply objected to Kennedy's arguments, especially the claim that the law was "cooked up by makers of sugared drinks and their allies in the Legislature" because the expansions extended only to water, and not flavored beverages.
("A Bottle Bill That Will Rot Your Teeth" was the headline of Kennedy's opus).
Haight said the Legislature excluded flavored drinks in deference to grocery stores who complained that sugary residue in returned bottles and cans would attract vermin into their stores.
Environmentalists accepted the compromise because water accounted for 70% of the beverage containers not already covered, she said.
Kennedy, the son of RFK and nephew of JFK, is best known as an environmental attorney. He was mentioned as a potential replacement for Hillary Clinton in the US Senate (for the seat once held by his father), but stepped aside to let his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, take center stage.
And we all know how that turned out.
He also briefly considered an AG run in 2006, creating a brief flurry of excitement among political reporters anxious to cover a race that pitted him against Andrew Cuomo, the ex-husband of his sister, Kerry Kennedy. (Sadly, that was not to be, either).
But, as Kennedy acknowledged toward the end of his OpEd, he's also a water bottler - as chairman of Keeper Springs, a company that donates after-tax profits to environmental causes.
This makes him part of an industry that lobbied hard to block the so-called "Bigger Better Bottle Bill," and he echoed the arguments of industry lobbyists in his article and in an affidavit he filed in support of the lawsuit.
"He's obviously carrying water for the bottled water companies," Haight said.
Haight said Kennedy called her Thursday to apologize for not contacting her sooner. He agreed to meet with her and other supporters of the law and correct any factual mistakes he may have made in his affidavit, she said.
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2009/05/environmentalists-say-et-tu-rf.html
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Drum Set for Young Child?
Thread starter MarkF786
MarkF786
I play the guitar and keyboards, so please forgive my intrusion into the drummer's world I have a four year old daughter who is big and intelligent for her age - she's about 3'8" and can fully hold an intelligent conversation, and most people think she's 6 - and she wants to get a drum set.
At home she likes to play with my guitars, keyboards, and hand drums, but after taking her to Sam Ash and Guitar Center 6 months ago where she played some drum kits, she keeps insisting that she wants a one. My wife and I have tried to talk her out of it, but she's persistent.
The best acoustic kit seems to be the junior Ludwig set, but it takes up a lot of room! I wouldn't mind if I knew she'd still be playing it years from now, but who knows if it's just a phase she's going through.
I'd really prefer the Roland HD-1 set, which I'd probably have fun with myself, but the price-tag is a bit expensive for a kid.
The Yamaha DD-65 looks interesting, though the pedals suck (and if you buy quality pedals to go with it, you're up in the same price range of the Roland HD-1).
Do you guys have any other suggestions of what I should consider? She really does want acoustic drums, but for space & noise considerations, I'd rather go digital.
larryz
Hi there. I'd go the used cheap First Act or similar kids model route via Craigslist. You should really have no trouble find one for around $75. Certainly pay no more than $100 for anything. If she was a little older, maybe 8 or so I'd suggest a bop 4-piece kit, like Sonor Safari. Good luck. I'm sure you'll get many more replies, similar to mine.
My daughter is an adult now, but I remember the 4 years of age period with fondness. Great time to be a dad!
tamadrm
larryz said:
I Agree.I'm not a big fan of electronic kits,especially for beginers.They just don't feel like real(acoustic) drums.
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Zelda: Breath of the Wild patch brings a much-requested feature
Emma Schaefer
ON May 2, 2017 @ 12:30PM
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has just gotten a major audio update.
A new voice pack, which will automatically be patched in to the Switch version of the game, lets players choose from any of the Nintendo Switch’s nine languages for the game’s audio. Wii U players can download the patch for free from the Nintendo eShop. Supported languages include English, French (standard and Canadian), German, Italian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Russian, and Japanese.
The audio is decoupled from the subtitles, so this means that players can, for example, hear Japanese audio with English subtitles. For fans who weren’t impressed with the game’s English voice acting, this is a huge quality of life improvement.
The patch was announced alongside Nintendo’s full reveal of the game’s first DLC. While that expansion won’t be out until this summer, the voice pack can be downloaded for free immediately.
Source: Zelda.com
open-world
About Emma Schaefer
Emma’s early gaming was mostly done in secret, as the only gamer in a family of normal people. She still retains skills from this dark period in her life, such as the ability to teleport instantly across the house away from the computer, and holds a gold medal in the Olympic sport of “Hide the Gameboy.” Sorry, Mom, now you know. Find her on Twitter @Emma4EGM
Finally, you can have Japanese audio and English subtitles.
By Emma Schaefer | 05/2/2017 12:30 PM PT
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The Proclamatorium of Post Street
When Emperor Norton lived at the Eureka Lodgings on Commercial Street (between Montgomery and Kearny), from 1863 to 1880, his days often followed a similar pattern. Shortly after awaking and dressing, he made his way to the Empire House lodgings next door. The Empire House had a reading room, where the Emperor was able to read the dailies — probably the Morning Call and the Daily Alta California. After reading the papers, he strolled the couple of blocks up Kearny Street to Portsmouth Square, where he spent the rest of the morning meeting and speaking with friends.
In the afternoon — perhaps after a repast at the "free lunch counter" of one of his favorite taverns, the Bank Exchange or Martin & Horton's, both on Montgomery Street — the Emperor could be found at one of a number of libraries and reading rooms in San Francisco where he was welcomed. Perhaps the Mercantile Library. Perhaps even the reading room of the Bohemian Club, where there was a portrait of him, by Virgil Williams, in the reading room — even though, almost certainly, the Emperor himself wasn't a Bohemian.
But it appears that the Emperor's favorite "afternoon residency" was at the Mechanics' Institute library and chess room. In 1866 — three years after Emperor Norton moved in to the Eureka — the Institute built a new home at 31 Post Street (pictured below) that served the library for the next 40 years, until it was lost in the earthquake and fire of 1906. (The Institute's current building — same site, slightly different number (57 Post) — was completed in 1910.)
Photograph, by Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), of the Mechanics' Institute's building at 31 Post Street (1866-1906). Emperor Norton — who frequented the Institute "daily," according to the Morning Call newspaper — wrote many of his Proclamations in this building. Source: "Lone Mountain College Collection of Stereographs by Eadweard Muybridge, 1867-1880," Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Here, Emperor Norton met and spoke with technological visionaries like Andrew Hallidie (1836-1900), the "father" of the cable car; Frederick Marriott (1805-1884), the inventor of the Avitor, a prototype steam-powered airship; and Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), the pioneering photographer who, in 1869, took a certain legendary photograph of the Emperor on a bicycle.
It also was in this building — and on the Institute's engraved stationery — that Emperor Norton wrote many, possibly most, of his Proclamations.
Photograph of the Mechanics' Institute's 1866 building at 31 Post Street, San Francisco. The building was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Source: The Mechanics Institute.
And it was said that, while the Emperor was here, he played a fine game of chess. His biographer, William Drury, related the memory of the Morning Call newspaper that
[h]e was seen daily in the chess-room of the Mechanics’ Library, and there were few who could beat him at the royal game.
categories / Campaign research, Histories, Proclamations, Places
tags / Mechanics Institute, photographs, Eadweard Muybridge, Morning Call, chess
The Confluence of Market, Post & Montgomery Streets in 1868
Emperor Norton at the Metropolitan Hotel
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Home / News / Barnes to be inducted to NICC Hall of Fame
Barnes to be inducted to NICC Hall of Fame
Wed, 11/01/2017 - 1:04pm admin
CRESCO - There are city people, and then there are country people.
Thomas Barnes of Cresco arrived at this realization very quickly after graduation from Notre Dame High School in 1970, when he enrolled at DeVry Institute in Chicago to pursue a career in electronics.
“I liked math, electronics and radios when I was a high school student, so I enrolled at DeVry. When I arrived in the big city as a student – the crowds of people, the apartment housing near Michigan Avenue, the different attitudes – I quickly realized this environment wasn’t for me,” Barnes laughed, recalling his short-lived urban experience.
“I came back home and enrolled at Area One Vocational-Technical School (now Northeast Iowa Community College) when the College was still in its infancy. Looking back at that time in my life and the decision I made to return home, I feel as if God was watching over me.”
After graduating from the College with a Building Materials Management degree in 1971, Barnes embarked on a 45-year year career in building, management, construction, customer service and sales. Now first vice president of sales and estimating for Cresco Building Service, Barnes’ career is equally devoted to another calling: to serve the people of Howard County and his Cresco hometown.
On Monday, Nov. 6, Northeast Iowa Community College will induct Barnes into the Hall of Fame to celebrate and recognize his many honors, volunteer service and community achievements.
As an NICC student, Barnes found inspiration and career direction under the guidance of the late Bob Bartell, who taught Building Materials Management students. Bartell served as his teacher and life mentor and was instrumental in Barnes securing his first position as an intern, and then drafter and salesperson, for Spahn & Rose Lumber Company. His NICC education and experience in customer relations for Spahn & Rose deepened his understanding of communication and customer needs.
“My generation growing up in school was somewhat sheltered from many of the challenges in real life. I learned in my early career how to relate to customers and people, to be diplomatic and be positive,” Barnes said. In 2000, his customer service and managerial talents brought him to Cresco Building Service and to the leadership position he holds today.
He and his wife, Susan, believe that professional success is interconnected community service and concern for others’ well-being. He served as a volunteer firefighter for the Cresco Fire Department from 1973-1996, and the Barnes’ have devoted their time and volunteer work to the people of Cresco and Howard County.
The Barnes’ have served on the Mighty Howard County Fair Board since 1983, are active in the 4-H and FFA youth programs in the area, Cresco Speedway and serve as Executive Director (Tom) and Executive Secretary/Treasurer (Sue) of the Association of Iowa Fairs.
After the merging of the Assumption and St. Joseph’s parishes into Notre Dame Parish in Cresco in 1999, enrollment at the parish’s elementary school grew steadily. A few parish members and school staff members started a discussion on a school and church addition that would relieve an overflowing population of students and make the church accessible to persons with mobility issues.
Barnes, as a member of the Notre Dame School Board, worked with this group to raise funding for the school and church addition and remodeling effort.
He also identified strategies during the process that influenced the final product’s architectural beauty, aesthetic and cost, drawing upon his building materials and professional estimating expertise.
“When I was involved in the process with the building committee, it just really hit home that I needed to stay involved. This is my school and my parish. We brought construction costs down from just over $2 million to $1.6 million and raised the money in a year – it was fabulous,” Barnes said, of the completed construction in 2010.
“This is what my school, community and my parents taught me: ‘You give back to your community.’”
He has received numerous honors for his leadership in the community, including: Knights of Columbus Community Activity Award (1979); Meritorious Service to 4-H (1990); Degree of Honorary Chapter Farmer/FFA (1991); Cresco’s Citizen of the Year (2002); Iowa 4-H Hall of Fame (2002); Association of Iowa Fairs Hall of Fame (2006, both Tom & Sue); and the Outstanding Community Service Award from Cresco Industrial Development Corporation (2016). Many other community honors have recognized the service and dedicated efforts of both Tom and Susan Barnes.
Since its founding in 1966, Northeast Iowa Community College graduates have achieved distinction in their professions and through service to their communities. Retired faculty, staff and administrators continue to lend their time, talent and expertise to help NICC, students and graduates succeed. For more information on the College’s Foundation and ways you can contribute, contact: Julie Wurtzel, director of annual and alumni giving, at (800) 728-2256, ext. 218; Barbara O’Hea, director of the NICC Foundation, at (800) 728-7367, ext. 284; or visit www.nicc.edu/foundation.
NICC
cresco forecast
Cresco Times
Cresco TPD
214 N. Elm Street
Cresco, IA 52136
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Victoria State ‘future proofs’ with investment in major transport and infrastructure projects
Murt Coleman and Dónal Minnock report from the St Patrick’s Day Seminar in Melbourne, where Victoria State’s infrastructure projects, as well as Transport Infrastructure Ireland’s plans, were outlined to delegates
Engineers Ireland continued its strong focus at maintaining and supporting links with its regional branches as it arranged for a representation earlier in the year at the annual Engineers Ireland Australia/New Zealand Region Saint Patrick’s Day Seminar, held this year at the Crown Palladium in Melbourne, Australia.
ICE president Sir John Armitt earlier this year delivered his presidential address, ‘Civil engineers: Shaping ourselves and our world’, to Engineers Ireland members at Clyde Road. Sir John has made a significant contribution to Britain’s infrastructure. Among his many achievements was leading the team responsible for constructing venues including the Olympic Stadium, Aquatics Centre, Velopark, media centre and athletes facilities, as well as associated transport systems, for the London 2012 Olympics.
In his presentation, he placed a strong emphasis on the need for Engineers Ireland to foster relations with other professional bodies at a domestic level and to nurture strong international and cross-community links and collaboration across the engineering profession.
Engineers Ireland’s representation at this event in Melbourne was an ideal opportunity to galvanise such links and to communicate with the ex-patriate members of the engineering community who have an interest in the current state of the construction sector and significant projects and opportunities arising in Ireland.
This was the second year that the seminar was run by the Antipodean branch, following on from the success of the inaugural event held in 2015 and attended by former director general, John Power. Representing Engineers Ireland at this year’s event were Murt Coleman, Executive Board member and chair of the Finance Committee, and Dónal Minnock, operations manager, Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) and chair of the Roads and Transportation Society.
Infrastructure projects in Victoria State
L-r: Darren McDonnell, Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources; Aoibhin Flanagan, Arup; Colin Dowdall, Wood and Grieve Engineers; Dónal Minnock, Transport Infrastructure Ireland; and Joe McSweeney, Area3
The first speaker was Daniel Mulino, the Victorian parliamentary secretary for the Department of Treasury and Finance. He presented on the very comprehensive range of infrastructure projects that the Department were pursuing. Mulino noted that Ireland and the State of Victoria were somewhat equivalent in terms of population size (currently 5.791 million). Victoria has enjoyed significant population growth (circa 1.5-1.7 per cent) over the last 20 years and it is projected to continue growing at equivalent levels.
Victoria has a AAA credit rating, which is exceptional for a State Government, and it has significant capacity to raise its debt levels whilst retaining its strong credit rating. It was interesting to hear that the Government appeared to be open not only to the possibility of up-front capital spending, but also the utilisation of a private-sector funding to facilitate the delivery of some of its more complex and challenging projects including:
• 50 level crossings project:
This project involves the removal of 50 dangerous and congested level crossings, with the goal of transforming the way people live, work and travel across metropolitan Melbourne and the improvement of safety for drivers and pedestrians. To put into an Irish context, this project is effectively the equivalent of 50 Newlands Cross projects and therefore explains the circa $6 billion dollar cost and the decision to link funding with the lease of Melbourne Port.
The project has an ambitious programme with all 50 level crossings to be removed over the next eight years, with at least 20 level crossings to be completed by 2018. The Victoria State Government has utilised an innovative means of financing the 50 level crossings project, through the linking of it with the lease of Melbourne Port, such that the lease proceeds go to the Victorian Transport Fund (VTF), which in turn supports projects like removing level crossings, building Melbourne Metro and the Western Distributor and other important transport initiatives.
Around the world and across Australia, successful port leases have seen benefits flowing to the community, exporters, port users, industry and the state and in the case of Melbourne only the port’s commercial operations are being leased. The Victorian and Commonwealth Governments retain responsibility for regulating the port’s safety, security and environmental functions.
• Melbourne Metro:
The Metro Project is a significant priority project for the Victoria State Government also. The project will deliver two 9km rail tunnels from South Kensington to South Yarra via the Melbourne City Business District (CBD) with five new underground stations. The line will run from the north-west to the south-east and combine the Sunbury Line with the Cranbourne/Pakenham Line of Melbourne. The funding of this project, with a price tag of $10.9 billion Australian dollars, is quite simply not possible by relying on the fare box.
Challenges lie ahead in determining how best to subdivide the project to provide for delivery, with appropriate risk transfer and public sector funding will be a vital component. For example, the Victorian Government has opted to utilise an Availability Payment PPP-type procurement for the delivery of the tunnel and stations.
• Western Distributor Road:
The Western Distributor is a proposed 5km toll road in Melbourne, to link the West Gate Freeway at Yarraville with CityLink at Docklands via a tunnel beneath Yarraville.
The $5.5 billion project was proposed as an unsolicited offer by infrastructure company Transurban in 2014 as a means of alleviating congestion on the M1 corridor, providing a new river crossing as an alternative to the West Gate Bridge and moving trucks away from homes in the city’s inner west. The freeway-standard link would include a 1.5 km-long, six-lane tunnel and a new bridge over the Maribyrnong River.
The Victorian Government announced in December 2015 it would proceed with the project. The project was presented to the then Victorian Labour opposition in 2014 as an unsolicited proposal by Transurban. Transurban offered to pay two-thirds of the cost of construction in exchange for a 10- to 15-year extension of its CityLink toll contract. It will be a significant challenge to the Victorian Government in negotiating a value for money outcome for the exchequer. Ireland itself has had mixed experiences with unsolicited infrastructure offers and it will be interesting to see how this project progresses.
• Murray Basin rail project:
This project involves standardising the rail freight lines servicing the Murray Basin region in the north-west of Victoria. The project will also increase axle loading on these lines from 19 to 21 tonnes. These improvements will mean the freight industry in the Murray Basin region will be able to deliver exports to Victoria’s ports in a more efficient and cost-competitive way. Standardisation and upgrade of all the key rail lines in the Murray Basin Region comes at a nominal cost estimate of $416.2 million.
Transport Infrastructure Ireland projects
L-r: Dónal Minnock, Transport Infrastructure Ireland; Darren McDonnell, Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources; and Murt Coleman, Engineers Ireland Executive Board member
Representing Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), I was very pleased to be invited to present on the broad range of activities with which TII is now engaged as it approaches its first anniversary post the merger of the National Roads Authority and the Railway Procurement Agency. TII’s remit is now more diverse, in so far as in addition to it being a funding agency for local authority-delivered roads projects, it is a direct client on many very significant infrastructural projects through its PPP programme such as the M50 upgrade PPP Scheme, the Limerick Tunnel PPP Scheme, but more notably the New Ross Bypass, the Enniscorthy Bypass and the N17/N18 PPP Schemes currently under construction.
When you add into the mix the very significant milestone that is the LUAS Cross City project, also currently under construction, it is reasonable to say that despite our very challenging budgetary circumstances, TII is progressing circa €1 billion worth of heavy infrastructure.
Furthermore, through our Network Management and Commercial Operations Divisions, we now have a pipeline of operations, maintenance, and asset-management services in relation to our Motorway Maintenance & Renewal Contracts (MMaRC), Operation and Maintenance of Tunnels and Traffic Control Centre Contract (OMTTCC), Luas red and green line operations and M50 barrier free tolling projects, a pipeline that quite simply did not exist just over a decade ago.
Nevertheless, TII also has in place numerous shovel-ready projects that are subject to the availability of funding under the current development plan ‘Building on Recovery 2016-2022’ as well as a broad range of other roads projects in the pipeline that it may be in a position to advance in the event of improving Exchequer returns and any interim review of the current plan that might occur.
With the ambitious Metro North project now being advanced by TII with an intended commencement of construction in 2021, it seems that TII is ready to anticipate any improvement in capital funding availability, and that it does indeed offer a prospect to the expatriate community seeking to venture home to return the benefit of their international experience to the Irish construction sector.
Engineers intending to return to Ireland
Paul Carroll, who is a director of CPL Resources, explained the services offered by CPL (originally Computer Placements Limited) to then engineering community, and more particularly in the context of the Engineers Ireland ANZ Branch technical seminar, to the many engineers in attendance at the seminar who were exploring the possibilities available to them at returning home to Ireland.
He described a positive outlook at home for graduates in the areas of STEM and more significantly STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering Arts and Mathematics) and noted the use of their online service One Tribe, specifically aimed at facilitating a move back home to progress their careers back in Ireland.
The final word came from Murt Coleman of Engineers Ireland, who impressed upon the audience the need for Engineers Ireland to grow its membership at home and abroad and to try to establish itself further as a profession of reputation and integrity. He noted the importance of maintaining strong ties with the expatriate engineering community and the important role Engineers Ireland had in paving the way home for its disapora when economic stability and furthermore growth re-emerged in Ireland.
Coleman paid tribute to the excellent rate of progress of the Australia/New Zealand region having attended committee meetings whilst there and encouraged inter alia the Roads & Transportation Society continue to support and engage with the branch to underpin its further establishment.
The audience was a diverse mix of consultants and contractors alike and some interesting questions were raised, such as when we might see a freeflow scenario on all our toll roads across the national road network in Ireland. The question of why Irish Government cannot utilise superannuation funds to support infrastructure development to meet the future demands on Irish infrastructure was also queried.
Interestingly, one of the more ‘adversarial’ questions asked by a member of the local contracting fraternity of the Department of Treasury & Finance representative related to the relatively sudden extensive expenditure announcements by the Victorian State Government and the need to get access to readily skilled and affordable labour. The question seemed to echo the experiences in Ireland throughout the period of exceptional construction output experienced in or around the period 2000-2005.
It seems that the scarcity of well trained and experienced tradespeople is a universal problem (something that was, incidentally, verified by my Melbourne based sister-in-law’s complaints to me on how no-one she contacted was interested in doing their reasonably significant basement floor replacement project that they desperately needed doing!).
It seems Sir John Armitt may have been right on a number of fronts. One of the challenges of our profession is the fact that we need as many trades/technicians/inspectors as we need engineers. One of the challenges also facing our industry and, in particular, our policymakers and decision makers is the need to ensure that there is sufficient capacity in the market to absorb (and in a cost-effective manner) any significant increases in expenditure that may arise on the back of improved economic circumstances.
In essence, it seems that the State of Victoria is in a buoyant position and is very much focused on the future. It may have an equivalent economy size to Ireland, but the perspective is so very much different. Ireland is currently working towards a position of ‘recovery’, whereas as engineers I think that we can only look in envy at our Australian counterparts in the State of Victoria and the extent of the projects being progressed.
Its development plan is aimed at catering for, or perhaps as Victorians might claim, catching up with the anticipated demand, whereas our current development plan is aimed at rebalancing. As an Irishman and an engineer, I hope that our circumstances can continue to improve such that our Government can return to setting our development plans based on catering for the future needs of our citizens, and with investment levels that are per capita/as a percentage of GDP proportionate and commensurate with other State economies similar in scale and character.
From a transportation perspective, we need to proceed with the delivery of our national road network, our rail network, our light-rail network and our bus network to underpin the economic competitiveness of the State, and to facilitate the quality of life that all our citizens should be able to enjoy.
http://www.engineersjournal.ie/2016/08/09/engineers-ireland-australia-transport-infrastructure/http://www.engineersjournal.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Melbourne.jpghttp://www.engineersjournal.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Melbourne-300x300.jpg 2016-08-09T13:13:01+00:00 David O'RiordanCivilArup,Australia,civil,infrastructure,New Zealand,Transport Infrastructure Ireland
Engineers Ireland continued its strong focus at maintaining and supporting links with its regional branches as it arranged for a representation earlier in the year at the annual Engineers Ireland Australia/New Zealand Region Saint Patrick’s Day Seminar, held this year at the Crown Palladium in Melbourne, Australia. ICE president Sir...
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With No Comments Permalink
November 19, 2014 Nick Preston
Tū Kahika Programme Scholarship
Tū Kahika is an award that supports young Māori students interested in a career in health, into and through the University of Otago’s Foundation Year health sciences course and beyond. Tū Kahika prepares students for further study in health sciences (particularly Health Sciences First Year) by providing wrap-around academic, cultural, pastoral and financial support over the year.
Māori are significantly under-represented in the health workforce relative to population size (Ministry of Health, 2006). This under-representation also occurs within a context of marked ethnic inequalities in education and health and Māori experience disproportionately greater health need, morbidity and mortality when compared with non-Māori (Robson & Harris, 2007).
Advancing Māori educational attainment, particularly in science, is vital for increasing Māori health professional numbers. Cram (2010), in a report on the Māori health workforce states, “Māori secondary school students need to be encouraged to study science and then be supported to successfully do so (at personal, pedagogical and curriculum levels)” (p. 18). Unfortunately students studying at Māori language immersion schools, or rural and provincial schools have lower access to senior secondary school science study. Cram further highlights the importance of taking an inter-sectorial approach to achieve Māori health workforce development goals (Cram, 2010).
Tū Kahika is an award that supports young Māori students interested in a career in health, into and through the University of Otago’s Foundation Year health sciences course and beyond.
Tū Kahika prepares students for further study in health sciences (particularly Health Sciences First Year) by providing wrap-around academic, cultural, pastoral and financial support over the year. It works together with different departments within the university, and is part of wider vision.
It was initiated by the university, but with support from different government institutions. In line with policy objectives, in 2009 the Ministry of Health, Tertiary Education Commission and University of Otago together developed ‘The Otago Project’ to increase Māori student recruitment, retention and achievement in health science programmes at the University of Otago.
Pivotal to the success of the Otago Project was the establishment of the Māori Health Workforce Development Unit (MHWDU) in 2010. Situated within the Division of Health Sciences, the MHWDU has taken a strategic approach to Māori student recruitment, retention and achievement implementing and supporting a number of programmes including Tū Kahika. Following the establishment of the MHWDU and implementation of its student programmes, Māori student recruitment, achievement and retention outcomes have been very promising with demonstrable increases in Māori student entry into Otago University’s health professional programmes.
MHWDU strategy and approach is guided by Māori values and worldview. Framing health workforce initiatives ‘within indigenous world views’ is required for making gains in indigenous health workforce development. Embedding MHWDU activities within a kaupapa Māori framework is also integral to Māori achievement. A kaupapa Māori approach enables Māori staff to relate and operate according to Māori values and norms and be culturally responsive to the needs of a diversity of Māori students. The approach taken does not attempt to ‘shape students to fit’. The institution and a viewpoint that students need to be changed in order to ‘fit in’ is indeed antithetical to a kaupapa Māori approach. Rather, the MHWDU takes a strengths based approach that addresses systemic and organisational challenges and supports students to navigate pathways that will result in their achievement and success.
As with other indigenous peoples, Māori are significantly under-represented in the health workforce relative to the population size (Ministry of Health, 2006). This under-representation also occurs within a context of marked ethnic inequalities in education and health. Also Māori experience disproportionately greater health need, morbidity and mortality when compared with non-Māori in New Zealand. This project is implemented on the level of students, local communities and the management of institutions.
Tū Kahika is a culturally responsive scholarship programme, overseen by the MHWDU, supporting young Māori to complete the University of Otago’s Foundation Year Health Sciences course.
Tū Kahika aims to reduce barriers that Māori students encounter when entering into university study for the first time, and provides a platform for students to increase awareness, preparedness and eligibility for further health science and health professional study. The first phase of Tū Kahika was implemented in 2010 with 14 students gaining scholarships in that year, 19 students in 2011, 10 students in 2012 and 18 scholarship holders in 2013.
The decision for a programme based within a Foundation Year course was based on a recognised need for addressing educational gaps and disadvantage. Māori students in years 11-13 have relatively lower science subject participation and attainment in comparison to non-Māori. Māori students are also disproportionately represented in lower decile schools with relatively few school leavers continuing into tertiary study when compared with students in more affluent schools.
A decile is a 10% grouping, there are ten deciles and around 10% of schools are in each decile. A school’s decile rating indicates the extent to which it draws its students from low socio-economic communities. Decile 1 schools are the 10% of schools with the highest proportion of students from low socio-economic communities, whereas decile 10 schools are the 10% of schools with the lowest proportion of these students. The lower a school’s decile rating, the more funding it gets. The increased funding given to lower decile schools is to provide additional resources to support their students’ learning needs. A decile does not indicate the overall socio-economic mix of the students attending a school or measure the standard of education delivered at a school.
See: http://www.minedu.govt.nz/Parents/AllAges/EducationInNZ/SchoolsInNewZealand/SchoolDecileRatings.aspx
The University of Otago acknowledges the support for Tū Kahika received from the Ministry of Health and the Tertiary Education Commission, and has a wide support-base in the public domain.
New Zealand’s health workforce does not reflect New Zealand’s population and, in particular Māori and Pacific peoples are greatly under-represented in all health professions (Robson & Harris, 2007). Furthermore Māori and Pacific populations will grow over the next decades, with increasing demand for quality health services that meet community preferences and needs (Robson & Harris, 2007).
The importance of a representative workforce is reflected in Government policy (Health Workforce Advisory Committee, 2002; Ministry of Health, 2006), University of Otago strategy, and in Division of Health Sciences objectives to ‘contribute to the national good’ (Crampton, Weaver & Howard, 2012). The University of Otago’s Division of Health Sciences is committed to increasing the number of Māori health professional graduates (Crampton, Weaver & Howard, 2012).
In line with policy objectives, in 2009 the Ministry of Health, Tertiary Education Commission and University of Otago together developed ‘The Otago Project’ to increase Māori student recruitment, retention and achievement in health science programmes at the University of Otago. Pivotal to the success of the Otago Project was the establishment of the Māori Health Workforce Development Unit (MHWDU) in 2010. Situated within the Division of Health Sciences, the MHWDU has taken a strategic approach to Māori student recruitment, retention and achievement implementing and supporting a number of programmes including Tū Kahika. Following establishment of the MHWDU and implementation of its student programmes, Māori student recruitment, achievement and retention outcomes have been very promising with demonstrable increases in Māori student entry into Otago University’s health professional programmes.
The Tū Kahika programme encompasses:
Scholarship components. Through Tū Kahika students are provided: Foundation Year tuition fees; financial contribution to accommodation in a University of Otago Residential College; additional targeted tutorials in core subjects; a Kaiārahi (dedicated support person); activities that foster whanaungatanga (a sense of family and belonging); career development and health career exposure; and professional and cultural development.
Service development and delivery components: Leadership and management; marketing; stakeholder relationships; student recruitment and selection; provision of student services; outcomes monitoring and evaluation.
In Tū Kahika up to 20 Māori students from around New Zealand come together to live and study with the ultimate goal of a health professional career. Students who aspire for a career in health apply for a place in the programme and applicants are shortlisted according to a range of criteria. Shortlisted applicants are interviewed with their whānau (family) in (or close to) their home region. The interview process provides whānau the opportunity to learn about Tū Kahika, Health Sciences First Year and pathways to careers in health. The interview is an opportunity to demystify University and is a starting-point for ongoing relationships. Students who are not accepted in the Tū Kahika programme are given comprehensive study and course advising by the interviewers.
Tū Kahika students are provided:
assistance with their transition into university
guaranteed accommodation in a Residential College
a financial contribution towards accommodation ensures that basic needs (such as food and housing) are met and students benefit from additional academic, pastoral and social support
Students’ tuition fees are also paid in full
a dedicated Kaiārahi (Coordinator) is employed to work with each student to settle into university and coordinates extra activities including tutorials and professional and cultural development. The Kaiārahi gains a detailed understanding of each student’s learning strengths and challenges and works closely with academic programme components to support positive academic success across the course of the year.
Tū Kahika students receive:
guaranteed accommodation in a University of Otago Residential College (either Studholme College or Arana College)
$5,000 towards Residential College costs
Foundation Year tuition fees paid in full
additional tutorials and academic assistance
a dedicated Kaiārahi (support person) to assist with orientation through university
a strong support network of Māori staff and students
professional and cultural development (knowledge of health career pathways and options)
university study skills, exam preparation and time management techniques
academic preparedness for further tertiary study in health sciences, in particular Health Science First Year (HSFY)
The project is sustainable through support from both the government and the university. Elements have inspired projects in other regions of the world.
Tū Kahika is a successful programme. The programme is meeting its objective of contributing to increasing the Māori health workforce in New Zealand by providing effective strategies for Māori students to achieve academically and become prepared for later tertiary study, predominantly in health.
Tū Kahika has provided many students with the opportunity to gain University Entrance, to develop an understanding of the requisite science subjects and to become better academically prepared for HSFY.
The success of the programme is seen in the high levels of retention and achievement in health science study and university education and in the number of students gaining places in ‘difficult to enter’ professional training in medicine and dentistry.
Tū Kahika provides a very effective first year tertiary experience for Māori students, preparing them for later health science study. The programme’s success is founded on being culturally responsive, academically robust and strengths based. Tū Kahika is successfully contributing to increasing the Māori health workforce in New Zealand.
See below some data of developments 2009 – 2011:
Tagged: Bursary, Counseling, Culturally sensitive, Ethnic minority, Health Sciences, New Zealand, Socio economic disadvantage, Study Skills
http://www.otago.ac.nz/tukahika
Zoe Bristowe - zoe.bristowe@otago.ac.nz
http://www.otago.ac.nz/prospectivestudents/otago063651.pdf
Dunedin, New Zealand
Started in 2009
Bursary, Counseling, Culturally sensitive, Ethnic minority, Health Sciences, New Zealand, Socio economic disadvantage, Study Skills
Upward Bound Project UK (London Metropolitan University & Islington Council)
Fielding University: providing access to graduate education
Studiecoach
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Brexit: a reality break
Any rational analysis of the current situation will tell you that both Tory leadership candidates would, with their current policy proposals, head us directly towards a no-deal Brexit on 31 October.
So when Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson blithely declares that there is only a "million to one" chance we'll leave the EU with a no-deal, as he expects to conclude a new deal with the EU, one has to take this as just another example of the mindless rhetoric which is currently dominating the Brexit debate.
But even his fanboys are divided. One of them reckons he can pull off a renegotiation by mounting an "energetic charm offensive". Another one complains that the only way out [of the EU] is via a no-deal, which in turn requires an early general election – something which Johnson has spurned.
As for pulling off a renegotiation, the theory is that, although the Irish backstop is "a problem", the "alternatives are there". And this, supposedly, means that agreement is "tantalisingly close".
If nothing else, this is a testament to the power of self-delusion where the commentator, evidently convinced that these "alternatives" will work, is taking it for granted that the EU is similarly impressed and will accept them in lieu of a backstop. All they have to do is add a few sentences to the end of the Withdrawal Agreement and the clouds will part to reveal the sunlit uplands.
Meanwhile, The Times has been bitching from the comfort of its paywall about the consequences of a no-deal Brexit, arguing that too many senior Tories have for too long been scared to tell the public the truth about them. If we are headed that way, the paper says, those Tories "owe it to their party and their country does so with its eyes wide open".
It is a bit rich of this paper to take this view, having pushed via its star columnist, Matt Ridley, the canard that "a future under World Trade Organisation terms looks bright". But that's the legacy media for you – never having to say sorry when it changes its mind.
Partially atoning for its previous omissions, the paper has sought to explain the consequences, with an A to Z of what it means. The article is of such staggering superficiality, though, that you wonder why they bothered.
For aerospace, for example – the first of the entries – their "worst case" is that, under WTO rules mean there are no export tariffs, but "non-tariff barriers such as customs rules persuade manufacturers to relocate production to Europe, decimating UK aerospace, which employs 95,000 people and turns over £31 billion a year". For the "best case" scenario, we get:
A fall in sterling outweighs border trade friction and Britain’s aerospace manufacturers and component makers - BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, GKN and others - continue to thrive entrenched in Britain that it is almost unthinkable that big global manufacturers would stop working with UK suppliers but no-deal could accelerate the move of the supply chain to China and southeast Asia.
Then, the entry for "trade deals" tells us:
Worst case A failure to replicate certain agreements means British exporters endure higher tariffs and trade barriers in some markets, putting them at a significant disadvantage to European rivals.
Best case Whitehall officials manage to replicate a large number of the EU's 40 or so free state agreements with 70 nations.
Unknown factor Britain would immediately assume full control of an independent trade policy for the first time in four decades. It is unclear how long any negotiations with countries like the US would take. The capability and capacity of Britain’s fledgling negotiating operation has also yet to be tested.
These entries typify the whole of the piece, where the vagueness of the outcomes and the range of predictions is such that one could conclude that the paper has very little idea of how we would actually be affected by a no-deal Brexit.
To an extent, this is fair enough. In truth, no-one can accurately predict the outcome, and much will depend on the post-Brexit politics, and how the economies of the 27 EU Member States are affected. These uncertainties, in themselves, could give rise to an enormous variability in the effects experienced, and have an impact on the duration of those effects.
Even with the sensitive issue of the Irish border, there is considerable uncertainty as to the immediate response of the Irish Republic. In theory, on day one of a no-deal Brexit, Irish officials should be manning the barricades on the border, subjecting traffic from the North to the full range border checks.
So far, though, we've had no hint that the Irish government is prepared for such a draconian move. If I were to guess, I would expect no immediate action to be taken, with the Irish hoping for an emergency deal, where the UK and the EU come together to patch together a working arrangement which will enable both sides to muddle through.
What might happen also is that the EU-26 (the rest of the EU minus Ireland) might start imposing checks on goods imported from Ireland, and checks on Irish lorries using the land bridge via Dover. Then we might see the progressive imposition of checks on commercial traffic over the Irish border – small scale to start with – gradually increasing in intensity. Only after some years might checks apply to private vehicles.
All this, of course, is pure speculation but, in terms of the bigger picture, I think the one certainty is that trade flows between the UK and the EU-27 will slow. It is probable, though, that this effect will be asymmetric, and we will lose proportionately more exports than will the EU-27. Equally uncertain is the effect on trade with the rest of the world, but my guess is that the shorter-term will also bring a downturn in trade flows, again largely asymmetric to our disadvantage.
The net outcome of this, almost certainly, will be a massive increase in our trade deficit (on reduced trading) and pressure on the pound. It will be back like the old days in the 70s, with the monthly deficit making front-page headlines, and increasingly desperate governments mounting "buy British" campaigns.
The overall effect may (and in my view probably will) be severe enough to trigger a recession. One might expect inflation to re-emerge as a serious factor, and some rise in unemployment seems inevitable. Property prices will take a hit (as they already are) and, with personal debt already at unsustainable levels, we might see a record surge in bankruptcies and a sharp drop in consumer spending.
My great concern is that any such recession will not be part of the cyclical economic process, but a response to a downturn in economic activity. The effects of recessions, themselves, are to depress economic activity, so it does not take much to postulate that we could see a self-reinforcing phenomenon, where the economy takes a permanent hit, from which we do not recover in the foreseeable future.
Returning to the current cri de coeur of The Times, we can hardly therefore disagree with the view that those who are currently so casual about the prospect of a no-deal should be far more candid about the possible effects. Those who are intent on a no-deal Brexit should at least be fully apprised on what they are letting themselves (and us) in for.
But it is here, more than anything, that we are taking a reality break. With a fundamentally unserious person such as Mr Johnson, we can't expect any reliable detail from him, and Mr Hunt isn't proving to be any better. Yet, even the mighty Times isn't really up to the job.
Faced with such uncertainty, more sensible politicians might steer away from courses of action which might exacerbate the situation but, instead, we are hurtling at breakneck speed into the unknown, with fantasy solutions rolling off the presses.
The trouble is, as is evident from my piece yesterday, the normal mechanisms for sorting truth from fiction no longer seem to be working. Lies have become the normal currency of politics and reality has taken the back seat. How long, one wonders, before reality looks like the picture above.
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Metro Atlanta’s next toll lanes: I-75 in Henry and Clayton
By Ariel Hart and Tammy Joyner – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia is about to construct its first new toll road since Ga. 400 and almost no one is talking about it.
Two counties away from the much-condemned I-85 HOT lane and the checkered, billion-dollar Northwest Corridor, 12.2 miles of I-75 mostly in Henry County is scheduled to sprout new lanes, to be the state’s first newly constructed toll road in two decades.
Public meetings Tuesday and Thursday launch the last chance for the public to have its say, and to learn about the pathbreaking project, before it goes out to bid in two months for design completion and construction.
The state Department of Transportation has held open houses, placed yard signs, gone door-to-door and met with local officials. But if interviews conducted for this article are any guide, the broader public either has not gotten the message, or isn’t exercised.
Tommy Smith has lived in Henry County for decades and just became chairman of its county commission. “I don’t know enough about the express lane project to form an opinion,” he said, “but if it’s something that could be added to Interstate 75 that gets people through here without a bottleneck, I’m all for it … Anything helps, if you get on a superslab.”
The project is among the most important the state will build in decades, since state officials hope it will reset public opinion on the principal plan for congestion relief in metro Atlanta: optional toll lanes.
Unlike the I-85 HOT lane between the Perimeter and Old Peachtree Road, with I-75 South taxpayers will get a new lane for their money. I-75 South is scheduled to be Georgia’s first optional toll road with new pavement to go under contract — and the first to open to traffic, in 2016. (Unlike the I-85 HOT lane, three-person carpools on the I-75 South toll lanes will not ride free.)
It will affect every Georgia taxpayer, since the tolls will not pay off the road’s construction; that’s being done by taxpayers, but they won’t be able to drive on the new lanes without paying the toll. DOT won’t know the job’s price until bids come in, but it was once estimated at $150 million.
The little attention paid so far to the I-75 toll lane is in contrast to the state’s history with other toll lanes. The I-85 HOT lane in Gwinnett County and Ga. 400 are all too famous, mostly for infuriating drivers with a toll they think shouldn’t be there. The I-75/I-575 Northwest Corridor project in Cobb and Cherokee counties has made national news as Georgia policymakers have stumbled and backtracked on it over nearly a decade.
The new project demonstrates a signature policy of Gov. Nathan Deal: He’s for toll lanes, but only those that build new pavement.
“I think that’s the difference” in public reaction to the Henry County project, Deal told the AJC last week. “As you know, I said that I would not approve in the future anything that converted an existing lane into a HOT lane.”
He added, “I do think it will be a success.”
DOT officials have no doubt.
“It’s an awesome thing,” said DOT’s deputy commissioner, Todd Long. “Everybody who’s ever traveled south of Atlanta on Saturday and Sunday knows it backs up for miles … you’re going to have people all over South Georgia getting Peach Passes.” All the region’s optional toll lanes will be electronically tolled, with sensors pinging “Peach Pass” transponders that drivers buy and place in their windows.
DOT’s efforts to publicize the project so far have reached a few hundred residents. Of those, more than a hundred offered opinions on the project. That’s not enough for a scientific survey, but in contrast to some other Georgia surveys that found overwhelming opposition to a toll project, majorities supported the one on I-75 South. With at least one exception: Unlike higher-income people, respondents making less than $25,000 overwhelmingly said that tolls were unfair.
In interviews this week, a number of residents said they’d never heard of the I-75 South project, while others echoed the survey responses.
Jim Everson, a crane operator who lives in Stockbridge, wasn’t aware of the project. When a reporter explained it to him, he said he was on board. “I’d use the express lane,” he said. “It’ll help traffic and really help during holidays and summers.” He travels I-75 South on the weekends to attend church and doesn’t mind paying a toll, though it depends on the amount.
McDonough resident John Koth agreed. He uses I-75 every weekday to get to his job at Auto-Chlor in Hapeville. He said he’s in favor of anything that will help ease the traffic congestion along the corridor.
On the other hand, a local blogger, McDonough resident Joanie Scott, wasn’t pleased.
Scott tries to stay well versed in Henry County happenings but didn’t know much about the I-75 express lane project. She uses I-75 to commute to her job near Hartsfield Airport but lives off of exit 218, past the toll lane entrance.
When told of some details of the project, she said it looked like a way to get out-of-state travelers quickly through the area and it wouldn’t do much to ease traffic for those in the county.
“My concern with that is that the long-distance travelers may not be aware of the rules,” she said. “As a commuter I don’t see where the benefit is for me.”
DOT officials hope building the lanes will drain traffic from the regular lanes — although history shows that building new lanes also draws new traffic to a highway.
The lanes will run in the center of the highway and be reversible. Northbound in the morning, they’ll start at Ga. 155 with one lane, and add a second lane at Ga. 20. At I-675 the toll lanes will branch and continue onto both I-75 and I-675, ending shortly after that split.
Unlike the I-85 HOT lane, drivers won’t be able to move back and forth between the regular interstate lanes and the toll lane except at the ends of the project. Northbound there will be a toll-only entrance from Jonesboro Road, and southbound it will exit onto Jonesboro Road.
An exit was originally planned at Mt. Carmel Road, but after public comment against it, that was canceled.
As on I-85, the toll price will rise and fall along with congestion in the main lanes, to keep out enough cars to keep the toll traffic flowing. That way, the state always has a tool to create one free-flowing space no matter how bad congestion gets.
It’s a compromise at DOT, which has come to the conclusion there will never be enough money to sufficiently widen all the region’s highways.
The state Department of Transportation is updating its plan for optional toll lanes around metro Atlanta. At the moment, these projects are likely the next up, each of them to add new lanes, with the date the state hopes they will open to traffic:
2016: I-75 in Henry and Clayton County
2017: I-85 in Gwinnett County extended north from current HOT lane
2018: I-75/I-575 in Cobb and Cherokee counties
Source: DOT
The DOT is holding two open houses this week where people can hear and be heard about the I-75 Express Lanes project in Henry and Clayton Counties.
5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Eagles Landing High School Commons
301 Tunis Road
McDonough, Ga. 30253
95 Highway 81 West
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Stories from Thursday, May 30, 2002
Where to host the Apple Festival? (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
BLOOMFIELD ---- The debate continues on where to hold this year's Apple Festival and who's going to control it. On Wednesday night, about 50 people came to Bloomfield High School to discuss the fate of their annual fall festival, but came to no decision...
Area athletes preparing for track state finals (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
Malea Firestone and Doug Dayhoff will once again represent White River Valley at the track and field state finals this weekend in Indianapolis. This will be the fifth straight season that WRV has had at least one athlete at the Indiana High School Athletic Association finals at Carroll Stadium on the campus of IUPUI...
Miners conclude regular season (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
Linton-Stockton's boys golf team tuned up for the sectional with a 146-153 victory over host Edgewood at Cascades in its regular season finale. L-S senior Tim Fish shot a 32 to earn low medalist. It was a school record for nine holes, breaking the mark of 33, which was owned by four different players. Brock Anderson fired a 33 against West Vigo and Clay City in a match at Phil Harris Golf Course on May 4, 1999...
WRV awards (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
The White River Valley High School spring sports awards banquet has been moved to 7 p.m. Sunday, June 9. The banquet will take place in the WRV cafeteria.
Flynn Welding wins (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
Ridge's Medical Center pitcher Jessica Boucher had 14 strikeouts against Eastern's Flynn Welding on Wednesday night in a major league softball game at Linton, but the Linton team lost a 7-0 decision. The game was called in the top of the seventh because of lightning...
Bowhunters to help raise money for friend who was burned (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
Sometimes you never know how much your friends mean to you until you find yourself in need of some help. Some Linton people are demonstrating their concern for a buddy recently burned in an accident. Dave Johnson, owner of Thunderbird Traditional Archery in Linton, said his friend, Dave Witty, was severely burned in a May 4 accident. ...
Pool will open when water warms up (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
The A.M. Risher Memorial Swimming Pool in Linton should be open soon, according to pool board member ' Lehman. But, he stressed, the opening date depends on the weather. "We've got water in the pool, but I haven't fired anything up yet to see if everything's working all right," Lehman said...
Investigation into owner(s) of guns still ongoing (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
Investigation into a May 28 confiscation of 47 firearms by state and local police at a Linton residence is continuing. The weapons, 12 handguns and 35 long guns, were found in seven vehicles at the residence. Among the long guns were sawed-off shotguns and an AK 47. Police have not yet released the name of the property owner...
Foundation has done wonders for the entire county (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
I can still remember the telephone call and visit from Don Steward asking if this newspaper would help promote the Greene County Foundation's effort to raise money to reach a goal. It was about four or five years ago. I had heard of county foundations, but really had no idea how they worked. After Steward left that day, I was convinced this was something Greene County should latch onto and never let go...
Ivy Lorene VanHorn (Local News ~ 05/30/02)
JASONVILLE ---- Ivy Lorene VanHorn, 82, of Jasonville, passed away at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 29, 2002 at Walnut Creek at Linton. Born June 22, 1919 in Clay County, she was the daughter of Wm. Addison and Idella (P00l) Shonk. She was a homemaker, a member of Briley Chapel Church, and a 50-year member of Jasonville Chapter of Eastern Star...
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"Mo Vaughn Age"
Profession:Baseball player
Date of Birth: Dec 15, 1967
Ethnicity: African American
Country:United States of America
Mo Vaughn Age
· In Athletes, Baseball
Mo Vaughn
Mo Vaughn Net Worth is $60 Million. Former baseball star Mo Vaughn has an estimated net worth of $60 million. Vaughn also known as "The Hit Dog" clocked up his net worth as the Major League Baseball baseman from the early 1990's. Vaughn retired from. Maurice Samuel 'Mo' Vaughn (b...
Mo Vaughn Net Worth is $60 Million.
Mo Vaughn Net Worth is $60 Million. Former baseball star Mo Vaughn has an estimated net worth of $60 million. Vaughn also known as "The Hit Dog" clocked up his net worth as the Major League Baseball baseman from the early 1990's. Vaughn retired from Maurice Samuel 'Mo' Vaughn , nicknamed "The Hit Dog", is a former Major League Baseball first baseman. He played from 1991 to 2003. Vaughn was a three-time All-Star selection and won the American League MVP award in 1995.
Vaughn played high school baseball at New Canaan Country School in New Canaan, Connecticut. He then moved on to play baseball at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, along with seven-time All-Star Craig Biggio and future LexisNexis National Account Manager Philip Aiello Jr.
Vaughn became the center of the Red Sox's line-up in 1993, hitting 29 home runs and contributing 101 RBIs. In 1995, he established a reputation as one of the most feared hitters in the American League when he hit 39 home runs with 126 RBIs and a .300 average. He also garnered 11 stolen bases. His efforts, which led the Red Sox to the playoffs (only to lose to the Cleveland Indians in the American League Division Se...
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Come watch Jorge Posada, Mo Vaughn, O.J. McDuffie play softball at Pinkball event in Boca
Former New York Yankees catcher Jorge Posada and former Miami Dolphins wide receiver OJ McDuffie are just a two of the former pro athletes participating in the 10th annual Pinkball event this Saturday ...
Posted: March 8, 2019, 1:37 pm
Baseball Legend Frank Thomas Joins Forces With Big & Tall Clothing Brand MVP Collections
Baseball legend, and two time MVP and MLB Hall of Famer, Frank Thomas, known as "The Big Hurt," is an official partner in the business, alongside Co-Founders and Managing Partners, Mo Vaughn and Diane ...
Frank Thomas Joins Fashion Firm Founded By Mo Vaughn
Two former American League MVPs, both large men themselves, have joined forces in a new venture designed to fill that void. Hall of Famer Frank Thomas, winner of successive MVP trophies while playing ...
Posted: July 1, 2019, 10:21 am
Norwalk’s Laurel Athletic Club celebrates a century
A look through the city’s annals will bring you past entries for Hall of Fame basketball legend Calvin Murphy, one-time American League MVP Mo Vaughn, former middleweight champ Travis Simms and NASCAR ...
Posted: May 10, 2019, 2:38 pm
Patrick Mahomes’ father, Pat, was ‘athletic,’ ‘fiery’ Boston Red Sox reliever in late 1990s
Though his stay in Boston lasted just 10 months, the elder Mahomes suited up alongside Sox legends like Roger Clemens, Mo Vaughn, Nomar Garciaparra and Tim Wakefield over those two seasons. Then-Red ...
Posted: January 20, 2019, 2:22 pm
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Take Two: The Happening
by Patrick Bromley
It's just as bad as I remember. Maybe worse.
With M. Night Shyamalan back to being a major part of the pop culture conversation thanks to the success of Split (my feelings towards which aren't far off from Rob and Adam's), I've been thinking a lot about the director's work and what it means to me. As someone who would call himself a fan of Shyamalan's first few movies -- yes, even Signs and parts of The Village -- I'd argue that his career can be broken up into three movements: the skillful confidence of his early efforts, the flop sweat years of box office failure and constantly reacting to the previous bad movie by trying out a new kind of bad movie, and now the low-budget Blumhouse period, which has been met with a great deal of success both financially and with audience popularity. People really like M. Night Shyamalan again. It's been almost 15 years since we could say that.
Shyamalan made a number of bad movies during the flop sweat years, but none of them were really bad in the same way. After Earth is generic and impersonal big-budget filmmaking, while his adaptation of The Last Airbender is disastrously stiff, borderline incompetent big-budget filmmaking that suggests he'd never made a movie before. Of all his bad movies, I'm probably most partial to Lady in the Water and not because there's any single thing about it I actually like. He's really trying to do something different in that film, challenging both himself and his audience. I think he fails in every way, but I'd rather watch Shyamalan swing big and miss than what he does in, say, The Happening, a safe -- if still spectacularly terrible -- movie that's only distinction is that it's his first (and only) "rated R" effort. Outside of a little bit of extra self-inflicted violence, the film just finds Shyamalan doing his usual thing...and doing it very, very poorly.
I know that we have readers who love The Happening. It is not my intention to take that away from anyone. As entertainingly bad movies go, there is fun to be had here. It is a movie so poorly conceived on almost every imaginable level, so insanely misguided in its approach and, more often than not, so inept in its execution that I can very easily understand finding comfort in its awfulness. But there is no part of me that believes the theory that Shyamalan knew what he was doing -- that this is his tribute to bad B-movies and that he has pitched it thusly. I can buy the part about this being his B movie (in the way that the Shyamalan-produced Devil is), but like so much of his work he strangles it with pretense. I hate the term "elevated genre," by with The Happening Shyamalan is trying to do "elevated genre" and manages to fuck both the elevation and the genre up.
I still remember going to see the movie the weekend it opened in 2008 with Erika, JB and Jan. We were in a sparsely attended theater and more than willing to give The Happening a chance -- we were not there to make fun of it -- but pretty quickly it became clear what kind of movie it was and we found ourselves laughing at every terrible new line. No one else in the theater was laughing. I started to feel bad that we might be ruining the experience of everyone else, who appeared to be enjoying it on an unironic level. Truth be told, I hate inappropriate laughter at the movies, as it usually comes from an audience who have decided they are above what is on screen. It is not a practice in which I willfully partake. That said, The Happening wore me down. I didn't know how else to respond but to laugh, and the fact that we were among friends and all having the same reaction only made matters worse. I wasn't there to mess up anyone's good time, but how else am I supposed to respond when Shyamalan follows up a scene of graphic suicide with a character talking about how hot dogs are the perfect food?
There's a decent idea for a modern-day eco-horror movie at the center of The Happening: the trees and plants, tired of being trampled on by our stupid Uggs, fight back by releasing a toxin designed to wipe us out. Nature fights back! I'm on board. Unfortunately, Shyamalan either doesn't seem to know or care how the mechanics of horror movies work, so he establishes a premise but doesn't tell a story. There is no escalation to the situation he introduces. Things don't really get worse for our heroes. Something happens, and then it happens again and then it happens again. This is why the movie is called The Happening. It also doesn't understand how to dole out new information. There is a window of time in the first third of the movie in which we don't understand what is causing people to kill themselves. Then someone suggests it's the plants. Then the characters speculate that, yes, maybe it is the plants for a while. Then the big reveal is that it is HOLY FUCKING SHIT the plants. What a twist!
I am not suggesting that the movie need a twist. Part of what did M. Night Shyamalan in the first time around was his self-imposed need to end everything with a twist. But The Happening hardly understands dramatic structure. The movie works if we in the audience are misdirected to believe it's one thing, only to then be told "no, it's literally nature trying to kill us." The horror is in that realization. Instead, Shyamalan telegraphs everything early on and then makes a movie in which nature is the slasher, resulting in a sequence in which characters RUN FROM THE WIND. This is not how movies work. This is not how wind works. Don't worry; they succeed and outrun air. They don't want to kill themselves. Would that I could say the same.
A word about the whole "plants make us want to kill ourselves" premise. I'm not sure it works. It's just too passive. For it to be really scary, the people exposed to the toxin should immediately begin killing each other. I know this would be effective because I have seen The Crazies. The original and the remake! One setpiece, in which Shyamalan tracks the progress of a handgun as it is passed off from person to person shooting him/herself in the street, is the kind of thing I know he fell in love with from the writing stage through the final edit. It's photographed well because Shyamalan still knows how to put a sequence together, but the construction of it is self-conscious and the game of suicidal telephone becomes silly when it's meant to be, like, totally fucked up, you know dude? There is exactly one scene in the first few minutes of the movie in which the whole mass suicide thing is genuinely horrifying, and it's when the construction workers are all jumping off the top of a building en masse. Yes, it's ludicrous. Yes, it would be an unintentionally hilarious visual if it weren't for the reactions of the guys on the ground, who first think their friend has fallen and then can't understand what the fuck is happening when a few more people hit the ground. It's an honest moment, and the only time in the film in which a character's lack of understanding as to what is happening actually gives way to horror. Don't worry; because it's The Happening, it's ruined seconds later when the same actor gets a teary close up and cries "God in heaven..." and it all becomes funny because it is the worst. So much for bringing us to the brink of being scared.
Speaking of terrible acting, goddamnit does The Happening put most Hollywood movies to shame in this department. There are almost no words for how badly miscast Mark Wahlberg is in the lead. I'm not one of these assholes who suggests that it's impossible to buy him as a science teacher (especially if it was a science teacher that, I don't know, actively fought against teaching evolution under the direction of Peter Berg), but it is impossible to buy him as this science teacher. I'm not sure if it's just Shyamalan writing a garbage part for any actor or if he had so little faith in Wahlberg's ability to convincingly play the role, but the character's every line says something about "science." IT IS SO HORRIBLE AND FUNNY. I would quote them here, but it wouldn't do justice to Wahlberg's high-pitched, sing-song delivery that makes everything sound like he's not exactly sure he's pronouncing the words correctly. Zooey Deschanel, equally miscast as his wife, looks totally stranded. Her enormous eyes, once used to level Joseph Gordon Levitt and Buddy the Elf, here look into the camera like she wants to scream for help but can't because her sister Dr. Bones is being held captive right off screen and she doesn't want to get caught signaling us. Dummy up, New Girl.
Not helping matters is the fact that Shyamalan has asked cinematographer Tak Fujimoto to shoot much of the movie in closeups on actors' faces, a trick he borrows from Jonathan Demme (for whom Fujimoto has shot a number of movies). This results in a series of shots in which Mark Wahlberg looks confused even before people begin unexplainably killing themselves. He comes off really, really bad, but he's not alone. John Leguizamo is more convincing as a fat demon clown than he is here, forced to spout nonsense like "Don't take my daughter's hand unless you mean it!" and reference the fact that he's a math teacher as often as possible, because Shyamalan can only conceive of writing these characters in relation to what they do for a job. I know he thinks he's being all deep and shit by having these two men who guide their lives by the principles of logic and reason (math and science!) being confronted by something which defies everything they know to be true, but none of that comes off. Instead it feels like the first script written by a high schooler who doesn't know how to give characters personality traits, only expository details. Betty Buckley, a talented actress, is a disaster as a kooky old lady named You Eyein' My Lemon Drink. She poses one of the only external conflicts in the movie -- you know, the thing The Happening needs more of in order to be at all interesting or suspenseful -- and then succumbs to the same dumb suicide as everyone else. Thank you, threat, for neutralizing yourself without the heroes having to do a single goddamn thing. THE HORROR!
I know exactly how you feel, boys
I recognize that there can be a certain joy in watching a bad movie. But the pleasures of "bad" classics like Plan 9 from Outer Space or Troll 2 or Miami Connection is that everyone is working really hard to make a good movie but it's just not within their means. The fun is in watching them try. In the case of The Happening, though, we know that everyone is capable of doing good work, which means that the enjoyment comes not from watching them try but in watching them fail. It's cinematic schadenfreude of the highest order and it's hard to feel good by the time the end credits come up. (See? Told you! It's the wind! BUT IN FRANCE) It's hard not to giggle at the screenplay, one of the worst ever written by a former Oscar nominee, or at every second that Mark Wahlberg is on screen, but seeing a group of people this talented eat it this hard isn't rewarding; it's disheartening.
Now if you need me I'll be at the zoo feeding myself to the lions. Save me some lemon drink.
Posted by Patrick Bromley at 12:00 PM
Labels: 2000s horror movies, m. night shyamalan, mark wahlberg, take two, the happening, zooey deschanel
John Murphy January 31, 2017 at 12:13 PM
This movie is terrible, but that third Mark Wahlberg face makes my day.
ben peterson January 31, 2017 at 3:40 PM
This hurts me deep inside :(
...but I get it :)
Leo Logan January 31, 2017 at 6:21 PM
"It makes you kill yourself, just when you thought there couldn't be any more evil that can be invented." Ha?
Michael Giammarino January 31, 2017 at 8:28 PM
For me, The Village is the last of Night's "good" movies. That being said, I think Lady in the Water and The Happening are fun for what they are. I look at them like midnight movies. If Monstervision still aired on TNT, Lady in the Water and The Happening would undoubtedly wind up on 100% Weird after Joe Bob folds up his patio chair and reminds us "The drive-in will never die."
I don't think The Happening is "bad" on purpose, but sometimes I wonder. On the making of featurette on the blu ray, we get to see Night shooting the "Old Man River" porch sequence. Night seems to be shooting the scene and editing in the camera, but he also seems to be shooting only first takes. Close up on Mark, he says his line, cut. Close up on a kid, say your line, cut. Close up on Zooey, she says her line, cut. Just a very strange way to go about shooting a scene.
Michael Giammarino February 1, 2017 at 12:01 AM
"Old Man River." Oh brother. It's "Ol Black Water." My memory is shot. I blame the trees.
Paul Calvert February 1, 2017 at 8:52 AM
It's the wind, you fool!
It's a toxin produced by the trees and foliage, spread by the wind.
Brent Petersen January 31, 2017 at 11:17 PM
This movie is in my TOP TEN OF ALL TIME but I did not like it the first time I saw it. I watched it a couple of years later and really saw it for what it was. It is not a horror movie. I feel like I've said this on here so many times but here it goes. The Bees is satire of disaster movies from 1978. It stars John Saxon and white specs they call killer bees. It's over the top and silly and I love it. They do business with a business called "Big Business". It's ridiculous. When Mark Wahlberg teaches his class(which is absolutely hilarious), he talks about "the bees". He goes on about how some things just can't be explained. He's a fucking science teacher! Some of the music from The Happening is from The Bees. This is not a coincidence. Mark Wahlberg talks to plants, bodies fall out of the sky(hysterical) and the wind did it. Calling it bad on purpose really cheapens it. You walk a fine line with this kind of movie but he pulled if off so well that no one got it. So when M. Night said that he was trying to make a B movie, he was just lying? Just because the actors don't know what movie they are in, doesn't mean that wasn't his purpose. Is everything done on Starship Troopers on purpose? Why does Verhoeven get the benefit of the doubt and not Shyamalan? You know who would make a great science teacher...Mark Wahlberg! He gets crapped on for trying different things instead of the same old bullshit everyone else does. There have been twists in movies since there were movies. Why can't the whole movie be a twist? You said when you saw it for the first time you were laughing at it. Why is that a bad thing? What difference does it make how something entertains you? There are plenty of movies that everyone loves that has questionable to terrible acting in it. To me, it doesn't matter if he did it on purpose. But to say there is no way he did leaves me dumbfounded. In the end, it doesn't matter. I don't blame you for hating it. We all have movies we love that other people think are terrible. Right now, history is on your side. We'll just have to see what happens...
Michael Giammarino January 31, 2017 at 11:23 PM
Music from The Bees is in The Happening?
Will Benson February 1, 2017 at 2:22 AM
I got so much enjoyment from The Happening I can't possibly hate it. I'm on your side with this. It'd be like hating a puppy that kept looking at you with a confused crinkly Wahlberg forehead.
I agree with the point you're making, but there is one thing I must take issue with. Mark Wahlberg would make a great science teacher? Shit, do I have to say more? Sorry, I am nitpicking, but as someone who studied and works in the "Sciences", it's quite laughable.
Also, I never wanted to see this movie (and Patrick kind of confirmed it with his nice review), but you have given me second thoughts. Maybe I'll check it out.
Patrick Bromley February 1, 2017 at 9:47 AM
I promise I was not trying to attack or undermine your enjoyment of the movie. I know you love it and had you in mind as I wrote it. I think we just read the movie very, very differently. When Shyamalan says he was trying to make a "B" movie, I believe he means something smaller, higher concept, more sensationalistic. I do not believe he meant deliberately bad. And the reason Verhoeven gets the benefit of the doubt is because he has spent an entire career being subversive and funny and because there are context clues in Starship Troopers that tell us what he is doing. Shyamalan's entire career is built on earnestness. I think The Happening reads as earnest, and on that level I think it fails. But I also completely understand why anyone would enjoy watching it, because it is very entertaining in its badness.
Brent Petersen February 1, 2017 at 11:01 AM
I know you weren't trying to undermine my enjoyment, I was just offering an alternative take on it. I see it one way and you see it the other. That's ok. I just wanted to give other people who hadn't seen it or had that didn't enjoy it the first time another reason to give it a shot. I attempted to say it without coming off like an asshole. Like I said, there are plenty of movies we both like that others would think we are crazy for doing so. I also don't think it's trying to be bad. It's trying to be silly. If that's not your thing then it won't appeal to you. Have you seen The Bees? You didn't mention if you had:)
@Paul - my point was that it would be ridiculous to put Wahlberg as a science teacher. He casted him because that is absurd and no one would do that if they were making a serious movie.
Let me just add, just for the sake of argument, that B movie doesn't mean BAD movie. A lot of people get that confused, especially in the current, modern Syfy Channel culture. Whether the movie is good or bad is up to subjective opinion. I agree with Patrick's hypothesis for what Night thought he was making - a smaller, higher concept, sensationalistic movie. The sensationalism involved is what makes it a B movie, or, in the proper sense, I think, something that, in the 70s, would have been called a drive in movie. As for the dialogue and the delivery of the dialogue, line delivery in Night's films, at least up until this point in his filmography, have always been very deliberate, and here he really goes for broke with it.
Brent Petersen February 1, 2017 at 12:16 PM
But what if he was being very deliberate about making it sound like a 70s disaster horror movie? Watch The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Airport and The Poseidon Adventure. Also, nobody thinks it's hilarious when the bodies start falling from the sky? They didn't even look like people! I can't be the only one sees this. Like it or not, every movie he does has a twist. The twist is that it's the wind? That's not a twist. The movie is the twist. You think you are watching one thing but you are actually watching something completely different. That's what he does.
Michael Giammarino February 1, 2017 at 12:22 PM
He WAS being very deliberate about making it sound like a 70s disaster movie.
The bodies weren't falling from the sky. They were falling from the roof of a building. And I don't know, man, they certainly looked like bodies to me.
Hello. My name is Elliot Moore. I'm just going to talk in a very positive manner, giving off good vibes. We're just here to use the bathroom, and we're just going to leave. I hope that's okay...
Plastic. I'm talking to a plastic plant...
I'm still doing it.
Which cue in the soundtrack is from The Bees, though?
E.S.A.D.D. February 1, 2017 at 1:51 PM
Oh fuck, now I get it... he wanted to make a "Bee Movie"
And BTW, the plants never say "yeah, we did it," ISIS-style; I think the bees are the real culprits (controlled by another Shyamalan supervillain, The Beekeeper, as to be revealed in Unbreakable the Third: Bee-king Glass)
Brent Petersen February 1, 2017 at 2:50 PM
It's during the title sequence. The music that is associated with the movie is from The Bees.
RMS February 1, 2017 at 7:58 AM
I have not seen this since I saw it in a theater, and I remember having an experience similar to Patrick's--I thought the movie was bad, and things quickly devolved into a fair portion of the the audience laughing at what was "happening."
Perhaps I need to give it another shot and really try to give it the benefit of the doubt as an intentionally ludicrous B movie.
I love Signs (I'll admit it's formulaic and tidy as hell, but the suspense, humor, and great acting performances sell it for me). I genuinely liked Lady in the Water when I saw it in the theater; I didn't just admire its ambition--I LIKED it. So even if I still don't like the Happening after a second watch, I can't begrudge anyone who does.
If all perspectives are welcome, then consider this a different perspective.
http://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2008/06/movie-review-happening-2008.html?m=1
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Abu Dhabi gets the X factor
As emerging Asian and Middle Eastern destinations compete for stopover business, top-quality airport design is a must. Elly Earls speaks to Anthony Mosellie and Mustafa Chehabeddine of international architectural practice Kohn Pedersen Fox about striking the balance between form and functionality.
In December 2011, the EU announced plans for a controversial emissions tax on airlines; since 1 January 2012, airlines have been charged for carbon emissions created by flights to and from EU member states. The US, Canada and China have all openly opposed the scheme, with US carriers claiming that the charges violate climate change and aviation pacts, and four Chinese airlines stating that this tax could cost them €95m.
Conversely, the scheme could have a positive impact on emerging destinations in the Middle East, which will become increasingly attractive as transit hubs for many of the larger North American carriers. Moreover, this will only serve to bolster the strategy of building 'airport cities' that many Middle Eastern destinations have put in place in an aim to attract stopover traffic to their shores.
"There are two components of airport design that are crucial to get right: quay frontage and terminal curb frontage."
"The predominance of land in the Middle East has led to the creation of these major transit hubs, and world-class airlines and destinations to compete with the legacy carriers in North America and Europe," says Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF)'s Anthony Mosellie, who is serving as principal-incharge of the Abu Dhabi International Airport Midfield Terminal Complex.
"These regions have vast land resources, but fewer cities, making the idea of creating an airport city very attractive."
Mustafa Chehabeddine, KPF's principal of the new passenger terminal complex at Abu Dhabi International Airport, agrees. "These destinations are all fighting for transfer passengers and, as such, the quality of the space you stop in suddenly becomes very important," he explains. "This is without a doubt a new phenomenon in certain parts of the world - the airport as a city, rather than the airport as a processing machine."
New breed hub
Abu Dhabi International Airport, a project for which KPF has been acting as master planner and lead architect for the past six years and which is touted for completion in 2017, is a prime example of this new breed of mega transit hub; at over seven million square feet, the project is one of the largest currently under construction.
"Abu Dhabi airport is a prime example of this new breed of mega transit hub."
"It's not just an airport; it's part of a city," says Chehabeddine. "We conceived of it as a gathering space, a civic space - we have an art gallery, a hotel and even an office building in the airport."
For Chehabeddine, the Abu Dhabi project is not about processing; it's about extending the amount of time passengers are able to spend in the central, civic space.
"For transferring passengers, this is going to be their only experience of Abu Dhabi, so it needs to represent the city," he says. "It's about minimising waiting and queue times; passengers can now spend time in a city as opposed to rushing from gate to gate. Conceptually, we've gone for big, column-free spaces as opposed to corridors, and we've elevated the roof so it looks almost like a sky - it's all linked to the idea of creating a city."
Crossing continents
Until the early 2000s, KPF's airport projects were primarily found on the eastern seaboard of the US where the practice, with Mosellie at the helm, designed facilities in cities including Philadelphia, Washington and Boston. The concepts of these airports were very different to the airport city the firm is working on in Abu Dhabi, something Mosellie admits was a new challenge.
"We weren't sure how much of the design strategies, requirements and regulations would be transferable," he says. However, KPF's team quickly realised that the fundamental aspects of airport design are universally applicable: "A 747 is a 747, whether it's in London or Chicago."
For the KPF principal, there are two components of airport design that are crucial to get right, irrespective of size, location or design concept: quay frontage and terminal curb frontage.
"You can never entirely future-proof an airport - these projects have life expectancies of 60-70 years - but we always try to maximise the land utilisation from a real estate perspective to give us the best chance of future proofing the airport," he explains. "It's all about the functionality of the planning; you have to be very efficient in the design to protect and safeguard those two real estate assets."
Sustainability is becoming a key priority for airport designers, and one that Mosellie believes begins with airfield design.
"The X-shaped facility’s main terminal is the first of its kind. KPF spent six months proving to the airport operators that this was the optimal solution."
"The greatest creators of emissions are the service vehicles around the terminals that transport goods and baggage, as well as the planes when they are moving to take-off and landing positions," he says. "When it comes to working with runway configurations, you need to create flexible, efficient routes so taxiing time is minimised from a sustainability standpoint."
This combination of real estate asset protection and sustainability is evident in the design of Abu Dhabi International Airport. The X-shaped facility's main terminal is the first of its kind, which meant the KPF team had to spend nearly six months proving to the airport operators that this was the optimal solution.
"We carried out simulations showing how the planes can reach a particular point in the shortest amount of time, and how walking distances are reduced for passengers," Chehabeddine explains. "Eventually, we proved that an X is the right solution."
Only after the airport's functionality and efficiency have been proven is it time to think about the details of its architectural character, Mosellie is keen to emphasise.
"Rather than starting with a big idea, such as an arched roof, we focus on those two very functional planning strategies and within those, we look for architectural opportunities that will enhance the passenger experience and increase the commercial opportunities within the building," he says. "If you can crack the efficiency question, you can build the smallest facility with the maximum passenger throughput, and create a situation where you're not competing for dollars to spend on the architectural elements that the passengers come into contact with."
Designers are then able to come in and develop uplifting spaces, which serve to facilitate a stress-free, user-friendly passenger experience.
"We also try to bring that same idea of efficiency into the passenger movements within the facility," Mosellie adds. "The more intuitive the wayfinding is within a terminal facility, the more passengers can anticipate where they're going without the use of signage; they can just follow the flow of the spaces."
The airport's undulating ceilings were conceived for precisely this purpose, while the main terminal's supporting arches, one or two of which could become some of the largest spanning arches ever built in an interior space, are similarly functional.
"It gives the airport the flexibility to move counters and make other changes in the future, as well as creating the open, civic-like space we were looking for," says Chehabeddine.
Flexibility is essential for any modern airport project, Mosellie agrees.
"The one constant in airports is change," he says.
"There’s little doubt that uplifting airport design is gaining in importance."
From security regulations that can change significantly, even during the design phase of a project, to advancements in technology that can render aspects of an airport obsolete overnight, flexibility must be built in. This is true not only when it comes to security checks and use of technology, but also when considering passenger expectations.
"15 years ago, you couldn't find an airport with a spa, now you can't find an airport without one," says Mosellie. "What people do in airports is very different to what it used to be; airlines and airports need to be flexible to new demands for different amenities within terminals."
As Asian and Middle Eastern airports begin to position themselves as transit hubs rather than processing machines, there's little doubt that uplifting airport design is gaining in importance. But as the KPF team have demonstrated with their Abu Dhabi project, form should never come ahead of functionality.
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HMRC targets Direct Sellers
HMRC announced on 28 January 2013 that people involved in direct selling have until 28 February 2013 to inform HMRC of any previously undeclared earnings, settle the tax liability and take advantage of the favourable settlement terms available.
HMRC have categorized ‘direct sellers’ as those people who are involved in selling directly to customers and receive commissions without the need for a retail outlet. Most people would recognise direct sellers as door to door salespeople or people that sell through product parties.
Direct sellers need to approach HMRC before 28 February 2013 and make a full disclosure of all undeclared income and gains. In exchange they will be offered;
a simple and straightforward process to put there tax affairs in order; and
a reduced penalty (reported to be 10% in most cases).
To encourage people to come forward HMRC have announced that they are going to write to people that they believe are affected by this campaign. This indicates that HMRC have co-ordinated their approach and have already reviewed people’s tax records and the third party information in their possession to generate a ‘target’ list of people they believe need to come forward.
Once the disclosure window has closed HMRC will investigate the people they believe still owe tax and charge considerably higher penalties on the tax paid late. In view of the recent fivefold increase in criminal investigations, there is also an enhanced risk that the most serious offenders may face a criminal investigation. It is safe to say those people who have been written to and have not made a disclosure will be the first to be investigated.
Should any of your clients receive a letter from HMRC or you are approached concerning the direct selling campaign we recommend that serious consideration should be given to utilising the disclosure facility by registering with HMRC by 28 February. In the more serious or complex cases, we recommend that specialist tax investigation advice is sought to ensure that the best settlement route is taken. There are other voluntary disclosure routes available and by seeking advice now a client’s exposure to tax and in the worst case scenario, a criminal investigation, can be minimised.
The direct seller’s campaign is one of a series of targeted campaigns launched by HMRC and signifies a more strategic approach to tackling tax evasion. HMRC have reported that almost £540 million has been raised from their campaigns and a further £137 million from related enquiries.
For more information on this, HMRC’s other campaigns and the different disclosure facilities available, please contact our TaxDesk on 0845 4900 509 and ask for Noel Hankinson.
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Glagoslav Publications Authors
Ak Welsapar
Ak Welsapar was born in 1956 in the former Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. He is still a proscribed writer in Turkmenistan and his name has been in the list of black-listed writers since 1990.
Srđan Srdić
Srđan Srdić was born in Kikinda in 1977. He graduated from the Department of World Literature and Theory of Literature of the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, where he also completed his doctoral thesis.
Former Russian Special Forces soldier and the winner of the Big Book Prize, Terekhov is the master of 'fine satire', noted by The Guardian and compared by The Moscow Times to that of Saltykov-Shchedrin.
Maria Matios
Grande Dame of Ukrainian literature and a prominent public person, Maria Matios published her first prose in 1992. Since then she's gone to write seven books of poetry and five books of prose, winning top national prizes and awards.
A prolific bestselling author, Dmitry Glukhovsky is known worldwide for his Metro 2033 franchise that won sci-fi EUROCON and became a THQ videogame. Most recent plans for Metro include a Hollywood film and a new series of novels.
Elena Chizhova
Praised in the New York Times and Kirkus, Elena Chizhova recieved the Russian Booker Prize and an international recongition for her achievements in literature. Today she's presiding over the St. Petersburg PEN Club.
Eduard Kochergin
After his parents are taken away from Eduard, a child of two at the time, Eduard Kochergin not only survives the harshness of life under Stalinism, but becomes one of the world's most renowned artists and now an author.
Vladimir Medinskiy is a Russian statesman, professor, essayist and novelist. Since May 2012 he has held the post of Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation. His series Myths About Russia is the bestselling Russian popular history series of recent years.
A son of a high-ranking Soviet diplomat Viktor Erofeev is a well known Russian writer. His works received both critical and popular acclaim. His novel Good Stalin is inspired by Erofeev's experience of growing up amidst the Soviet political hierarchy.
Natalka Babina
Born in a small village in the southern part of Belarus near Polish and Ukrainian borders Natalka Babina grew up surrounded by a mixture Belarusian, Ukrainian and Polish cultural traditions. She works as a journalist at an independent Belarusian newspaper writing on cultural topics.
Vladimir Soloviev
He is a popular host on Russian radio and television, works in the theatre and in cinematography, gives various lectures and corporate trainings. Soloviev’s bibliography consists of more than two dozen titles on the hottest topics of contemporary Russia.
Sergei Kapitsa
Sergei Kapitsa was a Russian physicist and demographer. He was the vice president of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and president of the Eurasian Physical Society. Kapitsa played a great role in the popularisation of science and restoring support for science in Russia.
Chris Hutchins
Chris Hutchins, being a famous journalist with years of experience in established British media, published several biographies of famous people.
Alexander Korobko
Alexander Korobko is a Russian journalist and television producer, currently living and working in London. He co-authored the famous biography of Vladimir Putin.
Maria Konyukova
Maria Konyukova was born in Leningrad. In her Watching the Russians, she shows a keen insight into Russian customs and traditions, and celebrates the Russian soul at large.
Oleg Pavlov is a critically acclaimed award winning author with a social and personal theme in the core of his writing. His experience in the Russian military forces adds an edge to his literary style.
Vladlen Loginov
Vladlen Loginov, best known for his work on Lenin, is one of Russia’s most prominent historians and screenwriters. His book Lenin. How to Become a Leader exposes the factors that formed the personality of the revolutionary leader.
The media calls Irene "The Lady Detective of Ukrainian literature" for her intriguing suspence novels. The author has an inquisitive mind and a recognizable style that continue winning her top national literary awards.
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
A poet, fiction writer and literary translator, Kudryavitsky is a member of the Russian Writers’ Union and the Irish PEN. His poems and stories have been translated into fourteen languages.
Maarten Tengbergen
He is the founder of the "Club Russe des Institutions Européennes" established to spread the knowledge of Russian culture within the European institutions.
Elvira Baryakina
Elvira Baryakina is the author of an ongoing novel series devoted to the early 20th century Russia, revolution, the first wave of emigration and exile. Elvira bases her novels on detailed research and fine literary artistry.
Serhiy Zhadan
Born in 1974, Ukraine's celebrated author Serhiy Zhadan belongs to the generation of witnesses who lived through the collapse of the USSR and the changes that followed. His works reflect the turbulence he experienced in early age.
Hamid Ismailov
Hamid was forced to flee Uzbekistan and came to UK where he took a job with the BBC World Service, becoming the network's first Writer-in-Residence. He speaks many languages and writes on hot topics of socio-political context.
Sergei Shargunov earned his reputation as a writer with a social conscience covering some of the most significant events in recent Russian history.
Igor Sakhnovsky
He studied Russian language and literature at the State University of the Urals, then worked as a literary consultant and editor for a number of publishers and magazines. Member of Hawthornden Fellowship, UK.
Ptushkina is one of the most popular playwrights in contemporary Russia. Her works are emotional, sincere and at times bitter with dramatic twists and turns that are thoroughly elaborated and structured.
Lubov Bazan
Lubov Bazan is a Belorussian historian, art analyst and translator. Her professional experience became the backbone of her work on Belorussian history.
Layla Alexander-Garrett
Author of the memoir Andrei Tarkovsky: the Collector of Dreams, producer Layla Alexander-Garrett enjoys a fruitful career in Film and Dramatic Arts.
Michael M. Naydan
He has published over 30 articles on literary topics and more that 50 translations in journals and anthologies. The volume Herstories: An Anthology Of New Ukrainian Women Prose Writers is compiled, edited and accompanied with a critical introduction by Michael M. Naydan.
Larysa Denysenko
Larysa learned the Ukrainian language when working for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice at the age of 23 - then went on to write seven novels in this language and win national literary awards.
Uladzimir Karatkevich
Uladzimir Karatkevich was a Belarusian writer, poet, playwright, journalist and screenwriter with a passion for archeology. He is known as the creator of the Belorussian historical novel with his works filmed on many occassions.
Taras Shevchenko was a Ukrainian author and painter. The Kobzar is considered his most important work, which he worked on throughout his life. His works are celebrated worldwide in named after him museums and cultural centres.
Leonid Andreev
Founder of Russian Expressionism, Leonid Andreev is Russia's celebrated classic. His works are considered an invaluable part of Russian literary heritage.
Ales Adamovych
Ales Adamovich (1927-1994) was a Belarusian author, literary critic, screenwriter of many fulfilled TV productions and a public person. A celebrated legend in Belarus, the author left a legacy of appreciation for historical truth.
Zakhar Prilepin
Prilepin's combination of lucid prose and social consciousness has made him one of the most popular and acclaimed writers in Russia today and drawn comparisons with the Russian classics.
Dmitry Rogozin
Dmitry Rogozin is a famous Russian politician, statesman and diplomat. Rogozin was the Russian Federation’s representative to NATO up to December 2011, and since then has been Russian Deputy Prime Minister.
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Gnfnr.dk • Vis emne - Artikel: Four Bust-ups And A Single!
Artikel: Four Bust-ups And A Single!
RAW, November 1994
GUNS N' ROSES release a new single on January 2! W AXL ROSE WON'T be suing SLASH over his solo album! But they're still rowing! PAUL HUGE has definitely replaced Gilby Clarke! And they might start an album next year! JON HOTTEN loses his illusion ...
GUNS N' Roses, Los Angeles' recalcitrant Rock'n' Roll superstars, will return to action in 1995 with a brand new single, a cover of the Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy For The Devil', through Geffen on January 2.
The song - the first new Guns N' Roses material since their album of cover versions, 'The Spaghetti Incident?', came out in 1993 - is their contribution to the soundtrack for the blockbuster new Tom Cruise movie, Interview With A Vampire. The film features an entirely orchestral score with the exception of the GN'R track, which plays as the movie's credits roll.
It was recorded in Los Angeles in October, and features the line-up of vocalist W Axl Rose, bassist Duff McKagan, drummer Matt Sorum and guitarists Slash and new man Paul Huge.
Gilby Clarke's omission from the recording marks the end of his participation in Guns N' Roses.
Huge, Clarke's (temporary?) replacement, is an unheard of musician who has known Axl Rose from the years when the pair lived in Indiana. Axl is thought to be keen for Huge to combine with GN'R on a permanent basis, following a spate of successful rehearsals and the new man's tasty playing on 'Sympathy...', where his guitar lines twist together perfectly with Slash's.
Officially, Guns N' Roses' plans are to regroup in the second half of 1995 to begin work on a studio album of new original material, their first since the double 'Use Your Illusion' sets of 1991.
Unofficially, however, there are many barriers to the planned reunion, not least of which is the current reported bad blood between Axl and Slash!
Although stories ruminating elsewhere in the press are untrue (namely that Axl was to sue Slash over the use of some new songs the guitarist plans to include on his forthcoming solo album `It's Five O' Clock Somewhere'), RAW understands that the pair do not see eye to eye over Slash's extensive solo plans.
'IT'S FIVE O' Clock Somewhere' will be released via Geffen in February, and Slash is planning an extensive tour to support its release. To that end, he's confirmed the line-up of his touring band, SVO Snakepit. It features former Jellyfish sideman Eric Dover on vocals, Alice In Chains' Mike Inez on bass, and GN'R drummer Matt Sorum. They'll also be joined onstage by second guitarist Gilby Clarke, now, of course, very much an ex-Gunner!
And in a move that's reportedly not gone down too well with Axl, Clarke's involvement will extend to supporting SVO Snakepit with his own band, in order to promote his current solo release 'Pawn Shop Guitars'!
The solo album and tourwhich could begin this month with some low-key club shows in the States - is currently occupying all of Slash's time and energy. Sources close to the guitarist claim that, "he's not even thinking about Guns N' Roses at the moment."
The album has been produced by Mike Clink, who handled GN'R's first album, 'Appetite For Destruction'- and will feature the following tracks: 'Good To Be Alive', 'Back And Forth Again', 'Neither Can I', 'Dime Store Rock', 'Beggars And Hangers On', 'What Do You Want To Be?', 'Good To Be Alive', 'Monkey Chow', 'Some City Ward', 'Jazz Da Pit', 'Doin' Fine', 'I Hate Everyone But You' (a tune about Slash's wife Renee, apparently!), 'Be The Bait', 'Lower' and 'Take It Away'.
Although Rose has no plans to actually sue Slash over the material he considers to be 'Guns N' Roses tracks', the guitarist's choice to use the songs on his solo album has caused a rift between the pair. Slash has often commented on how similar he felt his material was to some of the tracks on the classic 'Appetite...'.
AS FAR as UK action goes, Slash is planning a promotional trip for 'it's Five O' Clock Somewhere' in February. The trip may include a one-off live date, with a full UK and European tour later in the year.
Naturally, the rumours of a rift have led to speculation ripping through the LA scene like wildfire. Reports of a permanent split arise almost every week. The most recent ones have gone as far as to suggest that Rose and Slash were wrangling over the ownership of the Guns N' Roses name and logo. It's claimed that Axl is the man in possession, and could, in theory, continue the band on his own with a crew of sidemen!
On a less crucial note, drummer Matt Sorum has been at the centre of some whispers over the apparently vacant drumstool for the mooted Led Zeppelin reunion tour.
Geffen Records have put all the rumours in some sort of perspective by confirming the plans to begin the next GN'R album later next year. However, the situation does appear to be as volatile as ever, so prepare for plans to change as often as the wind!
In addition to the rift with Slash, Axl is facing two big lawsuits from his major relationships. Ex-wife Erin Everley will be seeing the singer in court over allegations that he physically and verbally assaulted her during the course of their marriage. Model Stephanie Seymour-star of most of the band's 'Use Your Illusion' videos -will also be bringing a civil suit into a Californian court shortly, alleging that Rose ill-treated her during their time together. Rose is reported to be counter-suing for the return of jewellery and other property.
ROSE HAS found time for a couple of interesting projects inbetween court dates, though. Firstly, he has been keeping an eye on the forthcoming official biography of Guns N' Roses. Somewhat pessimistically titled Shattered Illusion, it's due for publication in 1995 and has been written by Axl's long-time friend and lyrical collaborator, Del James. The book is understood to be the inside story of the band with a great deal of input from the vocalist's side. It's sure to be both an entertaining and controversial read!
From a musical point of view, Rose has turned his attention to resurrecting GN'R's own label, Uzi Suicide, which they used to launch their debut EP, 'Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide'.
With distribution lined up via Geffen, Rose organised a showcase gig for Geffen execs featuring four of the bands he's interested in. They are Soul, Davy's Farm, Salt Of The Earth and The Assassins.
Davy's Farm are now close to a deal, while Soul will have an EP out early next year, plus a Del James-directed video.
The Assassins are also close to inking a deal, and can expect a huge amount of publicity when they do sign, as they feature Axl's brother Stuart Bailey on guitar. Bailey was previously best-known as a vocalist with Dr. Whiskey. The Assassins' music, which Bailey has a hand in writing, is in the currently hot Southern Rock vein being pursued by the likes of Pride & Glory, and on the softer side, Blind Melon (another band Axl has helped out).
Uzi Suicide re-released all of Hanoi Rocks' back catalogue on CD in the US last year. Rose and Slash have often acknowledged the debt they owe to the seminal Glam tarts, who were led by Michael Monroe, currently with Demolition 23.
Rose has also been writing new material for GN'R, for when they do return to the studio.
So, one way or another, devotees will not be waiting much longer for GN'R activity, and there are sure to be many more twists and turns in the Axl/Slash saga before the band finally make it back into full-time action. We will, of course, keep you posted...
TIMETABLE OF RECONSTRUCTION
The dates for your diary, GN'R fans!
'Sympathy For The Devil' will be the next GN'R single, due out on January 2. The film from which it's taken, Interview With A Vampire, goes on general release in the UK on January 1. It will be accompanied by a full soundtrack album.
Slash's solo project, SVO Snakepit, release `It's Five O'Clock Somewhere' album via Geffen (see main feature for tracklisting). Slash and band will arrive in the UK for press and promotion and, it's hoped, a one-off gig to launch the LP.
MARCH AND APRIL
Slash's solo world tour hits full stride, with European and UK dates currently planned for spring/early summer.
Meanwhile, the Uzi Suicide label plans its first releases, possibly from Soul and Davy's Farm.
MAY AND JUNE
Slash completes his solo touring schedule. Del James' official GN'R book, Shattered Illusion, is mooted for release around this time, via Bantam/ Doubleday. There should also be a second solo album out from original Guns guitarist Izzy Stradlin' and his band, Ju Ju Hounds.
JULY AND AUGUST
After a brief holiday, Slash, along with SVO Snakepit cohort Matt Sorum, will regroup with Axl, bassist Duff McKagan, keyboardist Dizzy Read and possibly Paul Huge to begin rehearsals for the next GN'R album(s).
THE REST OF '95
If all goes to plan (and who knows, it could happen!?!), work proper begins on the album, with Axl, Slash and Duff honing the new material. An eventual release date and touring plans are too far away to contemplate as yet!
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Alan Taylor was born on the 12 June 1930 in Tidworth where his father was billeted as a sergeant with the Royal Field Artillery. In 1934 he and his sister moved with their parents to Hollingbury, Brighton following their father’s discharge from the army after having served for 21 years.
Dad often spoke about his years growing up in Brighton, probably most vividly remembered were recollections from the period covering the Second World War 1939-1945. These were seen through the eyes of a ten year old, one oblivious to the awfulness of war. To him and his friends it was an exciting time. Many of these stories were told to me during the Rhodesian Bush War when we were both involved in differing roles during this conflict.
Following grammar school in Brighton, Dad attended the Brighton College of Art where he met and fell in love with Mary Cribb, daughter of the Ditchling Guild sculptor and letter cutter Joseph Cribb. Mary lived on Ditchling Common. They would meet half way between there and Brighton, at the top of the South Downs with that beautiful view over the Weald.
In April 1952 Alan and Mary were married. The following year Jane our eldest sister was born. Prudence followed two years later in 1955 and Matthew in 1958. During this period Dad was teaching and also spending valuable time with his father in law, exploring drawing and learning letter cutting; an investment that would have a profound effect on both his own work and how he taught his students for the rest of his teaching life. However towards the end of the 1950s he and Mary were becoming restless, wanting to find new horizons for themselves and opportunities for their young family.
A family connection was responsible for choosing Rhodesia. And so it was that in August 1960 we departed from Southampton on the ship, The Windsor Castle bound for CapeTown South Africa. Two weeks later the family would be winding their way up the subcontinent in a steam train bound for Bulawayo.
Until 1964 Dad held a position as Art Master at Guinea Fowl School near Gwelo in the Midlands, and so began the love affair with Africa, shown in his fine drawings, water colours and wood engravings many of which remain as part of his legacy with family, and friends around the world.
In August 1962, our youngest sister Felicity was born. I can remember seeing her for the first time as I peered between the seats of our Morris Traveller, craning my neck to get a better look. It was on a trip back to England nine months later that Felicity developed a life threatening condition on board the Pretoria Castle, near the island of Las Palmas. This incident, I believe, was the hardest thing Dad and Mum ever had to endure. Felicity was placed on board a flight to London with two nurses who were her guardians until her eventual fairly miraculous recovery was achieved at Guys Hospital.
Circumstances dictated that we return to England in 1964 and Dad took up a post as Art Master at The Blessed Phillip Howard in Barnham in Sussex. The family spent some happy years living in Walberton near Arundel. Jane attended Chichester High and Prudence, Matt and Felicity the convent in Bognor Regis. It was perhaps fortuitous that we were in England at this time as both Dad’s father and Mum’s father became unwell and passed away.
The longing to return to Africa was proving too great and in January 1970 Dad accepted the position of Head of Art at Falcon College in Matabeleland Rhodesia; an oasis of a unique learning establishment in the Matabeleland bush. Eagle country. He was to remain as a much loved and respected member of staff for the next quarter century. Following the untimely death of our mother, Dad remained for another three years, one of which proved a very special one as he was able to be with his eldest granddaughter Andrea, when she attended the college sixth form as the only girl, following in the footsteps of her mother, Jane and aunts.
The 25 years at Falcon were rich with memories as it was with anyone touched by such a community, student and teacher alike. The college was the realisation of a dream had by its founders who took an abandoned gold mining village and created an educational establishment for boys to rival any public school with a fierce reputation for academic and sporting prowess.
Dad quickly developed the reputation amongst the boys as being one who wasn’t quick to judge; having a sympathetic ear and a sincere understanding of how boys between 12 and 18 feel. The Art Room at the far end of the school was a sanctuary for many boys struggling with the pressures of growing up. Dad was no push over, and could often be stern. He was principled, and yet his ability to relate to the pupils and his willingness to listen, resulted in a lasting mutual respect. He was a much loved Deputy Housemaster of both Founders and George Grey Houses during different periods spanning his time there.
I was fortunate enough to spend many times with Dad during the school holidays, exploring with him, the unfolding secrets of the African bush, camping, walking, climbing, hunting, identifying flora and fauna, watching him often record these findings in his sketchbooks. Dad was not only the Art Master, he also taught English Language and Literature, loving both with his Pythonesque wit and an insight that both inspired and influenced his students. The stage sets he created for college dramas were legendary. My wife Lisa was lucky to have been taught History of Art by him as one of those rare Falcon girls, as was Prudence who went on to become an artist, following in her parents’ footsteps. Dad had a way with tools; to watch his hands employ them in their purpose was a revelation. He drew a line with skill and economy, and our father’s love of words meant he could wield them with some power, occasionally disarming the person listening!
On retiring from Falcon, Dad spent ten years near Pietermaritzburg in Natal South Africa where he married for the second time. He lived close to some of us and we were able to see him frequently. Sadly he was to outlive Hilaria who died in 2004. His health became a matter of concern for his children and so he came to England, returning to the district of his birth place. During this latter period he enjoyed a quiet life, filled with a host of memories between two continents, and involving himself in wood turning and carving; listening to opera and classical music, reading Shakespeare, playing Bridge and always taking a keen interest in the changing times around him. He revelled in his role as the grandparent of ten children, and great grandparent to seven.
Recently I was reminded by a Falcon Old Boy, the closing words given by Dad at ‘House Prayers’ on Wednesday evenings.
“May the Lord support us all the day long, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and holy rest, and peace at last“.
Matt Taylor, Founders 1970 – 1976
Picture Credits: Photos from Matt Taylor; Illustration from Adam Truscott (Hervey 1982 – 1984)
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Dan Spence named ADT CHL Goaltender of the Week
By pbadmin
CHL Press Release
Toronto – The Canadian Hockey League today announced that Dan Spence of the Calgary Hitmen is the ADT CHL Goaltender of the Week for the second week in a row after posting a 3-0-0-0 record against two of the CHL’s top rated teams. Spence turned in a 1.95 goals against average and a .937 save percentage in three starts last week.
The 18-year-old from Langley, BC started the week with 30 saves in a 4-2 road win over the Medicine Hat Tigers on October 30. He followed up with 23 saves in a 7-2 home ice win over the Tigers on November 2 and finished the week with 36 saves in a 3-2 shootout win over the Vancouver Giants on November 4.
Steve Mason of the London Knights was the OHL nominee and Olivier Laliberte of the Gatineau Olympiques was the QMJHL nominee after posting identical 2-0-0 records and 1.50 goals against averages last week.
Each week the CHL recognizes the ADT CHL Goaltender of the Week and will present the ADT CHL Goaltender of the Year Award to the CHL’s top netminder at the conclusion of the 2006-07 season.
Celebrating its 132nd anniversary, ADT Security Services, Inc., a unit of Tyco Fire & Security, is the largest provider of electronic security services to more than six million commercial, federal and residential customers throughout North America. ADT’s total security solutions include intrusion, fire protection, closed circuit television, access control, critical condition monitoring, electronic article surveillance, radio frequency identification (RFID) and integrated systems. ADT’s web site addresses are www.adt.com or www.adt.ca.
ADT CHL Goaltender of the Week
Oct 2 – Ryan Mior, P.E.I. Rocket
Oct 10 – Sebastian Dahm, Sarnia Sting
Oct 17 – Andrew Perugini, Barrie Colts
Oct. 24 – James Reimer, Red Deer Rebels
Oct. 31 – Dan Spence, Calgary Hitmen
Nov. 6 – Dan Spence, Calgary Hitmen
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KATE GREENE
Kate Greene is a poet, essayist, and former laser physicist whose work has appeared in Aeon, the Atlantic, Discover, The Economist, Harvard Review, the New Yorker, Pacific Standard, Slate, and WIRED, among others. Her essays have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, CBS News Radio, and the BBC World Service. She has taught writing at Vanderbilt University, San Francisco State University, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. In 2013, Greene was the crew writer and second-in-command on a four-month simulated Mars mission for the NASA-funded HI-SEAS project. Her essay collection inspired by the experience, ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS AND OTHER STORIES, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. She currently lives in New York City where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University.
You can follow her on Twitter here. View her C.V. here. And download a high-resolution headshot here. (Photo by kjophoto)
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Riding the Raisina Tiger
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From Today's Papers - 28 Jan 09
Pakistan's present and future war
India has carried out a revaluation of its strategic options with Pakistan, and the coming years could witness an all-out strategy of coercion by it, a strategy so effectively applied by Israel in the Middle East. India's biggest advantage in conceptual and technical military cooperation with Israel lies in the fact that its technology is largely indigenous and facilitates material transfer with no end-user problems. Pakistan is already engaged in a war of attrition and the future will be a serious test of its strategy of defiance and ability to ride out the crises as a cohesive nation state.
India's quest for security and response to perceived external threats is shaped and complicated by its past. India desires to exist as a great power with a capability of bullying its neighbours and turning them into vassal states. Pakistan has been the major impediment towards this India's quest for great-power status. Wary of the freedom struggle in Kashmir, an exaggerated threat of Islamic militants and fear of another Two Nation Theory from within, Indian strategists have been toying with the idea of using a small but lethal rapid-reaction force for a limited duration inside Pakistan. However, India cannot accomplish what it has failed to do in the past six decades, unless the breeze blows in its favour.
In the post-9/11 scenario, India sees an opportunity and is acting as a neo-realist to minimise the importance of Pakistan through high-profile coercion in line with international perceptions. In this India is even ready to forego its traditional mantra of keeping the great powers out of the region and to align with them for short-term gains. In the final analysis, India wishes to frame a politically discredited, ethnically fragmented, economically fragile and morally weak Pakistan. This can only happen if the role of the armed forces in Pakistan's policymaking is reduced, Punjab divided and the rallying call of Kashmir taken care of for good.
The Indian military structure is geared towards such a capability with active assistance from Russia and Israel, and now the USA and UK. Having allied itself closely with Israel, India will now seek a continuous harassment through heightened military coercion, control of river waters, diplomatic isolation and covert interference. Mumbai and any such incidents in future will continue to provide reason for such intimidation, all in concert with the US and western strategic objectives in the region.
Interestingly, much of the blame for having landed in the box and then pushed into a vulnerable position must also be shared by the Pakistani establishments of the past decade. Pakistan's declared nuclear capability was meant to deter all types of conflicts and pave the way for sustained economic growth, international stature, and a political solution of the Kashmir dispute, Through Kargil, Pakistan led India and the world to believe that notwithstanding a nuclear shadow, a limited military conflict in an existing conflict zone was still possible. Kargil, and later 9/11, changed international perceptions on an armed freedom struggle in Kashmir as well as Pakistan's relevance to the new form of threat: non-state actors. Seen in the backdrop of 9/11, it was the second effect that finally resulted in disownership of the freedom fighters in Kashmir by Pakistan while also resigning the Kashmir question to the impossibility of backdoor diplomacy.
The nuclear capability of Pakistan provides a very small window of opportunity to India to carry out a physical offensive action across the LoC or the international border. This action could be a raid in the form of hot pursuit through ground or helicopter-borne troops, precision air strikes with or without stand-off; remote-controlled targeting through a guided-missile attack, and in the worst case, an attempt to seize objectives close to the international border with little military but considerable political significance. India had a fully developed chemical weapons programme even before it signed the chemical weapons convention as a country not possessing chemical weapons. But it declared its arsenal soon after signing the convention and is not averse to using quickly diffusing chemical weapons. After 9/11, India has held war games and fine-tuned these concepts and implemented some in a very limited manner during the escalation on the LoC.
Hot pursuit, as the name suggests, is only possible in an already hot theatre like the LoC. These are launched through ground troops or heliborne forces. Such an option has little probability because of the bilateral ceasefire. But such an option, however remote, cannot be ruled out.
With the active assistance of Israel, some Indian aircrafts have acquired a beyond-visual- range, precision stand-off capability, something witnessed during the Kargil conflict. India may use its air force remaining inside its own territory and launch laser-guided munitions diagonally inside Pakistan. However, the selected targets should be within 20 kilometres of the LoC or the international border.
Precision strikes imply that Indian aircrafts will physically violate Pakistan's airspace and launch precision surgical strikes against selected targets from a very high altitude, or conventional bombing runs, or use heliborne troops. In such a situation, these aircrafts will be vulnerable to Pakistani air defence and the PAF.
In the cold start strategy, India positions forces with offensive capabilities in military garrisons close to the international border, equipped, trained and tasked to capture some nodal points along the international border, before the Pakistani forces can react. India may not succeed in such an operation without a massive air cover. In Indian strategic calculus, the timing and lightening speed of such operations will solicit immense international pressure on Pakistan so as to curtail Pakistan's conventional and nuclear response.
Notwithstanding such options hinging on military and diplomatic brinkmanship, India will benefit from the use of Israeli armed and surveillance drones operated by Israeli crews from inside India. Historical precedents for such cooperation already exist.
The whole body of war fighting reasoning in such limited conflicts warrants a level of rationality and comprehension of a common strategic language between the belligerents. This is technically impossible. Different actors would draw varying conclusions from an animated Graduated Escalation Ladder (GEL) always vulnerable to a Fire Break Point that could result in uncontrolled conventional and nuclear escalation. It is, therefore, most important that the decision to graduate a conflict rest solely with the political leaders of the country, wherein a common strategic parlance could be evolved with more ease.
Taking a leaf from the Israeli opaqueness in its nuclear doctrine, India over time has applied a conceptual innovation in her nuclear strategy. The Indian revision in the nuclear doctrine implies the ambiguity in the "no first use clause" through a declared no first use and pre-emptive retaliation to create a perception that it is making a coercive transaction from doctrine of limited conventional war to an opaque level of conflict in which the nuclear weapons remain in a very high state of alert. The implication is that India may flirt with the concept of a limited strategic coercion in the shadow of a very high non-degradable nuclear alert beyond Pakistan's capability to neutralise. It is also my opinion that, as of now, after having signed the Nuclear Deal with USA, India benefits from an extended US nuclear umbrella, and strategic and diplomatic support.
There are reliable reports from Afghanistan that Indian contractors are busy building billets and accommodation in Kabul and Bagram to station two Indian divisions in the area. At the same time, bids have been invited by the US Corps of Engineers to construct a divisional size cantonment in Kandahar. Hypothetically, troops in the garb of protection for Indian investments will actually seal off Afghanistan's Pakhtun regions from the North. Then the US, NATO and Indian troops will go for an all-out counter insurgency operation in the cordoned off Pakhtun areas. The effects of spill-over into Pakistan would be pronounced and the Durand Line would become a figment of imagination. Premised on the romantic notion of Pakhtun nationalism, the doors to Pakhtunkhwa would be opened. The USA would then select the shortest route to Afghanistan through the Arabian Sea and Balochistan.
Whatever the concept, scope and objective of such limited escalations, India, with its newfound allies, has decided to maintain a constant vigil and coercion of Pakistan over a prolonged period of time but well below a Fire Break Point. The obvious targets, in tandem, with its allies, will be addressed through diverse instruments like control of rivers, economics, diplomacy, international pressure, internal law and order, military intimidation and even insurgency.. A trillion-dollar question is: will the USA be ready to occupy Balochistan for a secure supply corridor?
The war has already begun.. The question is. When did it begin?
The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistani army. Email: nicco1988@hotmail. com
US cuts terror aid to Pak
Islamabad, January 27
The US deducted $55 million under its reimbursement programme for expenses incurred by Pakistan on the war on terror after American auditors raised objections to a claim submitted by the country.
US authorities deducted the amount while releasing only $ 101 million out of Pakistan's claim of $156 million for expenses incurred on the campaign against terrorism till April 2008, said Shaukat Tarin, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Finance.
The move was the outcome of objections from American auditors as well as a change in the US format for releasing such funds, he said. "The Pakistan government will re-submit a case for the release of the amount, which has already been spent from its resources (on) the war on terror," Tarin told reporters here yesterday.
Tarin said increased defence spending due to tensions with India in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks had put pressure on the national exchequer.
Pakistan's balance of payment position will improve after a loan of $ 700 million from donors is received by the end of March. The country will get $ 500 million from the World Bank in February and another $ 200 million from the Asian Development Bank.
The country recently received a loan of $ 500 million from China and $ 100 million from the ADB.
Tarin said under an agreement with the International Monetary Fund, Pakistan was bound to eliminate subsidy on electricity by the end of June. The government will submit to the Friends of Pakistan group technical reports on areas needing financing in February. A ministerial-level meeting of the Friends of Pakistan is scheduled for mid-March. — PTI
JuD activists protest takeover of headquarters by Pak govt
Rezaul H Laskar in Islamabad | PTI | January 27, 2009 | 14:10 IST
Hundreds of activists and supporters of the Jamaat-ud-Dawah terror group, linked to the Mumbai attacks, on Tuesday staged a demonstration outside the organisation's headquarters in Muridke to protest its takeover by Pakistani authorities.
Waving the Jamaat's black and white flag and carrying banners, the protestors disrupted traffic for some time on the Grant Trunk�Road outside the Markaz-e-Tayiba complex in Murdike, located about 30 km from Lahore.
Tuesday is the second consecutive day that pro-JuD protestors demonstrated against the government crackdown that came after the United Nations Security Counil declared the outfit, a front of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, as a terror group.
The protestors carried banners that read "Restrictions on Jamaat-ud-Dawah because of Indian pressure are not acceptable" and "Free Hafiz Mohammed Saeed", referring to chief of the JuD. Some of the protestors brandished long sticks.
No police personnel were present at the time of the protest or inside the Muridke complex, TV channels reported.
Despite the takeover of the Jamaat headquarters on Sunday by the government of Punjab province, no security personnel had been posted there as yet, reports said.
Students of educational institutions run by the Jamaat at the sprawling Markaz-e-Tayiba complex were also part of the protests. The protestors later went back into the Muridke compound and continued their demonstration inside.
They told reporters that the takeover of the Jamaat complex by the authorities was unethical.
The protestors also said they would not accept an administrator being imposed on them by the government. They dismissed allegations that the Jamaat was linked to the Mumbai terror attacks and said they had the legal right to protest injustices perpetrated against the group.
On Sunday, the Punjab government took over the Muridke complex and appointed an administrator to monitor the activities of charitable and educational institutions run by the Jamaat at its headquarters.
Jamaat and Lashker-e-Tayiba founder Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and several other top leaders of the Jamaat are currently under house arrest. They have been detained under the Maintenance of Public Order law, though no charges have been brought against them.
Cabinet ignores holiday suggestion by pay panel
Ajay Banerjee
New Delhi, January 27
While the Union Cabinet has cleared the pay hike recommended by the Sixth Pay Commission, it has refrained from curbing the number of holidays to government servants to three which was also suggested by the commission.
The Cabinet has already taken a decision that the holidays that allow extended weekends to government servants at the cost of tax payers' money have to continue.
The Union Cabinet had okayed a pay hike much higher than what was recommended by the Sixth Pay Commission. The increase was in annual increment and the payment of arrears and was incorporated after intervention from the top.
When the hike was announced, the Sixth Pay Commission had suggested that the holidays be curtailed. It said that offices should be closed only on three national holidays. All gazetted holidays should be abolished and compensated by increasing the number of restricted holidays from the existing two to eight. This was to meet the needs of the employees who may prefer to avail a holiday on a particular religious festival. This would have stopped the practice of government declaring gazetted holidays for all major religious festivals.
The decision of the Cabinet has come to light now. The matter was raised in the Lok Sabha by Avinash Rai Khanna, MP from Hoshiarpur under rule 377. Prithviraj Chavan, Minister for Personnel, has told Khanna in a letter dated January 23 that the Cabinet has decided not to accept the recommendations of the pay commission with regard to curtailment of holidays.
The Obama team wants to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy.
"Don't try to put out a fire by throwing on more fire! Don't wash a wound with blood!"
– Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th century
ON January 13, 2009, Senator John Kerry, Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, leaned into his microphone and said of the United States' war in Afghanistan, "I think we're on the wrong track." A former presidential candidate who not only served in Vietnam but also became one of that war's most powerful critics, Kerry now cautioned, "Unless we rethink [the Afghan policy] very, very carefully, we could raise the stakes, investing America's reputation in a greater way as well as our treasure, and wind up pursuing a policy that is frankly unachievable."
Sitting before Kerry's committee, Senator Hillary Clinton, who was later confirmed as President Barack Obama's Secretary of State, said, "I think that your cautions are extremely well taken." The Afghan policy was not to be taken lightly. It was going to be thoroughly reconsidered. The U.S. does not have "a set of discrete goals". This is what has to be clarified. "My awareness of the history going back to Alexander the Great, certainly the imperial British military, and Rudyard Kipling's memorable poems about Afghanistan, the Soviet Union which put in more troops than we're thinking about putting in – I mean, it calls for a large dose of humility about what it is we are trying to accomplish," she said.
No longer the brave statements about "getting Bin Laden", of installing a liberal democracy, of freeing women, of ridding the region of the Taliban. Realism is the order of the day. Currently, there are 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with an additional detachment of 8,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) troops (from 47 countries). During his election campaign, Obama promised to double the U.S. number, and to make Afghanistan the "central front on terror". By all indications, the troops will arrive in Kabul by mid-March. What they will do is another question.
Admiral Mike Mullen, Chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of this deployment: "It isn't going to make a difference after those troops get here if we haven't made progress on the development side and on the government side." A report in The Washington Post (January 13) noted that the expansion of the U.S. forces "will buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy". The incoming administration has made it clear that it will not passively continue the drift over the past seven years. It has not yet revealed its own strategy.
Neglected peace
In March 2008, the Atlantic Council, a major policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., released a report entitled "Saving Afghanistan: An Appeal and Plan for Urgent Action". The co-author of the report was Major General (retired) James L. Jones, who commanded NATO's European forces from 2003 to 2006. The first line of the report is blunt: "Make no mistake, the international community is not winning in Afghanistan."
The Taliban and the NATO-U.S. forces are at a military stalemate, the report admits. An increase in the NATO-U.S. troops will allow them to take the fight against the Taliban to the less populated, largely rural areas. But this is simply not going to end the conflict. The future of Afghanistan is not going to be fought in its countryside but it will be "determined by progress or failure in the civil sector".
The NATO-U.S. effort fails in this aspect. The funds for civil development are limited, and even here, "to add insult to injury, of every dollar of aid spent on Afghanistan, less than 10 per cent goes directly to Afghans". The NGO (non-governmental organisation) economy is top-heavy, catering to international aid brokers who have inflamed Kabul's housing market. In addition, the Atlantic Council, in a remarkable departure from the George Bush policy, called for "a regional approach and regional solutions".
The NATO-U.S. alliance and the Hamid Karzai government need to bring "in interested parties and neighbours", including the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (which includes the Central Asian states, China and Russia), India, Iran and, of course, Pakistan. None of this can be done without a comprehensive reconsideration of U.S.-NATO strategy in Afghanistan.
Shortly after the Atlantic Council made its report, the Bush White House created its own review of Afghan policy. Lt. General Douglas Lute, the White House's "war czar", headed the review, which reported back to Bush in December 2008. Lute laid out three proposals: (1) that aid to Pakistan should be conditional on its commitment to the battle in the border regions of Afghanistan; (2) that the U.S. government must take a regional view, including India, Pakistan and other states into the discussion on insurgency; (3) that the U.S. government must broaden its strategy to emphasise development and governance rather than military power. This was an in-house rebuke of the Bush policy. It went largely unnoticed.
When Barack Obama picked the Atlantic Council's author James Jones to be his National Security Adviser, it became clear that rethinking Afghan policy had to be on the agenda. Drawing from that study and the Lute report, the Obama transition began to review intensively how the Afghan war has been conducted. Obama went on NBC's Meet the Press (December 7, 2008) to underscore his commitment to bringing India, Pakistan and Iran into the discussion with Afghanistan and the U.S.-NATO for the future of the country. In addition, he pointed out that the U.S. had to increase its development work.
Part of the problem, he said, was that "the average Afghan farmer hasn't seen any improvement in his life. You know, we haven't seen the kinds of infrastructure improvements, we haven't seen the security improvements, we haven't seen the reduction in narco-trafficking, we haven't seen a reliance on rule of law in Afghanistan that would make people feel confident that the central government can, in fact, deliver on its promises". These statements offer a window into what the new strategy would look like.
Food, not bombs
U.S. Marines return from patrolling nearby villages during Operation Backstop in Helmand province south of Kabul on December 10, 2008. The U.S. is preparing to pour at least 20,000 extra troops into southern Afghanistan, but the country's future will be determined by the progress or failure in the civil sector.
For several months, Admiral Mullen has complained that the U.S. military cannot do the job alone. It has been reduced to the cities and bases, with occasional forays into the countryside (mainly from the air). The isolation of the U.S.-NATO soldiers, despite the attempt to reach out to ordinary Afghans through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, has come to resemble the Red Army's isolation in the last years before it exited the country. Russia's Ambassador to Kabul, Zamir Kabulov, was once the KGB's man there, and now points out that the U.S. has not only copied all the Soviet errors but made some of its own. At least, he said, the Soviets had a modernisation strategy, spending billions in the 1980s on education, women's empowerment and infrastructure. "Where, I ask, are the big American projects to match these," he told The New York Times' John Burns in October 2008. "I'll tell you. There aren't any."
Amy Frumin of the Council on Foreign Relations spent a year in Afghanistan as the USAID representative to one of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. She acknowledges that the U.S. needs development assistance as well, but "the institutions in the U.S. to carry out development assistance are inadequate for this environment and are, therefore, not as useful as they could be. We will need to create a more effective tool to assist the Afghan government in extending its reach throughout the country."
The search for these more effective tools will certainly detain the Obama report, whose interest in making development a priority has enthused not only the policy section but also the military leadership. Frumin points out that good procedures are only part of the solution. "We will find that we need to partner with the Afghans in order to create a counter-corruption strategy that works – imposing one from outside has not worked and will not work." The Atlantic Council's report is more general about this, saying that "the key to success rests on the Afghans". Without Afghan participation in all aspects of development work, the new strategy will also be doomed to failure.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army continues to build military infrastructure across Afghanistan. Military training centres, new airfields, and bases: all these amount to hardware that belies the idea that the military aspect will be whittled down.
The Washington Post (January 13) reports that the U.S. might end up spending an additional $4 billion to build these military outposts, which of course "signals a long-term U.S. military commitment at a time when the incoming Obama administration's policy for the Afghan war is unclear". If the new Obama policy is not crystal clear, the new military hardware will begin to drive the strategy on the ground.
It is odd that Hillary Clinton mentioned the name of Rudyard Kipling as she spoke of her awareness of Afghan history. As the Pakistani writer Tariq Ali says, Kipling is frequently evoked to explain Afghanistan, all in the service of a fantasy of the infantile, savage tribes. Kipling's descriptions, he says, are "mistakenly read as history".
To speak of Kipling and Alexander and not of Mahmud Tarzi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, of Anahita Ratebzad and Malalai Joya is to indicate a preference for Afghanistan's imperial history to its history of reform and freedom. This failure to see the country from Afghan eyes is going to make any review Americo-centric.
The Obama administration will certainly send in more troops, and in April it will possibly reveal its new strategy at the NATO summit in France.
Between now and then, perhaps Hillary Clinton and Obama will digest the lesson of the Atlantic Council, of people such as Amy Frumin, and of a wounded President Hamid Karzai.
National Military Academy of Afghanistan host first graduation ceremony
Written on January 27, 2009 – 7:42 pm | by Frontier India Strategic and Defence |
National Military Academy of Afghanistan cadets participated in a graduation ceremony, January 25, 2009 , in Kabul. The 84 cadets who participated in the ceremony are members of the academy's first class of graduates. More than 1,500 people attended the graduation, to include Afghan government officials and Coalition officials.
Five years ago, the Ministry of Defense and the United States Military Academy (USMA), West Point, N.Y., developed a concept plan for the National Military Academy (NMAA) of Afghanistan in effort to produce more efficient, educated leaders within the Afghan National Army (ANA).
The keynote speaker was President Hamid Karzai, President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Others that participated in the ceremony included, Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, Afghan Minister of Defense, General Bismullah Khan, ANA Chief of the General Staff; and General David D. McKiernan, U.S. Forces Afghanistan Commanding General.
Prepared under the authority of the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan and the Afghan Ministry of Defense, a NMAA Concept Plan was signed in November 2003 by representatives from Afghanistan, the United States and Turkey. Since the beginning of the Academy, West Point has sent staff and faculty to NMAA and recently, the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. has also contributed to this effort.
The National Military Academy of Afghanistan which is an extensive four-year university level institution. The NMAA often referred to as the crown jewel of the ANA, is designed to educate, train and inspire the cadet brigade so each graduate is a competent, courageous and honorable officer.
The concept plan also included a dynamic layout of ethnic distribution throughout the corps of cadets and the staff and faculty to represent ethnicities from 33 of 34 provinces. And although the first graduating class consisted of all males, NMAA officials ensure female integration is soon to come.
Upon graduation each cadet, or officer in training, will have completed one of four majors to include: civil engineering, computer science, general engineering, sciences and legal studies and will be commissioned as a second lieutenant beginning their career according to a ten-year service agreement. During that time, each officer will serve in either infantry, artillery, armor, aviation, logistics or communication branches of the ANA. Leadership and Management, Military History and English majors will be available for future cadets.
Along with intense academic activities, the physical education infrastructure is also a vital component of cadet training. The NMAA provides each cadet with physical education instruction that they use throughout the four-year program in their new weight-lifting room and athletic fields.
The Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, responsible for training, equipping, advising and mentoring the Afghan National Security Forces, currently share student expenses with the Afghan Ministry of Defense who has assured to provide all funding in the future.
One graduate said this was the most defining moment in his life and he will continue to pursue an even better education and more difficult training to ensure his soldiers are well taken care of.
In addition to all future changes, NMAA officials say leveraging technology for outreach to the population and encouraging under-represented ethnicities to apply, the number of applicants is expected to increase from 360 applicants in 2009 to nearly 2,000 applicants in 2012.
Confusion In Islamabad: Can Politicians & Military Handle The Mess?
There are conflicting signals about what is happening inside the Zardari government, and mixed signals on U.S. and India. Pakistani experts are now convinced that India's 'evidence' regarding Mumbai is not watertight. But a pro-U.S. core within the Pakistani government is preventing Islamabad from talking openly about it. The Pakistani media and political class remain confused about priorities, discussing nonissues such as the marks of a daughter of a senior judge and political backstabbing when the country faces a gathering storm on its international borders. The debate within military circles is substantive. But the military won't interfere.
By AHMED QURAISHI
Sunday, 25 January 2009.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—There are some indications that the Zardari government is taking a tougher line toward India and toward the proxy U.S. pressure regarding the Mumbai attacks and the U.S. attacks inside Pakistan.
This change, if real, contrasts sharply with the initial passive attitude of the members of the government who appeared too eager to take in the sermons from U.S. officials and to appease India.
Meanwhile, Pakistani defense analysts are reviewing some of the longtime military beliefs regarding how to fight a war with India in case of Indian aggression. Of special concern is the reported power concentration around central and northern Pakistan, leaving the southern parts of the country exposed. Some defense analysts, as shown later in this report, are arguing.
The problem lies in the fact that this government is issuing contradictory statements. President Zardari, for example, has condemned, without naming President Obama, the Jan. 23 U.S. missile attacks inside Pakistan. But he is not ready to go beyond this or take a stronger public line. There are reports that his government has an understanding with Washington on increasing U.S. operations inside Pakistan. But Mr. Husain Haqqani, Mr. Zardari's pointman and ambassador in Washington, was reported last week as having said that Pakistan might consider 'other options' if the U.S. did not change its policy. The statement raised eyebrows in Islamabad, coming from a known U.S. apologist in the elected Pakistani government.
This hardline is tempered by other statements that verge on appeasement. On India, Prime Minister Gilani said on Jan. 14 that India's 'evidence' on Mumbai attacks is more of 'information' and not evidence that can admitted in a court of law. But o Jan 23, Mr. Gilani told a London newspaper that Pakistan 'needs to act fast' on the Indian dossier and emphasized, rather sheepishly, that Pakistan is taking the dossier 'seriously'.
There are elements within the PPP government who are strongly pro-U.S. This includes President Zardari, Mr. Haqqani, and Interior Adviser Rehman Malik. The former national security adviser M. A. Durrani is no longer in this group. All four were either longtime residents in the United States and United Kingdom or retained strong business and personal interests in both countries. On the other hand, there are other PPP officials who do not approve of the policies of this pro-U.S. camp but are incapable of opposing them openly. This group supposedly includes – to varying degrees – Prime Minister Yousaf Reza Gilani and some other lower-level party officials. This division is fluid and is not immediately clear. One sign of it surfaced on Jan. 7, when national security adviser Mr. Durrani was caught making leaks to the Indian media to embarrass Pakistan. Mr. Tasnim Qureshi, the State Minister for Interior, appeared on television to confront the revelations that Mr. Durrani was making. A couple of news channels showed Mr. Qureshi quite disturbed by his own government's national security adviser insisting that Ajmal Kassab, the name India uses to describe the man in its custody involved in the Mumbai attacks, was indeed a Pakistani citizen. Mr. Qureshi went as far as saying that Mr. Kassab was an Indian intelligence asset even if it was proven beyond doubt that he was a Pakistani citizen.
President Zardari appears to be in a bind. He apparently has some commitments under the 'deal' brokered by the U.S. with former president Pervez Musharraf. But on the other hand, has to keep the Pakistani public opinion and the Pakistani military on his side.
Prime Minister Gilani's soft message to India is balanced by Interior Advisor Rehman Malik's veiled statement on Jan. 22 that foreign hands were behind insurgencies in Swat and the tribal belt:
Pakistan Interior Advisor Rehman Malik has said that the rise in extremist activities in the tribal regions of the country was due to the help being offered to the extremists groups from some foreign countries. He said that foreign hands were patronizing terrorists in the Swat valley, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
Mr. Malik's statement came during a closed door briefing at the Pakistan Foreign Office given to eighty diplomats based in the Pakistani capital, including U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson. Ms. Patterson was apparently keen to counter the impression that Washington is endorsing India's position. This is an impression that U.S. ambassador in New Delhi and the outgoing Bush administration made quite clear. Additionally, the CIA, which is facilitating information exchange between ISI and the Indian security establishment, had also given clear indication that U.S. endorses the Indian 'evidence' without giving Pakistan the chance to verify it.
Pakistani officials are now telling the Americans and the British that they need DNA samples from Mr. Kassab to ascertain that he is the same person whose name appears in Pakistani records. Pakistani officials are also talking now about asking India for access to three senior Indian army officers arrested for blowing up 60 Pakistani citizens visiting Indian aboard a train service known as 'Samjhauta Express' [friendship train] in 2006.
Interestingly, the Zardari government has not made any formal request to India regarding access to the arrested Indian army officers. It could be possible that the government is releasing these trial balloons in order to show Pakistanis that the government is willing to take a hardline in defense of Pakistani interests. In this line of analysis, it would be fair to say that the Zardari government is reluctant to confront the 'deal guarantors' in Washington by taking a policy line that is confrontational in any way to the U.S. or its new regional ally, India.
The chairman of the Pakistani Senate Standing Committee on Interior, Senator Talha Mahmood, said as much on Jan. 14, insisting that Foreign powers are dictating the government:
Chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Interior, Talha Mahmood, said that the government was taking dictates from the foreign powers for promoting their agenda in Pakistan and had sidelined the parliament's resolution that asked for a halt to the operations in the tribal and settled areas besides his committee's recommendations. Talking to journalists here, Talha alleged that the government was being run by two or four persons who were taking dictates from the foreign powers instead of protecting the interests of the country and its people. "It is being trumpeted that there is a complete democracy in the country but it exists on papers only. Two or four persons are running the affairs of the government who don't consider themselves responsible to the people or parliament," he alleged.
Military Rethink
The former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Air Force, retired Air Vice Marshal Shehzad Chaudhry, in an op-ed piece published on Jan. 21, called on the government to adopt an 'institutional approach' in analyzing the threats facing Pakistan. He called on the Pakistani military to temporarily shed its resolve not to interfere in politics and offer its institutional capabilities for crisis management to the government considering the exceptionally difficult regional situation.
His analysis was quite clear on the threats facing Pakistan and it's not just 'terrorism' as defined by the United States. In his piece, titled, 'The gathering storm, AVM Chaudhry wrote:
What gathers additionally on the horizon is even more disconcerting. What with the RAND study for the US Army engaging in a "long war"; and another sponsored by the US Joint Staff endeavoring to determine the most likely points of application of the US military in the future, pointing towards a nexus of Islamist threat in combination with a failed state of nuclear Pakistan that so scares the Americans.
The importance of what RAND says or what the US Joint Staff is sweating on can never be underplayed. The RAND guys are no neo-cons working on extravagant notions of re-carving the world; instead they are at the delivery end working out the combatant level logistic, operational and strategic details. Pakistan has never been in a more critical security dilemma. Even the 1971 the loss of East Pakistan was not as dangerous in consequences as is the current and progressively deteriorating regional and global environment from Pakistan's perspective.
Most importantly, he sent an indirect message to General Tariq Majeed, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to General Ashfaq Kayani, Chief of the Army Staff. The message is that this is not the time to keep the military in the background:
Amongst the few functioning institutions, the military chastened by their experience of the last nine years consider it wise to keep at a distance, while the foreign ministry is woefully short of effort to go beyond fire-fighting and superficial treatment of immediate sores. It neither has the time nor the inclination to dig deeper than the surface and address the inherent dangers to the state and the nation. In a paradox of comical proportions, neither is the state and government leadership getting an honest and well deliberated guidance from the bureaucracy. The state is in need of all hands; even though the military might wish to prove its non-intervening credentials, now perhaps is not the time. It should be able to bring the support of its organizational strength and institutional approach to deliberating issues of critical national importance in helping formulate the blue-print of recovery from a complex situation. The other national institutions too
On India, he wrote:
India is likely to continue to up the ante in terms of diplomatic pressure, enlivened by suitably spaced jingoistic support. It shall essentially be an effort to keep Pakistan embroiled in a meaningless banter and dissuade Pakistan from a steadied attention to the most important, hoping that Pakistan might implode from within under the weight of these compounding adversities.
Another retired Pakistani military officer and a defense analyst, Ikram Sehgal, published an important article on Jan. 22, titled Cold-starting Pakistan, describing in detail an Indian military doctrine that is stunning in its aggressiveness leaves no doubts about India's aggressive military intentions toward Pakistan. The article is important because it indirectly raises questions about how and why the U.S. government and the think tanks deliberately suppress such glaring evidence that shows India as a cause of regional instability and not the victim that New Delhi likes to portray itself as.
Cold Start is the name that India has given to a policy of ordering rapid deployment forces to attack Pakistan in case of a terrorist attack inside or against India, without taking into consideration the other possibilities, like some third player trying to start a war, or the possibility of Hindu terrorist groups staging attacks and blaming them on Pakistan like they did in the 'Samjhauta Express' tragedy, according to India's own investigations.
Mr. Sehgal made two important revelations in his article. One on how a quick Pakistani military response dampened the chances of a possible Indian military aggression after the Mumbai attacks, and second, an important revelation about the distribution of Pakistani military forces in Pakistan's northern and southern regions.
Rumors are afloat about a game plan where India will conduct surgical strikes against "known" terrorist camps, and Pakistan will helpfully turn the other cheek. Our rather helpless response to daily "Predator" attacks, bluster rather than any substance, has given weight to this belief. Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" describes how, agonising over how to convince Pakistan, the US hierarchy was nonplussed by Pervez Musharraf's "ready and willing" acceptance of all seven US demands without even a murmur. Was diplomatic pressure recently brought on Pakistan to fall in line in the "supreme" interest of the "war against terrorism," the logic being that since only "terrorist" targets were to be engaged this was in "Pakistan's interest"? Wonder of wonders, for once we did not roll over and play dead! Our rulers probably calculated that the people of Pakistan would give them short shift.
Initiating preliminary actions of their "Cold Start" Doctrine, the IAF was geared into a "first strike" mode. Picked up by our intelligence, the PAF responded by a "show of force" on "high alert." A dense fog then engulfed most areas of the likely military options. During this time-lag some strategic reserves were extricated from FATA and rushed eastwards, that "window of opportunity" for India passed. Mere coincidence that three Strike Corps are in "winter collective exercise" mode in the Rajasthan Desert? That too carrying their first- and second-line ammunition? Movement of their Amphibious Brigade and dumping of fuel for forward deployment of troop-lifting helicopters has also been detected.
Pakistan's history is replete with strategic blunders of monumental stupidity, we have only been saved by tactical successes achieved by the great sacrifices and outstanding bravery of our soldiers, sailors and airmen, those who have actually taken part in action, and not just talked about it.
On the second point, the distribution of Pakistani military forces between the north and the south of the country, Mr. Sehgal made this observation:
Some morons thought up the "Defence of the East lies in the West," and we left East Pakistan defenceless […] Those who think that "the defence of the South lies in the North," i.e., putting the bulk of our Armed Forces protecting our main population centres and communication in the Punjab and AK, may be theoretically correct in a long-drawn-out war, in the short Indo-Pak version it is stupid, monumentally stupid, particularly in the face of the known Indian deployment.
As night turns into day, the Indians will put their main effort in the deep South. 18 Div was almost overwhelmed in 1971. Two brigades of 33 Div were force-marched from the Rahimyarkhan area to stem the rot. Only the outstanding courage of individual unit commanders like Lt Col (later Brig) Mohammad Taj, S J & Bar (44 Punjab now 4 Sindh), saved Pakistan when "the barbarians were at the gate" in Chhor and Umerkot on Dec 12, 1971. Taj was symbolic of many brave officers who went up and down the line in the Thar Desert exhorting the rank and file, the line held. It was touch and go for a couple of days! Later, no one did more than Lt Gen Lehrasab Khan as Commander 5 Corps for improving our defences in the area but even his soldierly persistence did not succeed penetrating military obduracy to get the resources in men and material required for the Chhor-Badin-Sujawal area. Kayani must ensure that this time around we have enough in the Thar Desert and the adjacent coast. Our existence is a zero-sum situation; can we afford to take chances?
These are issues that the political elite of the country is not aware of. In fact, with the lack of any organized research and analysis activities within the Pakistani political parties, it is no wonder that we see many Pakistani politicians and parties conducting their own private 'foreign policies' with outside powers.
The Pakistani military, while rightfully keeping a distance from domestic politics, has to make a temporary break and involve the political elite in an issue that concerns external threats facing Pakistan. The military will need this channel in the future, in case of a foreign imposed war, to urge the politicians to be able to explain the Pakistanis why Pakistan has to take unusual steps to protect the nation.
Eurocopter to build state of the art flagship Helicopter Service and Simulator Facility in Aberdeen
Eurocopter UK is to build a major new helicopter service centre at Kirkhill Commercial Park in Dyce, Aberdeen. The centre will bring the most up to date helicopter support technology to one of the busiest off shore oil and gas helicopter maintenance hubs in the world.
The facility, which will be designed and built for Eurocopter UK by Knight Property Group, will be ideally placed to offer state of the art logistical and technical support and flight simulator training for the UK's main heliport for the offshore oil industry. Home to major offshore helicopter operators Bristow Helicopters, Bond Offshore and CHC, Aberdeen is already a maintenance centre for 59 Super Puma/ EC255 family helicopters which fly an average of 85,000 hours per year in offshore missions, representing some of the most intensive helicopter traffic in the world.
The Eurocopter centre will comprise a 10,000 sq ft logistics warehouse and 5,000 sq ft of offices as well as 5,360 sq ft of flight simulator accommodation, which will house Eurocopter's first UK-based EC225 Flight Training Simulator. Work at the site will begin with ground breaking in April, and it is expected that the facility will be completed by December 2009. The centre will occupy the 1.2 acre site four at Knight Property Group's Kirkhill Commercial Park
Markus Steinke, Managing Director of Eurocopter UK commented: "The new state of the art Eurocopter facility in Aberdeen reinforces Eurocopter's commitment to investing in the UK, and to bringing the best technical and logistical support to where our customers need it most. The Eurocopter Puma/ Super Puma/ EC255 helicopter family has proved very popular in the UK, both supporting the UK offshore oil and gas industry and in military missions, as a key part of the Royal Air Force helicopter fleet. The new Aberdeen facility we are building is the latest of a growing range of high quality support services which we provide to our UK customers, both civil and military.
We aim to have a network of local operations close to our customers throughout the UK. With our already strong presence in England, Wales and Ireland, we are pleased to be now making a further commitment to Scotland."
Indian and Chinese security forces hold flag meeting in Ladakh
Chushul(J-K) Jan 27 (ANI): Keen to develop a long lasting friendship between border forces, Indian and Chinese security forces held a flag meeting at Chushul in Ladakh on Monday.
Sino-Indian border personnel meetings and flag meetings are guided by a mechanism that has been in vogue as a viable means to promote of Confidence Building Measures (CBM)).
The Indian Army received the Chinese delegation.
The flags of the two countries hoisted on the occasion and a cultural programme was also organised by the Chushul Garrison.
Brigadier Somnath Jha, Commandant of Indian Army's 114 Brigade based at Chushul who led the Indian delegation talked of the growing relation between the two countries.
"The relationship has grown rapidly from revolving around a volatile border dispute to one that is now encompasses, complex, political and economic connections," said Brigadier. Jha.
Describing meeting of Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh with Chinese President Hu Jintao and visit of Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee last year as successful, Chinese senior Colonel Deng Guo Hua appreciated the success of the recent Sino-India joint anti-terrorism exercise in Belgaum, Karnataka.
Such friendly interactions have played a significant role in promoting and strengthening mutual confidence between both forces.
Reportedly both sides agreed to further intensify efforts to ensure peace and tranquility in the region in line with the border peace and tranquility accord signed in 1993.
China and India held the anti-terrorism exercise in a show of cooperation between the two long time rivals a week after armed militants attackedumbai.
India and China held their first such joint military exercise in 2007. (ANI)
Why does China continue to undergo such rapid military expansion?
China has issued a white paper entitled "China's National Defense in 2008," tracing shifts in its defense budget since the nation first implemented its open door policy in 1978. The dramatic increase in defense spending over the past 30 years is striking.
The first decade saw an average 3.5 percent rise in the defense budget. In the second decade the figure rose to an average increase of 14.5 percent, and the last decade, 15.9 percent. In recent years, the figure has exceeded Japan's overall spending on national defense -- in 2008, China's military budget was 417.7 billion yuan (approximately 5.849 trillion yen).
According to Western military experts, however, China's military spending is actually said to be two to three times the figure, once other military-related expenses designated for categories such as space exploration and foreign aid are taken into account.
Why does China continue to undergo such rapid military expansion? The white paper says that, "China will never seek hegemony or engage in military expansion now or in the future, no matter how developed it becomes." But this does not amount to a rational explanation and does nothing to reassure neighboring countries.
At one time, China offered an increase in military personnel costs as a result of improved labor conditions as its justification for soaring military expenses. It is more realistic to assume, however, that China's defense budget increase of recent years is due to qualitative changes made under the country's shifting military strategy.
The white paper touches upon the military's pelagic and space capabilities, and as if to confirm the country's focus, the government has acknowledged its consideration of constructing aircraft carriers. China, furthermore, has succeeded in several manned spacecraft missions, has developed the missile technology necessary to shoot down satellites in orbit, and has continued launching its own positioning satellites crucial to guiding these missiles. China's aspirations are transparent.
The country's goal is no longer the preservation of its land, territorial waters, and airspace, but the safeguarding of national interests, now spread across the globe. A debate has emerged within the military about replacing the protection of "territorial boundaries" with that of "boundaries of national interests." If military expansion is the purpose of this shift, how does it differ from the pursuit of hegemony? The white paper, alas, does not shed light on this question.
Currently the world's third biggest economy, China obtains the oil and natural gas necessary to support its economic growth via massive pipelines running from Central Asia, Myanmar, and Russia. It has participated in oil field development in Africa and the Middle East, its tank vessels loaded with oil forming a queue in the Indian Ocean, and is hoping to explore undersea resources in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.
The economic interests of the country have expanded on a worldwide scale. The Chinese Navy's deployment of cutting-edge missile destroyers to the waters off the coast of Somalia was not a mere short-term measure for dealing with pirates, but a way to establish the foundations to develop sea lane defense capabilities to Africa's coast.
How will China's military buildup be affected by economic growth that has slowed drastically this year? Had this been the China of yesterday, it would have focused its budget on building the economy. Putting the brakes on military expansion once it has gained momentum is no easy task, however, and, whether there will be a shift in the relationship between the government and the military remains to be seen.
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Melbourne selected as first international city for Uber Air::
Melbourne has been announced as the first international launch city for Uber Air at the Uber Elevate Summit 2019 in Washington, DC.
Melbourne will become the first city outside the United States to trial Uber’s aerial ridesharing service.
Uber Air is an aerial ridesharing service being developed by Uber, which will use small, environmentally friendly electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft for commuter travel in cities across the world.
Uber’s ambition is to create the world’s first aerial rideshare network with safe, quiet, and electric VTOL vehicles transporting tens of thousands of people across cities, eventually for the same price as an uberX trip of the same distance.
Melbourne was selected after a rigorous 18-month global search that included cities around the world such as Paris, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Sydney and Mumbai.
Through Invest Victoria, the Victorian Government hosted a number of visit programs for Uber Air to Melbourne, facilitated meetings with Federal government agencies and local stakeholders and assisted the company to build the business case for the launch of Uber Air in Melbourne.
As Australia’s leading Tech City, Melbourne is the perfect place to help make aerial ridesharing a reality, due to our history of leading and embracing innovation.
Melbourne is home to some of the world’s top universities, research and development centres, and leading tech companies such as Alibaba, Square, Eventbrite and Zendesk.
As a cosmopolitan and culturally-diverse city, Melbourne also has the fastest growing population in Australia and is on track to become the country’s largest city by 2031.
“Melbourne is among the world’s most technologically adept cities, with a population that is comfortable with and has high expectations for what technology can do for them,” said Eric Allison, Head of Uber Elevate.
“It’s easy to see why so many innovative global companies choose to establish their regional presence in Melbourne. In addition to the many advantages it has that make it Australia’s fastest growing city, the Government of Victoria, Australia’s active interest and involvement in Uber Air and the Australian government’s track record as an efficient and progressive regulator make Melbourne the perfect partner for us in our quest to develop aerial ridesharing at scale.”
Uber is currently preparing to begin demonstrator flights as early as 2020, with a target of launching commercial flights from 2023.
The Victorian Government will work closely with Uber Air leading up to and through the field trial phase.
The Invest Victoria team in Australia and the Victorian Government Trade and Investment Office team in the United States will assist by engaging all levels of government, connecting Uber Air to a range of stakeholders in a vast array of industry sectors, and providing a local perspective and advice to guide the significant community consultation required for success.
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New grants support smarter energy use across the community for a clean energy future::
The Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Greg Combet, and Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Mark Dreyfus, today announced new funding rounds for three energy efficiency grant programs to drive smarter energy use in business, local government, households and communities.
A second round of grants is now being offered in the following programs:
• the Community Energy Efficiency Program (CEEP) - a $200 million program to help local government and not-for-profit community organisations undertake energy efficiency upgrades to community infrastructure such as council buildings and recreation centres;
• the Low Income Energy Efficiency Program (LIEEP) - a $100 million program to demonstrate smarter energy use and provide practical advice and assistance to low income households across Australia;
• Energy Efficiency Information Grants (EEIG) - a $40 million program to support small to medium-sized businesses and community groups, by providing tailored information and advice on saving energy and cutting costs with smarter energy choices.
"The investment in trialling and demonstrating smarter ways to use energy in Australian households, communities and businesses will create new job opportunities and strengthen local economies," Mr Combet said.
"For regional communities and smaller councils, the second round of CEEP grants will make it easier to access assistance for projects that benefit low socio-economic and other disadvantaged communities, especially in regional and rural areas," said Mr Dreyfus.
"The LIEEP grants are targeted directly at households that need practical help to improve energy efficiency to cope with the rising cost of living. LIEEP supports the most vulnerable in making smart energy choices to improve living standards while reducing energy use," he said.
The second round of the EEIG program will add to the $20 million already allocated to 28 projects in the manufacturing, agriculture, retail and tourism sectors. These projects provide practical information to time-poor businesses on conserving energy and saving money through to energy smart choices.
"Today, I encourage all eligible applicants to apply. The government is committed to promoting better energy efficiency - it saves money, cuts pollution and improves our living standards at home and in the community. These are the benefits of moving towards a clean energy future," said Mr Dreyfus.
Program opening and closing dates:
• Community Energy Efficiency Program - 30/10/12 - 7/02/13
• Low Income Energy Efficiency Program - 30/10/12 - 13/12/12
• Energy Efficiency Information Grants - 30/10/12 - 20/12/12
To find out more about the package of energy efficiency programs, visit: www.climatechange.gov.au
To find out more about the Government's plan for a clean energy future, visit: www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au
Media contact: Mark Davis (Mr Combet) (02) 6277 7920
Giulia Baggio: (Mr Dreyfus) 0400 918 776
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Development & Aid, Environment, Featured, Global, Global Governance, Headlines, Health, IPS UN: Inside the Glasshouse, Mercury, Regional Categories
Minamata Convention, Curbing Mercury Use, is Now Legally Binding
By IPS World Desk Reprint | | Print |
Informal gold mining is one of the main sources of mercury contamination. An artisanal gold miner in El Corpus, Choluteca along the Pacific ocean in Honduras. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS.
ROME, Aug 16 2017 (IPS) - The Minamata Convention — a legally-binding landmark treaty, described as the first new environmental agreement in over a decade – entered into force August 16.
The primary aim of the Convention is “to protect human health and the environment” from mercury releases, which are considered both environmental and health hazards, according to the United Nations.
So far, the international treaty has been signed by 128 of the 193 UN member states and ratified by 74 countries, which are now legally obliged to comply with its provisions.
The Minamata Convention joins three other UN conventions seeking to reduce impacts from chemicals and waste – the Basel Convention (1992), Rotterdam Convention (2004) and Stockholm Convention (2004).
The Zero Mercury Working Group (ZMWG), an international coalition of over 95 public interest non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from more than 50 countries, has been calling for a legally binding treaty for over a decade and “welcomes the new protocol”.
The treaty holds critical obligations for all 74 State Parties to ban new primary mercury mines while phasing out existing ones and also includes a ban on many common products and processes using mercury, measures to control releases, and a requirement for national plans to reduce mercury in artisanal and small-scale gold mining.
In addition, it seeks to reduce trade, promote sound storage of mercury and its disposal, address contaminated sites and reduce exposure from this dangerous neurotoxin.
According to ZMWG, mercury is a global pollutant that travels long distances. Its most toxic form – methylmercury – accumulates in large predatory fish and is taken up in bodies through eating fish, with the worst impacts on babies in utero and small children.
In an interview with IPS, Michael Bender and Elena Lymberidi-Settimo, Co-coordinators of ZMWG said despite its flaws, the new treaty presents the best opportunity to address the global mercury crisis.
‘’The ZMWG looks forward to effective treaty implementation and providing support, where feasible, particularly to developing countries and countries with economies in transition”.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: What would be the significant impact of the Minamata Convention entering into legal force on August 16? How will it advance the longstanding global campaign to end the widespread use of mercury which has long been declared both an environmental and health hazard worldwide?
A: The new treaty is a mixture of mandatory and voluntary elements intended to control the burgeoning global mercury crisis. It holds critical obligations that affect global use, trade, emissions and disposal of mercury. In the near term, such provisions include a prohibition on any new primary mining of mercury, and phasing out mercury added products (by 2020) and mercury bearing processes (by 2025).
Some of these steps were unthinkable several years ago. Now, viable, available and cost effective alternatives exist for most all products containing mercury like thermometers, dental amalgam, thermostats, measuring devices and batteries, as well as processes using mercury (e.g. production of chlorine.)
Support for treaty implementation will be provided through a financial mechanism established in the Convention text. Furthermore, the treaty includes reporting provisions (also relevant to the question below) which entails the Convention Secretariat monitoring progress and, over time, having the Conference of the Parties address issues that may arise.
The treaty also includes other provisions which provide information and guidance necessary to reduce major sources of emissions and releases. Taken together, these steps will eventually lead to significant global mercury reductions.
However, while heading in the right direction, the treaty does not move far enough nor fast enough in the short run to address the spiraling human health risks from mercury exposure.
In the case of major emission sources, like coal-fired power plants, the requirements are for countries to follow BAT/BEP practices (best available technologies/best environmental practices) to curtail releases, but no numerical reduction targets were established. New facilities will not be required to have mercury pollution controls for 5 years after the treaty enters into force, with existing facilities given 10 years before they begin their control efforts.
The treaty also addresses artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), which is both the largest intentional use and emission source of mercury globally. However, while required ASGM national action plans (NAPs) will foster reduced use, the treaty fails to include a provision to require an eventual end to mercury use. It is envisioned, however, that NAPs will eliminate many of the worst practices that constitute the vast majority of mercury use in the sector.
While the Convention bans new primary mercury mining, it allows existing primary mining for 15 years (but does not allow supplying such uses as ASGM.) From this source, mercury is only allowed in the manufacturing of mercury-added products and other manufacturing processes.
Q: What in your opinion are the key provisions of the Convention that could eventually lead to a worldwide ban on the use of mercury?
A: The Convention contains control measures aimed at significantly limiting the global supply of mercury to complement and reinforce the demand reduction control measures. Specifically, the Article 3 provisions limit the sources of mercury available for use and trade, and specify procedures to follow where such trade is allowed. Eventually, as mercury uses diminish, via the different Convention provisions – (e.g. the Convention’s 2020 mercury-added product phase out, and 2025 ban on the mercury use in the chlorine production)– the production and exports from primary mercury mines will be reduced.
As discussed above, while the Convention does not ban its use, the provision to develop plans for curtailing mercury use in artisanal and small scale gold mining is important, since it is the largest mercury use and release sector, far surpassing emissions from coal fired power plants.
Q: With 74 ratifications so far, is there any mechanism that will help monitor the implementation of the convention by the 74 countries that are state parties and who are legally obliged to comply with the provisions of the convention? Does the convention lay out any penalties against those who violate the convention or fail to implement its provisions?
A: The Convention establishes reporting requirements by the Parties, including reporting on “measures it has taken to implement provisions of the Convention and on the effectiveness of such measures…” Further, no later than six years after the Convention enters into force, the Conference of the Parties (COP) is charged with evaluating the effectiveness of the Convention The evaluation shall be based on available reports and monitoring information, reports submitted pursuant and information and recommendations provided the Implementation and compliance committee.
This is why discussions during COP1 (scheduled to take place in Geneva September 24-29) regarding reporting forms are so important. The Article 21 reporting requirements will provide critical information on the global mercury situation and the effectiveness of the Convention in achieving mercury reductions and protecting human health.
Information Parties report on should be made publicly available. This should include information on emissions and releases; the quantities of waste mercury (i.e., commodity-grade mercury no longer used) that was disposed, and the method of final disposal; and the decisions on frequency of reporting. Most importantly (at least for mercury production and trade) we recommend the data be provided annually in order to accurately monitor the changing global circumstances, and because of the problems with other data sources.
Finally, the Convention does not foresee penalties for noncompliance. However, the Convention compliance committee will also focus on assisting countries come into compliance as well as also identifying areas where countries may need more assistance. In addition, individual country laws can enact penalties – (e.g. the EU regulation on mercury discusses penalties, and the Member States have to define these within their national laws.)
The NGOs will also play the watchdog role in monitoring progress, and ‘naming and shaming’ as relevant, as we follow the process in the COPs, etc.
Q: Are there any concerns that some of the leading countries, including UK, Russia, Germany, India, Italy, South Africa, Australia and Spain are not on the list of ratifiers of the convention? Have they given any indications of future ratifications?
A: For developed countries, it’s anticipated that they already have implemented many of the conference provisions, or are in a position to finance them in the future (unlike developing countries, which will rely on Convention funding.)
As far as South Africa, our partner NGO, Ground Work, has stated that ratification remains a challenge in South Africa because the industrial sector is very heavily driven by the coal industry, with almost 90% of the energy from coal. The large-scale mining sector is also not willing to declare the amount of mercury released from the ore that they mine.
All EU countries will eventually all ratify. India has started the process toward ratification, as has Australia and also Russia- but it may take some time.
In the meantime, India has taken some affirmative steps in shifting out of mercury-cell chlor-alkali plants and regulating mercury. However, emissions from thermal power plants is still a concern since almost 60 % of the energy generated is from coal and the cost associated with capturing mercury from coal emissions is viewed as a constrain.
Ban on Mercury Use
Minamata Convention on Mercury
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Published: 1105 GMT May 20, 2019
Billionaire pledges to pay student debt for 2019 class at historic black US college
Delivering the commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr., the billionaire technology investor and philanthropist Robert F. Smith made a surprise announcement: His family would wipe out the student debt of the entire class of 2019.
Smith’s words to nearly 400 graduating seniors were greeted with a moment of stunned silence, then, unsurprisingly, the biggest cheers of the morning, the Guardian reported.
“On behalf of the eight generations of my family that have been in this country, we’re gonna put a little fuel in your bus,” Smith said.
“This is my class, 2019. And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans.”
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he added, “I know my class will pay this forward.”
Smith, who received an honorary doctorate in the ceremony, had already announced a $1.5-million gift to the college. The Journal-Constitution reported that the pledge to eliminate student debt for the 2019 class was estimated at $40 million.
Aaron Mitchom, a 22-year-old finance major, told the Associated Press he had drawn up a spreadsheet to calculate how long it would take him to pay back $200,000 in student loans. It came to 25 years at half his monthly salary, he said. In an instant, that number vanished. Mitchom wept.
“I can delete that spreadsheet,” he said. “I don’t have to live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was shocked. My heart dropped. We all cried. In the moment it was like a burden had been taken off.”
His mother, Tina Mitchom, was also shocked. Eight family members, she said, including Mitchom’s 76-year-old grandmother, took turns over four years cosigning on the loans that got their student across the finish line.
“It takes a village,” she said. “It now means he can start paying it forward and start closing this gap a lot sooner, giving back to the college and thinking about a succession plan” for his younger siblings.
Unpaid student debt, which last year stood at $1.5 trillion, has become a major national problem. Under Trump appointee Betsy DeVos, however, the federal education department has been found to have rejected 99 percent of applications for student debt forgiveness.
The issue has duly become a point of contention in the Democratic presidential primary. Last month, the Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren won widespread praise when she published a plan to cancel much student debt and make public college free, funded by a tax on the super rich.
Subject to a distinction between commitments to tuition-free college and debt-free college, Warren is not alone in focusing on the cost of further education. The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, for example, pursued it in 2016 and is doing so again this year.
Among other candidates, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has said she will allow students to refinance debt at a lower interest rate while Kamala Harris of California told a CNN town hall “we need a … commitment to debt-free college, which I support”.
Others have made similar remarks without offering actual policy plans. The Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar has said she is not in favor of debt- or tuition-free college, telling CNN: “If I were a magic genie and could give that to everyone and we could afford it, I would.” She says she supports efforts to relieve but not remove such burdens.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has released a proposal to make college debt-free for low-income students. It read in part: “Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) are vital for this country and our communities and deserve to receive more dedicated support.”
Morehouse is an all-male HBCU. Smith, who is African American, is an engineer by training who has also donated to Cornell University in New York. He also studied at Columbia.
As founder and chief executive of Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm that invests in software, data and technology driven companies, he placed 355th on the 2019 Forbes list of richest Americans.
Morehouse president David A Thomas told the AP Smith’s gift would have a profound effect.
“Many of my students,” he said, “are interested in going into teaching, for example, but leave with an amount of student debt that makes that untenable. In some ways, it was a liberation gift for these young men that just opened up their choices.”
The Journal-Constitution quoted Tonga Releford, a Morehouse class of 2019 parent, as saying her son’s student loans totalled about $70,000.
“I feel like it’s Mother’s Day all over again,” she said.
Her husband, Charles Releford II, also a Morehouse graduate, said their younger son was a junior.
“Maybe [Smith] will come back next year,” he said.
Robert F. Smith
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Quito’s Carmen Bajo Monastery: Three Centuries of Art, Prayer and Silence
QUITO – The thick white walls of Carmen Bajo Monastery in Quito’s colonial center display works of art more than three centuries old, silent witnesses to the prayers of the Carmelite nuns who came to Ecuador 350 years ago.
Located in the historic center of the Ecuadorian capital at some 200 meters (660 feet) from the Grand Plaza, its imposing stone walls are home to 12 nuns, some of them ever-smiling, of whom the youngest is 18 and the eldest 103, though the faces of many hide their true age.
“It’s because the place is so cold, it keeps us like a refrigerator,” laughed Sister Raquel de Santa Teresita y San Jose, 59, she of the small body, big grin and unwrinkled skin.
Sister Raquel is curator of the art collection of the monastery where she has lived for 41 years, and whose history is compiled in the book “Desde las Entrañas del Carmelo” (From the Heart of the Carmelite Convent), which goes on sale this Monday.
Its author, the Colombian priest Carlos Leon, wants people to see the other side of mankind... far from the noise and bustle and material interests... that they see inside themselves through their communion with silence... and that they search inside themselves for what they have tried to find outside,” he told EFE about Carmelite spirituality.
Entering the monastery is like passing to another dimension, one of silence and contemplation that contrasts with the hurry-up hubbub of the historic center where more than 36,000 people live and thousands more engage in commerce and tourism.
Originally founded in 1669 in the Andean city of Latacunga, the monastery was moved to its current location following a devastating earthquake in the late 17th century.
It covers an area of 5,400 sq. meters (6,600 sq. yards), and its architectural design permits a clear view of two cloisters – that of the Oranges, named for the fruit trees planted in its patio, and that of the Magnolia, which got its name from a tree planted there 100 years ago.
Its true treasure is in the rooms of the second cloister, which display paintings on canvas, sculptures of wood and wax, and a splendid Nativity with hundreds of pieces that were stored away for centuries.
“In the gallery of the Nativity alone there are some 500 works of art” and “so many more in the whole monastery,” Sister Raquel told EFE.
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Social vaccine and its role in oral health
Kalyana Chakravarthy Pentapati
Department of Public Health Dentistry, Manipal College of Dental Sciences, Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka, India
Department of Public Health Dentistry, Manipal College of Dental Sciences, Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka
Social vaccine is the alternative term intended to change the predominant biomedical orientation of healthcare personnel toward the underlying distal and proximal factors that could lead to disease and infirmity. This report highlights the importance of social vaccine concept in the field of dentistry to have better understanding of the oral diseases and reduce the social inequality in communities.
Keywords: Health, oral, social, vaccine
Pentapati KC. Social vaccine and its role in oral health. J Dent Res Rev 2015;2:182-3
Pentapati KC. Social vaccine and its role in oral health. J Dent Res Rev [serial online] 2015 [cited 2019 Jul 16];2:182-3. Available from: http://www.jdrr.org/text.asp?2015/2/4/182/167878
Social vaccine is the alternative term intended to change the predominant biomedical orientation of healthcare personnel toward the underlying distal and proximal factors that could lead to disease and infirmity. Baum et al., believed that such a metaphor could be useful in engaging the healthcare personnel who were instilled with the so-called medical model. [1] It is defined as "A process of social and political mobilization which leads to increased government and other institutions willingness to intervene with interventions, applied to populations rather than individuals, aimed at mitigating the structural social and economic conditions that make people and communities vulnerable to disease, illness, and trauma." [1] "Medical vaccines help develop the immunity against disease, whereas social vaccines develop the ability of communities to resist and change the social and economic structures and processes that have a negative impact on health and force governments to intervene and regulate in the interests of community health." [1] Alternatively, it was simplified as "Actions that address social determinants and social inequities in society, which act as a precursor to the public health problem being addressed." [2],[3] The term social vaccine was used in the past by the UN's International Labor Organization and Global Forum on Health Research. [4] This term is designed to propagate the socioeconomic determinants of health with an aim to promote equity and social justice.
Many socioeconomic determinants that effect the general health can also have dental effects. Racial discrimination, unhealthy housing, and working conditions, food insecurity, poor transport, the polluted living environment, need for accessible, equitable, and effective health care are few determinants in a broader sense. Such factors can have direct and indirect effects on oral health. [1] For example, food insecurity could lead to malnutrition, and stunted growth with delayed milestones leading to dental effects such as delayed teeth eruption and shedding, gingivitis, dental caries, and malocclusion. Similarly, based on the extensive research that have been reported in the past, dental caries is linked to social and behavioral factors. [5] Factors that are linked to dental caries were categorized as a health system and oral health services, sociocultural risk factors, environmental risk factors along with risk behavior. [5],[6] However, social vaccine is not specific to any disease or health problem [2],[3] and has to be adapted to have public health response and many such factors that have effects on general health have implications on oral health. Hence, while formulating public health activities to improve the public health, it should be kept in mind all such factors that can effect oral health to have a broader impact and successful response.
Previously, social vaccine context was used and implemented in land rights and subsistence, restriction, and regulation of corporate advertising and progressive taxation for social security. Unequal land holding and unfair agricultural policies have been linked to large number suicides of among farmers in India. Strengthening of farmers through protests and consumer support would lead to a social vaccine that would result in political will to change unfavorable agricultural policies. Unhealthy, unethical advertising and promotion of smoking, tobacco habits, alcohol, and substitution of breast milk with infant formulas are few examples that led to the regulation of advertising restriction and regulation of corporate advertising. Progressive taxation for social security is one of the significant advances in promoting good health in developed countries. However, low-income countries lack the adequate revenue. Hence, a social movement advocating for universal social protection could be the first step in developing a social vaccine to secure the political will to implement social protection for all citizens. [1]
Social vaccines can encourage popular mobilization and advocate change in the socioeconomic conditions. They also facilitate social and political processes that promote health through action. It increases the awareness leading to resistance to unhealthy policies. Also, it needs to be spread through a population so that health promoting policies can be adapted by the government, nongovernmental organizations and other health agencies to achieve effective population coverage. [1],[3]
The risk factors for several chronic diseases are shared by oral diseases and henceforth should be addressed with common risk factor approach. [7] A systematic risk factor approach was suggested by previously which could be used in planning implementation there is a complex interplay of political, economic, environmental, and social factors that are embedded in the casual pathway disease process. Future research should improve the understanding of these processes in reducing the social inequality. Public health programs should emphasize on the assessment of systematic risk factors including socioeconomic determinants since most of these risk factors that affect general health have implications on oral health. Also, incorporating the so-called "common risk factor approach" would help the inclusion of few such risk factors to have a wider impact on many diseases with greater efficacy and effectiveness. [7],[8]
Baum F, Narayan R, Sanders D, Patel V, Quizhpe A. Social vaccines to resist and change unhealthy social and economic structures: A useful metaphor for health promotion. Health Promot Int 2009;24:428-33.
Thomas IN. Towards a Broader Understanding of Social Vaccine: A Discussion Paper, SOCHARA; 2006.
Available from: http://www.sochara.org/Social-Vaccine. [Last accessed on 2015 Jun 27].
International Labour Organization. The Magazine of the ILO: World of Work No. 32. In Search of a ′Social Vaccine′. Switzerland: International Labour Organization; 2006.
Petersen PE. Sociobehavioural risk factors in dental caries - International perspectives. Community Dent Oral Epidemiol 2005;33:274-9.
Petersen PE. The World Oral Health Report 2003: Continuous improvement of oral health in the 21 st century - The approach of the WHO Global Oral Health Programme. Community Dent Oral Epidemiol 2003;31 Suppl 1:3-23.
Sheiham A, Watt RG. The common risk factor approach: A rational basis for promoting oral health. Community Dent Oral Epidemiol 2000;28:399-406.
Grabauskas V. Integrated programme for community health in noncommunicable disease (Interhealth). In: Leparski E, editor. The Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases: Experiences and Prospects. Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe; 1987. p. 285-310.
Pentapati KC
Social Vaccine a...
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TORAT KOHANIM (THE SIFRA) – See Midrash Haggadah.
TORDESILLAS – Spanish city near Valladolid, with a Jewish community, which was visited by Vicente Ferrer toward the end of 1411 for propagandic purposes. He advised the Jews of the city to change their abode for the narrow ghetto of...
TORDESILLAS, MOSES HA-KOHEN DE – Spanish controversialist, who was called upon to suffer for his faith, an attempt being made to convert him to Christianity by force. Despite cruel persecution, he remained true to his convictions, although he was robbed of all...
TORONTO – Canadian city; capital of the province of Ontario. Toronto possesses four regularly organized Jewish congregations, the oldest being the Holy Blossom congregation, which had its beginnings in 1845, though it was not formally...
TORQUEMADA, TOMAS DE – See Auto da Fé; Inquisition.
TORRE, LELIO (HILLEL) DELLA – Italian rabbi and educator; born in Cuneo, Piedmont, Jan. 11, 1805; died in Padua July 9, 1871. His father, Solomon Jehiel Raphael ha-Kohen, died in 1807; and Lelio was brought up by his uncle Sabbatai Elhanan Treves, a rabbi in...
TORT – Any wrongful act, neglect, or default whereby legal damage is caused to the person, property, or reputation of another. Liability arises either from contract or from tort. Direct and wilful tort is Trespass. Trespass on the...
TORTOISE – Rendering in the Authorized Version of the Hebrew word "ẓab" (Lev. xi. 29; see Lizard). Some commentators assume "gallim" in Hos. xii. 12 to mean "tortoises," a view which has the support of the Septuagint, the Peshiṭta, and old...
TORTOSA – City in Catalonia where Jews lived and owned land as early as the Roman period. This Jewish community was one of the richest in the country in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and had certain ancient privileges which...
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Joe Shakarchi
Joe's Bio
Home » About Joe
After receiving his B.A. from Brooklyn College and his M.A. from City College of New York (City University of New York), Joe Shakarchi went on to a thirty-five year teaching and writing career. Joe taught writing, literature, reading, and basic skills at San Francisco State University, the University of Colorado, Southern Oregon State University, and San Jose City College. He also taught at King Mongkut's University of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand. His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in various publications.
Raised in New York, Joe was part of the San Francisco poetry scene from 1982 until 2012. His writing has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Poetry Flash, The Berkeley Poetry Review, and North Beach Journal. He was the winner of the 1999 Common Ground poetry contest. Joe was also one of six San Francisco poets chosen for the "Poetry in Public Display" exhibition throughout the city. Along with frequent appearances on radio and TV, he has helped produce poetry videos, and has often performed with musicians. His book of poems, "Sunrise in the West," is accompanied by a poetry/music CD featuring John Densmore (founding member of The Doors) on percussion, Stephen Kent on dijeridu, and Manose on flute. Most recently, he has performed in New York and in Bangkok. His influences include Rumi, rock ‘n’ roll, Zen, the temples of Bangkok and Kathmandu, and the cafes of North Beach and Greenwich Village.
Joe is currently living in Bangkok, and has been traveling to Bali, the USA, and.....who knows where the winds will blow him? In addition, he will be writing new poems. He has also been writing travel stories and memoirs, two of which have already been published in "To Thailand with Love" (available from Amazon).
Welcome to Joe Shakarchi's Website
Poet and Travel Writer
Please enjoy the poetry and music from Joe's CD "Sunrise in the West"
Sunrise in the West Playlist
Powered by Cincopa Video Hosting for Business solution.Sunrise in the WestBy Joe Shakarchi
Latest Poems
Deathless
On the Rooftop
Indonesian Dreads Singing Marley
Poet's Walk
If the Buddha Was a Woman
Kismet: My Journey to Turkey
A Monk's Initiation
Latest News from Joe
Life in Ubud, Bali
Tokyo, Burma and Sri Lanka
Back to Banglamphu
Copyright © 2019, Joe Shakarchi. Theme by Devsaran.
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Haniyeh: Interference in Palestinian affairs impedes unity
Feb. 22, 2013 4:33 P.M. (Updated: Feb. 23, 2013 9:40 P.M.)
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on Friday blamed external intervention in Palestinian affairs for hindering national reconciliation.
"We started to see a new wave of external interventions in the Palestinian decision-making process aimed at impeding the ongoing reconciliation efforts," Haniyeh said after Friday prayers at Khan Younis mosque in southern Gaza.
Haniyeh said Hamas' commitment to reconciliation was demonstrated by its decision to allow the Central Elections Commission to update the electoral roll in Gaza. The CEC completed voter registration on Wednesday.
"This move wouldn’t have been accomplished without the positive atmosphere and the honest intentions which prevailed during the Cairo talks and the responsible decision taken by the Gaza government and embraced by Hamas," the premier said.
The decision showed that Hamas is not afraid of elections, he said, adding that "legislative and presidential elections and elections of the Palestinian National Council should be carried out simultaneously."
Other unresolved issues should be addressed at the same time, he said.
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Presented by the Arab Cinema Center in Cooperation with The Hollywood Reporter
The Arab Cinema Center (ACC) announced that Abdulhamid Juma, Chairman of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), and Masoud Amralla Al Ali, Artistic Director of the DIFF, are the winners of the Arab Cinema Personality of the Year award, presented by the Arab Cinema Center in cooperation with The Hollywood Reporter. This marks the first time that an award of this nature is given to the directors of a film festival. The Arab Cinema Personality of the Year award was presented out at this year's Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale).
Kevin Cassidy, International News Editor at The Hollywood Reporter, comments,"Creating and managing a festival and creative environment over 15 years which continues to inspire, drive and showcase the Arab film world internationally truly deserves recognition. We are delighted to present THR's 1st Arab Cinema Personality of the Year Award jointly to the two leaders of the Dubai International Film Festival, Abdulhamid Juma and Masoud Amralla Al Ali."
Film Analyst Alaa Karkouti, Managing Partner and Co-founder of the ACC and CEO of MAD Solutions, says, "The award was given to Juma and Amralla for contributing to the success of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) since its very beginning. The festival became a central event in the Arab filmmaking calendar and it has maintained a steady commitment these past fifteen years to nurturing and championing filmmakers across the Arab-speaking region."
Abdulhamid Juma, Chairman of the Dubai International Film Festival, comments, "As we approach the 15th edition I am incredibly proud of what the Festival has achieved. On behalf of the team, I thank The Hollywood Reporter and the Arab Cinema Center for this recognition of DIFF's commitment to promoting incredible Arab talent and their work to global audiences and thus strengthening intercultural dialogue. We are looking forward to an exciting future as we continue to see the interest in Arab cinema grow, connect creatives from around the world, discover new talent, embark on new collaborations and take our audiences on a journey of extraordinary storytelling that will inspire, inform and encourage debate."
Masoud Amralla Al Ali, Artistic Director of DIFF, said "Over the last 15 years we have been privileged at DIFF to host remarkable new talents from the region to world renowned visionaries, embrace the latest advances in immersive storytelling, discover local and global narratives that enlighten us, take inspiration from maverick short filmmakers and share this and more with our audiences in the UAE. So many incredible stories have graced the screens of our festival and we look forward to welcoming more creatives from both home and abroad. Thank you for this award, it's a fantastic acknowledgement that the dedicated team at DIFF are accomplishing our mission of building a platform for Arab filmmakers at an international level by spearheading the cinema movement in the region."
Since they started managing DIFF, Juma and Amralla have been constantly adapting along the way to create an indispensable Arab marketplace, project forum and glittering showcase willing to shine a spotlight on films that ask controversial questions, while also showcasing Arab entertainment at its finest. DIFF holds the largest film market in the Arab world, attracting regional and international distributors and sales agents from across the globe. To date, the festival has screened over 2,000 films and keeps attracting thousands of filmmakers, producers, celebrities, industry professionals and cinephiles from all over the world. The festival's various initiatives including Enjaaz for post-production grants and Dubai Film Connection for film projects in their various stages of production have helped shape the careers of several filmmakers from the Arab world. The 7th issue of the Arab Cinema Magazine, released by the ACC at the Berlinale, has singled out a feature about the Arab Cinema Personality of the Year award and its winners.
The ACC's participation in presenting the award comes as part of its strategy of promoting the Arab film industry internationally and supporting Arab filmmakers. In January 2018, the ACC selected Arab producers to attend the Rotterdam Lab, held on the sidelines of the International Film Festival Rotterdam - IFFR. Moreover, the ACC opened call for applications to Arab film projects for the MAFF - Málaga Film Festival Fund & Co-production Event and Málaga Work In Progress that are held within the Málaga Film Festival in Spain (April 13-22, 2018).
Organized by MAD Solutions in 2015, the Arab Cinema Center (ACC) is an international promotional platform for Arab cinema as it provides the filmmaking industry with a professional window to connect with their counterparts from all over the world through a number of events that it organizes. The ACC also provides networking opportunities with representatives of companies and institutions specialized in co-production and international distribution, among others. The Center's activities vary between film market main wings, introduction and networking sessions for Arab and foreign filmmakers, welcome parties, as well as meetings with international organizations and festivals, and the issuance of the Arab Cinema Magazine to be distributed at the leading international film festivals and markets.
Furthermore, newsletter subscription is now available on the ACC's website, allowing users to obtain digital copies of the Arab Cinema Magazine, as well as news on the ACC's activities, notifications of application dates for grants, festivals and offers from educational and training institutions, updates on Arab films participating at festivals, exclusive news on the Arab Cinema LAB, and highlights from the ACC partners and their future projects.
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Diplomatic service
Structure of the Ministry
Deputy Ministers
Diplomatic Missions of the Republic of Azerbaijan abroad
Department of Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nakhchivan
ADA University
Ministers of Foreign Affairs of AR
Diplomat’s Day
Working hours of the Ministry
Human Rights and Humanitarian Issues
Human rights and democratization
Social and humanitarian issues
International Development Cooperation
Co-operation with international organizations
Consular service and visa
Articles and İnterviews
Contacts of the Press Service
Address of Ministry
Reception for the citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan by the Officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Reception of appeals and documents
Contacts of the Consular Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
Contacts of the Council of Appeal of Ministry of Foreign Affairs
REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Heydər Əliyev: “Müstəqilliyimiz əbədidir, daimidir, dönməzdir”
Speech by H.E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov,...
Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held...
Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met...
Speech by H.E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the 14th Pacific Alliance Summit
Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held bilateral meetings during his working visit to Peru
Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Director-General of UNESCO Audrey Azoulay
2019-07-16 No:206/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the heads of the Foreign Affairs Committees of the Turkish and Georgian Parliaments
2019-07-16 No:205/19, On removal of the name of Tomasz Poręba, citizen of the Republic of Poland, from the “List of foreign citizens illegally visited the occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan”
2019-07-11 No:204/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights
2019-07-11 No:203/19, İnfogramma by the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the fifth anniversary of the hostage taking of Dilgam Asgarov and Shahbaz Guliyev by Armenia.
2019-07-11 No:202/19, Comments of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the fifth anniversary of the hostage taking of Dilgam Asgarov and Shahbaz Guliyev by Armenia.
2019-07-10 No:201/19, Head of the State Protocol Department Ambassador Parvin Mirzazade received the newly appointed Consul General of Georgia to Ganja
2019-07-10 No:200/19, From the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the participants of VI Conference dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of the Diplomatic Service of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-07-09 No:198/19, Opening Speech by H.E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan, at the 6th Conference of the heads of diplomatic missions of Azerbaijan
2019-07-08 No:197/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of Germany to Azerbaijan.
2019-07-06 No:196/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held several bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the 14th Summit meeting of the Pacific Alliance
2019-07-06 No:195/19, Speech by H.E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the 14th Pacific Alliance Summit
2019-07-05 No:194/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the President of the Congress of the Republic of Peru
2019-07-05 No:193/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held bilateral meetings during his working visit to Peru
2019-07-03 No:190/19, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov departed on a working visit to the capital of the Republic of Peru, Lima
2019-07-02 No:189/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of Malaysia to Azerbaijan
2019-07-02 No:188/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of the Swiss Confederation to the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-06-30 No:187/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Director-General of UNESCO Audrey Azoulay
2019-06-27 No:186/19, Praqada Azərbaycan və Çexiya Xarici İşlər Nazirlikləri arasında siyasi məsləhətləşmələr keçirilib
2019-06-27 No:185/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the Director General of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development
2019-06-26 No:184/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the Ambassador of the Republic of Latvia to the Republic of Azerbaijan upon termination of his diplomatic term
2019-06-25 No:183/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmar Mammadyarov received the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland Marek Calke upon termination of his diplomatic term
2019-06-25 No:182/19, Joint Press Conference of Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and Ekaterina Zakharieva, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria
2019-06-24 No:181/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria
2019-06-21 No:180/19, Information by the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the results of the meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan and Armenia in Washington (En/Ru)
2019-06-20 No:179/19, The meeting between Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan with the participation of OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs Andrew Schofer, Igor Popov, Stefan Visconti and A.Kasprzyk, the personal representative of the OSCE CiO has started in Washington DC
2019-06-20 No:178/19, Information for the media by the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on a meeting of the Joint Azerbaijan-Russia Demarcation Commission (En/Ru)
2019-06-20 No:177/19, Infographic on the United Nations World Refugees Day
2019-06-20 No:176/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale
2019-06-20 No:175/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held a meeting with the acting assistant secretary of the Department of State’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Reeker
2019-06-19 No:174/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Assistant to the President of the United States of America for National Security Affairs John Bolton
2019-06-18 No:173/19, Xarici İşlər nazirinin müavini Mahmud Məmməd-Quliyev QDİƏT-Aİ əməkdaşlığı üzrə Yüksək səviyyəli konfransda iştirak edib
2019-06-14 No:172/19, Press information of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the decision of the Grenoble administrative court of the Republic of France
2019-06-14 No:171/19, Commentary of the Press Service Department of the MFA of Azerbaijan (En/Ru)
2019-06-14 No:170/19, Information of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan (En/Ru)
2019-06-13 No:169/19, Azərbaycan və İspaniya Xarici İşlər Nazirlikləri arasında siyasi məsləhətləşmələr keçirildi
2019-06-13 No:168/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People’s Republic of China to the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-06-13 No:167/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held a meeting with the delegation led by the EU Commissioner Johannes Hahn
2019-06-12 No:166/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov met with a delegation led by the vice-speaker of Grand National Assembly of Turkey
2019-06-12 No:165/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with George Tsereteli, the President of the OSCE PA
2019-06-12 No:164/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the delegation led by the vice-president of the German Bundestag
2019-06-10 No:163/19, Statement by the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan (En/Ru)
2019-06-09 No:162/19, Press information of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan (En/Ru)
2019-06-04 No:160/19, Press information of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-06-04 No:159/19, Azərbaycan və Serbiya XİN-ləri arasında siyasi məsləhətləşmələr keçirilib
2019-06-03 No:158/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia Toivo Klaar
2019-06-02 No:157/19, The commentary of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan (En/Ru)
2019-05-31 No:156/19, Azərbaycan Respublikası Xarici İşlər nazirinin müavini Ramiz Həsənov 27-29 may tarixlərində Çin Xalq Respublikasına işgüzar səfər etmişdir
2019-05-30 No:155/19, Press-release of the Press Service Department of the MFA of the Republic of Azerbaijan (En/Ru)
2019-05-30 No:154/19, Polşa Respublikasının vətəndaşı Piotr Leoniak adının “Azərbaycan Respublikasının işğal edilmiş ərazilərinə qanunsuz səfər etmiş xarici ölkə vətəndaşlarının siyahısı”ndan çıxarılmasına dair
2019-05-27 No:153/19, Azərbaycan Xarici İşlər naziri Rusiyada dərc olunan “Kommersant” qəzetinə müsahibə verib (RU)
2019-05-25 No:152/19, Head of the Press Service Department of the MFA of Azerbaijan responded to CNN on the UEFA Europe League final game to be held in Baku
2019-05-25 No:151/19, AR XİN Mətbuat Xidməti idarəsinin mətbuat açıqlaması (Az/Ru)
2019-05-24 No:150/19, On the removal of the name of Robert Gish, a citizen of the United States of America from the “List of foreign citizens illegally visited the occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan”
2019-05-23 No:149/19, Press Release of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-05-22 No:148/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Alessandro Fracassetti, the newly appointed UNDP Resident Representative to the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-05-22 No:147/19, MFA Spokesperson answers the question of the media (En/Ru)
2019-05-22 No:146/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received heads of diplomatic missions of Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile, member states of the Pacific Alliance
2019-05-21 No:145/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of Colombia to Azerbaijan
2019-05-21 No:144/19, Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov and Foreign Minister of Paraguay Luis Alberto Castiglioni had an exchange of congratulatory letters on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries
2019-05-18 No:143/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Vice-President of the National Assembly of France and the President of France-Azerbaijan Friendship Group in National Assembly
2019-05-18 No:142/19, Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe approved its support for independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all member states
2019-05-17 No:141/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the French Foreign Affairs
2019-05-17 No:140/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Diplomatic Adviser to the President of the French Republic
2019-05-17 No:139/19, Statement by Leyla Abdullayeva, Spokesperson of the MFA on the 27th anniversary of the occupation of the Lachyn district of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-05-14 No:138/19, Press release on the meeting between Deputy Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan and Georgia
2019-05-14 No:137/19, Commentary by Leyla Abdullayeva, the Spokesperson of the Azerbaijani MFA (En/Ru)
2019-05-13 No:136/19, Statement by H.E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the Eastern Partnership Foreign Ministers´ Meeting
2019-05-12 No:135/19, Commentary by Leyla Abdullayeva, head of the Press Service Department of the MFA
2019-05-11 No:134/19, Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of cease-fire between Armenia and Azerbaijan
2019-05-08 No:133/19, Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the 27th anniversary of occupation of the city of Shusha
2019-05-06 No:131/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Baghdad Amreyev, the Secretary General of the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States
2019-05-04 No:130/19, Press-release of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Azerbaijan’s joining to the Partnership for Peace Program of NATO on May 4, 1994
2019-05-03 No:129/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the High Representative for UNAOC
2019-05-02 No:128/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the delegation headed by the Secretary General of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) Dr. Hadi Soleimanpour
2019-05-02 No:127/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held a meeting with the Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Dr. Yousef Bin Ahmad Al-Othaimeen
2019-05-02 No:126/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Ghanaian Foreign Minister
2019-05-01 No:125/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with Rodolfo Nin Novoa, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uruguay
2019-04-30 No:124/19, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
2019-04-30 No:123/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union
2019-04-30 No:122/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the President of the Chamber of Deputies of the Argentine National Congress
2019-04-30 No:121/19, Joint Press Conference of the Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and Marija Pejčinović Burić, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Croatia, April 29, 2019
2019-04-29 No:120/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of Croatia
2019-04-27 No:119/19, Information of the Press Service Department of the MFA of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-04-22 No:118/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the Swiss Ambassador upon termination of his diplomatic term
2019-04-18 No:117/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Minister of Marine Economy and Inland Navigation of Poland
2019-04-17 No:115/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with Krzyshtof Szczerzki, Secretary of State – Chief of the Cabinet of the President of Poland
2019-04-17 No:114/19, On the sidelines of his official visit to Poland, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov participated in the tree planting ceremony in honor of the 100th anniversary of the independence of Azerbaijan and Poland in the Józef Poliński Park, Warsaw.
2019-04-17 No:113/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland Jacek Czaputowicz
2019-04-17 No:112/19, Head of the State Protocol Department Ambassador Parvin Mirzazade received the newly appointed Honorary Consul of San Marino
2019-04-17 No:111/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov participated in the unveiling ceremony of the memorial plaque
2019-04-16 No:110/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with President of the Polish Oil & Gas Company (PGNIG)
2019-04-16 No:109/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held a meeting with the Marshal of the Sejm of Poland.
2019-04-16 No:109/19, Information of Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-04-15 No:108/19, Information of the Press Service of MFA
2019-04-12 No:107/19, Commentary of the Press Service Department of the MFA of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-04-11 No:106/19, Commentary of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-04-11 No:105/19, Information of Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan (Eng-Rus)
2019-04-09 No:104/19, Head of the State Protocol Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ambassador Parvin Mirzazade received the newly appointed Chargé d'affaires of Montenegro.
2019-04-08 No:103/19, Information of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-04-05 No:102/19, Azərbaycan Respublikasının xarici işlər naziri cənab Elmar Məmmədyarovun MDB Xarici İşlər Nazirləri Şurasının iclasında çıxışı (Az/Ru)
2019-04-05 No:101/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (En/Ru)
2019-04-04 No:100/19, Statement by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Elmar Mammadyarov at the 16th meeting of the EU-Azerbaijan Cooperation Council
2019-04-02 No:099/19, Commentary by the Press Service Department of the Azerbaijani MFA
2019-04-02 No:098/19, Statement by the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the anniversary of occupation of the Kalbajar district of Azerbaijan,1993 and April escalation, 2016
2019-04-01 No:097/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Michael Heinritz, newly appointed Honorary Consul of Azerbaijan to Austria
2019-03-30 No:096/19, Commentary by the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-03-30 No:095/19, Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on March 31- Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis
2019-03-29 No:094/19, Information of the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-03-27 No:092/19, Information of the Press Service of the MFA of the Republic of Azerbaijan (En/Ru)
2019-03-24 No:091/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held several meetings during his first official visit to the Republic of Paraguay.
2019-03-23 No:090/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met his counterpart from Uruguay
2019-03-22 No:089/19, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov and Foreign Minister of the Republic of Ecuador Jose Samuel Valencia Amores had an exchange of congratulatory letters on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between the two countries
2019-03-21 No:088/19, Commentary of the Press Service of the MFA of the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-03-21 No:087/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Worship of Argentine Jorge Faurie
2019-03-21 No:086/19, Statement by H. E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the plenary session of the Second High-level UN Conference on South-South Cooperation
2019-03-20 No:085/19, The Azerbaijan International Development Agency (AIDA) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan was represented at the exhibition organized within the framework of the international conference dedicated to the 40th anniversary of “Buenos Aires Action Plan”
2019-03-20 No:084/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov held several meetings at the National Congress of Chile on the sidelines of his official visit to Chile (En/Ru)
2019-03-19 No:083/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Foreign Minister of Chile Roberto Ampuero on the sidelines of his official visit to the Republic of Chile
2019-03-17 No:082/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov has left for an official visit to Latin America
2019-03-14 No:081/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of the Republic of Argentina to the Republic of Azerbaijan
2019-03-12 No:078/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Gabriel Jara, Chargé d'affaires of the Republic of Chile
2019-03-11 No:076/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of Ukraine to Azerbaijan
2019-03-11 No:075/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of the United States of America
2019-03-11 No:074/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the delegation of the National Assembly of Kuwait
2019-03-09 No:073/19, Commentary by the Spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the statement by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs on the upcoming meeting of President İlham Aliyev and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan
2019-03-09 No:072,/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran
2019-03-09 No:071/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Chairman of the Iranian Parliament
2019-03-09 No:070/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
2019-03-09 No:069/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan met his counterpart from Islamic Republic of Iran
2019-03-08 No:068/19, Joint press conference of the Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of Slovakia Miroslav Lajčák on March 5, 2019
2019-03-07 No:067/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov recieved the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus
2019-03-07 No:066/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of India Bawitlung Vanlalvawna
2019-03-07 No:065/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Russian Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Azerbaijan Mikhail Bocharnikov
2019-03-07 No:062/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Paolo Grimoldi, head of the Italian delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Deputy Head of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament
2019-03-07 No:061/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the delegation headed by the President of US-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding
2019-03-07 No:060/19, Statement by Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov at the International Conference on Illegality of Economic and Other Activities in and with regard to Territories under Military Occupation: Third-Party Obligations and Implications for Conflict Resolution
2019-03-05 No:058/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Christina Marti Lang, Deputy State Secretary on Foreign Affairs of Switzerland
2019-03-05 No:057/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office
2019-03-04 No:053/19, Bucharest Statement - Special Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Turkmenistan
2019-03-04 No:052/19, Statement by H.E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Special Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Turkmenistan on “Caspian Sea – Black Sea International Transport Route”
2019-03-03 No:051/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the President of İslamic Cooperation Youth Forum
2019-03-02 No:050/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov attended the brain storming session on the OIC concept paper about “Role of OIC in promoting development among its Member States”
2019-03-02 No:049/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan met with The Foreign Ministry Undersecretary of Iraq in the margins of the 46th session of the Foreign Ministers Council of the OIC
2019-03-02 No:048/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov had a meeting with the Foreign Minister of the Suriname
2019-03-02 No:047/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Commissioner-General of the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)
2019-03-01 No:046/19, Statement by H.E. Elmar Mammadyarov, The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the 46th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the OIC
2019-02-28 No:044/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the President of the World Economic Forum
2019-02-27 No:043/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi in Geneva
2019-02-27 No:042/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
2019-02-27 No:041/19, On a removal of the name of Karol Małolepszy, citizen of the Republic of Poland, from the “List of foreign citizens illegally visited the occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan”
2019-02-26 No:039/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Repubic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov met with the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross Peter Maurer
2019-02-26 No:038/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov held a meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Affairs of Belgium
2019-02-26 No:037/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Deputy Foreign Minister of North Macedonia Andrej Žernovski
2019-02-26 No:036/19, Statement by H.E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the 40th Session of the UN Human Rights Council
2019-02-26 No:035/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Indonesian Minister for Foreign Affairs
2019-02-25 No:034/19, The official presentation of the report “The Illegal Activities in the Territories of Azerbaijan under Armenia’s occupation: Evidence from Satellite Imagery” held at ADA University (270 Mb)
2019-02-25 No:033/19, Joint Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the 27th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide (En/Ru)
2019-02-20 No:030/19, КОММЮНИКЕ 1-го заседания Рабочей группы высокого уровня по вопросам Каспийского моря
2019-02-19 No:029/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov met with the delegation of the Turkey-Azerbaijan friendship group of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey
2019-02-19 No:028/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Director-General for Mobility and Transport under the European Commission Henrik Hololei
2019-02-16 No:027/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Foreign and Security Policy Adviser to the German Federal Chancellor
2019-02-16 No:026/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the US Senior National Security Council Director Fiona Hill
2019-02-16 No:024/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Məmmədyarov met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic
2019-02-15 No:023/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the member of the German Bundestag
2019-02-15 No:022/19, Foreign Minister of Elmar Mammadyarov met with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister
2019-02-15 No:021/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the EU Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations
2019-02-14 No:020/19, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov left for a working visit to Germany to take part at the Munich Security Conference
2019-02-14 No:019/19, On a removal of the name of Giuliano Bifolchi, citizen of the Italian Republic, from the “List of foreign citizens illegally visited the occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan”
2019-02-08 No:018/19, Information of the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan (En/Ru)
2019-02-07 No:017/19, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the Ukrainian Ambassador upon termination of his diplomatic term
2019-02-07 No:016/19, On a removal of the name of the Ukrainian TV reporter from the “List of foreign citizens illegally visited the occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan”
2019-02-06 No:015/19, The 7th meeting of the European Union and Azerbaijan Subcommittee meeting on Justice, Freedom, Security (JFS) & Human Rights and Democracy was held in Baku
2019-01-30 No:013/19, On a removal of the name of Konstantin Andriyuk, citizen of the Ukraine from the “List of foreign citizens illegally visited the occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan”
2019-01-30 No:011/19, Press Release on the meeting of the Azerbaijani Community of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Republic of Azerbaijan with the diplomatic corps accredited in Azerbaijan
2019-01-24 No:010/19, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs had an exchange of congratulatory letters on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries
2019-01-22 No:009/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the delegation of the Interparliamentary Friendship Group with Azerbaijan in the Shura Council of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia headed by Dr. Fayez bin Abdullah bin Ali Al-Shihri
2019-01-22 No:008/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the delegation led by the Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry of Montenegro, Veselin Šuković
2019-01-18 No:007/19, Сообщение Пресс-службы МИД Азербайджанской Республики
2019-01-18 No:006/19, Infographic on the 29th Anniversary of the Black January Tragedy (En/Ru)
2019-01-16 No:004/19, Commentary by the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan regarding the meeting of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov and Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan held on January 16 in Paris with the participation of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs (En/Ru)
2019-01-14 No:003/19, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov will meet with acting Foreign Minister of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan (En/Ru)
2019-01-11 No:002/19, Комментарий руководителя Пресс-службы Министерства иностранных дел Лейлы Абдуллаевой относительно высказываний официального представителя Министерства иностранных дел Российской Федерации Марии Захаровой о недопуске граждан РФ армянского происхождения на территорию Азербайджанской Республики
2018-12-26 No:337/18, On a removal of the name of Sergei Konoplyov, citizen of the United States of America and Ukraine, Director of the Eurasia Security Program at the Kennedy School of Harvard University, from the “List of foreign citizens illegally visited the occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan”
2018-12-25 No:336/18, Interview of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov to local media outlets on the results of 2018 year
2018-12-24 No:335/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Ambassador of the Federative Republic of Brazil
2018-12-24 No:334/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the newly appointed Saudi Arabian Ambassador
2018-12-19 No:333/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received the UN Resident Coordinator in Azerbaijan
2018-12-17 No:332/18, Head of the State Protocol Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ambassador Parvin Mirzazade received the newly appointed Chargé d'affaires of Chile
2018-12-14 No:330/18, Speech of H.E. Elmar Mammadyarov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the 39th Meeting of the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the BSEC Member States
2018-12-13 No:328/18, Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmar Mammadyarov met with his Moldovan counterpart Tudor Ulianovschi
2018-12-13 No:327/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Brazil to the Republic of Azerbaijan
2018-12-12 No:326/18, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Ambassador of India Sanjay Rana upon termination of his diplomatic term
2018-12-07 No:325/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met Harlem Désir, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media
2018-12-07 No:324/18, Statement by Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the Promoting Economic Connectivity in the OSCE area Side Event
2018-12-07 No:323/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with European Union Special Representative for the South Caucasus Toivo Klaar in Milan
2018-12-07 No:322/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell in Milan
2018-12-07 No:321/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met with the OSCE Secretary-General
2018-12-07 No:320/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met Baghdad Amreyev, the Secretary General of the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States
2018-12-07 No:319/18, Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmar Mammadyarov met Paolo Grimoldi, the head of the Italian Delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly
2018-12-06 No:318/18, Statement by H.E. Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan, at the 25th Ministerial Council of the OSCE
2018-12-06 No:317/18, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov met Attilio Fontana, the president of the Lombardy Region of Italy
2018-12-06 No:316/18, Comments by Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov in response to media inquires about the meeting with the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs and acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan on 5 December in Milan
2018-12-06 No:315/18, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Araz Azimov participated at the meeting of the North Atlantic Council with Resolute Support Operational Partner and Potential Operational Partner Nations in Foreign Ministers' session
2018-12-05 No:314/18, Commentary by the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the first Russian-Armenian "Lazarev Club" meeting held in Yerevan (Ru)
2018-12-03 No:313/18, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Azerbaijan Elmar Mammadyarov will meet with acting Foreign Minister of the Republic of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan (Eng-Rus)
ABOUT AZERBAIJAN
PROTOCOL RULES AND REGULATIONS
THE REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS WEBSITES
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Michael Ray Live in Concert with Matt Stell at Moonshine Flats
Fri Feb 1
Friday, February 1, 2019 @ 8:00pm
Moonshine Flats 344 7th Ave
Country singer-songwriter Michael Ray was a hit right out of the box, scoring both with critics and on the charts. With Country Aircheck boasting there are "big things on the horizon for Michael Ray' and his live shows lauded by USA today as simply "lip-smacking good," the Florida native backed up that praise with two number ones from his 2015 self-titled debut album with "Kiss You in the Morning" and "Think a Little Less." His sophomore album, Amos, named after his grandfather and produced by the legendary Scott Hendricks, was released on June 1, 2018. The album has already spawned the hit single "Get To You," now climbing the Billboard charts and praised by Rolling Stone for its "impassioned chorus and impressive vocal range." Inspired by his rescue dog Wrigley, Ray also recently launched the charitable initiative Wrigley Cares: Helping Animals in Need to collect donations for local animal shelters at every stop on his Get To You Tour.
Opening Act: Matt Stell
Matt Stell knows what it means to stand at the crossroads. He was there not too long ago, guitar in one hand and textbook in the other. The road to his right led toward Cambridge, where Harvard University admitted him to their premed program. Beyond that horizon lay all that a physician's career could promise: security, meaningful work, maybe a lifetime in academia.
To the left, the other road pointed toward Nashville: honky-tonks, writing sessions and, beyond all that, uncertainty.
Fortunately, Stell made the right choice.
Growing up Stell divided his time between living with his mother on the Florida coast south of Tampa and spending summers, Christmases and spring breaks with his dad in Center Ridge, Arkansas, where he was born. "I saw the ocean in one place and cows in the other," he explains. "In Florida I lived where the South starts to peter out and the snowbirds from the Northeast come to visit. In Arkansas I was part of a farming family whose roots went back four or five generations. That helped me understand right at the start that family is important … but there's also a big world out there."
That applied to music as well. "My grandpa exposed me to Johnny Cash before that was cool," Stell says. "Since then I've always gravitated toward the older stuff from folks like Ernest Tubb, Patsy Cline and Merle Haggard. But I also spent half my time with a single mother, so I heard a lot of Bonnie Raitt, Alison Krauss and those 'single-mother' artists, which is still some of my favorite music."
Still, he was slow to try writing or playing himself. Stell was around 12 when his mother gave him his first guitar, which he promptly stowed in a closet and forgot about for eight years or so. Instead, he threw himself into basketball, getting good enough to earn an athletic scholarship and pave the way toward earning his bachelor's degree at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri and his masters in communication at the University of Arkansas.
He began hanging out with fellow students from Texas, who opened his eyes to their state's unique legacy of great country music artists. "These people would write their own songs and travel on the road, playing sings to people who were eager to listen. For some of them, something the artist wrote really moved them. That became a big deal to me. I wanted to do that too."
So Stell began to write. When a bar opened up near the campus that catered to performers doing original material, he signed up. It wasn't long before he was a regular to that stage, even playing under a pseudonym—Paul Wayne Walker—so that his coach wouldn't find out. Although he'd enjoyed all kinds of music as a kid, the songs he wrote drew from that well of country music he'd fist tasted with his family. "Country music is baked into the ground where I'm from," he says. "It permeates like creeks and rivers do."
Though inspired by time he spent as a student on a medical mission to Haiti, Stell realized when he reached that crossroads that music was the path he was destined to follow. He made the move to Music City around 2014, rented a room from a friend for a while, started playing writer rounds and eventually was signed with Wide Open Music. Headed by songwriters Ash Bowers and Steve Williams, the management firm guided and supported Stell as he stepped decisively down the road — the right road — toward what he now knows he always really wanted.
Line Dancing Lessons at Moonshine Flats
Young Guns Live at Moonshine Flats
Cassie B Project Live at Moonshine Flats
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The Steiner Stone
Surviving photograph of Jacob Steiner's original grave within the original German Reformed burying ground in Frederick (ca. 1920)
People often ask me what is the oldest burial stone marker in Mount Olivet Cemetery? It’s a great question, but one whose answer is not rooted in the cemetery’s first interment of 1854, or the cemetery's first monument. Ironically, it has a direct connection with the word stone, itself, not to mention being that of the builder of Frederick’s oldest known house. If you guessed the Brunner family (Schifferstadt built ca. 1758), you’d be wrong. It’s the gravestone, or grabstein, of Jacob Steiner (1713-1748). And in case you didn’t take German in high school, “stein” is the German word for stone.
To understand the significance of this unique cemetery marker, one can also look at the significance of the house Jacob Steiner left behind, the archaic centerpiece of one of Frederick’s prime residential developments. Both are true stories left in stone.
Master of Mill Pond
I was intrigued to see a recent story in the Frederick News announcing the formation of the Mill Pond House Ruins Committee, a group taking aim to further preserve and interpret the “mortal remains” of what most likely represents Frederick’s oldest known house. The article states that City of Frederick planning officials are aiming to take the ruins over as part of a parkland dedication agreement with the developers of Worman’s Mill, located in the northeast portion of the city, just off MD route 26 and Monocacy Boulevard.
Thankfully the remnants were not bulldozed with the creation of the Worman’s Mill community a few decades back. You can find them safely secured behind a chain link fence, located off a bicycle/walking trail that traverses the Worman’s Mill Conservancy property. This locale is bounded by Tuscarora Creek and Mill Race Road, and is also in close proximity to the Monocacy River to the northeast.
Dedra Salatrik with the ruins in the background (photo courtesy of the Frederick News-Post)
Unfortunately, all that exists of the original Mill Pond House are the chimney and a few of the structure’s stone walls. The current location of the remains of the Mill Pond House can be found on the Worman’s Mill Conservancy property (abutting the fore mentioned Mill Race Road and the Tuscarora Creek). We are lucky that multiple residents, past and present, have taken a great interest in the architectural importance of the house, and the life of its original builder.
Neighboring Worman’s Mill resident Dedra Salitrik, a master gardener, became enamored with the Mill Pond House when she and husband, John, bought their home on Mill Race Road. The Salitrik residence actually backs to the ruins, and gave inspiration for their purchase at this location. The couple immediately started doing detective work on the structure, eventually receiving permission from the Wormald Development Company to go inside the chain-link fence and build a pollinator garden to attract birds and bees. They went on to enhance the ruins with plantings of elderberries, winterberry holly, milkweed and turtlehead.
As for context on this old house, Worman’s Mill resident and historian Heidi Sproat wrote the following introductory piece on the Worman Mill Conservancy’s website:
Jacob Stoner, a German settler to Frederick, MD built the Mill Pond House around 1746, before the Revolutionary War, on a site along the Old Annapolis Road. It was a prime example of half-timber and wattle-and-daub construction typical of late medieval dwellings in the valley of the Upper Rhine in Germany. In fact, it was the only known house in the East German or Palatine style ever built in Maryland. The house was constructed entirely of peg and rail construction; there were no nails used. The house was built forty feet wide and thirty feet deep and had two stories. While the original house was constructed using a technique known as "waddle and daubing," the ground floor was made of both sandstone and limestone. Incredibly, there was a vaulted cellar and spiral stairs. The house resembled what we refer to today as English Tudor.
After Jacob Steiner’s (Stoner’s) death in 1748, the Mill Pond House, and surrounding property, was held by the Frederick County court and eventually transferred to his children in 1767. His wife had died the same year, leaving minor aged children. Jacob’s eldest son, John, inherited the Mill Pond parcel and continued to operate his father’s mill. Mill Pond was sold out of the family in 1798 (the time of John’s death) to William Potts, who would eventually convey the property to namesake Moses Worman on April 3, 1811.
I have had the pleasure of knowing two of the leading contemporary authorities on Jacob Stoner and his Mill Pond House. One is my friend Patricia “Pat” Ogden, a historian, genealogist and master docent at Schifferstadt Architectural Museum. Pat has researched and presented on the Mill Pond House and Jacob Steiner in recent years, and serves as a key member of the Mill Pond House Ruins Committee. The other individual of note is no longer with us, however my work office is within 100 yards of his gravesite. His name was Claggett Jones (1924-2004).
Claggett Jones, a Washington DC native and World War II veteran, took a great interest in the Mill Pond House and its history. After his retirement from the Department of Commerce, Mr. Jones moved to Frederick with his wife Jean, taking up residence in the Worman’s Mill community. Back in 1995, he was kind enough to provide me with a copy of an old article from 1951 which included photographs of the ancient structure for use in my documentary film series Frederick Town. A few years later, we invited Claggett to be a guest for a special feature on Young at Heart, one of our GS Communication’s Cable 10 television programs. He spoke on the Mill Pond House and shared a spectacular two-foot square model of the structure which he and lifelong friend and neighbor Wes Stewart had meticulously crafted in his basement.
The model replica of the Mill Pond House
Jacob Steiner (Stoner)
One of the area’s earliest settlers, Jacob Steiner (Stoner), was one of six men who tried to buy Tasker’s Chance in the late 1730’s. Tasker’s Chance was a parcel of 7,000 acres patented to Annapolis businessman and politician Benjamin Tasker in June 1727. It was eventually conveyed to Frederick Town’s founder, Daniel Dulany, and would constitute the bulk of the land that the City of Frederick sits on today. Of the 19 individuals in 1746 who initially received deeds from Dulany, only Steiner received more than one parcel. He held three lots, all located northeast of the newly laid-out town.
Steiner operated a grain mill near the mouth of the Tuscarora Creek and named his lands Bear Den, The Barrens, and Mill Pond. It was on this latter tract that Jacob Steiner erected a late medieval-style stone and timber dwelling in 1746.
The Mill Pond House (ca. 1930's)
Not much more is documented about Jacob Steiner’s arrival to this country from Germany, or his early years here. He was born in 1713 and married Magdalena Glattacker (1715-1748) in 1733. It is likely that Jacob arrived in Philadelphia and settled west of the city like many of his German brethren of the era. He would eventually come to Maryland and the Monocacy River Valley in the late 1730’s. In the year 1740, Jacob Steiner was naturalized with sons John and Jacob (Jr).
Steiner would also purchase individual town lots from Daniel Dulany. On one, he built Frederick Town’s first brick structure—later used as a tavern. The two-story building sat on the southwest corner of the Square Corner at the intersection of Patrick and Market streets. I’ve always contended that this would be the same building to come under the ownership of innkeeper Kennedy Farrell in 1749. Farrell’s tavern was said to be the principal tavern in town during the era of the French and Indian War, making it the most likely place of lodging for Gen. Edward Braddock in April, 1755. Here, Gen. Braddock met with Maryland Royal governor Horatio Sharpe, as well as the postmaster of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin. From here, he and his Army of British soldiers headed west and embarked on the ill-fated expedition to Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh).
Representation of a Colonial era brick tavern. (Below)Present-day southeast corner, intersection of Market and Patrick streets.
Trinity Chapel (ca. 1950)
Jacob Steiner would not see the growth of Frederick, dying in 1748 at the age of 35. He would be laid to rest in the first graveyard associated with the German Reformed Church. This was located behind the site of the congregation’s first church structure in the first block of West Church Street. The place of worship would eventually be enhanced in the form of Trinity Chapel which still exists today. The burying ground stretched from behind the church, southward to West Patrick Street. The former McCrory's Store, today’s Maryland Ensemble Theater building (31 W. Patrick St.), occupies the footprint today. The congregation eventually built a second graveyard at the corner of Bentz and West Second streets, the site of Memorial Park.
With the opening of Mount Olivet in 1854, many churches were relieved of the burden of not having adequate burial space. In some cases, folks bought lots in Mount Olivet and decided to move their ancestors into newly purchased lots from other cemeteries. Sometimes this was by choice, and other times by necessity as various congregations were making decisions to expand church structures, build support buildings or simply sell off downtown graveyard properties for lucrative offers made for residential and commercial purposes. This was the situation with for the German Reformed Church’s first cemetery. Coincidentally, the church’s second cemetery, original resting place of the famed Barbara Fritchie, was condemned by the City of Frederick in the 1920’s, and repurposed as Memorial Park in which soon became home to a fine World War I monument, erected in 1924.
Jacob Steiner's gravestone within Area C/Lot 185
I found that descendants of Jacob Schley bought a burial plot in Mount Olivet’s Area C in late November of 1923. Several Steiners were removed from the German Reformed burial ground and moved here to Lot 185. Of particular note is Christian Schley (1797-1862), whose prominent monument dominates the lot and it’s smaller grave markers from the early 19th century. Christian was the grandson of John Steiner who reclaimed the Mill Pond House and mill after his father’s death. For some reason or another, Christian’s great-grandfather’s “grabstein” was brought here and placed over space 8, to the immediate left of Christian’s wife Rebecca.
Steiner Lot within Mount Olivet (Area C/Lot 185)
Replacement memorial stone for Jacob Steiner
Our cemetery records do not show the removal or reburial of Jacob Stoner in Mount Olivet. Based on the time of his death, one of the earliest in Frederick Town’s history, his mortal remains are likely one with the earth that comprises the original German Reformed burying ground. Steiner's beautifully crafted tombstone was moved to Mount Olivet, likely in 1923 with the other family stones.
Back in 2014, Jacob's grave stone was moved to the basement of the Key Memorial Chapel for safekeeping after descendant Roland Steiner and family of Howard County had new memorial stones crafted for Jacob Steiner and others whose stones had been disintegrating. The intent of Mr. Steiner was to preserve what is likely the oldest surviving tombstone in Frederick. With our new Preservation and Enhancement Fund, we hope to make a thorough restoration for the future and have the stone available for public display.
Jacob Steiner is one with Frederick, and his original grave stone and some of the stone work associated with his magnificent home at Mill Pond have survived the test of time.
Jacob Steiner's original gravestone
Gracie Heller
Thank you. Love your work.
Patricia Ogden
Wonderful article, Chris. Thanks for the mention. Scharf published a description of Jacob Stoner's tombstone in History of Western Maryland, Vol. I, page 525. Fantastic that his stone will be preserved. All the best to you, my friend, in your noble work.
Denise Cue
So VERY interesting. I am working on my Family Genealogy and find myself landing on this story. The story of my SIX Greats Grandfather. I live in Iowa, and would one day love to visit Frederick. Seeing and feeling places that my ancestors once grew and loved. Thank you for sharing his story! Denise Cue
Denise, I,too, am doing some genealogy including up-dating my grand father's and great grandfather's work on the subject. How are you related to Jacob? I am via: John, Henry, Christian, Lewis, Bernard, and Richard (my father). Sincerely, roland.c.steiner5@gmail.com
Roland Christian Steiner
Chris, Wow, I just happened upon this article. Pulls together various threads of family history of which I was vaguely aware. Jacob was my first documented (Steiner) ancestor to arrive in this country, and although it is a very narrow line, most of his descendants are buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. I have some old photos of the stone wherein the lettering is mostly legible, and was translated for me by a friend who speaks German.
Chris Haugh link
Hello old friend,
So glad to hear from you. I would love to see additional pictures and a translation...perhaps I can add to the story. We have a new Preservation Fund (501C3) here at the cemetery and hope to have the monument endure some restoration work sometime down the road.
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Missouri's top health official has history of controversies
FILE -In this June 5, 2019, file photo, Dr. Randall Williams, Director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, speaks with reporters outside the courthouse after Circuit Judge Michael Stelzer heard his testimony concerning the renewal of Planned Parenthood's abortion clinic license in St. Louis. As director of the state's Department of Health and Senior Services, Williams oversees the agency that licenses health care facilities, tracks the spread of disease and is now setting up the state’s medical marijuana program. Each of those services has spawned disputes in Missouri, with the most recent involving the political storm surrounding the move to close the state’s Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis. (Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP, File)
JEFFERSON CITY (AP) — Missouri's top health official, the face of the effort to end abortions at the only clinic in the state that performs them, has generated controversy since taking the helm of the Missouri department after a sometimes tumultuous tenure at a similar job in North Carolina.
As director of the state's Department of Health and Senior Services, Dr. Randall Williams oversees the agency that licenses health care facilities, tracks the spread of disease and is now setting up the state's medical marijuana program. Each of those services has spawned disputes in Missouri, with the most recent involving the political storm surrounding the move to close the state's Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis.
Williams told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in response to written questions that he anticipated criticism when he took the job.
"Our job is to ensure the nearly 4,000 licensed health facilities are complying with current Missouri laws and regulations," Williams said. "As for feedback, both positive and negative, I try to use it to help make us better at serving the people of Missouri."
New Missouri Health Director involved in water scandal
Williams is at the front of a debate that coincides with Republican Gov. Mike Parson signing legislation last month that will prohibit women from terminating pregnancies after eight weeks except in medical emergencies.
Williams, 62, did not address his own views on abortion, saying only, "Abortion is legal in Missouri, and I want it to be safe."
The 62-year-old obstetrician said he delivered more than 2,000 babies while in private practice in Raleigh, North Carolina, from 1989-2015. North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory named him health director for his state in 2015. Williams came to Missouri in 2017 as former Gov. Eric Greitens assembled his cabinet.
The health department is in a dispute with Planned Parenthood over renewal of the clinic's license to perform abortions. The department conducted a two-month investigation at the clinic and outlined 30 deficiencies. The state said the clinic has addressed only a handful to its satisfaction.
Planned Parenthood has accused the administration of politicizing state health regulations to restrict abortion access.
Williams said politics have nothing to do with his department's decision to revoke the clinic's license.
Williams has sparred with Missouri lawmakers on several occasions. Last year, House budget writers scolded him for bungling a program that helps get stroke and heart attack patients to the most appropriate facility in the shortest amount of time.
That dust-up came after Parson vetoed $153,000 from the program, setting off fears the program might be discontinued. Williams said the veto was a way to force hospitals to pay more to fund the program. He and the governor played down potential problems, arguing that their maneuver would not result in a break in service. Lawmakers said they were misled about the intent of the veto.
Williams has also been accused several times of being secretive. Citing confidentiality laws, he refused to release information about an outbreak of the tick-borne Bourbon virus. Lawmakers responded by cutting eight positions in his agency's budget.
Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce found the health department violated open records laws when it refused to release lab tests of a liquid thrown at St. Louis County police officers during 2017 protests sparked by the acquittal of white former Officer Jason Stockley in the fatal shooting of black suspect Anthony Lamar Smith. The judge ordered the release of the results and told the state to pay the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, which sought the records, $10,754 in fines and legal fees. The liquid was identified as apple cider vinegar.
That ruling came two days after the Post-Dispatch sued the agency to obtain records of applicants seeking to sell and grow medical marijuana in Missouri. Circuit Judge Daniel R. Green ruled in the Post-Dispatch's favor.
The health department also eliminated geographic details from its reporting of West Nile virus cases, citing privacy concerns.
"One of our agency's top priorities is to follow the law and provide transparency and access to public information while using an abundance of caution to follow the law and protect confidential information," Williams said.
Williams has faced similar controversies in North Carolina.
In 2016, North Carolina's toxicologist testified in a lawsuit that Williams and other environmental officials attempted to "play down the risk" of coal ash contamination of drinking wells by rescinding a do-not-drink notice. The toxicologist said the state was telling people the water was safe when it knew it wasn't.
Williams said he rescinded the warning notices because they were stirring up unwarranted fears.
That dispute led to the resignation of at least one North Carolina health official, who said she couldn't support how Williams had downplayed the risks.
He was unanimously confirmed by the Missouri Senate.
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Philip McBride Johnson
Philip McBride Johnson is a self-employed commodities, futures and derivative products attorney.[1][2] He is a retired partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, LLP.[3] He also served as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from 1981 through 1983 and was a key figure in the drafting of commodities trading regulations.
In March of 2009, Johnson was inducted into the Futures Industry Association Futures Hall of Fame.[4]
As a commodities lawyer, Johnson helped draft key provisions of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Act of 1974 that made the agency the sole regulator of the U.S. futures industry.
As chairman of the CFTC, he reached a jurisdictional agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission named the "Shad-Johnson Accord" after Johnson and the then-chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, John Shad. The accord paved the way for futures on stock indexes. This agreement later became part of the Commodity Exchange Act. It was later repealed in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, paving the way for single stock futures trading in the U.S.
Johnson also approved the first stock-index futures contracts, reopened option trading on exchanges after 35 years of inactivity, and allowed the first cash-settled futures contracts.
Johnson helped to create trading linkages between the gold and crude oil markets in New York and Sydney, between securities exchanges in New York and Amsterdam, and between currency markets in New York and Hong Kong. These linkages allowed investors to enter or exit the market approximately 16 hours a day.
Johnson also helped create the world’s first futures contracts on a U.S. dollar index, the European Currency Unit. He has served on many U.S. and international boards and committees, including five government advisory panels in the commodities area and twice as a director of the Futures Industry Association. He is the author of Derivatives Regulation, the first modern legal treatise on the subject. He also published a business guide entitled Derivatives: A Manager’s Guide to the World’s Most Powerful Financial Instruments (McGraw-Hill, 1999).[5]
Johnson headed the exchange-traded commodities, futures and derivative products practice group at the New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom before his retirement at the end of 2010. He joined Skadden, Arps in 1984 after 20 years of practice and government experience in the commodities field. He has served as general outside counsel to several futures markets and self-regulatory organizations.
He also contributed to the development of the first interest-rate futures contract, the first central exchange for securities options and the first national self-regulatory organization for the futures brokerage community.
He was selected for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America 2008 in the specialty of derivatives law, as well as in Chambers Global: The World’s Leading Lawyers for Business 2008. He also has taught courses in derivatives law and regulation at the University of Virginia School of Law and other academic institutions. The Chicago Board of Trade honored Mr. Johnson as part of its 30th anniversary celebration in 2006, saying that he “played a critical role in the development of the first interest rate futures.” He also is a member of the board of editors of the International Financial Law Review and is referenced in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in American Law.
Johnson received a Bachelor of Arts (with Honors) from Indiana University and an LL.B. from Yale University, where he was managing editor of the Yale Law Journal.
↑ Philip McBride Johnson. LinkedIn.
↑ Philip McBride Johnson to leave Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, stay active in derivatives community. John Lothian News.
↑ Philip McBride Johnson. Skadden.
↑ FIA Announces Inductees to Futures Hall of Fame. Futures Industry Association.
↑ Philip McBride Johnson bio. Skadden, Arps.
Retrieved from "http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Philip_McBride_Johnson&oldid=172463"
Sponsored Pages - ISE
Former CFTC Chairmen
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[MBM] - Reaching Nirvana Through Lawn Maintenance
The Esoteric South
Reaching Nirvana Through Lawn Maintenance
By Marshall McCart
* originally appeared in The Covington News in 2016
Cutting grass is a passion of mine, and I believe it to be good for the soul. I truly do.
Now, that statement probably comes as a great surprise to some of my neighbors in and around the North Covington historical community. They'd probably speak to this in the contrary, and, if so, I'd probably not have much to say to dispute it. However, I think I've got a pretty good excuse. For most of the last year or so our lawn mower has been broken, and while we've tried to pay folks to cut it a fair amount, it's just so much harder to put it high on the priority list when we have to dish out money. In addition, I've been known to have a propensity for laziness, and it's just been so hot! And maybe the whiskey sometimes plays a role...
In fact — truth be told — the last time the grass was cut, after our lawn mower was fixed, it was my lovely wife who cut the grass.
There was a time in my life when I used to concern myself whenever she'd cut the grass (so you can tell it's been more than once). I'd think to myself something along the lines of: "Man, the folks around here are going to think you're a total and absolute no-account." I used to concern myself with this but not anymore. No, I finally learned to embrace it. It's like the lyrics to "Good Hearted Woman." I realized, ultimately, that it was a win for Yours Truly. "That rascal Marshall McCart," they'd say. "He won't even cut his own grass. Poor ole Ann has to do it."
For the record, she says she likes to cut grass. Therefore, in my mind's eye, I'm just helping her to be happy and reach Maslow's concept of Self Actualization, right? We do what we can here, folks, I'm just happy to help!
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Affordable Green Energy
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It can be very satisfying to switch to a low-cost, green-energy source that helps the environment by reducing the demand for fossil-fuel energy sources that produce toxic, carbon emissions. This effort is recognized and supported by individuals, customers, and organizations around the world.
There are substantial government incentives that solar power investments qualify for, including the 30% Federal Tax Credit. In addition, depending on your location, there can also be significant state and local incentives available for small businesses that invest in solar. In some cases, small businesses can recoup close to half of the original system cost after the first year.
Mass Megawatts Solar Power Systems can be installed on rooftops or at ground level. They can be scaled or expanded to meet future energy needs at the site. Mass Megawatts handles all aspect of system installation, delivery, and monitoring, which makes the process to go Solar much easier for customers.
The operational performance of your Mass Megawatts Solar Power System is fully guaranteed. If it doesn’t generate the expected level of energy, then Mass Megawatts will pay you the difference. Also, while not anticipated, any needed maintenance and/or repairs are fully covered as well over the first 10 years.
Commercial Solar Power (Please click here)
The patented, STS technology is designed to automatically adjust the position of solar panels to receive an optimal level of direct sunlight throughout the day. Unlike other solar tracking technologies, the Mass Megawatts STS utilizes a low-cost structure that adds stability to the overall system while improving energy production levels.
The STS utilizes an innovative structural design that combines a simple, yet robust, A-frame design with a low-cost, protective outer-wall. Using a non-electrical, and passive, tracking technology, the solar panels are automatically repositioned throughout the day as the sun’s position travels from east to west. With ground fittings secured at multiple points, the system is designed to handle extreme weather and winds up to 120 mph.
The tracking technology allows the panels to receive more direct sunlight and to generate more solar power for the customer. With this system, solar power production is increased by up to 28% as compared to stationary configurations. Future versions of the STS will also offer a dual-tracking capability, which can further improve solar power generation levels by an additional 10%.
The STS allows Mass Megawatts to lower material costs and reduce the number of solar panels needed to generate the rated capacity. Due to this advantage, Mass Megawatts can deliver more solar power production at a price similar to lower-capacity, stationary systems. In many locations, this improved output translates into a 20 to 30% rate of return for the customer with investment payback occurring in the 3rd or 4th year.
The STS provides scalable capacity for 10+ megawatt installations and can be installed on variety of ground-level terrains and rooftop locations. The system is well suited to provide power generation at remote locations and for internal, high-energy demand operations. The STS provides an ideal, cost effective approach to meeting organization energy needs.
Mass Megawatts coordinates all aspects of system delivery, including permitting, installation, and working to obtain any available tax incentives. They monitor the performance of each system, and provide a full, performance guarantee.
We welcome the opportunity to work with commercial and corporate entities, as well as, solar power developers directly.
Mass Megawatts continues to develop and improve alternative energy solutions that seek to reduce energy costs, improve the environment, and provide power access to remote locations throughout the world. We believe our advanced solar power system has created an unprecedented opportunity for residential and commercial electric users alike.
Tax Incentives and Government Grants (Please click here)
Where can I get more information about tax credits, grants, and accelerated depreciation?
As a starting point, you can view information about the 30% Federal Renewable Energy Tax Credit at http://programs.dsireusa.org/system/program/detail/1235
Information about accelerated depreciation, for businesses, can be found at http://programs.dsireusa.org/system/program/detail/1235
Information about USDA grants for rural wind projects can be found at http://programs.dsireusa.org/system/program/detail/5681
Information about state incentives can be found at http://www.dsireusa.org/.
Wind Tunnel Testing and Charlton Prototype (Please click here)
Mass Megawatts has constructed a wind tunnel for gathering data for power output of different blade designs and augmenters using a range of controlled wind speeds. Click on the photos below to view larger images of our wind tunnel testing facility and past project at field testing locations.
Augmented Wind Power Project (Please click here)
Solar Tracking System Presentation
Project Financial Summary with Solar Tracker
The rate of return is better when tracker price is reduced in mass production (Higher than 40% in some projects with End of Utility Line Distribution and Demand Charge Optimization)
Solar Tracking System Video
Learn more about going Solar
Mass Mega Watts Wind Power
Contact: info@massmegawatts.com
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News and Publications / News / News Releases / 2018 / May / 2018 Eric Turner Memorial Award
Norristown Lawyer Mary Cushing Doherty to Receive Service Award from PBA Family Law Section
HARRISBURG (May 29, 2018) — Mary Cushing Doherty, a partner at High Swartz in Norristown, will be presented with the Pennsylvania Bar Association (PBA) Family Law Section Eric Turner Memorial Award on July 14 at the section’s Summer Meeting in Hershey.
The Eric Turner Memorial Award honors a lawyer who is dedicated to the practice of family law and who serves as a mentor and teacher to fellow lawyers.
As part of the award, a $1000 donation will be made to the Eastern Pennsylvania Chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, a charity selected by Doherty.
Throughout her more than 35 years of practice, Doherty has been invested in the advancement of family law practice and women’s issues in the practice of law.
An active member of the legal community, Doherty has held numerous leadership positions in the PBA, including chair, officer and council member of the Family Law Section and chair of the Review and Certifying Board tasked with developing and implementing a certification process for various practice areas. Last year, she was recognized with a Special Achievement Award for her service in navigating a divorce reform bill through the General Assembly — one of the many contributions she has made since joining the section in 1979. Doherty is currently a member at-large of the Commission on Women in the Profession Executive Council.
She tackled gender bias and domestic violence issues impacting residents of the commonwealth via her work on a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the Justice System and the Attorney General Family Violence Task Force. Appointed in 1995, she currently serves on advisory committees dealing with domestic relations and assisted reproduction technologies for the Joint State Government Commission of Pennsylvania.
A frequent course planner and lecturer, Doherty participates in seminars and meetings held by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, Pennsylvania Bar Institute, state and local bar associations and law schools. She received an Award of Professional Excellence in Programming from the Association for Continuing Legal Education for a course on drafting marital settlement agreements in 1997.
In addition to membership at the PBA, Doherty is a member of the American Bar Association, Philadelphia Bar Association, American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers — Pennsylvania Chapter, Doris Jonas Freed Inn of Court and Professionals for Amicable Divorce. She has held numerous leadership positions for several of these organizations, including: chair of the Family Law Section, a Family Law delegate to the Board of Governors and a member of the Judicial Selection Commission of the Philadelphia Bar Association; chair of the Montgomery Bar Association Family Law Section; president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers — Pennsylvania Chapter; and member of the Pennsylvania Bar Institute Board of Directors.
Throughout her career, Doherty’s work and service have been recognized with several awards, including the PBA Commission on Women in Profession 2012 Lynette Norton Award, 2012 Women of the Year list by The Legal Intelligencer, 2009 Woman of Distinction list by Philadelphia Business Journal, 2008 Frederick Cohen Award for Excellence in Teaching and 2006 Margaret Richardson Award.
Doherty received a B.A. from the University of Delaware in 1975 and a J.D. from Villanova University in 1978.
For more information about the PBA Family Law Section Summer Meeting, July 12-15 at The Hotel Hershey, visit the PBA website at https://www.pabar.org/site/Events-and-Education/Event-Info/sessionaltcd/FAM718.
Founded in 1895, the Pennsylvania Bar Association exists to promote justice, professional excellence and respect of the law; improve public understanding of the legal system; facilitate access to legal services; and serve the 26,000 lawyers who are members of the association.
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Amy Harman - Bassoon
Born in London in 1987, Amy Harman began her studies at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music where she was awarded the Sally Wainwright Woodwind Prize. In 2009 she completed her undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music, under the tuition of Andrea de Flammineis, Julie Price and Martin Gatt, where she was awarded the RCM Bassoon Prize. Amy also studied with František Herman at the Hudební Fakulta Akademie Múzických Umění in Prague.
As an orchestral musician Amy has performed with the European Union Youth Orchestra, and as guest principal with the London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber, City of Birmingham Symphony and Hallé orchestras. From 2010 she was Principal Bassoon at BBC National Orchestra of Wales until being appointed Principal Bassoon of the Philharmonia in 2011.
Amy is also an active chamber musician and has been a member of Ensemble 360 since 2010. She has performed at festivals internationally, collaborating with artists such as Radovan Vlatković, Natalia Gutman, Charles Neidich and the Chilingirian Quartet.
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Music for Media Reel
Concert Works
Michael W. Barry
Michael W. Barry is an accomplished game, film, and television composer and classically-trained pianist based in Los Angeles. Following his many years studying classical piano in his native Long Island, NY, Barry earned a degree in piano performance from SUNY Geneseo. After graduation, he moved to Los Angeles to attend USC’s Film Scoring Program, which began his composing career for film, television, and interactive media. Most notably, Michael's music can be heard throughout Riot Games' hugely successful title League of Legends and on their recent soundtrack release Music of League - Volume 1. In addition to his work for the screen, Michael is an avid composer of concert works, most recently releasing Endeavor and Boomba for wind ensemble. Barry is also an accomplished entrepreneur, having co-founded several successful companies including Hollywood Scoring and Cinesamples - one of the largest sample library companies for composers.
Copyright 2016 Michael W. Barry
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Vatnajökull Glacier
Glacier Vatnajökull
It takes a lot of madness not to see a glacier in Iceland. Vatnoyokull is the largest glacier in Europe. Choose from our Vatnajökull hikes.
Value-added service at Vatnajökull
The glacier Vatnajökull is the biggest glacier in Europe and covers 8% of Iceland's land mass. Situated in the southwest of Iceland, Vatnajökull National Reserve is a favourite place for glacier walks from Skaftafell, boating in the Jökulsárlón glacier lake and cave trips between November and March.
The area of Vatnajökull is about 8,100 sq km; although it is declining quickly due to climatic changes, its shrinkage is not quite as far along as other types of glacier such as Langjökull and Mýrdalsjökull. The highest summit of Iceland is also held under its glacier; Hvannadalshnjúkur is 2,200 meters (7,218 feet) high.
Assuming their computations are accurate, this would mean significant vulcanic activities for Vatnajökull over the next halfcentenary. There are over 30 exit icecaps that run out of the glacier but are limited on the sides of the canyon. Most important exit glacier of Vatnajökull are Dyngjujökull in the northern part, Breiðamerkurjökull and Skeiðarárjökull in the southern part.
On the western side are the Síðujökull, Skaftárjökull and Tungnaárjökull endings. There are many streams flowing out of Vatnajökull, forming some of Iceland's largest glacier creeks. Launched in June 2008, Vatnajökull National Parks has gradually expanded to more and more areas. It now encompasses 14,141 km2 (5,460 sq. miles), 14% of the state.
This is the second biggest Nationalpark in Europe. There is a river that divides the tableland just off the northern side of the reserve. Ravine Jökulsárgljúfur was excavated by glacier tides hundreds of years ago. Dettifoss, the most mighty cascade in Europe, is located at the top of the gorge. Cliffy peaks form the southern side of Vatnajökull, where discharge ice creeps onto the plain.
Southwards is the sand plain of Skeiðarársandur, and the Skeiðará glacier flows through this huge wasteland. The glacierlagune at the foot of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier is one of Iceland's most popular national park attractions. Here, large glaciers, which have torn off the glacier, drift over a huge sea before they land in the Atlantic or are rinsed on land at Diamond Beach near by.
In the 1930s the size of Vatnajökull peaked, but has been falling steadily ever since. Due to the increasing worldwide temperatures, Vatnajökull has been losing about one meter of its annual weight on board over the last 15 years. As temperatures keep increasing, the glacier could have almost disappeared by the end of the next millennium, with only small icecaps left on the highest peaks.
Attempts are being made to avoid what some people say is unavoidable, as reafforestation is being carried out around the glacier, a tried and tested way of keeping the area cool. Mr President, the splendour of Vatnajökull National Park has not gone unseen. However, the best known is that many places in Vatnajökull were used in the HBO series Throne Game, just off the wall.
It is built with the help of computer-generated images of the glacier. The Grimsvotn area includes sub-lacial seas and a homonymous vulcano in the west of Vatnajokull, Europe's biggest glacier.... Pietro Kverkfjöll's picture is a sub-lacial mountains on the north side of Vatnajökul.....
Morsárfoss, at 228 meters, is the highest falls in Iceland. The glacier tongues of Breiðamerkurjökull stretch from the south of Vatnajökull to the glacier Laguna Jökulsárló..... Complimentary: Praveen Kumar Bodigutla Skaftafellsjökull is a glacier ledge that is one of Iceland's..... The Vestragil is a gorge at Skaftafell in Vatnajokull National Park and a favourite stop for walkers.
Bardarbunga is Iceland's second highest peak and is situated under the ice cap of Vatnajokull, Europe's biggest glacier. The Hafrafell is a small hill just to the South of Mosfellsbaer, about 12 km from Reykjavik. The glacier is a 1600 square kilometre glacier ledge that stretches from Iceland's biggest..... The glacier Fjallsjokull is situated in the Vatnajokull National Park, not far from Skaftafell.
On this glacier you will..... Øraefajokull is a glacier vulcano in the southeast of Iceland. Iceland's highest summit, Hvannadalshnjukur (2109 m), is situated on its north-western side. .... Springfurl is a protected area in the Vatnajökull National Park in south-east Iceland. Although only 20 meters high and not particularly mighty, it is one of Iceland's most beloved falls.
The glacier Breiðárlón is a beautiful but often missed glacierlaguna, which you can find here..... The Holuhraun is a huge vertical expanse of volcanic rock just off the Vatnajökull Glacier in the Icelandic highlands. With an area of 1300 km it is the biggest sands in the whole wide area. Fallsjokull ('Falling Glacier') is an exit glacier from the upper ice cap of Mount Patnajokull.
Mirkisjokull is a glacier near Skaftafell in southeast Iceland. Vikisjokull is an exit of the Vatnajokull glacier and thus a part of the..... The glacier Fjallsárlón is a glacierlaguna in Iceland, which lies at the south end of the Vatnajökull glacier.
Node centre Naypyidaw
The Shwe Mann Thu Express
Weather in March
Burma's main religion
Beach Ngapali Guesthouse
Burma President List
Yangon airport to city center
Things to see in Yangon
Myanmar? Where's Myanmar?
Burma Asia
Yangon Central Hotel
The Prambananan Hindu Temple
Museum and Tour
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Myanmar Pye
Best Myanmar Website Tayar Section
Swedream Video Movies
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shopping in Yangon Myanmar
Myanmar Hotel
International Airport Myanmar
Myanmar Burma Time
Burma and Yangon
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The Hakha Chin State
Rudolfsee
Things you can do in Bagan
Hotel Mawlamyine List
The Ayeyarwady Burmese News
Bassin 8
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Flight from Yangon to Ngapali
Urals Rex
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German News
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Burma Itinerary
Best travel agency in Myanmar
Myanmar Neighbouring Countries
The Thayet of Myanmar
Phee Aye
In Kalaw Place
Amithabh
Bílu Kyun
Las Vega
Burma Business Visa Renewal
Burma needs a visa
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Marlene Schwartz, APNP, Ph.D.
Marlene F. Schwartz lost her battle with ovarian cancer April 2018.
Marlene, co-founder of PCT along with Dinshah D. Gagrat, MD and Mary Jo Caminiti, LCSW said one of her greatest satisfactions in life was caring for the thousands of patients and families over her nearly 40 years of seeing patients. Marlene tirelessly served her patients, collaborated with her colleagues and tried to repair the world. PCT wants to continue to model the clinic after the many things Marlene believed in. She knew it was important to greet each patient with respect and compassion who called on the phone or walked in the office knowing that taking that first step toward therapy was often the hardest. Marlene also believed in going the extra mile for each patient and used humor to make people more comfortable. Although soft spoken, her words and her “tell it like it is” attitude had a profound impact on those lucky enough to know her. Due to Marlene’s belief that everyone should have access to mental health care, a memorial fund has been established in her name to provide support for those that cannot afford treatment.
Marlene’s Dream/Marlene F. Schwartz Memorial Fund, established in 2018, supports two primary passions of Dr. Marlene Schwartz:
Help train and support individuals who are entering the field of mental health
Provide funds for mental health services for those who cannot afford treatment.
We appreciate your contribution to Marlene’s Dream that honors Marlene’s legacy and helps generations to come in the Greater Milwaukee area. Marlene accompanied many individuals, couples and families in our community through many of their life changes. She was always present for her colleagues and helped them learn a little more about their patients and themselves. All of us at PCT and those who want to honor her with this Fund feel that life’s challenges offer us an opportunity to grow. Marlene deeply believed in the Yiddish Proverb: “You can’t control the wind, but you can adjust your sails.”
We miss her every day and remember her through Marlene’s Dream – a fund at Psychiatric Consultants & Therapists. If you are interested in helping with Marlene’s Dream, please contact the clinic at psychct@gmail.com or call Mary Jo Caminiti at 414-224-3737 ext 222. If you are interested in donating, please make checks payable to Marlene’s Dream/Marlene F. Schwartz Fund and mail checks to Psychiatric Consultants & Therapists at 229 E. Wisconsin Avenue, Suite 600, Milwaukee, WI 53202.
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Nepal ramps up control on Tibetan refugees, develops database in a surveillance bid
[Wednesday, March 13, 2019 17:51]
By Tenzin Dharpo
Nepalese police manhandling peaceful Tibetan protestors in kathmandu. Photo- Reuters
DHARAMSHALA, Mar. 13: In what is seen as a bid to control and monitor the Tibetan refugee community in Nepal, the government there is reportedly in the process of developing a database of Tibetans in the country.
The Kathmandu government has begun collecting details of Tibetans and recording the same on software, reported english.onlinekhabar.com earlier last month. The report did not elaborate on the purposes of the database.
The Nepalese government which is known to be strong ally of China and under its lucrative patronage has attracted scepticism on the issue with observers saying that the database will serve to monitor the Tibetan community and curb anti-china activities at Beijing’s behest.
Experts also say that the database will limit the number of Tibetan refugees fleeing Tibet through their border. Measures such as this will further choke crucial routes of Tibetan refugees who are already disadvantaged by the Chinese government pushing for joint security patrols along the Nepal-China border points. Increasingly militarised borders and strict deportation practices, among other factors, have meant that the number of Tibetans crossing into exile has dwindled drastically over the years.
According to a source who wishes to remain anonymous, less than 50 Tibetans crossed into exile and reached Dharamshala, the exile seat of the Tibetan government in exile in the year 2017. In 2018, only 80 Tibetans have arrived in 2017, a senior Tibetan official from the CTA said.
Despite being one of the 147 nations that have signed the United Nations Convention on the protection of Refugees which guarantees refugee populations certain rights, Tibetans refugees and their children who were born in the country remains undocumented pushing them to the fringe of the society as far as basic rights are concerned.
Nepal which is home to more than 20,000 Tibetans who either came across the border or were born to settlers, are finding it hard to sustain a free and normal existence. The Nepalese government’s treatment of the Tibetan refugees has taken a turn for the worse in the last few years with China pumping in cheap interest loans and relaxed FDR (Foreign Direct Investment) schemes in exchange for its will to be imposed.
Nepal stands to gain lucrative investments from the booming Chinese market. In the tourism sector alone, Chinese investors committed over $8.3 billion to several tourism-related projects in the coming years, during the Nepal Investment Summit held in Kathmandu in March 2017.
However, human rights experts and international communities have pointed that such gains are secured on Nepal’s harsh treatment of the Tibetan community there and at the cost of human rights for them.
The Nepalese government has publicly spoken on the issue when then foreign minister of Nepal, Mahendra Bahadur Pandey, during a visit to Beijing in March 2016, said that they, “will never allow any forces to use Nepali territory to engage in anti-China activity."
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www.gov.nt.ca » NTGS » Geoscience Forum
NAPEG Student Awards
Applications will be accepted until October 15, 2019 for the Yukon and NWT conferences.
Once again there will be cash prizes of $1000 each for the best technical oral and poster presentations. Please note that to be eligible for the poster award, students are required to give a soap box talk. The conference organizers thank the NAPEG Education Foundation for sponsoring these awards. The winners will be announced in Capitol Theatre 1 on Thursday, November 21, 2019.
Finnigan Award for Northern Research
This year the Northwest Territories and Nunavut Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists (NAPEG) is pleased to announce the inauguration of a new award designed to provide a student with funding to attend the Geoscience Forum. The Finnigan Award for Northern Research is inspired by Dr. Craig Finnigan.
Dr. Craig Finnigan was a Professional Geoscientist who spent the majority of his short career working across the Canadian north for industry, government, and academia. Craig passed away in 2014 at the age of 45, however his passion for geoscientific field work and exploration has left an imprint on those who worked with him over the years. He was recognized in 2014 with the prestigious Huestis Award (AMEBC) for his role in the discovery of the Coffee gold deposits in the Yukon. Craig was an adamant supporter of students and education. As an Adjunct Professor at Western University, he co-supervised a number of graduate student theses, including studies on the Coffee gold deposits in Yukon and uranium mineralization at the Lac Cinquante uranium deposit in Nunavut. To honour Craig’s memory, a student focused scholarship that encourages presentation at northern conferences has been established.
NAPEG encourages the achievement of excellence in the engineering and geosciences professions through the promotion of advanced studies and research programs. By providing financial assistance to researchers working in the northern territories the Association seeks to encourage young geoscientists to communicate effectively to their peers and the public, an important skill in the development of a professional practitioner.
To be eligible, the applicant must be enrolled in a Canadian university and registered in a Geology or Earth Sciences program that includes a thesis with a subject relevant to the territory in which the results would be presented. The applicant must also have submitted an abstract (or similar document) for a talk or poster presentation at the conference indicated on their application form. The applicant must attend this conference and give the presentation in order to receive scholarship funding.
Please visit NAPEG to apply for the Finnigan Award.
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ICE AGE to hit shelves Nov.26!
2 Shorts!! Deleted Scenes!! More Scrat!! 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has announced a release date and some details on extras for ICE AGE. The CGI animated film, which grossed over $175 Million at the box-office, is being prized as a big DVD and VHS release for the studio, and is being treated as such. With an insanely expensive marketing campaign about to launch, the DVD will be released on November 26, 2002. The DVD will feature a new 5-minute short starring the character of Scrat still fighting with his acorn. Also included will be 6 deleted scenes, commentary from co-directors Carlos Saldanha and Chris Wedge and Wedge\’s Oscar-winning short BUNNY. Fox has enlisted 14 promotional partners for the campaign, including Papa Johns, Coca Cola, Microsoft(?), Bloomingdales(??), and the NHL(???). Expect to see Scrat everywhere you turn very soon.
A few Eggs for you
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE!
Who says I can’t bring this here axe into the courthouse??
DVD Marquee Episode 22
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SBOWay
South Texas Eagle Ford
Division Order Instructions
Online System Login
Health, Safety, & Environment
Marcus C. Rowland
Mr. Rowland was named director and Chairman of the Board of SilverBow Resources on September 26, 2016.
Mr. Marc Rowland is a seasoned oil and gas corporate executive, director, and investment manager with over 40 years of experience in all aspects of upstream and midstream business segments. Mr. Rowland is considered a leading industry expert in energy mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, public securities transactions, and derivatives facilities. He has won numerous awards for transactions, and has received recognition by Institutional Investor as Energy CFO of the Year.
Marc Rowland is the Founder and Senior Managing Director of IOG Capital, LP where he leads the company's investment team. Mr. Rowland is the former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Chesapeake Energy Corporation, where he led the Company from its IPO in 1993 to a $40+ billion market cap oil and gas producer for 18 years. Notable financial achievements included numerous billions of volumetric production payments, internationally financed shale joint ventures, all varieties of securities issuances including the first Euro denominated bond financing for a US only oil and gas company, and the successful IPO of Chesapeake Midstream Partners, LP in August of 2010.
Mr. Rowland served as the Chief Executive Officer at FTS International, Inc. (formerly Frac Tech International, LLC) from May 2011- November 2012, and as the President and Chief Financial Officer of Frac Tech Services, LLC and Frac Tech International, LLC from November 2010 to May 2011. Mr. Rowland served as the Chief Financial Officer or equivalent positions of Chesapeake Energy Corporation from 1993, when the company became publicly traded, until October 2010. Mr. Rowland served as Chief Operating Officer of Anglo-Suisse, LP from 1990 to 1992 where he was assigned to the White Nights Russian Enterprise, a joint venture of Anglo-Suisse, LP and Phibro Energy Corporation, a major foreign operation which was granted the right to engage in oil and gas operations in Russia.
Mr. Rowland has served as a director on the boards of a number of public and private companies, and he currently serves on the boards of Mitcham Industries, Inc. and Chaparral Energy, Inc. He is a 1975 alumnus of Wichita State University.
Michael Duginski
Michael Duginski was named a director of SilverBow Resources on April 22, 2016.
Mr. Duginski is the President and CEO of Sentinel Peak Resources, a Quantum Energy Partners portfolio E&P company, focused in California and the Rocky Mountains. Previously, Mr. Duginski was Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Berry Petroleum from 2007 to 2013, where he led all operations including corporate development, production, reserves, drilling, EH&S; and land, including corporate strategic planning, until Berry Petroleum's sale to Linn Energy. Mr. Duginski joined Berry Petroleum in 2002 as VP of Corporate Development. Mr. Duginski began his career with Texaco in 1988, holding positions of increasing responsibility in operations and business development until Texaco's sale to Chevron in 2002. Mr. Duginski received his Master of Business Administration from California State University, Bakersfield, and his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Arizona. Mr. Duginski has served on the public board of Madagascar Oil Limited, and the boards of the California Independent Petroleum Association and Kern Environmental Education Program Foundation.
Gabriel L. Ellisor
Gabriel L. Ellisor was named a director of SilverBow Resources on April 22, 2016.
Mr. Ellisor served as Chief Financial Officer of Three Rivers Operating Company II from July 2012 – February 2015. Mr. Ellisor also served as the Chief Financial Officer for Three Rivers Operating Company I from 2010 to 2012. Both Three Rivers entities were private equity companies backed by Riverstone Holdings. Built as acquisition vehicles focused in the Permian Basin, both Three Rivers I and II were formed, built and sold in less than five years for aggregate proceeds totaling over $2.25 billion. Additionally, both Three Rivers entities filed S-1 documents (2012 and 2014, respectively) with the SEC relating to an initial public offering, ultimately being sold prior to their IPO. Prior to joining Three Rivers, Mr. Ellisor was a principal at Rivington Capital Advisors from 2008 to 2010, a boutique investment banking firm that specializes in raising private capital and providing merger and acquisition advisory services for the energy and production sector. Mr. Ellisor has approximately 20 years of experience in the finance sector of the oil and gas industry, including holding various positions at First Interstate Bank, Wells Fargo, and BNP Paribas. During his tenure at BNP Paribas from June 1997 to May 2008, Mr. Ellisor was responsible for arranging, structuring and underwriting various financings, including revolving bank facilities, institutional term loans and high yield offerings. He also serves on the board of Salt Creek Midstream LLC and served on the board of Energy XXI Gulf Coast, Inc. until its merger with Cox Oil in October 2018. Mr. Ellisor earned a B.B.A., with a major in Finance, from Texas Christian University.
David Geenberg
David Geenberg was named a director of SilverBow Resources on April 22, 2016.
Mr. Geenberg is Co-Head of the North American investment team at Strategic Value Partners with a focus on energy, merchant power and infrastructure. From 2005 to 2009, Mr. Geenberg worked at Goldman, Sachs & Co., most recently in the Infrastructure Investment Group and Principal Investment Area focused on power, utility and infrastructure businesses and, prior to that, in the Natural Resources Group in investment banking. Mr. Geenberg received a BA in Economics from Dartmouth College in 2005.
Christoph O. Majeske
Mr. Majeske was appointed a director of SilverBow Resources on September 27, 2016.
Mr. Majeske is a Director of Strategic Value Partners and is a member of the North American investment team with a focus on energy, transportation and industrials. From 2006 to 2015, he was a Vice President and Operating Executive of Cerberus Capital Management. At Cerberus, Mr. Majeske executed private equity transactions and held various interim executive roles at portfolio companies, including Chief Financial Officer and Chief Restructuring Officer, in both North America and Europe across a range of industries. From 2000 to 2006, Mr. Majeske was a member of the M&A Advisory team at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Mr. Majeske received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance, Accounting and Economics with High Distinction from the University of Michigan in 2000. He serves on the Boards of Genco Shipping & Trading and White Energy.
Charles W. Wampler
Charles W. Wampler was named a director of SilverBow Resources on April 22, 2016.
Mr. Wampler is the Chairman, CEO and President of Resource Rock Exploration II LLC, a role he assumed in June 2017. Previously, Mr. Wampler served as Chief Operating Officer of Aspect Holdings, President of Aspect Energy and General Exploration Partners (GEP) and Board Member for GEP from 2007 to 2012. Mr. Wampler directed the day to day management of Aspect's domestic operations in the US Gulf Coast and international operations in Hungary and Kurdistan, Iraq. Prior to joining Aspect, Mr. Wampler was Chief Operating Officer of Lewis Energy Group and Board member from 2004 to 2007. Mr. Wampler directed the day to day management of Lewis's domestic, fully integrated, exploration and production company with drilling, production, and pipeline operations and international operations in Mexico and Columbia. Prior to joining Lewis Energy, Mr. Wampler was Division Operations Manager and Drilling Manager of EOG Resources from 1984 to 2004. Prior to joining EOG, Mr. Wampler held several Engineering positions with Valero Producing Company and Kerr-McGee. Mr. Wampler served on the Board of Directors of Energy XXI Gulf Coast, Inc. until its merger with Cox Oil in October 2018. Mr. Wampler earned his BS in Petroleum Engineering from USL in 1978.
Sean C. Woolverton
Mr. Woolverton was appointed Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of SilverBow Resources, Inc. on March 1, 2017. He was previously the Chief Operating Officer of Samson Resources Company, where he joined in November 2013. From 2007 to 2013, Mr. Woolverton held a series of positions of increasing responsibility at Chesapeake Energy Corporation, a public independent exploration and development oil and natural gas company, including Vice President of its Southern Appalachia business unit.
Prior to joining Chesapeake Energy Corporation, Mr. Woolverton worked for Encana Corporation, a North American oil and natural gas producer, where he oversaw its Fort Worth Basin development and shale exploration teams in North Texas. Earlier in his career, Mr. Woolverton worked for Burlington Resources in multiple engineering and management roles. Mr. Woolverton received his Bachelor of Science degree in Petroleum Engineering from Montana Tech.
SilverBow Resources
575 North Dairy Ashford
info@sbow.com (281) 874-2700 or (888) 991-SBOW
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Rock Siding in Alabama
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Rock Siding Experts in Alabama
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China built a great wall, too it failed
Michael Schuman
Monumental mistake: the Great Wall was built by the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century
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Public registers showdown can be avoided
From the moment he launched his campaign for president, Donald Trump compared the barrier he wanted to build along the United States southern border to China’s Great Wall. With the US Government now shuttered by the stand-off over funding Trump’s wall, both he and his Democratic opponents may want to take a closer look at the Chinese fortification — and why exactly it failed.
The Great Wall visited by tourists today is the handiwork of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and was primarily constructed in the mid to late-16th century. The common perception is that the wall was conceived as a single, massive infrastructure project to protect China’s tumultuous northern border from foreign invaders. It was nothing of the sort. The Great Wall was built to a great degree by default, by a political system too paralysed by infighting to come up with anything better.
Border security had been a preoccupation of China’s imperial court from its earliest days. “Barbarians” from the northern steppe — whether Xiongnu, Turk, Jurchen, Mongol or other — routinely threatened the Middle Kingdom. Some, such as Genghis Khan’s Mongols in the 13th century, managed to overrun the entire empire.
The long northern boundary ran through inhospitable terrain that made it difficult to defend. Chinese emperors had tried a variety of methods to secure the border, from buying off the barbarians to mounting massive military expeditions against them. The problem would always return when a new batch of tribesmen appeared across the frontier.
The Ming Dynasty compounded the usual difficulties of securing the border with a combination of arrogance, division and indecision. The Ming court was an especially raucous place where hostile factions were almost constantly at each other’s throats. The border issue often got dragged into these contests for palace power.
Generally, the Ming, having reclaimed the empire from Genghis Khan’s descendants, leant towards a tough line against their northern neighbours, often denying them the opportunity to trade with China. The Mongols were dependent on such trade for the grain and other supplies they needed to survive on the inhospitable steppe. So they were left little choice but to launch raids into China to plunder what they needed. The attacks both hardened opinion in China against the Mongol tribes and heightened the urgency for more border security.
The fractured Ming court groped for a solution. Some officials advocated a more diplomatic approach that would restore trade and alleviate the pressure on the Mongols to raid. They were usually shouted down by more hawkish mandarins who thought such policies smacked of appeasement. The latter argued that Mongol requests for trade relations were just a ploy by the untrustworthy barbarians to lull the Chinese into a vulnerable complacency.
These hawks often favoured military action to push the raiders away from the border. But sending troops into the northern wastes to chase nomadic horsemen was costly, difficult to organise and widely unpopular. Proposals often became entangled in the arcane, personal intrigues between palace notables jockeying for imperial favour.
That seemed to leave the court with one option: building defensive barriers to keep the barbarians out.
“Unwilling to trade with the Mongols, and unable to defeat them militarily, by the middle of the sixteenth century the Ming had no policy choice left but … to attempt to exclude the nomads by building walls,” historian Arthur Waldron wrote in his exhaustive study The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth.
The strategy proved effective in blunting Mongol raids — where walls were built. The problem was that the mobile horsemen could easily shift their assaults to undefended areas of the border. That is exactly what a large Mongol force did in 1550 when it penetrated to the Beijing suburbs. The response of the court was to build more walls. The Great Wall was the result of this haphazard defence policy.
The tragedy is that the Ming’s big, beautiful wall failed to fulfil its sole mission: to protect China from invasion. The Ming were still tinkering with the massive structure when the dynasty collapsed in 1644. Amid the resulting chaos, a new steppe power, the Manchus, descended from the north, snatched Beijing and ruled as the Qing Dynasty.
Maybe the Manchu conquest was beyond repulse. A China divided was bound to fall. But, the Ming clearly contributed to their own catastrophe. A court environment that prioritising defeating one’s internal rivals over co-operating on policy stymied any hope of developing an effective solution to a serious problem. Emperors, coddled in luxurious palaces and lacking any real knowledge of conditions along the border, preferred looking tough on foreigners to compromise. Resistance to mutually beneficial trade deepened the causes of instability along the border. Treating those others across the frontier as bandits to be thwarted rather than poor people in need doomed Ming policy to failure.
Sound familiar? The ultimate lesson of the Great Wall of China is that a physical barrier, no matter how expensive and impressive, will fail if detached from a broader set of policies to alleviate the sources of insecurity along the border. The Ming never figured that out. Hopefully Washington’s mandarins will.
• Michael Schuman, who is based in Beijing, is the author of The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth and Confucius and the World He Created
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Legacy and Lionel Messi
Epistemic frustration is the curse and the genius of soccer, which, compared to, say, basketball, obscures causes, disguises responsibilities, and makes all forms of knowing and categorizing moot. Not in a radically skeptical way, but just in terms of guys kicking stuff, I sometimes wonder whether it’s possible to know anything at all.
By now, you’ve heard it said that Messi’s greatness depends on winning the World Cup. That’s a sentence that makes sense in terms of the narrative machinery surrounding the game—Messi’s compared to Maradona, who won the World Cup, so if Messi wants to be as great as Maradona, he has to win it too—but as a form of knowledge, or of expectation, it completely takes itself apart. It’s the kind of statement that can’t be made without simultaneously collapsing its own logic. Not in a radically deconstructive sense, but just in terms of guys kicking stuff, I direct your attention to the nation of Bhutan.
Say there’s a Bhutanese Messi. He’s all-time in potential, but rather than playing for Spain, where he went to live as a boy, he’s chosen to ply his trade for an ancestral homeland that’s currently on the chilly side of 195 in the FIFA World Rankings. You would never hear of this tiny patriot that his greatness depended on winning a World Cup, because with Bhutan, the greatest player of all worlds and epochs would stand no chance of even qualifying for the World Cup. One player can only do so much. And so unless greatness is reserved for players from certain neighborhoods, the Messi of Lho Mon would have to be judged on club form and raw awesomeness alone.
In other words, you can’t say “Messi’s greatness depends on winning the World Cup” without implicitly acknowledging that Messi happens to play for a team for which winning the World Cup is a possibility. Argentina are capable of winning the World Cup, so Messi is capable of winning the World Cup, so the test is relevant. But if that’s all true, then the test is irrelevant, because the fact that Messi needs a good team even to enter the arena in which his legacy might depend on winning the World Cup more or less dispenses with winning the World Cup as a test of individual achievement. Messi could play brilliantly, but a bad day for Demichelis could still flick him over on the chessboard.
You could argue that Messi only has to play well for Argentina to cement his legacy—to “show he can get it done at the international level”—but say they hadn’t qualified, or that they hadn’t advanced past the group stage? The record is (probably) littered with early-round heroics that don’t mean much to history because they didn’t reach the peak. In any case, “getting it done at the international level” is essentially the preface to “he has to win,” or do you think not winning the World Cup has had no effect on how we think of Cruyff? Also in any case, your ability even to play well at the World Cup is dependent on your teammates. Say Messi never gets the ball?
Of course, this is true not only at the World Cup, or at the international level, but at all levels, which is why I sometimes wonder if instead of ranking great players, it would make more sense to rank great “other 10s.” And maybe remove stars from ranking altogether, like mountains that are hors catégorie. After all, a player can only be selected for his national team if various factors, including the right circumstances at club level, align, and can only make a club team if he’s, say, been to an academy where his teammates could pick him out with a precisely weighted ball so he can show the world what he can do when so precisely picked out. If he hasn’t, then he’s just an unraveled set of circumstances. Maybe instead of just exempting great players from rank, we should erase their names altogether, declaring that greatness is simply a set of potential outcomes that happened to be fulfilled many times in a row, and focusing on the conditions that created the outcomes rather than the apparent agent of them. After all, if an individual player can’t win the World Cup, in some sense it’s meaningless to say that there are great soccer players at all.
Obviously, or I hope obviously, this is a sketch of a—what? Tolstoyan?—theory of soccer that I don’t really like or believe. It’s crude and false to rule out individual agency to this extent, not to mention talent; it’s context without text. I want there to be great players, and I think I’ve seen them play. If nothing else, though, it’s scary how flimsy some of the narratives we build on the game (and care about, and invest hopes in) turn out to look when you think about them for a second. Very generally, that is, I’d say the argument above is just about as distorted and self-contradictory as its opposite—which is what we usually think of as the truth.
Read More: Lionel Messi, World Cup
by Brian Phillips · June 29, 2010
svartman
This may have been the case for George Weah, the great striker from Liberia that was once elected the World’s best player. The next generation will probably not even know who he was. What if he had played for a great nation?
niju
Tolstoyan is a brilliant adjective for this
Much of our thinking about these matters — or sportswriters’ thinking anyway — is founded on a transference of Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history to sports. Carlyle believed that Great Men possess extraordinary reserves of sheer Will which they are capable of injecting into others, so that what they want to happen just happens. This is how many fans and almost all sportswriters think of great athletes: they will their teams to victory. No matter how magnificent and dominant an athlete is, if he does not win championships, it is never, ever because he is on an inferior team, bur rather because he lacked that superabundance of Will. Thus you simply cannot convince someone who holds to this theory that if Kevin Garnett had played for the Spurs and Tim Duncan for the Timberwolves their career levels of achievement would have been reversed. It’s just not a thinkable thought; you might as well try saying that Dan Marino was a better quarterback than Joe Montana. Not thinkable — even if it’s true.
This is why George Weah (brilliant example there, svartman) will indeed be forgotten, and players of far less accomplishment will be celebrated as great winners. Will is the sovereign idea of the reigning philosophy of sports history.
Dave's Football Blog
So Messi essentially wouldn’t have the opportunity to be truly “great” if he were from, say, Northern Ireland?
And in a way, doesn’t this just get back to the whole club v. country debate?
sidvee
Valid point but I’m sure a lot of people acknowledge the ‘greatness’ of players like Weah, Giggs and Best despite having little to show for it at World Cups. Messi is only being compared with those like Maradona, Pele and Zidane – those who were blessed with circumstances allowing them to take part in World Cups. And though there’s a huge element of luck in a team sport, there is a case to be made that Messi’s chances are at least in the same ballpark as those of Maradona’s, Pele’s and Zidane’s (unlike the Bhutanse Messi, who is again an outlier).
I am not saying Messi’s legacy must be decided on this World Cup alone (that will ultimately boil down to an individual definition of ‘legacy’) but to say it’s ‘impossible’ to be a great soccer player maybe stretching it a bit. After all ‘greatness’ lies in the eyes of the beholder.
@sidvee That is very sensible and thus completely out of keeping with the spirit of this post.
Messi is already a Great Player. Like Drogba is a Great Player. Like Maldini was a Great Player. And many others before them, such as Eusébio, Cruyff or Puskas.
But Pele and Maradona are Legends. Messi is not a Legend, yet. Maybe he will become one if he wins the World Cup, maybe he will have to win two, who knows?
And of course legends, heroes and saints are made of chance, circumstance and context, it is part of the story and crucial to the narrative that grants them such status.
As for Bhutanese Messi, he would undoubtedly become a great player. And he would go on to become the first democratic President of Bhutan, turning him into an Historical Figure – almost as good as legendary status.
I am surprised that all the comments so far are focused on the matter of whether there are gerat players or not, and whether they are properly recognized. For me, this post tapped into something much deeper, which is the question of how much of the game is socially constructed: do we think that Torres is a brilliant striker because we’ve seen it with our own eyes, or do we think that because we’ve told that he is?
I think there’s some level on which the World Cup defies the possibility of successful epistemology, while club soccer confirms it. The Cup is ephemeral; it’s short; it’s ruled by chance, and bad refereeing, and the introduction of new balls. If there are elemental truths to be perceived in the sport, the Cup is too short to allow them to assert themselves definitively. Which is not to say that they never do — Brazil, after all, are always in striking distance of another title — but to make a claim about the relative likelihood of knowing that you know something.
Club play, on the other hand, is, like the baseball season, long enough that averages assert themselves, and small differences — really, I think, it’s a vanishingly small distance between an Alexis Sanchez and a Cristiano Ronaldo — add up into significant gaps.
From the Cup, though, you’d have a hard time discerning whether Torres, Ronaldo, and Lampard or Bradley, Suarez, and Annan are the highly-paid trio of superstars. You’d have an exceptionally difficult time deciding which of, say, England and the United States is the team that was given reasonable odds to win the tournament.
If that doesn’t make you doubt whether the narratives and predictions and relative evaluations we’ve laid over the game are not at least half collective delusion, then I don’t know what will.
John Louis Swaine
This is football, narrative is king. Every player is its thrall and we its willing supplicants.
The Bhutanese Messi would probably still have heretical scholars who sought to disseminate a different narrative of his greatness but they would be like those of us who claim Matt Le Tissier was one of the greatest English players in a generation – subdued always by the volume and weight of the orthodox.
Can a player be great? As commented above, greatness is in the eye of the beholder. It takes on the aspect of the splintered title belts in boxing – seldom will a player come along who can gather together all the narrative strands and unify them under the auspice of greatness.
For now it is enough for Messi to be a great player, maybe even a legend under the glittering authority of his current fight record, but there will always be a slavering promoter or columnist calling him out for not taking a tilt at the other belts.
Sparkle Motion!
“. . . but as a form of knowledge, or of expectation, it completely takes itself apart. It’s the kind of statement that can’t be made without simultaneously collapsing its own logic.”
Okay then. And such a quintessentially Brian Phillips move. See, e.g., . . .
“‘Taste’ is a contradiction; the word is no sooner brought to mind than it begins to oppose itself. . . . “
@Sparkle Motion! Well, sure. Only this piece is serious.
Rogersworthe
I am new to the sport of futbol, but I have learned that the media and the narratives follow the same pattern as my favorite sport American Football. In American Football, it is even worse because teams have a totally different set of players for offense and defense. So a top offensive player could be considered a failure as a “winner” because he plays on a team with a horrible defense.
@Alan Jacobs summed it up best with his point about the narrative being about the “Will” to win. Luck and circumstance make up so much of the sports world, but that isn’t fun to believe in and it doesn’t sell papers/get hits. I think this is because of the role of sports to most people in their lives, which is an escape from the mundane of their own lives (I know that’s what it is for me, though I process it differently). I believe people don’t wish to think about sports scientifically and philosophically any more than the average Ancient Greek or Roman citizen wanted to think about the lives and stories of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar in philosophical and scientific terms. That’s not an escape for most. The narrative of greatness, overpowering Will, drama, and a host of other intangibles are what people want from sports. In regards to then how sports is covered, the media, as a whole, will give the masses what they want because that’s the way of the free market.
Ted Harwood
I think a lot of “greatness,” too, depends on audience, and the size of the audience. Millions of witnesses fill Messi’s reserves of greatness, as he plays for one of the most popular clubs in the world, a club that also happens to have a gigantic media apparatus doling out sainthood. If Messi were the player he is for, say, River Plate or Fulham (unlikely, as you point out, because his greatness depends at least partly on the other ten), would the World Cup still hold the key to Andre’s “legend” title?
And because of the exponential power of today’s television and media compared to even when Weah played, to say nothing of when Best or Puskas (even at Real) played, are Messi and those two even on the same chess board?
@Brian Phillips — If only Lionel Trilling had lived long enough to finish his real magnum opus: The Moral Obligation to Cheer Against Everton . . . .
Rob Marrs
Interesting stuff. Plenty of people are remembered despite not doing a huge amount at the World Cup:
John Charles
Alfredi di Stefano
Valentino Mazzola
Bernd Schuster
Some did great things at international level (Schuster for example led the Germans to Euro 1980 but never played in a World Cup).
Don’t forget Alfredo di Stefano, arguably the greatest ever, never played in a World Cup.
@rob just reiterating your great quote “I think there’s some level on which the World Cup defies the possibility of successful epistemology, while club soccer confirms it. The Cup is ephemeral; it’s short; it’s ruled by chance, and bad refereeing, and the introduction of new balls. If there are elemental truths to be perceived in the sport, the Cup is too short to allow them to assert themselves definitively.”
There is an interesting parallel in US sports to college basketball, which ends each season with a semi-random, one-loss-and-you’re-out tournament that captures people rooting for the shirt (mascot, college) rather than the specific players. Nobody’s greatness is defined through this tournament, though several players are remembered fondly for great tournaments; true stardom must be achieved after college, in the NBA. Of course, it’s easier to separate in this case because college is age-limited and the best players are not there; it’s like U-20 or Olympics football.
What I find perhaps most interesting in this tension over epistemology is the bleed between the two – the idea that we expect Gerrard and Lampard to do well in the World Cup because they have proven club pedigree; and the clubs every year who buy the hot-name striker who impresses in his 240 minutes for a mediocre national side. Human nature to over-value short samples and under-value random chance in short samples, I guess, which is why we really expect that Messi will win, because we know how great he is, and we want him to confirm it for us in each and every instance.
We question his greatness because we believe it already proven, perhaps?
Mark (2ndYellow.com)
Perhaps we need to define levels of winning? To illustrate:
In 1986 Neri Pumpido and Maradona both “won” the World Cup. That is to say, they were both members of Argentina’s World Cup winning team.
However, the identity of Argentina’s goalkeeper was probably not crucial to that outcome insofar as you could exchange Pumpido for another goalkeeper and still imagine Maradona winning the World Cup. Could we say that Neri Pumpido would have won the World Cup had Maradona not been in that team? Regardless of which player took his place, almost certainly not.
Whilst the other 10 provided the base camp for Maradona in 1986, he was the only “variable” that could have conquered the summit.
The same might apply to Pele in 1970, or Zidane in 1998, but Maradona in 1986 is the most clear cut example.
In that sense I would argue that an individual player can “win” the World Cup.
I would further argue that “achieving greatness” is a different thing entirely to being “a great player”. As @Andre suggests, Messi is already a great player, but he has yet to achieve greatness in the way that Maradona did.
From a book review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: “Challenging our cherished belief of the ‘self-made man,’ he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: ‘they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.’ Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, ‘some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.'”
Is this not the same argument? That greatness has as much to do with opportunity and luck meeting preparedness as innate skill or capabilities alone?
Quite the article that I wanted to read. As fanatical as I can get when it comes to Lionel Messi (and any discussions about the man), I couldn’t have agreed more with Brian. This article is not about the club v. country debate. It seems to be more about opportunity and a player’s sheer talent. Brian’s article now makes me wonder: what are the attributes of a great player? Winning a WC or the Euro or the CL? Not really. When a player, time and again, makes you sit up, in fact quite unconsciously, you sit on the edge of your seat, and every now and then you jump up because you’ve just seen something so beautiful that the game of football suddenly feels so much more exciting and worth watching (or playing in my case), then he surely must be a great player.
Lionel Messi, and all other great names that have come up in this discussion, are remembered for the same reason. They get us excited and they do things that we’ve never seen (or imagined) before. It really shouldn’t depend on what team he plays for and whether he won the WC or any other trophy. Like Brian says, it is a team-game and one player can only do so much. Unfortunately, the Bhutanese Messi would not be remembered in the same breath as the Argentinean one; and certainly not as Pele, Maradona, Cryuff et al. May be we should.
@Brian: Brilliant topic. Your writing makes it worth visiting this blog everyday.
dmitri
Could never compare a champions league final with world cup final. A team built on legionaires is not a team built on the same set of bad guys who’re supposed to look good. Blame Bhutan for wasting a talent, but a football genius needs a team who slaves for result. Champions league only need hype. If Bhutan really gets to win the world cup having only one good player, then he is the man. Ape-ish logic, but ape-ish nonetheless. The alpha and his followers. Argentina 86 was a shambles of a team, until the world cup that is. Argentineans pay weekly to spot the next football god, Bhutanese couldn’t care less about organising a league. Brazilians, however, overdo it. Pele shares fame with the rest of his top class team mates, insisting even today, that they’re the real apha gang. As if such thing exists. There’s only one alpha, and a bunch of loyal followers. Maybe that’s the human touch in it. Loyalty. Apes don’t have that, I don’t think. If this is true, and then if a player lets his ape-instinct work, he’ll change nationality. But let’s say that loyalty has nothing to do with basic insticts. Still, why bother playing for a country that doesn’t care about providing you with eleven brave men?
errr, sorry for messing the last bit up. Spain Portugal failed to exchange penalties, or was it pleasentries?
again! spain paraguay.. arrrrgh
Epistemology, generally ways of knowing or knowing the world around you, in this case is directly tied to ontology, ways of being, as they relate to football. This World Cup has really made clear for me how the media chatter has infiltrated the epistemic process of football knowledge in a way that muddies our knowledge. Too much information, too much top-down information comes our way, and we accept it. It seems in my own football universe much of my football knowledge was bottom-up, similar to a feminist standpoint (but only in relationship to knowledge), rejecting the top-down narratives.
With Messi the narrative, if one watches him play regularly can be built from your own foundational base. With the World Cup, it comes top-down, built for us, Zidane’s electrical magnetics and all.
Ontology-Messi was stuck way deep, without midfielders to feed his game. Argentina would get bottled up in the middle, and while Tevez ran like crazy, at times he did little to create the necessary spaces. Messi’s game was targeted and ontologically, his game, suffered. Epistemically his game suffered, because it seems he too believed that maybe Maradona’s will was enough.
Ontology-I’ve seen Messi, fortunately and many other greats play in person.
Full-stop.
Holy Sh** Messi has something I have not seen in my lifetime. I am old enough to have seen Maradona on TV but not old enough to have seen him live. It is breathtaking, my being fills with awe in a way I can’t describe when I watched him play. That sense of awe translates to my own grounded epistemology, built upon my own sense of Messi.
I don’t believe I will see another player like Messi in my lifetime. My father, rip, never saw him play live, but he knows football from an older way of relating to the game and when he saw Messi play his eyes would light up and he would grin, that boy is something special.
@Mark (2ndYellow.com)
Well Maradona is far away from Messi when we talk about club performances. He also played for Barcelona but he left on the back door because of his ape-like behaviour when he started that fight in the game against Bilbao. Maradona didn’t have the goal scoring greatness that Leo has so for me, Leo is better.
Simply fantastic question analogy to a “baseball season” you pose. I would argue that Club football is more important in the 21st Century then World Cup football. Like you mention, there are to many external factors that can play a part in a teams demise in the short time span a World Cup is played. Tim Vickery argues that the better teams in the World are Club teams. I would have to agree. I would put Barcelona, Real Madrid, Man. City, Man U.(teams of old) against any national squad(with the exception of maybe Spain) and give them the odds of winning that match. Look at how many matches a player plays for his Club team! Astonishing! Xavi & Messi have averaged 60+ matches a year for 3 years!!! The consistency both show over that span is simply irrefutable evidence that their greatness trancends any “must win World Cup” sterotype
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Unlucky Luke | Akron Sports Now
Analysis: Messi, Despite Setting Record, Is Missing a Key Distinction : One Caribbean Radio | The Global Mix
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Sherlock Holmes Society of the Cape Fear
Stories Discussed
Our 23rd Meeting!
Our 23rd meeting was conducted on Tuesday, March 19, 2019, and began at 7pm at 5905 Carolina Beach Road, Unit 7, in Monkey Junction. Attending was (from left to right) Barry, Barb, Candace, Pat, Michelle, Rick, Bill, Henry, and myself (Tom).
Notes from this Meeting:
INTRODUCTION: The meeting began on time, and everyone seemed to be in a jolly mood.
MYSTERY QUOTE: Credit for the correct identification of the quote is awarded to Rick, Barb, Candace, Barry, and Michelle. The answer was "The Yellow Face".
SHOW AND TELL: Tom passed around several Sherlock Holmes comic books for everyone to see.
MYSTERY CHARACTER: Candace presented a description of Irene Adler, and only Rick, Barry, and Michele guessed the character's identity. The story was "Scandal in Bohemia", which featured Irene Adler.
MYSTERY TO SOLVE: The mystery at tonight's meeting was entitled, "Good help is hard to find", and was joint credit for the solution goes to Candace and Henry. The crime was a death, which turned out to be suicide. The housekeeper was in on it, and was guilty of assisting the deceased in killing himself. In a nutshell, the knife which was used to kill the deceased was tied to a vacuum cleaner cord, which retracted after the deceased let it go. The Housekeeper then removed the knife later when she was alone. It was staged like this to make it look like an unsolvable murder, and that way the insurance would pay for the death.
TONIGHT'S STORY: Henry led us in a discussion of "The Horror of the Heights", a story written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Although this was not a Sherlock Holmes story, it was nevertheless very entertaining. In fact, Henry also drew pictures to illustrate his presentation as shown below:
Plans for the April Meeting:
The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, April 16, 2019, and be held at Beach PC, 5905 Carolina Beach Road, Unit 7. The starting time is 7pm, and the meetings usually last until 8:30pm. All are welcome to attend, but, it would be a nice gesture to let Tom know in advance if you plan to come.
MYSTERY QUOTE:
“Now, it is a fact, gentlemen, as you may see for yourselves, that my hair is of a very full and rich tint, so that it seemed to me that if there was to be any competition in the matter I stood as good a chance as any man that I had ever met. Vincent Spaulding seemed to know so much about it that I thought he might prove useful, so I just ordered him to put up the shutters for the day and to come right away with me. He was very willing to have a holiday, so we shut the business up and started off for the address that was given us in the advertisement."
MYSTERY CHARACTER: To be perfectly honest with you all, I can't recall who agreed to bring a character description... so hopefully if it's you, then you will be ready. LOL
STORY TO DISCUSS: The story we are discussing is "The Copper Beeches". You can watch the full length video starring Jeremy Brett below:
MYSTERY TO SOLVE:
Sherlock Holmes Society of the Cape Fear - P. O. Box 347 - Carolina Beach, NC 28428
This site was last updated on June 11, 2019 by Tom Campbell
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History of English - Old English
Описание раздела "History of English - Old English"
The Old English language (also called Anglo-Saxon) dates back to 449 CE. Old English should not be regarded as a single monolithic entity just as Modern English is also not monolithic. Within Old English, there were language variations.
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Список статей в разделе "History of English - Old English"
Interrogative pronouns. Relative pronouns. Demonstrative pronouns.
Interrogative pronouns. There are three common interrogative pronouns: hwā, the ancestor of Modern English who/what; hwelċ/hwilċ/hwylċ, which gives Modern English which;...
Syntax. Word order. Questions. Prepositions and postpositions.
OE was largely a synthetic language; it possessed a system of grammatical forms, which could indicate the connection between words; consequently, the functional load of syntactic ways of word connection was relatively small. It was primarily a spoken language, therefore the...
Most pronouns are declined by number, case and gender; in the plural form most pronouns have only one form for all genders. Additionally, Old English pronouns reserve the dual form (which is specifically for talking about groups of two things, for example "we two" or...
Nouns. The athematic nouns. Irregular strong nouns.
The OE noun had two grammatical categories: number and case. The category of number consisted of two members, singular and plural, they were well distinguished formally in all the declensions. The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and...
Inflection in Old English
Old English was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern German. Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the Old English inflectional system. The English possessive indicator 's (as in "Jane's book") is a remnant of the Old English...
The OE vocabulary was almost purely Germanic; except for a small number of borrowings, it consisted of native words inherited from PG or formed from native roots and affixes. Native words. Native OE words can be subdivided into a number of etymological layers from different historical...
Phonology and spelling
Spelling. OE alphabet used two kinds of letters: the runes and the letters of the Latin alphabet. The bulk of the OE material is written in the Latin script. The most interesting peculiarity of OE writing was the use of some runic characters,...
The Old English Dialects
Old English should not be regarded as a single monolithic entity just as Modern English is also not monolithic. Within Old English, there were language variations. Old English has variation along regional lines as well as variation across different times. The...
Old English (449 - 1066 CE). Reliable evidence of that period is extremely scarce. The story of the invasion is told by Bede (673-735), a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of England. The Old English language (also called Anglo-Saxon) dates back to 449 CE....
The aims of studying the history of the English language. Periodisation.
In studying Modern English we regard the language as fixed in time and describe each linguistic level – phonetics, grammar or lexis – synchronically. When considered diachronically, every linguistic fact is interpreted as a stage or step in the never-ending evolution...
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.ranez.ru/article/categories/790/">History of English - Old English</a>
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Type of Collection
Hussey Map
A 17th Century manuscript estate map for Ballingarry, Slieveardagh, Co. Tipperary.
Private acts of parliament
This is a small collection of local interest private acts of parliament ranging from 1695 to 1905. An individual (wealthy, influential and of course male) who for example wanted a divorce or who wanted to undo some family arrangement about property had to finance a private act of parliament to achie...
Cole Bowen Papers
This is a large collection of mainly 19th century estate material, rentals and maps of the Cole Bowen family based in Cork (Bowen’s Court, Co. Cork). However the bulk of their land was in Tipperary amounting to around 5,000 acres.
Murphy family, Ballinamona collection
This is a collection of family and estate papers from the Murphys of Ballinamona.
The Sam Melbourne Scrapbook Collection
A collection of GAA scrapbooks put together by Sam Melbourne over a forty year period.
Nodstown National School
Nodstown National School records from 1841 - 1987
Lough Derg Yacht Club
A miscellaneous collection of records and documents relating to Lough Derg Yacht Club founded 1836.The collection includes minute books, accounts, regatta programmes and books, members lists, general correspondence, a short history of the club, lease and building & club improvements.
A large colle...
The Bagwell Papers
This is a large collection of papers relating to the Bagwell family of Tipperary. It relates entirely to estate matters from the 17th century Butler Ormonde interest to the end of the 20th century when the Bagwell connection with Clonmel finally ended.
Poor Law Union Records
A collection of records from Tipperary Poor Law Unions. Mainly minute and rate books.
Fired! Bibliography
Fired! Bibliography collated by Laura Loftus.
Bertram, Vicki. Gendering Poetry: Men and Women Poets. Pandora Press. 2004.
Bhreathnach-Lynch, Sighle, ‘Landscape, Space, and Gender: Their Role in the Construction of Female Identity in Newly-Independent Ireland’, Canadian Women’s Studies is, vol . ...
Now I am a tower of Darkness; Emerging genealogies by Walt Hunter
Published / Digitised / Open Access / Jacket2 Magazine
Jacket2 Magazine URL: https://jacket2.org/commentary/now-i-am-tower-darkness
Walt Hunter is assistant professor of world literature at Clemson University and visiting lecturer...
The Pledge [Related Documents]
Files for Darcy 'Works Cited ': The Pledge: Critical Works Cited, Published, The Pledge (Website, 2017)
URL: https://awomanpoetspledge.com/critical-works-cited/
Works cited in Preamble to the Pledge: URL: https://awomanpoetspledge.com/preamble-to-the-pledge/ and in The Pledge: URL https://awoman...
Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 edited by Dr Lucy Collins
Published by: Liverpool University Press
Restricted access via JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gn6dkq
MLA: Collins, Lucy, editor. Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1...
Dunn Family Collection
Donated to WIMA by David K. Dunn, the Dunn Family Collection contains the manuscripts, books, sheet music, recordings, artifacts and ephemera collected by Michael J. Dunn. Musician and instrument maker/repairer Michael J. Dunn (1855 - 1935)
The Pledge [Signatories]
Pledges like this one are increasingly common in any field where participants want to take positive action to promote gender fairness. An example is the online petition set up by Virginia Valian and Dan Sperber, in which “signatories commit to accepting talk invitations only from conferences that...
Why Has Poet Lola Ridge Disappeared? On The Historical Erasure Of Political Women Artists
Terese Svoboda on her biography of Lola Ridge Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (for Lithub).
Lola Ridge (1874-1941) was a very prominent proletariat modernist poet—the New York Times said at the time of her death that she was one of the best poets in the country–but p...
I am a poet without a landscape, a woman poet without a narrative heritage. (Irish Times)
A meditation on publishing in an Irish Poetry landscape which has disavowed the woman poet's voice in numerous iterations throughout the writing life of the poet C. Murray, for the Irish Times.
Published / Digitised / Open Access / Irish Times/
URL: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/i-am-a-...
"The Influence of Absences" by Moyra Donaldson
Moyra Donaldson delineates her response to Alex Pryce, “Ambiguous Silences? Women in Anthologies of Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry”, Peer English 9 (2014).
URL: http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon/alex-pryce-papers
I’ve told the story before, of how I went t...
'A tipping point’: women writers pledge to boycott gender biased books after very male anthology
Media Article/ Feature: Published / Digitised / Open Access
Published:The Guardian Newspaper 12/01/2018
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/12/a-tipping-point-women-writers-pledge-to-boycott-gender-biased-books-after-very-male-anthology
Irish women poets are rising up en masse agains...
A prosaic lack of women in the Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets
Mary O'Donnell writes for Fired!
(Published, Irish Times, January 8th, 2018)
It’s almost 100 years since women were granted franchise, and a start to some kind of social equality. If you were 30 or over, you could vote. Given what voting rights imply in terms of adult equality, it’s a strange th...
The White Blackbird; The Marginalisation of Irish Women Poets from Literary Magazines During the 1980s
The White Blackbird; The Marginalisation of Irish Women Poets from Literary Magazines During the 1980s.
Online article published, The Honest Ulsterman Magazine (February, 2018)
Article URL: http://humag.co/features/the-white-blackbird
A Meditation on Ireland, Women, Poetry and Subversion
A Meditation on Ireland, Women, Poetry and Subversion:
They say a lot of things about how you get in:
there are accounts of the glories of the hearth, the strength, our hospitality, our courage and the
various ways in which we are taken,
but I volunteered:
I was not driven out to wander eit...
Freda Laughton (1907-1995)
Now I am a Tower of Darkness: A Critical History of Poetry by Women in Ireland by Emma Penney
Freda Laughton (1907-1995) was born in Bristol and moved to Co. Down after her marriage. She published one collection of poetry, A Transitory House (Jonathan Cape, 1945) but little else is known about her...
Irish Office Collection
In 1928 the reference library of the Irish Office in London was transferred to the Oireachtas Library.
Dublin Castle Collection
In 1924 the reference library of the Chief Secretary’s Office was transferred from Dublin Castle to the Houses of the Oireachtas.
Access to the forms related to the Fired! Irish Women poets and the Canon pledge forms and associated documents can be found Via this URL: https://awomanpoetspledge.com/ Signing The Pledge opens access to an embedded Google form, where the signatory can leave a comment and document their protest at...
Irish Women Poets [Pamphlets]
Geraldine Plunkett Dillon's "Magnificat" (Published by The Candle Press, Dublin, 1917) Available online at The Internet Archive in [PDF/ DAISY, EPUB, KINDLE] formats
Open Access URL: https://archive.org/details/magnificat00pluniala/page/n6
The text of Magnificat and images associated with Geraldin...
The Éamon Donnelly Collection
The Collection contains the personal and political papers of Éamon Donnelly, a prominent Nationalist politician in Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s, and one of the founding members of Fianna Fáil. The collection also includes correspondence from leading figures including Éamon de Valera, Michael C...
The Hugh Irvine Collection
The Collection, compiled by Hugh Irvine, a teacher in Kilkeel High School, contains c.700 items relating to local social and family history in the Kilkeel area. This includes photographs, postcards, receipts from local businesses, Ordnance Survey Maps, books, newspaper cuttings and detailed notes on...
De Buitléar
The De Buitléar Collection accompanies the archive of the same name. It represents the scholarly and scientific interests of the well-known musician, film-maker and wildlife expert, Éamon de Buitléar (1930-2013).
Hibernica Collection
The Hibernica Collection, or Henry Collection as it was previously known, is a substantial collection of monographs, periodicals and pamphlets of general Irish interest and/or origin, being strongest in history and literature, and also including works of Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton. Officially...
Simms Collection (Irish)
Significant collection of early monographs, pamphlets, bound letters etc pertaining to Ireland by foreign authors and/or by Irishmen printed abroad. Dating mainly from before 1701, the Simms collection contains many rare and important items that have been gathered together by a local book collector...
Collection of letters and other papers relating to the public and private affairs of Sir John Newport (1756-1843), Irish Politician and Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, banker and landowner. The bulk of the collection consists of some 250 letters, c 1765-c 1862, addressed to, and received from, so...
McAllister Collection: Church History Pamphlets
This is a collection of pamphlets accumulated by James McAllister, lecturer in Economic History at Queen’s University Belfast 1973-2007. He had a particular interest in local history and is noted for compiling ‘A Belfast chronicle 1789: a compilation from the Belfast Newsletter.’ He collected a rang...
Andrews Manuscripts
This collection consists of a selection of scientific papers and correspondence by and addressed to Chemist and Physicist, Thomas Andrews (1813-85), chiefly written in his own hand or copied by his daughters, Elizabeth Andrews and Mary K. Andrews, and forming part of the documents used in the prepar...
Thomson Collection
Collection of scientific papers and notebooks, memoranda, lectures, correspondence etc of James Thomson (1822-1892), Professor of Engineering at Queen’s College, Belfast, 1857-1873. Various topics are highlighted in the collection reflecting Professor Thomson’s wide range of research interests. Thes...
O'Rahilly Collection
Collection of Irish manuscripts and printed books annotated by the distinguished Celtic Scholar, T.F. O’Rahilly (1883-1953). A relatively small assemblage of material, the books are extensively annotated by O'Rahilly and include a range of titles on Irish dialect, grammar and Irish Literature, datin...
Presbyterian Mission Archive
The Presbyterian Mission Archive is an indispensible resource for those investigating the history of missions conducted by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and Irish Presbyterians, in Ireland and further afield. It contains diaries, letters, scrapbooks, photographs, posters, audio recordings and m...
Gilbert Collection
Papers, manuscripts and letters of the novelist Stephen Gilbert (1912-2010)
Ross-Rosenzweig Collection
Collection of monographs, periodicals and facsimilies, etc., on or relating to a variety of Hebrew and Jewish subjects and studies. Included are Hebrew texts relating to the interpretation, analysis and commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community, alongside works of Hebrew literature...
Comintern Papers (Irish Labour Movement Papers)
This collection comprises copies of files held in the Russian Archive for Social and Political History. The files pertain to the Irish labour movement and the history of Communism in Ireland and include speeches, reports, letters, agendas, fliers, handwritten notes, lists, telegrams, minutes and pos...
MacDouall Collection
Collection of general literature, Sanskrit and comparative philology from the personal library of Charles MacDouall (1818-1883), first Professor of Latin at Queen's College, Belfast (1849-50) and second Professor of Greek (1850-78). The collection includes material relating to Classical, Eastern and...
Gamble Library Irish Collection
The Gamble Library Irish Collection is an essential resource for those researching Irish Church history. It contains approximately two thousand items relating to the wider religious and political history of the island and holds the biographies of many notable Irish personalities. The collection inco...
Early Economics Collection
This collection comprises works of early economic theory and philosophy dating from the 17th to the late 19th centuries.
Special Collections, Main Collections
Established in 1849, the Library of Queen's University Belfast comprises one of the largest collections of books, periodicals and pamphlets held in Northern Ireland. One of the Library's great strengths lies in its department of Special Collections & Archives. Containing approximately 100,000 volume...
Kyllmann Correspondence
Collection of 133 manuscript and typescript letters from 34 correspondents to Otto Kyllmann (d. 1958), senior partner of the publishing firm, Constable & Co., with typescript copies of 16 of his letters to various correspondents, and one note in his hand; the whole collection spanning the period 190...
Piry Collection
Collection of private papers of Théophile Piry (fl. 1880-1915), Commissioner of Customs and first Postmaster General of the Imperial Postal Service, China, 1911-1915. This collection contains a range of material bearing on Piry’s later career in the Chinese administration including drafts, notes, co...
Freedmen’s Bureau Records
This collection provides a valuable insight in to the affairs of the Freedmen’s Bureau, its staff and those freedmen who had been emancipated after the Civil War. A valuable resource to anyone studying the period immediately after the American Civil War. The collection contains digitally photographe...
Queen’s University Belfast,
BT7 1NN
rascal@qub.ac.uk
McClay Library
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Tara Reid (born 8 November 1975) is an American actress. Tara Reid was born in Wyckoff, New Jersey to Donna and Tom Reid, both of whom are teachers. Reid has Irish, English, Hungarian, French and Italian ancestry. She has starred in American Pie (1999), American Pie 2 (2001), National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002), and Dr. T & the Women (2000).
Reid began her career at the age of six in 1982 on the short-lived game show, Child’s Play. As a child, she had roles in a number of commercials for McDonald’s, Crayola, and Jell-O. She grew up in New York City, and attended the Professional Children’s School alongside such celebrities as Ben Taylor, Jerry O’Connell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Macaulay Culkin. Although her breakthrough role was in American Pie in 1999, followers of the 1998 cult film, The Big Lebowski, already knew her as Bunny Lebowski.
Reid spent the late 1990s appearing more often on the cover of tabloid magazines than on screen. Her extroverted social life soon gave her a reputation as a party girl; in fact, U.S. magazine In Touch Weekly, recently voted Reid “top party animal”. She has appeared as J.D.’s (Zach Braff) girlfriend in the NBC comedy Scrubs. Her initial appearance on the show was regarded by critics as largely bland[citation needed] with her character lacking any of the charisma of the other characters in the show as well as Reid herself. When the script called for Reid to return to the show the writers re-wrote her character as a promiscuous party girl, a tongue in cheek parody of Reid’s own public personna.[citation needed]
Taradise, her half-hour television show on the E! network, premiered in September 2005; it was cancelled the following month. The show was an updated incarnation of E!’s popular series Wild On, where a celebrity host or model traveled to exotic locations to party with locals. Previously during Summer 2005, she was busy shooting Incubus in Romania at an assortment of clubs with Bucharest’s local socialites.She is said to have had a torrid love affair with American super model Nick Corley.
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Experience Vivid Sydney as part of your REMIX trip
REMIX is delighted to be part of this year’s Vivid Ideas program during Vivid Sydney, the world’s largest festival of light, music and ideas.
Vivid Ideas is Asia Pacific’s annual celebration of innovation, creativity and community, and is held as part of Vivid Sydney. Vivid Ideas brings the world’s greatest minds, innovators and industry leaders to Sydney to build engagement between the creative industries and the broader economy, exploring trends, movements and opportunities that shape society and business through public talks, industry seminars, conferences, workshops and debates.
Vivid Sydney is owned, managed and produced by Destination NSW, the NSW Government’s tourism and major events agency and runs from 27 May to 18 June 2016.
It is a natural fit for REMIX, and we’re proud to officially be part of the Vivid Ideas program in 2016. For more information visit www.vividsydney.com/ideas
Image: Destination NSW/James Horan
Creative Entrepreneurship in Indonesia
Museum MACAN, Jakarta
Peter Tullin, Co-Founder of REMIX recently travelled to Indonesia as part of the British Council’s DICE initiative (Developing Inclusive and Creative Economies). The scoping trip involved a series of meetings with and visits to creative industries organisations in Jakarta and Jogjakarta, two of the main creative hubs. REMIX also delivered a presentation on global creative entrepreneurship trends at the Indonesian Creative Cities Network (ICCN) Conference.
The DICE initiative will see UK and foreign organisations will work together to develop and deliver innovative actions that support the growth of social and creative enterprises in the UK and five emerging economies including Indonesia. These interventions will aim to empower women and girls, foster youth employment or support people with disabilities or other marginalised groups.
In this post, Peter reports on some of the highlights of the trip and some thoughts on creative entrepreneurship in the Indonesia and the growth of the creative industries there.
The creative industries scene in Indonesia is incredibly diverse and exciting with strong government investment and support in this area. However, what impressed me the most is the creative entrepreneurs that I met on my journey. The creative industries are much more grass roots driven as opposed to being dominated by more conventional cultural institutions which tends to be more common in Western countries. Given the need to generate income to enable economic inclusion and grow sustainable cultural and socially beneficial activity entrepreneurship is a critical component. At the heart of this was the ‘collectivism’ model where people came together to pool resources and share risk and produce creative products and services on a scale beyond what a single individual could achieve.
Ruangrupa event
A great example of this was Ruangrupa, a not-for-profit artists’ initiative established in 2000 by a group of artists in Jakarta. It works to advance art ideas in urban context and the broad scope of culture through exhibitions, festivals, art laboratory, workshops, researches and book, magazine, and online journal publications.
I met with Leonhard Bartolomeus, a member of the Ruangrupa Collective and he outlined some of the theory behind ‘art collectivism recently in a talk (as reported in the Myanmar Times – full article here).
“Art collectivism is based on the fact that artists can no longer act passively or isolate themselves from other fields of knowledge that also take their roles in the construction of the many discourses and social practices in the levels of community and state.”
“Collectivism is both a tool and a way of thinking. He sees the art collective as a fluid process which means working together as collective that could multiply, integrate and even go viral pointing out that collective knowledge was like a virus mutation. It can spread and can be very contagious.”
“When different artists joined the collective, they felt a togetherness, bonded to a life which at times can be very challenging physically and emotionally. “The aims and purposes are stronger in art collectivism,” he said. “Make friends. Then art.”
Although they faced failure and hurdles at first in keeping alive the collective, he underscored the importance to embrace failure and start a new step again. They started modestly in their goal of spreading the knowledge of art to the public, by engaging them through the use of public spaces.
They have operated across a number of spaces and locations but I got a tour of the new site that ruangrupa were developing in a building that had previously housed an indoor soccer facility and it was truly impressive what they were building with such limited resources.
There were multiple support organisations that provided spaces for these entrepreneurs to work and gather. I met with William Hendradjaja, Co-Founder, Impact Hub. Impact Hub Jakarta is a coworking and innovation space that exists to support organisations & entrepreneurs creating sustainable positive impact in Indonesia and is part of a 100+ global network. The organisation has played a key role in supporting the social and creative entrepreneur ecosystem and it also ran an Innovation Lab which included a Corporate Innovation program to provide other organisations with the tools and skills to cultivate a culture of innovation.
Hub Jakarta
The government also runs a number of initiatives to support creative entrepreneurs though Bekraf, it’s Creative Economy Agency that was created to harness the potential of the creative industries to become a central pillar of the Indonesian economy. A team from the department talked me through a series of projects including training camps and special designed learning modules for creative entrepreneurs as well as international showcase events and platforms to showcase Indonesian creators and products.
In terms of more conventional cultural infrastructure, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara or Museum MACAN for short has been creating waves internationally in the art world. I met with Aaron Seeto the Director to see the space which continues to evolve and expand since opening in 2017. The museum has just been named in the World’s 100 Greatest Places 2018 by Time magazine.
In a similar vein I met with Monica Gunawan, Managing Director of Art:1 another key pillar of the growing private gallery network in the city. Housed in a new contemporary building it has been a pioneer in the development of the art scene in Jakarta. During its 30 years in art business, Mon Decor Gallery had expanded into several gallery branches all over Jakarta.
Art:1 Jakarta
Both of these last two examples really demonstrated how privately funded institutions are tapping into a growing middle class and an increased demand for cultural experiences.
Win a trip to REMIX Sydney 2015!
If statues could talk, what stories would they tell?
Do you have a creative idea that will change the way people experience arts and culture?
We’re looking for clever, game-changing concept: it could be big or small, apply to a country town, city, or even the whole country. Here are some examples to get you inspired.
Pitch your idea and you could be off to REMIX, an annual global summit which tackles the big ideas shaping the future of culture and the creative industries—and—have the chance to workshop your idea during a three month mentorship with global communications agency Mindshare.
All entries will be judged by the following panel of cultural movers, shakers and communicators:
- Peter Tullin, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, REMIX Summits
- Tony MacGregor, Arts Editor, ABC RN
- Rachel Healy, Head of Culture, City of Sydney
- Sam Turley, Head of Co-creation Strategy, Mindshare
RN, in partnership with REMIX and Mindshare, is offering you the chance to win a creative, cultural and technological experience like no other.
- Return flights to Sydney from the nearest Australian capital city (departing Monday 1 June, returning Wednesday 3 June)
- Two night’s accommodation at the amazing QT Sydney Hotel (Monday 1 June—Wednesday 3 June)
- A full-conference pass for REMIX (Tuesday 2 June and Wednesday 3 June)
- Attendance at REMIX reception events and trendscouting
- Participation in “The Ideas Brewery”—Mindshare’s dynamic, interactive space onsite at REMIX for attendees to share and explore their ideas for shaking up the Arts and Culture scene in Australia
The winning entrant may also be offered the following, at the judges discretion:
- The chance to present your winning idea on stage at REMIX
- A three month mentorship with Mindshare (3 hours per month)
- The opportunity to promote your winning idea on Pozible.com
- Participation in a coaching/feedback session with Mindshare and/or and interview/video shoot with ABC RN (Monday 1 June)
- Two full-conference passes for REMIX
You can enter here on the ABC RN website.
REMIX Sydney Speakers announced!
Lots of excitement in REMIX Towers today as we revealed the latest speakers. It has been a week of big announcements as we are a part of VIVID Sydney which also launched. If you want to see one of the most beautiful cities in the world bathed in dramatic light installations then come and join us. Especially as Vivid Sydney is set to shine even more brightly in 2015 when the world’s largest festival of light, music and ideas delivers its biggest program yet. For 18 nights, from 22 May – 8 June, Vivid Sydney will again transform the city and harbour. There will be over 60 Lighting Installations and Projections. Find out how to plan your time in Sydney here.
The first 30 REMIX Sydney speakers can now be viewed here and our line-up includes Seb Chan, Director of Digital & Emerging Media, Cooper-Hewitt (Smithsonian), the National Design Museum in New York. Seb has created a revolutionary new way to experience the newly remodelled museum with The Atlantic proclaiming ‘the museum of the future is here’.
Closer to home the Sydney Modern project is taking shape and we have challenged Michael Brand, Director of the Art Gallery of NSW to explore the next generation of museum spaces and the blurring of physical and digital.
We hear from the Artistic Director of the Perth International Arts Festival about the story of how some giant puppets brought 1.4 million people onto the streets of the city
The Editor of VICE explores the Future of Entertainment, the CEO of Yahoo!7 looks at how to compete online in a sea of noise and the Regional Director of General Assembly investigates the Future of Education. See all the topics here
They join 75 other inspirational speakers in. Twitter, The Metropolitan Museum, Australian Museum, Google Cultural Institute, MCA, Etsy, ACMI, The Guardian, Dubai Design District, Westfield and Blippar
REMIX Sydney is our Asia-Pacific summit in a series of events in leading creative capitals around the world including London, New York and Dubai. The inaugural Sydney event in 2014 was attended by over 1,000 creative leaders from around the globe. REMIX explores the intersection of culture, technology and entrepreneurship, bringing together thought-leaders from across different industries to tackle the big ideas shaping the future of the cultural and creative industries and the development of creative cities and the creative economy
Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia | Mechanised Colour Assemblage – artist impression by Danny Rose & Rebecca Baum
New City of London Research Report by CultureLabel: Cultural innovation and entrepreneurship in London
London is primed to lead the way in cultural innovation according to a new research paper by CultureLabel commissioned by the City of London looking at the soft and hard infrastructure shaping the cultural and creative industries in the UK capital.
The UK, and particularly London, has experienced a ‘golden age’ in arts and culture over the last decade. While public subsidy has declined in recent years, this has been offset by record investment in cultural infrastructure over the last twenty years. This has helped boost audience numbers and attendance for the arts and spawned a series of cultural ‘mega’ brands with multi-faceted income streams. Increased consumer demand means cultural institutions now have to cater to audiences which are global in nature and increasingly, expand their offer to be ‘multichannel’ (i.e. experienced in more than one way). For example the British Museum’s live broadcast exhibition, Pompeii Live – this grossed £471,000 at the box office, and reached the UK Top 10.
What is driving cultural innovation in London?
The rise of trends such as ‘urbanomics’ – business models which focus purely on city consumers – are reshaping the cultural landscape and creative economy in cities. London is at the forefront of this shift. A concentration of affluent urban consumers hunting for the latest alternative cultural experiences and seeking to escape the uniform offer of clone high streets and copy-cat brands has led to a surge in new creative enterprises such as Punchdrunk, Spectators’ Guild, Ginger Line, The Art of Dining and Secret Cinema.
In addition, the digital revolution has enabled the birth of a growing number of culture start-ups which challenge traditional business models. By intersecting with the technology sector, cultural institutions are increasingly offering up exciting new ways for cultural content to be created and distributed. This is increasingly evident in London – which was ranked first of 30 global cities for ‘technology readiness’ and second for ‘intellectual capital and innovation’ in PWC’s Cities of Opportunity, released earlier this week.
The proximity of London’s technology district to the east, ‘Tech City’, to the City of London, a leading global finance hub, is also helping to accelerate the development of these innovative approaches, by providing opportunities to access capital and a growing number of international venture capital funds with London outposts. Sedition.com, Retronaut.com and DigitalTheatre.com are just a few of the examples of specific culture start-ups alongside other technology companies such as YPlan that are revolutionising tools the sector can use to grow and develop.
Collaborating and innovating for growth
Against this backdrop, our paper looks at how collaboration between different sectors can be fostered to fuel new growth in London’s creative economy, as well as to create resilient business models for arts and culture organisations.
We look at cultural sector innovations in London – such as iCITY, a new digital hub for London being developed on the Olympic Park Site, bringing together arts, technology and start-up organisations. We also consider learning from international examples, such as New INC, a multi-disciplinary lab space for arts and technology collaborations launching this summer at the New Museum in New York, and the new Google Cultural Institute in Paris designed to help the cultural sector co-produce new innovations with one of the world’s leading technology companies.
The ‘golden age’ can be sustained, if the cultural and creative industries that make London great and help drive its economy, continue to be brave enough to push boundaries, reinvent themselves and reach out to new collaborators.
Click here to read the report.
Announcing REMIX Sydney 2015!
We’re back! After a record breaking first event in Australia (the biggest REMIX Summit to date) REMIX returns bigger and better and with an all new venue - the stunning Sydney Town Hall. We are also part of Vivid Sydney (22 May-8 June) is an 18-day festival of light, music and ideas – the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. It attracted a record 1.43 million attendees in 2014 and is the largest festival of its kind in the world.
In 2014 over 1,000 global creative leaders attended the first REMIX Sydney hearing from over 75 inspirational speakers inc. YouTube, LEGO, MONA, Sydney Opera House, MoMA, Telstra and Microsoft and we have 75 new speakers lined up for 2015 so book your flight now!
Read the official media release below!
The highly successful REMIX global summit, a series of creative industry discussions held exclusively in the world’s creative capitals, will return to Sydney as part of this year’s Vivid Ideas program at Vivid Sydney, Destination NSW Chief Executive Officer Sandra Chipchase announced today.
“Leaders and influencers from the cultural and creative industries sector will converge in Sydney for REMIX, an engaging platform that aims to foster discussion and the exchange of ideas exploring how the creative sector can thrive and benefit from emerging technologies,” Ms Chipchase said.
“NSW is home to 40 per cent of Australia’s creative industries workforce and I’m delighted this event, which focuses discussion around the growth and development of the creative economy, will be hosted in Sydney during Vivid Sydney as part of the festival’s Vivid Ideas program,” she said.
City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore said the return of the REMIX summit was more evidence of the digital and creative economy thriving in Sydney.
“Sydney is cementing its place as a leader in the global digital and creative economy. Last year we were a proud sponsor of the first REMIX event in Sydney, and this year we’re particularly happy to host the event at Sydney Town Hall as part of Vivid Sydney.”
REMIX tackles the big ideas shaping the future of the creative and cultural sectors that are vital to the development of creative cities and growing the creative economy. 75 creative pioneers from around the globe will speak at REMIX Sydney including Google Cultural Institute Director Amit Sood, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE, and Time Out Australia Chief Executive Officer, Michael Rodrigues.
Topics that will explored during this year’s REMIX Sydney summit include; The Creative Revolution; The future of Story-telling; Educating the next generation; Beyond hype: Building, engaging and sustaining communities; The gaming revolution: Everyone’s a gamer; Changing direction: Tales of reinvention; Multi-channel culture: Strategies for developing new markets and Competing online: Getting above the noise.
Vivid Sydney (22 May-8 June) is an 18-day festival of light, music and ideas – the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Now in its seventh year, the event is owned and managed by Destination NSW, the NSW Government’s tourism and major events agency.
REMIX Sydney will be held at Sydney Town Hall from 2-3 June 2015. For more information and to purchase tickets visit www.remixsummits.com/syd
For more info on Sydney Town Hall and how to reach the venue please visit - www.sydneytownhall.com.au
Knowledge Palaces
The team at CultureLabel were very proud to see the opening of the stunning new Library of Birmingham having developed a commercial strategy for the building. It was a great privilege to work with the team there to help imagine what a library should look like in the 21st Century. To celebrate the launch, here are some images of the building as well as our pick of ‘super libraries’ from around the globe.
No-one can accuse libraries of not looking to the future when they see the Biblioteca Sandro Penna, Perugia for the first time. It’s positively Sci-Fi.
The Tama Art University Library is full of beautifully designed reflective spaces with high glass windows to bring the inside in.
580,000 books are crammed into the incredible internal structure of Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico. It’s generally not helpful to put books back in the wrong place but they could be lost forever here!
The vast interior at Seattle Library, USA hold over 1 million books and has been used to create incredible social spaces.
Book Mountain is an appropriate translation for this new library near Rotterdam
Stuttgart City Library, Germany.
There are some cultural infrastructure developments of a quite fantastical scale at various points around the globe at present. Think of the new Louvre and Guggenheim outposts that will open in a few years on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi. A project costing in excess of a billion dollars. Another with equally extraordinary numbers attached is the £1.78 billion West Kowloon cultural district, which after many delays is now rapidly rising from the ground (or perhaps more accurately, the ocean) in Hong Kong. I was recently invited to an event organised jointly by the British Council, UK Trade and Invest, the Hong Kong Association and the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in association with the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority to hear about how the vision for this exciting new space is taking shape.
West Kowloon is one of a number of gargantuan cultural infrastructure projects in the works. The planned Louvre outpost in Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi is another.
The presentation was delivered by Michael Lynch, an astute choice as CEO of the project as he was a driving force in the revitalisation of London’s Southbank Centre before ending a brief retirement in his native Australia to try and repeat the trick at West Kowloon. You can see the appeal of swapping the beach for this opportunity as the development is on a truly epic scale on 40 hectares reclaimed from the sea (26 of which will be open public space which is impressive in a tightly contained city like Hong Kong). It was not hard to make this post a visual treat as some of the architecture is a genuine feast for the eyes as there will certainly be no shortage of new iconic structures. Built around a master plan by Foster and Partners of London it contains new galleries, concert halls and other performance and creative spaces. The retail and catering aspects are as important which is something Lynch pulled off well at the Southbank Centre which is a complete destination to create a balanced business model. The open spaces around the venues are equally important and the ‘permanent festival’ mind set is another echo of the Southbank Centre which was at the heart of Jude Kelly’s artistic vision for the site.
In the Saadiyat Island development, leading international culture brands have been courted to create a new tourist destination. In Hong Kong the efforts are more focused on local and regional cultural content with the opportunity for international partnerships and touring as the secondary element. This means a significant amount of organisations and spaces are being created from a blank canvas.
Mobile M+: INFLATION! was a project to start populating the site with culture including Jeremy Deller’s Stonehenge seen here so as to build an audience for West Kowloon Cultural District and not just parachute in culture
The idea of creating institutions from the ground up is in an intriguing one and which excited me most about the project but which clearly has the most risk attached as well. The digital era has accelerated the rise of prosumers or consumers who are looking to play a role in producing a product rather than passively consuming it. For example by customising it at the end of the process. NIKEiD has taken advantage of this trend. If the project team behind West Kowloon were to make a radical departure from the norm they would create platforms for the audience as much as the curators in the development of the spaces, services and content. An interesting example of this in the UK is the new £197 million Library of Birmingham project where technology start-ups were invited to pitch to reinvent the traditional library services from the humble library card to business services. This is where the leadership of the West Kowloon project need to be brave. To genuinely seed some of the central control of the development of these projects to the audience, technologists, commercial partners and others could create a genuinely new 21st cultural infrastructure. It was encouraging to hear that Michael Lynch had visited the new BT Sport studios at iCity, the new technology hub that forms part of the future use of London’s Olympic Park.
M+ museum by Herzog & de Meuron and TFP Farrells
The UK’s creative and cultural industries are envied around the world and in London now represent the biggest sector of the economy with only Finance more significant. The experiences we have in delivering projects on the scale of the Library of Birmingham and the Olympic Park puts us in a great position to influence and play a role in projects such as West Kowloon. It was great to see that UK Trade and Investment make this a focus for their work and working alongside the British Council who are able to make intelligent connections with the cultural sector to build relationships that could lead to significant new contracts and partnerships for UK organisations.
REMIX Sydney in Pictures
Over 1000 creative leaders attended REMIX Sydney over 2-days. The event kicked off with a special workshop in partnership with ABC and the Australia Council for the Arts on the future of arts and broadcast at the top of Bloomberg’s amazing new Skyscraper. Height remained a theme as the event kicked off with a VIP reception in the Board Dining Room at the summit of the AMP tower with stunning views over the harbour, bridge and Sydney Opera House. Delegates then descended upon the amazing industrial spaces of Carriageworks for a feast of ideas, interspersed with a Summit Part at the very cool Brand X curated by Timeout and the British Council.
Spaces evolved
Rough Trade recently opened up in NYC and lucky New Yorkers were treated to a cavernous space around four times larger than the store in East London. It might seem surprising that a record store has expanded so aggressively? Well, Rough Trade are the latest brand to work out that creating flexible space will allow then to change and adapt in the future. Learning from their experience in East London where they leapt from a record collectors Aladdin’s Cave in the form of their original iconic store to a warehouse with a cafe and small stage area, they have made an even bolder move. Rough Trade identified the growth of live performance in the music industry a few years ago and have made this even more central to the new store but they want to offer even more experiences and monetise an environment where people like to hang out. They know their audience in great detail as well as the value of these fans to other brands. They have formed careful partnerships with organisations that have similar brand values ranging from The Guardian to Tumblr.
Rough Trade need to be able to change the environment from record store to performance space in the same day. For the same reasons the newest spaces cultural sector are becoming ever more flexible and multi-purpose. For example, Bl_nk, is a new type of arts venue in Shoreditch. A range of partners including Hackney Council, the V&A and creative agency Poke are involved in the venture. We recently took a range of creative leaders from the UK on a trend scouting mission around East London’s Silicon Roundabout as part of the REMIX Summit in the city to find out more and here are some of the insights.
The V&A’s Digital Curator, Louise Shannon talked to us about how Bl_nk is an experiment for them to play with a space that offers the possibility of new forms of creative collaboration between artists and technologists, producing both new creative output, expression and distribution. Bl_nk is also built on the pillars of Hackney House, a roaming pop-up venue that promotes the borough as a creative location but crucially also provided a space for events that brought together a network of creatives’ from a wide range of industries and organisations in the area. This loose cross-disciplinary group are at the heart of the different approach to the output of Bl_nk as they seek to co-produce creative projects and creative output from a wide range of sources.
New types of purpose built cultural spaces are also coming on stream in cities such as Dubai. The Dubai Design District (or d3 as it is also known) is a new facility on an epic scale designed to provide cutting edge infrastructure for the design community to both support local talent and pull in new creative industries into the emirate. The spaces will open in 2015 and will help creatives turn their ideas into new scaleable enterprises.
Finally, our favourite flexi-space at the moment is the magnificent La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris which is a veritable hive of art tech collaborations such as the one below and just down the road from the new Google Cultural Institute which has also applied the same kind of thinking to the use of space and programming approach.
CultureLabel.com
Shop Creative Cities
New research report from REMIX - Future-proofing tech for arts & culture organisations
Building the 21st Century Library - REMIX collaborates with State Library Victoria
Glamping at Leeds Castle
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Optometry: Exam and Education Schedule
*Next Exam Scheduled:*
See the Link "Forms and Applications" for More Information. Call the Board Office at (505)476-4622 for a Packet to be sent to you.
Optometry Licensure Exam
As of January 15, 1995, all candidates for licensure are required to take the Board's licensing examination. The next board exam will be July 2016; for more information about board exam please contact board office 505-476-4622.
As of January 15, 1995, all candidates, except those who have met the qualification requirements set forth in Subsections A and B of 16.16.4.8 NMAC and have been approved as candidates for licensure by endorsement, shall be required to pass Part I, Part II, Part III, and the TMOD of the NBEO national standards examination as a prerequisite to sitting for the Board’s licensing examination.
Examination Policy And Procedure
(Policy to be brought by candidate to the Clinical Exam)
Effective January 15, 1995, successful completion of PART I, II, and III, and TMOD of the National Boards is a prerequisite for sitting for the New Mexico Board of Examiners in Optometry state examination, unless specific requirements for licensure by endorsement are met. The National Board of Examiners in Optometry (NBEO) must send proof of successful passing of the accepted NBEO exams directly to the Optometry Board. See the NBEO PART Equivalency information and Board Regulations, Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, for further information on examination requirements.
The New Mexico Board of Optometry will conduct the state optometry Jurisprudence and Clinical Practicum examinations once a year. The 2019 exam is scheduled for June 7-9, 2019. Approved candidates will be notified by mail of their official exam schedule immediately after they complete the application process or within two weeks after the final application deadline. Official notification will be mailed to each approved exam candidate no later than 40 days in advance of the exam, in time for candidates to make travel arrangements.
Travel arrangements should not be made until the candidate has received official written notification that his/her application has been approved and that he/she has been scheduled to sit for the exam.
Prior to the exam deadline candidates MUST provide the Board with a specifically written list of the names of any New Mexico licensed optometrist(s) with whom they are acquainted; with whom they have professional or personal affiliation; or that they would feel uncomfortable being examined by, in the event that one of those optometrists is a Board member or a clinical examiner for the Board. Failure to do so may disqualify the candidate from the exam.
Fee and Refund Policy
Application Fee: $175. Examination Fee: $400 (TOTAL $525) Licensure Fee: $200
By rule: All fees are non-refundable.
The deadline to receive the applicant’s Letter of Intent, Application Form and Application Fee is 65 days in advance of the Board’s exam. Candidates should recognize that arrangements and financial commitment made by the Board to examine the total number of approved candidates are made weeks in advance of the examination. A commitment of the candidates' fees, as well as a substantial amount of the Board's other funds, has already been made at least a month prior to any given exam. Therefore, candidates who cancel after the 40 day notice, or who fail to appear for the scheduled examination, will automatically forfeit any fees paid.
Candidate Scheduling
The Jurisprudence Exam is normally scheduled on Friday afternoon, and the Clinical Practicum is administered on Saturday and possibly Sunday. The Board will examine a maximum of twelve candidates a day for the Clinical Practicum. Candidates will be randomly scheduled for the Clinical Practicum.
The Board must receive ALL required documentation and examination fees on or before the deadline date, in order for the application to be considered complete.
After the exam schedules have been finalized, each APPROVED candidate will be notified by mail of the exact clinical practicum session that he/she has been scheduled for. However, an exact scenario schedule will be given to each candidate before the candidate leaves the Jurisprudence Exam on Friday afternoon.
Candidates will NOT be allowed entrance into either the Jurisprudence or the Clinical Practicum exam without the aforesaid notification letter.
At registration, candidates will be assigned an Identification number on an I.D. card.
The assigned I.D. number will be the sole means of candidate identification throughout the administration and grading of the exam.
Candidates must also present picture identification at the time of registration for both the jurisprudence and clinical/practicum exams.
Candidates should be present thirty (30) minutes prior to their scheduled examination time.
Candidates should bring their own pens or pencils.
All of the equipment and instruments necessary to take the Clinical Practicum examination will be furnished to the candidate. However, the candidate will be allowed to use personal binocular indirect ophthalmoscope and condensing lenses, provided that the ophthalmoscope is equipped with a teaching mirror.
Candidates will be required to furnish their own patient for the exam.
The patient must be at least eighteen years of age.
The candidate will anesthetize and dilate the patient for purposes of the examination in Station A (Next Section).
The patient may not be a graduate of, or a student enrolled in, a school or college of optometry.
Both the candidate and patient will be required to execute an affidavit and release form prior to the exam.
Under no circumstances will anyone be allowed at the site of the examination other than the candidate and the candidate’s patient without the consent of the Board.
Clinical Practicum Content
There will be four examination stations through which the candidates will rotate.
The maximum time allowed for examination of the candidate at each station is thirty-two (32) minutes.
There will be a thirteen (13) minute break between sessions in order for the examiners to complete their evaluations, and to allow candidates to move on to the next assignment.
Candidates will immediately return to and wait in the outer reception area during this period.
One of the stations (Red) will be dedicated to Procedures. This is where the candidate's patient will be utilized.
In each Procedures station, the candidate will be allowed a total time of thirty-two (32) minutes to prepare the patient and perform those procedures that are assigned to that station.
If for some reason a candidate is unable to provide their own patient please notify the Board office ASAP and one will be assigned to them.
Red Station Procedures
The following will be included in the Procedures Section of the Exam. The candidate will be required to perform or to have knowledge of:
Binocular indirect ophthalmoscopy, to include scleral indentation.
Gonioscopy,
Biomicroscopy of the posterior segment
Biomicroscopy of the anterior segment
Flouriscene Angiography (No injections required – just knowledge).
The candidate will be required to demonstrate proficiency in performing binocular indirect ophthalmoscopy to include scleral depression and posterior segment biomicroscopy with various fundus lenses. The candidate will be required to demonstrate proficiency in performing anterior segment biomicroscopy and gonioscopy. The Procedures (four in all) are evaluated separately. That is, the candidate is required to perform each procedure as he or she would in a private office setting on a patient presenting solely for the particular examination (Procedure) that is being evaluated.
Green, Yellow and Blue Station Scenarios
The candidate will be presented with patient Scenarios in the Green, Yellow and Blue Stations. Four Scenarios will be presented at each station for a total of twelve (12) scenarios. The scenarios presented will include patients with ocular disease, ocular degenerations and dystrophies, neuro-ocular disease, ocular manifestations of systemic disease, ocular side effects of systemic medication, systemic manifestations of ocular disease, trauma, post-operative management, and ocular irritations.
As in a real-life setting, the candidate will be expected to work through each case as if the patient were presenting in his or her office. Case presentations and findings will be given in a straightforward manner by the clinical examiners. However, it will be the candidate’s responsibility to ask for necessary or additional information, findings, or clarification (as would occur in a real-life setting) in order to arrive at the proper diagnosis and treatment. The candidate's patient presentation, evaluation, and questions will follow the S.O.A.P. (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan) format. The candidate’s performance will be evaluated in each part of the S.O.A.P. (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan).
The candidate should be mindful, however, that there are four (4) Scenarios to be presented within each thirty-two (32) minute time frame, and the exam must move forward as the schedule demands. It is to the candidate's advantage not to linger too long in an area (Scenario) where he/she may be having difficulty. One member of the examiner team will keep track of the time and move the exam forward to the next scenario when each eight minute period is up. When the eight minutes are up for a Scenario, it is the candidate’s responsibility to inform the clinical examiners that he or she is ready to move on to the next question. If time permits, the clinical examiners will allow the candidate to return to any of the candidate's problematic areas in order to allow opportunities for improvement.
Candidate's Exam Records
In each station, the candidate will be furnished with a blank sheet of paper with his or her I.D. Number and the Station name and time printed on each sheet. These sheets are to allow the candidate to take any notes deemed necessary as the clinical examiners “set up” the Scenario or Procedure. These sheets must be left with the examiners before the candidate exits the Station.
NMSA 1978 § 61-2-6.D. (7) states, “The Board shall certify as passing each applicant who obtains a grade of at least a 75% on each subject upon which he is examined.” Subsection D of Part 5 of 16.16.5.9 NMAC (the Board’s Rules and Regulations) states, “A score of seventy-five percent (75%) or better is required on each section of the Board’s exam.” The Board has some discretion as to what it can consider a “subject” or “section” of the Board exam. At its discretion, the Board has determined, for purposes of FINAL scoring, to break down the exam into two subjects: the Jurisprudence Exam and the Clinical Practicum Examination.
The Clinical Practicum examination will be scored based upon an average of the total score for the seven sections:
The four stand-alone Procedures in the Red Station, and
The three clinical categories presented in the Green, Yellow, and Blue Stations (consisting of four scenarios each).
In order to pass the Clinical Practicum examination, an applicant must obtain a minimum overall average of 75% in the Clinical Practicum and a 75% or better in the Jurisprudence.
Provided, however, that any applicant who has received a grade of less than 60% on any part of the Clinical Practicum examination will not be considered eligible for licensure even though the overall Clinical Practicum grade may average 75%.
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To the participants
Tavricheskiy palace
Draft Final Declaration
The Council of Federation of the Federal Assembly
The Interparliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the CIS
THE MINISTRY OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS
Government of St. Petersburg
Main Directorate for Road Safety, MoI of Russia
VI International Congress Road Safety for the Safety of Life: preparation is on track
Valentina Matvienko awards gymnasium with a certificate for 1k safety reflecting bands
Valentina Matvienko called for better involvement of GIBDD volunteers
In September 2016, the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation and the Interparliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States in liaison with the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation are hosting the Sixth International Congress Road Safety for the Safety of Life in St. Petersburg. The Congress will focus on the role of civil society in improving road safety.
Valentina Matvienko, Speaker of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Chairperson of the IPA CIS Council, is presiding at the Organizing Committee of the Congress.
The track record of the previous congresses Road Safety for the Safety of Life has shown the event's big potential for developing a concerted standpoint of the CIS countries in the matters of legal framework improvement, development and implementation of national policies to enhance road safety, prevention of road accidents and mitigation of their effects.
The main purpose of the 6th Congress is to open up a broad debate on the interaction of authorities, the general public and professional communities in shaping the road policy and road safety framework, as well as to introduce specific measures for their implementation, with an active involvement of civil society institutions.
From 28 to 30 September the Congress will feature an Expo Forum and side events dedicated to road safety.
The plenary session and roundtables will take place on 29 – 30 September, with a focus on the following issues: legislative measures and ways to involve civil society in public policy on road safety; vectors to develop partnership of public authorities, businesses and civil society, combining their resources to meet common road safety objectives; establishing civil road and transportation watch; raising legal awareness and knowledge on safe driving and safe road use, and instilling a "road culture" among road users.
The Congress will convene heads of government bodies of all levels, heads of municipal authorities, representatives of international transport service providers and other organizations specializing in road safety, representatives of schools and healthcare institutions, research organizations and task forces, business communities, professional associations, the mass media, public associations of the CIS member nations and other countries.
More information about the International Congress Road Safety for the Safety of Life is available on its official web-site at www.road-safety.ru and on the web-site of the Interparliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States at www.iacis.ru.
© 2008–2019 International Congress «Road Safety for the Safety of Life».
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Big soccer, athletics events on the way
on Thursday, 23 October, 2014 in Sport > Sport > Athletics •
Campbelltown Athletics centre
The Campbelltown sport complex at Leumeah will be a hive of activity in January next year.
The football stadium will be echoing to the sound of soccer ball as the Chinese national team practice for the finals of the 2015 Asian Cup.
Next door, the Athletics Centre will once again host the bi-annual Trans-Tasman Challenge in 2015.
The venue successfully hosted the event in 2013 and organisers were so impressed they decided to come back.
The Trans-Tasman Challenge is for athletes in the under 11 and under 12 age groups of Little Athletics from NSW and Auckland, New Zealand.
Every second year a team from NSW, both boys and girls, travel to Auckland to compete in the Trans-Tasman Challenge and on alternate years a team from Auckland travels to Sydney to compete against a NSW team.
The 2015 Trans-Tasman Challenge will be held on Janurary 18 next year.
The UWS Collegians Athletics Club is heavily involved with staging the event and is working with Little Athletics NSW to ensure its success.
Our history, our shame
Porter comeback in drag racing season finale
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MotoGP Pre-Season Testing: Yamaha Factory Racing
by Kerri Olsen
On Wednesday, Yamaha Factory Racing completed their second day of pre-season testing at Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas. The team consists of 2012 MotoGP World Champion Rider Jorge Lorenzo and six-time World Champion Rider Valentino Rossi (aka "The Doctor).
The testing days proved to be quite helpful as the riders got used to the "long and technical" track on their Yamaha YZR-M1s. In a recap, Yamaha said their riders were able to shave "several seconds off their first times but were still looking for more grip at full lean." This is evident as Lorenzo's best time on Tuesday was 2:05.291 and 2:04.664 on Wednesday; Rossi's best was 2:06.507 on Tuesday and 2:05.518 the second day of testing.
Jorge Lorenzo, No. 99, Yamaha Factory Racing Team
Lorenzo shared: “I feel better today, especially in the last run before the lunch break, we changed the set up of the bike and we improved some tenths so we are closer to the fastest riders, but not as much as we would like. We were too soft in the suspension to start with, we made it harder and in this track it works.
These two days that we are here I think is enough to get a good idea of set up and riding style. The fans will like MotoGP here, it is going to be a great show.
We have been trying different set ups of the bike, no new parts, just playing with the set up, changing the suspension and forks and in the last run I improved half a second with set up changes.
We still don't have enough grip on the rear so we can’t lean over with confidence which is why we are further behind than in Sepang.
I am adapting my riding style every lap a little for the track. In the main straight we are at 340kmh/h which is an amazing speed; when you have to brake and put your helmet up the wind is very strong so it’s difficult to be stable.”
Valentino Rossi, No. 46, of Yamaha Factory Racing Team
Valentino was also positive: “The feeling with the track improved today, we started to work on the bike to improve the difficult points, especially in the three very hard braking areas where it is important to have good stability. It’s also very important to have grip on the edge through the hairpin to have speed along the straight.
It looks like you can make a big difference in the slow parts here. The chicane part in turn two is very technical and difficult as it is blind; you have to go a bit with memory.
Step by step we improved a lot from yesterday but have some disadvantage compared to the other guys so we need to put all the sections together.
The target was to come here and try to understand the track and try to be ready for the race.
Our competitors are able to accelerate faster than us from the hairpin and they have a bit more grip on the edge compared to us so these are the areas where we have to work, in the flowing parts we are not so bad.
The track is good, a very classical ‘Tilke’ track, I like the fast parts, turn two and turn ten especially. There is lots of hard braking and it is very wide so good for overtaking. The long right before the last two lefts is also good. It's fun and not too hot like it is in Sepang so it's a good place to make a motorcycle race.”
For videos and more, visit our Facebook page.
Posted in MotoGP
tagged with CCircuit of the Americas, Jorge Lorenzo, MotoGP, Valentino Rossi, Yamaha Factory Racing, Yamaha MotoGP
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Japanese biotechnicians become closer to Toxoplasma vaccine discovery
Toxoplasma gondii is a common parasite which causes the development of fatal encephalosis or pneumonia in immunodeficient patients under treatment of AIDS or cancer.
Pregnant women who are infected may suffer a miscarriage or the newborn child may suffer from a congenital disease. Currently, a toxoplasma vaccine for humans is not available. Using experimental animals such as mice, basic research for developing an inactivated vaccine is underway.
group of researchers led by Masahiro Yamamoto, Professor at Research Institute for Microbial Diseases and the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University found that p62, a host molecule, played an important role in exerting immune effects of an experimental pathogenic parasite toxoplasma-inactivated vaccine.
This group's achievement is expected to offer strategies for developing a toxoplasma-inactivated vaccine targeting p62 for treating toxoplasmosis, whose case reports have been on the rise in Japan in recent years. From a prior study which found that the antigens derived from the toxoplasma emitted within the parasitophorous vacuole become the major antigens for the killer T cells, Professor Yamamoto's group investigated the activation of killer T cells when the toxoplasma-infected cells were stimulated by interferon-γ (IFN-γ).
As a result, it was found that the activity of antigen-specific killer T cells in infected cells that were stimulated by IFN-γ was dramatically higher than in non-stimulated infected cells. This robust activation of killer T cells seen when these infected cells undergo IFN-γ stimulation was significantly reduced in mice with p62 deficiencies. Even on an individual level, when compared with wild-type mice, there was a sharp decrease in antigen-specific killer T cells in p62 deficient mice when administered the toxoplasma-inactivated vaccine.
These findings clarified that IFN-γ-dependent p62 has the unique role of gathering in the parasitophorous vacuole of toxoplasma through IFN-γ stimulation and activating the antigen-specific killer T cells released within the parasitophorous vacuole, a world first.
We publish breaking news around the clock on developments in Asia's biotechnology industry.
About The Biotechnician
The Biotechnician produces daily news and intelligence on the most creative biotechnology and drug developments across the Asia Pacific. With experts and editors across Asia, The Biotechnician comments on breaking news while it occurs, and provides an insightful perspective to Asian based biotechnology firms, the development of medicines in the region, transactions that are occurring in the market, and regulatory issues that are preventing the development of the industry across the region.
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it's simple.ONE SONG...EVERY.DAY.
3 guys talking music.Ratings from 0-4 (4 being the best)
J.J. Orlando
When the Top 40 station isn't playing, Orlando is often found listening to alt-rock and vinyl versions of female pop vocalists. He grew up with an affinity for hip-hop but spends most of time trying to listen to a little of this and a little of that, with a growing appreciation for country.
David Johns Fraser
David Johns Fraser is constantly searching for music and all things real. Continues to be in awe of Radiohead and whatever they do even though everything after Kid A (their magnum opus) has had diminishing returns. Will gladly step out of his comfort zone if it makes him feel something. Would fund a kickstarter for a mashup album called DJ Skriplo.
Kædo-K:
A self-described 'Masshole' with a heart of gold. First 2 CDs ever purchased were James Taylor's Greatest Hits & the soundtrack to 'Boyz N Tha Hood'. Once attended a Tori Amos AND Lilith Fair concert in the same summer. Likes include singer-songwriters, jazzy hip-hop, and music that tells a story.
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Click here to stay on this site
News, Tanzania
Tanzanian journalist recounts his midnight flight from assassins
More in News:
Israel Launches Heaviest Air Strikes at Gaza Since 2014 17 July, 2018
Ireland Takes First Step to Banning Import of Goods from Illegal Israeli Settlements 17 July, 2018
Turkey Purges Continue as Nearly 19,000 Civil Servants Dismissed 13 July, 2018
Silenced: Assassins were sent to kill journalist Ansbert Ngurumo, forcing one of President John Magufuli’s most prominent critics into exile
By: Ansbert Ngurumo / Source: Mail & Guardian / The Dawn News / March 16, 2018
In early October 2017, I received a death threat. It wasn’t the first but it was the most serious. Confidential information was leaked that three hitmen had been tasked with getting rid of me, an apparent attempt to stop any further criticism of Tanzanian President John Magufuli.
I was lucky to have been tipped off.
“On a serious note, unknown assassins are threatening my life following my remarks criticising the government’s ban of newspapers,” I tweeted.
That tweet followed others that criticised the government’s reluctance to act against abductors and gunmen who have been threatening the lives of activists, musicians, politicians and journalists in Tanzania.
I had also tweeted about the government’s arbitrary closure or banning of newspapers in an effort to shield the president from criticism, something I reiterated in a two-hour live broadcast by Star TV on September 30 last year.
After learning that assassins had been sent to Mwanza, where I was, to shoot or stab me, I fled to Dar es Salaam. For the following two weeks, I moved to four different hotels, thanks to support from Good Samaritans, including the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition.
But, one evening, the manager politely asked me to vacate his hotel. He said he had been informed by attendants that “some government people” were asking about me. Two of them, he said, had hired rooms in the same hotel.
I started sweating. I smelt blood. I saw death. I called my friend Benedict and we left. In a state of panic, we had no destination in mind.
Then I called a journalist friend of mine. At midnight, he helped to move me to a secret residence. Two weeks later, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists came to my rescue, helping me get to relative safety in Nairobi. While in Kenya, I received an invitation to go to Sweden and Finland. I have been in the Nordic countries since the last week of January 2018.
By the time my assailants became aware of my presence in Nairobi and had sent people to trace me, I was in Europe. For me, the Nordic invitation was God’s saving grace. I have used my time here to make plans to ensure my own security, and to exercise the freedom of expression that was denied me at home.
Because my sources briefed me that “the big man” was personally involved in the saga, I can confidently say that it is Magufuli’s auto-cracy that has forced me to stay away from my family. As I narrate this story, I have been six months out of the country. I feel homesick.
During this period — in which I have become a vagabond, in exile — two other journalists have been abducted by the same authorities for writing stories that the government did not want published.
The first two years of Magufuli’s presidency have been fatal for some of the president’s critics.
The first casualty was Alphonce Mawazo, a charismatic orator, activist and opposition leader in the Geita region, Magufuli’s home territory. Ruling-party zealots lynched him one afternoon in December 2015.
A political activist, Ben Saanane, went missing in November 2016 a few weeks after he had expressed doubts on his Facebook page about the authenticity of Magufuli’s academic credentials.
Three musicians were abducted in April 2017 for recording music the authorities believed were in bad political taste. They were released after a public outcry but they reported they were tortured. When they called a press conference, the information minister attended it and sat at their side. Their story was never told.
In May 2017, a political reporter and critic of Magufuli’s leadership, Josephat Isango, developed a sudden inflammation of the lungs and was dead within a month. Doctors revealed later that he had been poisoned.
On September 7 2017, unidentified gunmen shot an outspoken and critical MP, Tundu Lissu, also a big critic of Magufuli.
On November 21 2017, Mwananchi newspaper reporter Azory Gwanda was abducted after he had reported on mysterious killings in Kibiti district.
Many social media users have been arrested and prosecuted for writing negative posts about the president. Two of them were convicted and had to pay fines to avoid a jail term.
As of today, 13 MPs from opposition parties are facing charges associated with “insulting” the president or holding political rallies without the president’s approval.
Mbeya Urban MP Joseph Mbilinyi was recently sentenced to five months’ imprisonment for uttering words that the regional court deemed “insulting to the president” at a public rally.
For people who have known Tanzania for the past few decades, this is not the country they associated with peace and security.
People are in the grip of terror because of Magufuli. He tolerates no criticism. He rules with an iron fist and has turned the country into a police state.
In February, security forces shot and killed Aquilina Aquiline, a passing university student, while attempting to disperse an opposition demonstration in Kinondoni. No one has been held responsible for the 22-year-old’s death.
For human rights activists, politicians, journalists, artists, bloggers, social media users, religious leaders and academics in Tanzania, fear is no longer a future threat; it is an everyday reality.
There is no freedom of expression and association, despite existing legal and constitutional provisions. Magufuli only respects the law or Constitution when it’s in his favour.
Some editors of mainstream newspapers critical of the government have been taken to court and charged with sedition. His government has banned many newspapers, especially those involved in investigative or public-interest journalism, for allegedly criticising or misquoting the president.
In early 2016, when Magufuli sent a friend to warn me about my writings, I was not overly alarmed. “The big man is asking, what did he wrong you that makes you keep hammering him in your articles?” his envoy asked me.
But I kept voicing my concerns, particularly in my 15-year-old column, Maswali Magumu, Swahili for “tough questions”, about his autocratic endeavour to muzzle freedom of expression. I never envisaged this catastrophe.
As it stands now, the shrinking space for freedom of expression threatens progress and puts the country’s security at risk. It paves the way for grand corruption.
But Magufuli’s dirty tricks will not silence everybody. Tanzania needs bold and vocal minds to put a halt to a culture of cold-blooded killings, abductions and the torture of government critics. Those of us who can still speak up have a duty to do so.
African journalist
Murder of Journalists
Receive updates on popular struggles around the world. Send a mail to subscribe to the bi-weekly newsletter now! Write us at: [email protected]
The Dawn News
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The List: Part 2, Reasons Why
As noted in my previous column, trans women face a particularly aggressive opposition when it comes to access to women’s private spaces such as restrooms and even more so locker rooms. Last time I promised you a set of arguments which may be presented to people of goodwill willing to change their views in light of new information. These will not convinced the willfully ignorant and hostile, in most cases, but for those willing to be compassionate we should give them the intellectual basis to do so.
What follows than is not every point that might be made but, I believe, sufficient arguments to support our claim.
First, the opposition assumes that something which is in reality merely a cultural tradition is instead some sort of law of nature. Our history as human beings has been filled with moments when cultural traditions were rightly challenged and we survived just fine. Not so very long ago white people were worried about the danger and trauma associated with sharing private spaces with black people, some still are sadly, and yet once that tradition was rightly challenged it took almost no time for the vast majority to realize that there was no threat at all. And it IS a culture-specific tradition. Other cultures around the world, both currently and throughout history, have not seen the need to gender segregate their private spaces.
Second, it cannot be fairly assumed that there is some inherently male condition of sexual aggressiveness for two reasons: first it assumes that all persons in possession of a penis are equally threatening to the safety of women, and in the specific case of trans women it assumes that nothing has happened to physically change that male attitude towards women. AND…
It falsely assumes that the trans woman “thinks like a guy” in relation to other women which is an insulting and ill-informed assumption. This assumption ignores the realities that from the trans woman’s point of view she is counted among women, not among men, and therefore rather than being a threat themselves would be just as much a target of the same sort of presumed aggression. Consider: if she, in fact, “thought like a guy” then she would hardly be asking you to accept her as a female, would she?
Moreover, it is no more logical (or ethical) for non-trans people to assume the status of trans people’s genitalia than it is for the reverse to happen. Nor is it practical to physically screen everyone who desires to enter. For every trans person whose history you may be aware of, there could well be others whose background you would not know. But since neither of them are a threat, it hardly matters. In any case, it is not necessarily true that because one was born with male on their birth certificate that they are thus therefore in exactly the same physical state they were in at that time.
Indeed, it ignores the fact that trans women have as much or more reason to feel threatened by men as non-trans women do. Violence by men (and sometimes women) against trans women is epidemic, and often regarded by the general population as, if not justified, at least understandable. To ask these women to place themselves at risk in confined spaces such as restrooms and locker rooms is to ask them to risk a thing that actually happens (violent assault by disapproving man) in order to spare non-trans women from a thing that NEVER happens – sexual assault by trans women.
The fact is that in various locations around the country this issue has already been addressed and trans women regularly share restrooms and locker rooms with non-trans women in many thousands of locations, and there is a remarkable absence of ANY reports of women being violated in these situations by professed trans women and a single-figure amount of rare cases by male imposters. It simply doesn’t happen to any statistically significant degree. Certainly not to the extent that non-trans men find a way to do offensive things such as plant cameras and so forth without the need to cross-dressing order to achieve their end. On the very rare occasion when some pervert tries to take advantage of the rules, he is caught and dealt with in exactly the same manner as he would have been had the local laws and policies not been favorable to trans people. The trans friendly policies are proven by real world experience to not have increased risk to non-trans women AT ALL. It’s not that hard to develop policies and practices which discourage the possibility of a false profession of trans status.
Also, it ignores the fact that in general terms women are much more likely to be violated by men that they presume they can trust to be safe than they are by strangers in public facilities. Men such as pastors, teachers, employers, neighbors, and family are the vast majority of those who violate women sexually.
The resistance to change further assumes that the trans woman will casually expose herself in these private spaces. This assumption ignores the fact that the one thing that a non-trans woman is most worried about seeing is the very thing that the trans woman is far MORE worried about being UNseen. If she is so very unhappy with its presence that she would consider going even to surgical lengths to get rid of it, then one can logically infer that the LAST thing she has any interest in doing is showing it to some stranger, either intentionally or accidentally.
Finally, it assumes that there is some sort of violation in the fact that the trans woman might glanced the non-trans woman in a state of undress because of sexual desire, but sexual orientation is not an issue since heterosexual people routinely share private spaces with homosexual people who may be oriented towards their gender. Any given woman in that space may in fact have a sexual interest in seeing the undressed woman in question and it further assumes that the trans woman has such a sexual interest, which may or may not be true. Most trans women consider themselves heterosexual – that is oriented toward men – and therefore that woman is no more or less concerning in the situation than any other heterosexual woman. For those trans women who are in fact lesbians, they are no more or less a concern than a non-trans lesbian. To say nothing of the asexual.
Photo by: Hank Hession
Making the Case, Part 8
The List: MTFs and the Locker Room
Posted on September 18, 2014 by Tammy Beth. This entry was posted in General. Bookmark the permalink.
Critic’s Corner?
2 thoughts on “The List: Part 2, Reasons Why”
Milena says:
I strongly agree with the “second”” point you make in this column. Thanks.
You brought up everything that I have always told people, but in a concise formal essay format. Thank you
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2002: 'Monk' Premieres on USA
July 12, 2019 | By TV WW | 1 comment
This day in 2002 marked the debut of the detective series, Monk.
The series, which ran eight seasons on the USA Network, starred Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk, a gifted detective whose career was derailed by a nervous breakdown brought on by the tragic, mysterious death of his wife.
Plagued by myriad phobias and extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder, Monk is able to work as a police consultant with the help of a nurse/assistant, played the first three seasons by Bitty Schram, and later by Traylor Howard. Supporting cast also included Ted Levine as Captian Stottlemeyer, a long-time friend of Monk and head of the homicide division of the San Francisco Police Department, and Jason Gray-Stanford as Lt. Randy Disher.
For his role as Monk, Shalhoub received eight consecutive Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, and won three times, in 2003, 2005 and 2006.
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"Monk" never aired on TNT. It is a USA show. This article is incorrect.
Jul 18, 2013 | Reply
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Home » Diesel News » TDISport News – VOLVO’S NEW AUTOMATIC BRAKING TECHOLOGY – RESPONDING TO BOTH VEHICLES AND PEDESTRIANS
TDISport News – VOLVO’S NEW AUTOMATIC BRAKING TECHOLOGY – RESPONDING TO BOTH VEHICLES AND PEDESTRIANS
The next generation of preventive safety technology from Volvo is a groundbreaking function that can detect a pedestrian who has walked out in front of the car, as well as automatically braking to avoid the person at speeds below 15 mph if the driver does not react in time.
Concurrent with the launch of the all-new Volvo S60 in 2010, Volvo Cars will be unveiling the next generation of preventive safety technology – Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Safety. The new safety functions represent the next stage in Volvo Cars’ continuous development of technology to detect dangerous situations and help the driver avoid accidents.
“The previous stages were developed to help the driver avoid collisions with other vehicles. Now we are taking a giant step forward with a function that also boosts safety for unprotected road-users. What is more, we are advancing from fifty percent to full automatic braking power. To our knowledge, none of our competitors have made such progress in this area,” explains Thomas Broberg, safety expert at Volvo Cars.
Accidents with pedestrians common in urban traffic
In the EU, the proportion of pedestrians figuring in overall traffic fatalities varies between 10 and 25 percent depending on the country. In the EU countries’ capital cities, 1,560 people died in road accidents in 2007. Of these, 43 percent were pedestrians.
The speed of a car is of considerable significance to the outcome of an accident. The risk of a pedestrian being killed in an accident at 31 miles per hour is 85 percent higher compared to if the speed is 15 miles per hour.
Avoids collisions at speeds below 15 mph
“Our aim is that this new technology should help the driver avoid collisions with pedestrians at speeds below 15 mph. If the car is travelling faster, the aim is to reduce the impact speed as much as possible. In most cases, we can reduce the collision force by about 75 percent. Considering the large number of pedestrian fatalities that occur, if we manage to reduce the fatality risk with 20 percent this new function will make a big difference. In specific situations the fatality reduction can be up to 85 percent”, says Thomas Broberg.
This technology is also highly beneficial in the event of rear-end impacts with other vehicles. Statistics reveal that half of all drivers who hit another vehicle from behind do not brake at all prior to the collision.
However, the main aim is still for the initial warning to be sufficient for the driver to brake or manoeuvre away from the hazard. If the driver does not respond to the warning, only then does the system step in with full braking force moments before a collision is imminent. In such cases, Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake can help entirely avoid a collision if the relative speed difference between the two vehicles is less than 15 mph.
Safer detection with state-of-the-art technology
Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Safety consists of a new dual-mode radar unit integrated into the car’s grille, a camera behind the inside rear-view mirror and a central control unit. The radar and camera continuously monitor the road in front of the car. The radar’s task is to detect objects and measure the distance to them. The camera’s function is to determine what type of objects they are.
As with Volvo’s current City Safety technology, the system is programmed to respond to cars in front that are at a standstill or moving in the same direction. Thanks to the state-of-the-art radar, which has a far wider field of vision than before, pedestrians about to step into the roadway can be detected early. What is more, the camera has better resolution than in the previous generation, allowing the system to monitor pedestrians’ movement patterns.
“We’ve been working on this technology for ten years now. We have had test cars out on the roads for several years and we’ve driven in many different countries. Factors like traffic behaviour, road conditions and climate must be taken into account in the design of the final system. We can also use the information from these real-life traffic tests to conduct advanced computer simulations,” says Thomas Broberg.
New technology permits full braking power
In an emergency situation, the driver first gets an audible warning together with a flashing light in the windscreen’s head-up display. In order to prompt an immediate, intuitive reaction, the visual warning is designed to look like a brake light coming on. If the driver does not respond to the warning and the system assesses that a collision is imminent, the car’s brakes are applied with full braking power.
“Active brake deployment requires that the object is confirmed by both the radar and the camera. Thanks to state-of-the-art sensor technology, it is now possible to engage full braking power. We are probably among the very first in the world to offer full-braking protection for pedestrians,” explains Thomas Broberg.
He adds: “The system is built along the same principles as the human eye and, just like our own eyes, vision is impaired in the dark and in poor weather.”
Upgraded Adaptive Cruise Control
Volvo’s Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) has now been upgraded with a function that, in combination with automatic transmission, even operates at very low speeds. The radar-based adaptive cruise control system maintains the set gap to the car in front all the way down to standstill. This means that this comfort-enhancing system becomes usable even in slow-moving queues with repeated starting and stopping. The previous version was not active at speeds below 18 miles per hour.
City Safety – prevents low-speed collisions
City Safety was introduced as standard in the new Volvo XC60 in 2008. The technology was developed in-house by Volvo Cars and can reduce or even entirely avoid impacts at speeds below 18 mph. In both heavy city traffic and when driving in slow-moving queues, rear-end collisions are a very common accident scenario. About 75 percent of all collisions occur at speeds below 18 miles an hour, and studies show that in 50 percent of these cases, the driver has totally failed to brake prior to the collision.
With City Safety, the car brakes automatically if the driver fails to respond in time when the vehicle in front slows down or stops. If the relative difference between the speeds of the two vehicles is less than 9 miles an hour, the collision is avoided entirely. If the speed difference is between 9 and 19 miles an hour, the speed of impact is lowered to reduce the severity of the collision and the subsequent consequences.
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Home | Keywords | People | South Sudan | Rebels | Riek Machar Teny | Riak Machar Teny
Riek Machar Teny | Riak Machar Teny
South Sudan’s vice president, Riek Machar (Reuters)
Name: Riek Machar Teny | Riak Machar Teny
Title: Dr.
Vice President of the Republic of South Sudan, 2005 - 23 July 2013.
Deputy Chairman of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), 2005 - 23 July 2013
Born: Leer County, Unity State, South Sudan
Education: Engineering, University of Khartoum; PhD in Philosophy and Strategic Planning, University of Bradford, UK, 1984.
Family: Machar is married to Angelina Teny who contested the Unity State gubernatorial election in 2010 loosing to incumbent Governor Taban Deng Gai in controversial circumstances.
He was also briefly married to British aid worker Emma McCune until her death in a car crash in Nairobi, Kenya in 1993.
Rise through the SPLM / SPLA
Riek Machar joined the SPLM/SPLA in 1984 and was soon put in charge of the the movement’s head office in Addis Ababa by the group’s late chairman, John Garang de Mabior.
He was given military training and deployed at the rank of major as a zonal commander in 1985 in Western Upper Nile.
Machar quickly rose to the rank of Alternate-Commander and then to the rank of a Commander before he then disagreed with late Garang in 1991 on how the movement was being run.
Split with Garang
The issues of contention centred on his call for self-determination, democratization of the movement and respect for human rights while the late chairman wanted the movement to maintain its objective for a new Sudan; secular democratic and united.
Tensions between Machar and Kiir
In April 2013 President Salva Kiir issued a presidential ordered the suspension of a proposed national reconciliation conference, until he formed his own committee that would prepare for the event. Machar had been tasked to oversee the event but this was scrapped when Kiir issued a controversial order on withdrawing unspecified delegated powers from his deputy.
Kiir’s decision is believed to have been takem because the two leaders couldn’t agree on the timing and agenda for the reconciliation.
A source told Sudan Tribune the president wanted the process delayed and also restricted to reconciling communities that experienced violent conflicts, while Machar wanted the process to kick off this year and also address issues of tribalism, good governance, justice, development, distribution of resources, land grabbing, among others, which he argued were some of the factors that caused disharmony in the country.
The matter was worsened by Machar’s declaration to challenge the South Sudan leader in the ruling party’s contest for the SPLM’s chairmanship in the upcoming convention. This caused Kiir to be suspect that Machar wanted to use the reconciliation process as a campaign to gain more popularity among the South Sudanese public.
On 23 July 2013 Kiir issued a decree relieving Machar from his position as vice president. On the same day he also sacked Pagan Amum from his position as the Secretary General of the SPLM.
Kiir appointed James Wani Igga as South Sudan’s new vice president on 26 August 2013.
Machar did not attend the ceremony but later told the press that he would have attended if he had been invited.
Wikipedia - Riek Machar
Machar calls on EU to support democratic elections in South Sudan
October 11, 2013 (JUBA) – South Sudan’s former vice-president, Riek Machar Teny, has called on the European Union (EU), as well as the wider international community to support ongoing efforts on democratic transformation processes and (...)
Family of Riek Machar celebrates wedding of their son in Poland
A group photo after the successful wedding ceremony, Poland, 17th August 2013 (ST) August 20, 2013 (JUBA) – The family and friends of South Sudan’s former Vice President, Riek Machar Teny, said they had a wonderful time celebrating (...)
Tanzania invites South Sudan’s rival leaders to dialogue launch
October 18, 2014 (JUBA) – Tanzania’s ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party announced on Saturday that it has extended an official invitation to South Sudan’s rival leaders, president Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar, to the (...)
South Sudan’s Machar calls on religious institutions to promote education
February 11, 2013 (JUBA) – South Sudan’s vice-president, Riek Machar, has called on the religious institutions in the 19-month-old country to promote education in their respective organisations. He also reiterated his government’s (...)
Kiir did not have succession deal with Machar: official
October 24, 2013 (JUBA) - A senior official from South Sudan’s governing Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) has refuted reports that president Salva Kiir secretly struck a deal with ex-vice president Riek Machar ahead of the 2015 (...)
Machar congratulates Ngok Dinka for determining their destiny
November 1, 2013 (JUBA) - The deputy chairperson of South Sudan’s ruling party (SPLM) has congratulated the Ngok Dinka people of Abyei for successfully conducting a unilateral referendum, in which 99% of them opted to join South Sudan. (...)
South Sudan set to develop on regional and international trade
July 25, 2012 (JUBA) – South Sudan’s vice president, Riek Machar, said at the closing of a trade and investment workshop on Wednesday that in the wake of the halting of oil production the country must diversify its economy. South Sudan (...)
We want peaceful party politics, Jikany-Nuer community tells South Sudan presidency
May 4, 2013 (JUBA) – The Jikany-Nuer community of the oil-rich South Sudan’s Upper Nile state said their consistent message to President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar is to maintain peaceful internal party politics in the (...)
S. Sudan rebels say they are in full control of Malakal, army denies claims
February 19, 2014 (JUBA) – Rebel forces led by South Sudan’s former president, Riek Machar, say they are now in full control of Malakal, the capital of oil-rich Upper Nile state, following fierce battles on Tuesday morning with (...)
Kiir dissolves all South Sudan’s SPLM structures
November 15, 2013 (JUBA) – In a move that surprised many among the senior leaders of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) party, South Sudan’s president and SPLM chairman, Salva Kiir Mayardit, on Friday revealed he had (...)
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4 April 2014 – Dont wory Hilda, I said it last time thtat those are empty heads of cows (...)
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Further Africa:
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights covered rape of children by French members of the UN forces in the Central African Republic. (July 23rd, 2015)
Sub-Sahara Africa comes to Vienna – the Amadinda of Buganda and the Nelson Mandela Hospital Foundation with two terrific opera singers – Pretty Yende and Johan Botha – and the square in front of the South Africa Embassy was renamed Nelson Mandela Square. (April 21st, 2015)
Big International Corporate interests in Africa and corrupt local despots are the trunk of Africa’s Poverty suppported by the foreign aid that lands in wrong hands.. (March 14th, 2014)
Professor Jeffrey David Sachs, the fully pledged Sustainable Development Guru and Climate Change Visionary, made a big splash in Vienna on March 12, 2014 with THE AGE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. He became The First IIASA Distinguished Visiting Fellow. (March 13th, 2014)
From Oxfam – an Africa Climate Change Alliance – meeting 0f The Oversaes Development Institute in London, UK – March 26, 2014. (March 7th, 2014)
Peace And Sustainable Development: A Two-Way Relationship. The importance to the UN of Fethullah Gulen’s teachings that have the power of a magic Rumi spell against the Islamic UN Retro-Members in the Current General Assembly efforts. (February 9th, 2014)
At the Kreisky Forum, Vienna, January 13, 2014 a Discussion of the EU and the Crises in the SAHEL extending from Mali to the Central African Republic. (January 7th, 2014)
July was the US presidency month at the UN Security Council. That baton is being passed now to Argentina that restarts the alphabet. Matthew Lee offers a summary. (July 30th, 2013)
It would help if the UN could accept the idea of need for self criticism – specially on issues of “NEVER AGAIN” – as its record on Rwanda hampers its effectiveness when on-going wars are being considered. (April 10th, 2013)
The After-Life Bulb: Elmot Ltd. is selling in Uganda an Electric bulb that has built-in batteries so it can continue giving light for 6 hours when the wires go dead. It can be used also as a torch-light. (March 8th, 2013)
As Revolutionary as saying Good Morning: To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart. The continuing legacy of colonialism in Africa is to be found in the largest artificial States it left behind and at the UN where dictators are honored and supported. (December 1st, 2012)
Hunting Lodges for Arab Kings that replace the Maasai of Tanzania is not Development. Avaaz.org points at renewed danger to the Maasai – the tribe that are the real owners of the land that is home to lyons and leopards. (August 12th, 2012)
UNIDO Director-General Yumkella, in Kinshasa, says Agriculture is the most important sector of the African economy, nevertheless he calls for diversification, sustainable industrial and agribusiness development in. (August 1st, 2012)
Africa has lost about $800 Billion in a decade of Kleptomaniac Governments. Think what this money could have done for Africa’s Development. (February 11th, 2012)
Nigeria, Tanzania, Eritrea, Rwanda talk at the UN of Africa problems that include terrorism and piracy and show the need for education, as well conflict mediation and perhaps a UN CONFLICT MEDIATION COMMISSION. (September 24th, 2011)
Southern Sudan Speaker of Parliament: “We, the democratically elected representatives of the people, hereby declare Southern Sudan to be an independent and sovereign state.” The UK found a high professional to head its Embassy in Juba – Dr Alastair McPhail OBE. We have no information yet of who will be US Ambassador. The UN Mission in Sudan terminates July 9th and President El-Bashir has said he expects UNMIS to leave after the independence of Southern Sudan. (July 9th, 2011)
A Global University System with Global Early Warning programs is being suggested by Japanese Professor Takeshi Utsumi who is living now in New York City in proximity to the UN Headquarters. He prepared Concept Papers for projects in Bangladesh, DRC, Nigeria and Rwanda – that is individual African problem States and a South Asian Hub of Global Early Warning. (June 6th, 2011)
Rabbi Gershom Sizomu of East Uganda comes May 3rd to the 92 Street YMHA in Manhattan to tell American Jews about one group of black brothers of Africa – the Abuyudaya Jews of Uganda. (April 22nd, 2011)
The Hamburg based World Future Council has launched a campaign for the promotion of positions of Guardians for Future Generations on the European and National governance level. They have also staff working in Brussels, London, Washington and Addis Ababa. (November 19th, 2010)
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the post-WWII Austrian State have the same calendar birthday – October 26th – and Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger brought her a Sacher Torte upon the joint visit to the UN Security Council meeting on WOMEN AND PEACE AND SECURITY – a UN topic initiated by Austria. OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MINISTER SPINDELEGGER. Austria as Vienna host to the IAEA is important on the issue of a nuclear Iran. (October 27th, 2010)
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights covered rape of children by French members of the UN forces in the Central African Republic.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 23rd, 2015
UN rights official who ignored African child rape by French troops resigns; UN Watch reacts.
Published on July 22, 2015 in Human Rights Council (UNHRC) by unwatch.
Flavia_Pansieri was Deputy UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at the Geneva Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights.
According to the UN she was not fired but resigned for Health Reasons – BUT her assistant the whistleblower was fired!
GENEVA, July 22, 2015 – The resignation of a top UN rights official who admitted she did nothing after receiving reports of child rape by French soldiers in Central African Republic — because she was “distracted” by budget cuts — underscores the dire need for greater accountability at the world body, said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a non-governmental Geneva watchdog agency that measures the performance of the world body by the yardstick of its own charter.
“Not only did Deputy UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Flavia Pansieri fail to act,” said Neuer, “but she was part of a coterie of top UN officials who punished the only member of her office who sounded the alarm, veteran staffer Anders Kompass, by firing him.”
“The message heard loud and clear throughout the world body was that speaking out against the banality of bureaucratic complicity with evil will kill one’s career, that it’s better to stay silent.”
“Therefore, to the extent that Ms. Pansieri is in fact resigning over her office’s shameful inaction, indifference and cover-up concerning the rape of children by peacekeepers, then today marks a small step toward greater accountability for malfeasance by UN officials.”
“In this episode, as in many others throughout the UN, minimal levels of scrutiny and acceptance of responsibility are desperately required,” added Neuer.
Posted in Archives, Central African Republic (C.A.R.), France, Geneva, Paris, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York
Sub-Sahara Africa comes to Vienna – the Amadinda of Buganda and the Nelson Mandela Hospital Foundation with two terrific opera singers – Pretty Yende and Johan Botha – and the square in front of the South Africa Embassy was renamed Nelson Mandela Square.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 21st, 2015
kulturen in bewegung <sindlhofer@vidc.org>
ÖSTERREICH-PREMIERE
Amadinda Uganda meets Uni Percussion Vienna
Außergewöhnliche Klänge – musikalische Dialoge
19. April 2015 um 19:30 im MuTh Wien
Einführung: Gerhard Kubik (Universität Wien, Musikwissenschaft)
Moderation: Albert Hosp (ORF, Ö1)
„Viele haben bereits über die Amadinda geschrieben, sie dokumentiert und erforscht – für mich persönlich ist es wichtiger, diese Kunstform erlebbar zu machen“, meint Lawrence Okello, musikalischer Leiter von Amadinda Uganda.
Einzigartige Klangerlebnisse und Dialoge verspricht das Zusammentreffen zweier Musikkulturen. Improvisationen aus dem ehemaligen Königreich der Buganda treten in Beziehung zu zeitgenössischen Kompositionen
von Philipp Tröstl, Miguel Kertsman und Julian Garmisch, die im Rahmen des Konzertes uraufgeführt werden.
Erstmals ist hier auch die Akadinda zu hören, ein drei Meter langes Xylophon, das von sechs Personen gleichzeitig gespielt wird.
Das Ensemble AMADINDA UGANDA versteht sich als Übermittler von Kompositionen aus der Zeit des vorkolonialen Königreichs Buganda, die trotz Verbot unter der Herrschaft von Idi Amin im Untergrund überlebt haben und bis heute in Uganda zu hören sind. Hauptinstrument ist die Akadinda, ein Xylophon mit zwölf Klangplatten. Jeweils drei Musiker mit zwei Schlägeln spielen gleichzeitig auf einem Instrument.
Durch die Verzahnung der Schlagmuster entstehen Klänge, die Hörer der nördlichen Hemisphäre in Staunen versetzen. Das Ensemble Amadinda Uganda tritt in dieser Formation erstmals in Europa auf. Klassische Hofmusik der Baganda wird in den Konzerten ebenso zu hören sein, wie zeitgenössische Kompositionen.
TRIBUTE TO NELSON MANDELA CONCERT
Mo 20. April 2015, 20.00 Uhr Wiener Konzerthaus, Grosser Saal
Pretty Yende Sopran
{started her international career when in 2010 was the first artist in the history of the Belvedere Competition to win First Prize in every category. She went on in 2011 to win the Placido Domingo Operalia Competition.}
KS Johan Botha Tenor
{KS stands for Austrian Kammersaenger – the highest distinction for a singer in this Opera-crazy Nation.}
Wiener KammerOrchester
Stefan Vladar Dirigent
Werke von Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini, Puccini, Lehar, J. Strauß
Dieses Konzert feiert Südafrikas zwanzigjähriges Jubiläum von Freiheit und Demokratie und somit den Beginn des dritten Jahrzehnts. Es ist Südafrikas erstem demokratisch gewählten Präsidenten und weltweiter Ikone, Nelson Mandela, gewidmet. Der Erlös dieses Konzertabends wird für die Errichtung des Nelson Mandela Kinderkrankenhaus in Johannesburg verwendet.
Es war Nelson Mandelas letzter Wunsch, ein Kinderkrankenhaus in Johannesburg zu errichten, die zweite medizinische Einrichtung dieser Art in Südafrika und die fünfte auf dem gesamten afrikanischen Kontinent.
Ein Benefizkonzert zugunsten des Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital Trust veranstaltet von der Südafrikanischen Botschaft, Wien
I would like to stress here further that the two singers, besides being now the greatest musical Ambassadors of the 20 years young South Africa – the acclaimed tenor Bootha and the rising star Yende – are in their hopefully color-blind Nation a terrific pairing of a white star and a black star. Their music is in the best tradition of old Europe. Austria and the city of Vienna played an important role in the professional development of above two artists.
On the other hand, the musical group from Uganda performed in the the pre-colonial tradition of the now non-existing old Kingdom of Buganda where the King himself was a musician and composer. In the days of Idi Amin that tradition had to go underground hunted by that literally crazy black dictator who held back the development of independent Uganda. Now, the art of the Kingdom of Buganda is being studied at the school of ethnic musicology of the University of Vienna and the tour of the Amadinda was the occasion of joint performance of the percussionists from Uganda with fully developed local artists and students of the art of percussion from all over the world – including China – that work now in Vienna.
Significant as well was the naming last week of the square in front of the South African Embassy – Nelson Mandela Square.
Posted in Addis Ababa, Africa, Archives, Art Performance reviews, South Africa, Uganda
Big International Corporate interests in Africa and corrupt local despots are the trunk of Africa’s Poverty suppported by the foreign aid that lands in wrong hands..
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 14th, 2014
It is all because of interests of big business why Africa is held down – and this with the help of corrupt African Governments’ leaders. If this continues – there is indeed no future for Africa. Foreign aid by old industrialized
Nations is wasted effort.
US aid to DR Congo: No more free rides for corrupt government officials!
Did you know your tax dollars are subsidizing corrupt bureaucrats in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)? Instead of subsidizing millions of dollars in theft, fraud and unpaid taxes, the US should…Read more
Herakles Farms must Stop Unjust Lawsuits Against a Cameroonian Activist
Herakles Farms, a US based agribusiness has filed a lawsuit against Mr. Nasako Besingi, a Cameroonian activist for defamation for peacefully protesting against the company’s grabbing of his ancestral land in South-West Cameroon. For the defamation case, the maximum penalty is 6 months imprisonment and $4,000 in fines, money he does not have. Today, ask Mr. Patrick Jones to withdraw this lawsuit.
Posted in Addis Ababa, Africa, Archives, Brussels, Cameroon, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Geneva, Policy Lessons from Mad Cow Disease, Real World's News, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC, Rome, Rwanda, Vienna
Professor Jeffrey David Sachs, the fully pledged Sustainable Development Guru and Climate Change Visionary, made a big splash in Vienna on March 12, 2014 with THE AGE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. He became The First IIASA Distinguished Visiting Fellow.
Jeffrey D.Sachs
Jeffrey David Sachs (born November 5, 1954) is professor of economics and Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. One of the youngest economics professors in the history of Harvard University (at age 28), Sachs became known for his role as an adviser to Eastern European and developing country governments during the transition from communism to a market system or during periods of economic crisis. Subsequently he has been known for his work on the challenges of economic development, environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, debt cancellation, and globalization.
Sachs is Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Senior Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011). His latest book is To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace.
Sachs is leader in sustainable development and syndicated columnist whose monthly newspaper columns appear in more than 80 countries.
Now he teaches that the intertwined challenges of economic development, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability must be addressed holistically, or else the world will find itself at dire risk of social instability and environmental calamity. The path ahead is a narrow one, fraught with difficulties and uncertainties, yet the promise of a better life for billions of people is also realistic. With proper policies and global cooperation, ours can be the era that ends extreme poverty, stabilizes the world’s population, and ushers in the exciting prospects of a new period of sustainable growth.
Some more about Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Sachs was raised in Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, the son of Joan (née Abrams) and Theodore Sachs, a labor lawyer.
He attended Harvard College, where he received his B.A. summa cum laude in 1976. He went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, and was invited to join the Harvard Society of Fellows while still a Harvard graduate student. In 1980, he joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1982. A year later, at the age of 28, Sachs became a full professor of economics with tenure at Harvard – one of the youngest ever.
During the next 19 years at Harvard, he became the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade, director of the Harvard Institute for International Development at the Kennedy School of Government (1995–1999), and director of the Center for International Development (1999–2002).
In 2002, Sachs became the Director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University. His classes are taught at the School of International and Public Affairs and the Mailman School of Public Health, and his course “Challenges of Sustainable Development” is taught at the undergraduate level.
In his capacity as director of the Earth Institute, he leads a university-wide organization of more than 850 professionals from natural-science and social-science disciplines, in support of sustainable development.
Sachs has consistently advocated for the expansion of university education on sustainable development, and helped to introduce the PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, one of the first PhD programs of its kind in the U.S. He championed the new Masters of Development Practice (MDP), which has led to a consortium of major universities around the world offering the new degree. The Earth Institute has also guided the adoption of sustainable development as a new major at Columbia College. The Earth Institute is home to cutting-edge research on all aspects of earth systems and sustainable development.
Sachs’ policy and academic works span the challenges of globalization, and include: the relationship of trade and economic growth; the resource curse and extractive industries; public health and economic development; economic geography; strategies of economic reform; international financial markets; macroeconomic policy; global competitiveness; climate change; and the end of poverty. He has authored or co-authored hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including three bestsellers and a textbook on macroeconomics that is widely used around the world.
In 2011, Sachs called for the creation of a third U.S. political party, the “Alliance for the Radical Center.“
Advising in Latin America and post-communist economies:
Sachs is known for his work as an economic adviser to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. A trained macroeconomist, he advised a number of national governments in the transition from communism to market economies.
In 1985, Bolivia was undergoing hyperinflation and was unable to pay back its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Sachs, an economic adviser to the Bolivian government at the time, drew up an extensive plan, later known as shock therapy, to cut inflation drastically by liberalizing the Bolivian market, ending government subsidies, eliminating import quotas, and linking the Bolivian economy to the US dollar. After Sachs’s plan was implemented, inflation fell from 11,750% to 15% per year from 1985 to 1987.
In 1989, Sachs advised Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement and the Government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He wrote the first-ever comprehensive plan for the transition from central planning to a market economy, which became incorporated into Poland’s reform program led by Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz. Sachs was the main architect of Poland’s successful debt reduction operation. Sachs and IMF economist David Lipton advised the rapid conversion of all property and assets from public to private ownership. Closure of many uncompetitive factories ensued. In Poland, Sachs was firmly on the side of rapid transition to “normal” capitalism. At first he proposed US-style corporate structures, with professional managers answering to many shareholders and a large economic role for stock markets. That did not fly with the Polish authorities, but he then proposed that large blocks of the shares of privatized companies be placed in the hands of private banks. As a result, there were some economic shortages and inflation, but prices in Poland eventually stabilized. The Government of Poland awarded Sachs with one of its highest honors in 1999, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit. He also received an honorary doctorate from the Cracow University of Economics.
Sachs’ ideas and methods of transition from central planning were adopted throughout the transition economies. He advised Slovenia (1991) and Estonia (1992) in the introduction of new stable and convertible currencies. Based on Poland’s success, he was invited first by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then by Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the transition to a market economy. He served as advisor to Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and Finance Minister Boris Federov during 1991-93 on macroeconomic policies. He received the Leontief Medal of the Leontief Centre, St. Petersburg, for his contributions to Russia’s economic reforms.
Work on global sustainable economic development
More recently, Sachs has turned to global issues of economic development, poverty alleviation, health and aid policy, and environmental sustainability. He has written extensively on climate change, disease control, and globalization, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the fight against poverty and sustainable development.
Since 1995, Sachs has been deeply engaged in efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa. He has worked in more than two dozen African countries, and has advised the African leadership at several African Union summits. In the mid-1990s he worked with senior officials of the Clinton Administration to develop the concept of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). He has engaged with dozens of African leaders to promote smallholder agriculture and to fight high disease burdens through strengthened primary health systems. His pioneering ideas on investing in health to break the poverty trap have been widely applied throughout the continent. He currently serves as an advisor to several African governments, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda, among others.
In his 2005 work, The End of Poverty, Sachs wrote “Africa’s governance is poor because Africa is poor.” According to Sachs, with the right policies and key interventions, extreme poverty — defined as living on less than $1 a day — can be eradicated within 20 years. India and China serve as examples, with the latter lifting 300 million people out of extreme poverty during the last two decades. Sachs has said that a key element to accomplishing this is raising aid from $65 billion in 2002 to $195 billion a year by 2015. He emphasizes the role of geography and climate, as much of Africa is landlocked and disease-prone. However, he stresses that these problems can be overcome.
Sachs suggests that with improved seeds, irrigation, and fertilizer, the crop yields in Africa and other places with subsistence farming can be increased from 1 ton/hectare to 3-5 tons/hectares. He reasons that increased harvests would significantly increase the income of subsistence farmers, thereby reducing poverty. Sachs does not believe that increased aid is the only solution. He also supports establishing credit and microloan programs, which are often lacking in impoverished areas. Sachs has also advocated the distribution of free insecticide-treated bed nets to combat malaria. The economic impact of malaria has been estimated to cost Africa US$12 billion per year. Sachs estimates that malaria can be controlled for US$3 billion per year, thus suggesting that anti-Malaria projects would be an economically justified investment.
From 2002 to 2006, Sachs was the Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to then Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. Sachs founded the Millennium Villages Project, a plan dedicated to ending extreme poverty in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa through targeted agricultural, medical, and educational interventions. Along with philanthropist Ray Chambers, Sachs founded Millennium Promise, a nonprofit organization, to help the Earth Institute fund and operate the Millennium Villages Project.
The Millennium Villages Project, which he directs, operates in more than one dozen African countries, and covers more than 500,000 people. The MVP has achieved notable successes in raising agricultural production, reducing children’s stunting, and cutting child mortality rates, with the results described in several peer-reviewed publications. Its key concepts of integrated rural development to achieve the MDGs are now being applied at national scale in Nigeria and Mali, and are being used by many other countries to help support national anti-poverty programs. He works very closely with the Islamic Development Bank to scale up programs of integrated rural development and sustainable agriculture among the Bank’s member countries. One such project supports pastoralist communities in Eastern Africa, with six participating nations: Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan.
Since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, Sachs has been the leading academic scholar and practitioner on the MDGs. He chaired the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2000-1), which played a pivotal role in scaling up the financing of health care and disease control in the low-income countries to support MDGs 4, 5, and 6. He worked with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000-1 to design and launch the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He worked closely with senior officials of the George W. Bush administration to develop the PEPFAR program to fight HIV/AIDS, and the PMI to fight malaria. On behalf of Annan, from 2002-2006 he chaired the UN Millennium Project, which was tasked with developing a concrete action plan to achieve the MDGs. The UN General Assembly adopted the key recommendations of the UN Millennium Project at a special session in September 2005. The recommendations for rural Africa are currently being implemented and documented in the Millennium Villages, and in several national scale-up efforts such as in Nigeria.
Now a Special Adviser to current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Sachs is still a leading advocate for the Millennium Development Goals, frequently meeting with foreign dignitaries and heads of state. He has also become a close friend of international celebrities Bono and Angelina Jolie, both of whom have traveled to Africa with Sachs to witness the progress of the Millennium Villages.
In August 2012, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the launch of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which will mobilize scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector in support of sustainable-development problem solving at local, national, and global scales. The Network convenes 12 global expert Thematic Groups on key sustainable development challenges that will identify common solutions and highlight best practices, and over time will launch projects to pilot or roll-out solutions to sustainable development challenges and assist countries in developing sustainable long-term development pathways.
Sachs has been a consistent critic of the IMF and its policies around the world. He has blasted the international bankers for what he sees as a pattern of ineffective investment strategies.
In Vienna, Sachs presented THE AGE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT as an unavoidable direction for the future of humanity and stated clearly that he is an optimist and knows that in the end we will move in the right direction.
Wednesday, 12 March, 2014, 18:00
The Aula of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (1010 Vienna, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2).
The event was chaired jointly by Professor Pavel Kabat, the Director General of IIASA, Professor Anton Zeilinger – the institutional host, the President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences – the location host, and Dr. Franz Fischler the President of the European Forum Alpbach of Austria.
We heard an announcement about the creation of a new Think Tank based on the network that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon charged Professor Sachs to be its catalyst – that UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) of institutions dispersed globally. IIASA will organize one of these institutions and Professor Sachs will become in the future a more frequent visitor at IIASA. – perhaps IIASA will be a major locus for this Network. I understand that right the following day a small meeting at IIASA, with the participation of 10 people, will start on this endeavor.
THUS THE START OF A NEW PATH TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WITH THE UNDERSTANDING AND THE MANAGING OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS. Sachs pointed out that we proved to be so successful in extracting things and producing things that lead us to the present challenges – but these same qualities are also what will help us – – in the future – when applying them to reverse the present trend of self destruction by finding the right technologies that will move us in the right direction.
We are now the first generation that can bring havoc to the planet through our exploitation of it, but we will also be those that can apply the corrections. Sachs loves to quote President Kennedy who seems to be his idol – “Man holds in his hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life!” as per the January 20, 1963 Inaugural Address.
Sachs reminded us that 1692 billionaires (in dollars) hold $6.3 trillion dollars in their possession – and this inequality is the great challenge we face. It is combined further with environmental and social issues. When the past century has raised the ocean level by 75 cm in New York City it was the poor that suffer most. He saw in the recent floods in New York that only the Goldman Sachs building was lit – this because they knew not to put the back-up generators in the basement – like all others did. Beijing that got its floods earlier, got now choked in smog – and the WHO advised people to stay indoors – think of the best economic development in history and now they have the worst air and water.
Professor Sachs went on to look at the Middle East and at Syria in particular. He drew intersecting circles for Social Systems (dynamics), the Economy (Techno-Economy), Earth Systems and Governance and pointed out how countries that lived in peace for centuries with the different population groups side-by-side were now at each other’s throat. He suggested to take the temperature of the social trust of societies. Then to analyze governance of the political system and the business system – eventually to look at political governance – and to see how this impacts on the stress.
Sachs looked at the US-Saudi-Turkey line-up vs. the Russia-Iran line up in regard to Syria – then looked at Mega-droughts and Sectarian Divisions – crops fail and reduce human security.
Complex systems have pivot points – the world does not care if poor hungry people when facing calamity tend to find a way out via migration – and disease, epidemics, violence – unrest can happen quickly. To bring home his points Professor Sachs showed us the map of the Middle East droughts and we saw how it fits also the violence patterns.
Looking closer to home – to the US – Professor Sachs sees there the lack of “Points of View” – it could be dangerous for politicians to have a point of view, he said. We need planning in the US – but after the Soviet Union was gone the belief in the US seems to be that planning is a NO! NO! Markets are great institutions for distribution – but they do not plan.
Power can come from investing in young people. He also found that bad experience of parents can be passed to children – 2 generations down – and we do not understand how – but it is real he said.
Professor Sachs advocated that every country needed an energy plan – a strategy – it need not be the same. We destroy land, acidify water and lead to extinction of species – 30% of the world food is lost in transmission from farms to consumers. He mentioned the power of Hedge Funds but pointed out that 0.7% of the income on earth could help close the gap with the poor. He kept stressing that Wellbeing is not measured by GDP.
People want to live in societies that have social support systems.
Professor Sachs turned back to his Idol – President Kennedy and said that equal compliments deserved also Mr. Nikita Khrushchev, when the two went ahead with the partial nuclear treaty and said that the need was to have the Americans to change themselves and not just to try to change the world of their adversaries. Kennedy and Krushev were partners and both had opponents among the extremes in their systems.
Kennedy said: Let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved.
So, now – let us end poverty by 2030 – we know people are up to this challenge.
The most important vocabulary is built with the words – Poverty, Economy, Inclusion, Health, Food, Cities, and ENERGY/CLIMATE, Biodiversity, Governance – of which is built the SDNS Action Plan, 2013.
Illustrative SDGs:
End Extreme Poverty Including
Growth and Jobs
within Planetary
Effective Education for
All Children and Youth for Life and
Achieve Gender Equality, Social Inclusion, and Human Rights for
Achieve Health and Wellbeing at All
Improve Agricultural Systems and Rural
Empower Inclusive, Productive, and Resilient
Change and Ensure Sustainable
ENERGY/CLIMATE
Secure Ecosystem
Services, Biodiversity, Water, Natural Resources
10. Transform Government for Sustainable Development
The Kennedy goal to put a man on the moon in a decade can be the inspiration for goals like “Save the Planet,” “Save other Species” … WE ALL BREATH THE SAME AIR, WE ALL CHERISH OUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE, AND WE ARE ALL MORTAL (JFK, June 10, 1963).
Main points of the presentartion:
www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/ev…
Pavel Kabat
IIASA Director General and Chief Executive Officer Directorate
T +43(0) 2236 807 402
kabat@iiasa.ac.at
Claudia Heilig-Staindl
Executive Assistant Directorate
staindl@iiasa.ac.at
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) – Schlossplatz 1 – A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 – Fax: (+43 2236) 71 313 – info@iiasa.ac.at
Posted in Africa, Archives, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Futurism, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC, Rome, Vienna
From Oxfam – an Africa Climate Change Alliance – meeting 0f The Oversaes Development Institute in London, UK – March 26, 2014.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 7th, 2014
Register online for ACCRA event on 26th March: “Planning for change and uncertainty: how can development prepare for the future??
Léa Doumenjou LDoumenjou@oxfam.org.uk via lists.iisd.ca
Dear colleagues, The Africa Climate Change Alliance (ACCRA) invites you to discusshow development sector currently plans for the future, and what practical tools can be used better equip decision makers (whether within government, NGOs or private sector) in preparing for change and uncertainty.This public event will showcase findings from a major report, building on 4 years of research and capacity building from the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA). It documents ACCRA’s efforts to design, trial and evaluate a tool for promoting Flexible and Forward-looking Decision Making (FFDM) through a “game-enabled reflection approach”. The tool was trialled with local and national decision makers in Uganda, Ethiopia and Mozambique.When:
26th March, 16:30 – 18:00
The event is hosted by the Overseas Development Institute in London and will be streamed live online.
Follow this link for direction to the ODI office:
Sign up here if you’re able to attend the event in person or if you’ll be watching us online. Places fill up quickly so please make sure you register early enough!
The phase 2 research report will be launched a week before the event.
In the meantime, you can learn more about the concept of flexible forward looking making and the tools to experience it in this report.
How can you practice your ability to plan for the future? Watch us playing the game in Kotido district, Uganda.
We hope you can join us on the 26th March!
The ACCRA team.
Léa Doumenjou | ACCRA Programme Officer
Oxfam GB | Kampala, Uganda | +256 (0) 785762216 | skype: leaoxfam
community.eldis.org/accra/
Posted in Africa, Archives, European Union, Future Events, Kenya, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Uganda, United Kingdom
Peace And Sustainable Development: A Two-Way Relationship. The importance to the UN of Fethullah Gulen’s teachings that have the power of a magic Rumi spell against the Islamic UN Retro-Members in the Current General Assembly efforts.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 9th, 2014
Supported by the Permanent Mission of El Salvador to the UN,
The Journalists & Writers Foundation (JWF) – an ECOSOC NGO at the UN – based in Turkey, and
The Peace Islands Institute based in New York City
Chaired by Galymshan Kirbasov, Adjunct Faculty at Columbia University with a pannel :
Mr. Huseyin Hurmali, Vice President JWF,
H.E. Carlos Enrique Garcia Gonzalez, El Salvador Ambassador to the UN,
Prof. Alastair Smith, Dept of Politics at the New York University,
Prof. Severine Autesserre, Barnard College, Columbia University,
Prof. Johannes Urpelainen, Columbia University,
Friday, February 7, 2014 – during the lunch-break time slot at the last day of the 8-th Session of the OWG on the topic of the post-2015 SDGs.
The JWF is active since 1994 in efforts to promote love, tolerance and dialogue in an effort to create common living space based on reconciliation and mutual respect. The strategy is to bring together people from different backgrounds in order to find intellectual capital for social peace. They are active in 146 countries on 5 continents. and are inspired by the philosophy of the Turkish preacher, former imam, writer, and Islamic opinion leader who lives in self-imposed exile to Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania – Mr. Fethullah Gulen.
Throughout his life and until today, Fethullah Gulen has been greatly influenced by the ideas and writings of many great Muslim scholars, amongst them: Said Nursi, Mawlana Jalaladdin Rumi, Abu Hanifa, Ghazali, Imam Rabbani, Yunus Emre.
In line with these great thinkers, Fethullah Gulen’s philosophy and writings embody ideas of altruistic service to one’s community and likewise to humanity in general; harmony between intelligence and heart; sincerity; a holistic view of the human; a profound devotion and love of creation. Throughout his life, Mr. Gulen has been noted for his support of democracy, science, dialogue and non-violence.
In 1994, Mr. Gulen co-founded the “Journalists and Writers Foundation” and was given the title “Honorary President” by the foundation. In March 1999, upon the recommendation of his doctors, Fethullah Gulen moved to the U.S. to receive medical care.
In July 2008, Fethullah Gulen was voted the top public intellectual in the world by Foreign Policy Magazine.
He is serving also as the Honorary President of the Rumi Forum since 1999. He was recently listed by Time 100 of 2013.
Despite the high regard millions hold for him, Mr. Gulen considers himself a volunteering member of the civil society movement he helped found and does not accept any credit of leadership for the Hizmet (Service) Movement.
Fethullah Gulen devotes his time to reading, writing, and religious devotion. He has based his understanding of service upon this guiding principle, ‘living to let others live’ (‘yasatmak icin yasamak’ in Turkish).
The Gülen movement has been described as “having the characteristics of a cult” and its secretiveness and influence in Turkish politics likened to “an Islamic Opus Dei.“ In the Turkish context, Gülen appears as a religious conservative.
Gülen is actively involved in the societal debate concerning the future of the Turkish state and Islam in the modern world. Gullen has millions of followers in Turkey and outside Turkey.
His teachings differ in emphasis from those of other mainstream Islamic scholars in two respects, both based on his interpretations of particular verses of the Quran. Let us repeat this – He teaches that the Muslim community has a duty of service (Turkish: hizmet) to the “common good” of the community and the nationand to Muslims and non-Muslims all over the world; and also that the Muslim community is obliged to conduct interfaith dialogue with the “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians) – though this does not extend to other religions and it seems he dislikes atheists
His teachings about hizmet (altruistic service to the “common good”) have attracted a large number of supporters in Turkey, Central Asia, and increasingly in other parts of the world.
Gülen has supported Turkey’s bid to join the European Union and has said that neither Turkey nor the EU have anything to fear, but have much to gain, from a future of full Turkish membership in the EU.
Gülen has condemned terrorism. He warns against the phenomenon of arbitrary violence and aggression against civilians and said that it “has no place in Islam”. He wrote a condemnation article in the Washington Post on September 12, 2001, one day after the September 11 attacks, and stated that “A Muslim can not be a terrorist, nor can a terrorist be a true Muslim.” Gülen lamented the “hijacking of Islam” by terrorists.
Gülen criticized the Turkish-led Gaza flotilla for trying to deliver aid without Israel’s consent. He spoke of watching the news coverage of the deadly confrontation between Israeli commandos and multinational aid group members as its flotilla approached Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza. He said, “What I saw was not pretty, it was ugly.” He has since continued his criticism, saying later that the organizers’ failure to seek accord with Israel before attempting to deliver aid was “a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters.
Gülen is strongly against Turkish involvement in the Syrian Civil War. No doubt in our mind – Gullen is best advised not to return to Turkey or to any Muslim led country these days.
Despite Gülen’s and his followers’ claims that the organization is non-political in nature, analysts believe that a number of corruption-related arrests made against allies of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an reflect a growing political power struggle between Gülen and the prime minister. These arrests led to the 2013 corruption scandal in Turkey, which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s supporters (along with Erdo?an himself) and the opposition parties alike have said was choreographed by Gülen after Erdo?an’s government came to the decision early in December 2013 to shut down many of his movement’s private Islamic schools in Turkey.
The ongoing power struggle between the Erdo?an government and the Gülenists in the police force and the judiciary has allegedly revealed the existence of a well-organized and powerful “parallel state” directed by Gülen himself.The scandals uncovered what the Erdo?an government has said are the long term political agenda of Gülen’s movement to infiltrate security, intelligence, and justice institutions of the Turkish state, a charge almost identical to the charges found against Gülen by the Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Turkey in his trial in 2000 before Erdo?an’s party had come into power. Gülen was tried in absentia in 2000, and acquitted in 2008 under Erdo?an’s AKP government from these charges.
In emailed comments to the Wall Street Journal in January 2014, Gülen said that “Turkish people … are upset that in the last two years democratic progress is now being reversed,” but he denied being part of a plot to unseat the government ] Later, in January 2014, in an interview with BBC World, Gulen said “If I were to say anything to people I may say people should vote for those who are respectful to democracy, rule of law, who get on well with people. Telling or encouraging people to vote for a party would be an insult to peoples’ intellect. Everybody very clearly sees what is going on.
After this large introduction about one unusual intellectual Muslim living now in the US – let us see now what the Journalists & Writers Foundation and their Panel of Academics have as advise to the UN?
Professor Alastair Smith, who studied for years hunger in Ethiopia found that foreign aid funds that do-good NGOs funelled to ethiopian government or local NGOs never reached their intended targets for help, but were rather reaching arms dealers to supply the forces involved in the ongoing civil war. The money helped the dictators in order to increase the misery that was providing them with outside funding – a convenient cycle to them. So, the EU gave money through the UN affiliates to support arm exporters? Did I just hear an honest description of how the concept of Sovereignty at the UN makes it hard to do humanitarian work through the UN?
A Democratic Donor feeding money to an Autocratic Recipient is a self defeating procedure – anyone at the UN is honest enough to accept this true fact?
The Democracy helping the authoritarian government to keep the peace for trade and export of commodities, may look as a good deal to the democracy – but guess what – the poor people that were not helped by this will now hate the Democracy even more then their direct oppressors.
Then – if you get elected to the Security Council you get more aid then in the years you are not on the Security Council – that he checked easily by using not only indicators that related to GDP and growth in poor authoritarian countries that rotate in and out of the UN Security Council. He also checked indices of Human Rights and Freedom of the Press – and found that these are connected to aid money as well. When it arrives and when it is lower.
If you are supposed to do preventive work to avoid floods – but you find that aid money arrives after the floods did occur, you find it convenient to have those floods. What now with Climate Change an increasing factor? The remedy?
Do not give Misery-Money – rather Pay for Success Stories!Some pearls from Prof. Smith I found on the Internet: The Dictator’s Handbook 2011 PublicAffairs.
Quick study: Alastair Smith on political tyranny
How to be a dictator
Jan 1st 2012, 15:23 by A.B. | LONDON
ALASTAIR SMITH is professor of politics at New York University. The recipient of three grants from the National Science Foundation and author of three books, he was chosen as the 2005 Karl Deutsch Award winner, given biennially to the best international-relations scholar under the age of 40. He is co-author of “The Dictator’s Handbook: How Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics” (2011).
To whom do your guidelines apply?
Everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are a dictator, a democratic leader, head of a charity or a sports organisation, the same things go on. Firstly, you don’t rule by yourself—you need supporters to keep you there, and what determines how you best survive is how many supporters you have and how big a pool you can draw these supporters from.
Do they actually have to support me, or can I just terrify them into supporting me by threatening them with death?
No, they absolutely have to support you on some level. You can’t personally go around and terrorise everyone. Our poor old struggling Syrian president is not personally killing people on the streets. He needs the support of his family, senior generals who are willing to go out and kill people on his behalf. The common misconception is that you need support from the vast majority of the population, but that’s typically not true. There is all this protest on Wall Street, but CEOs are keeping the people they need to keep happy happy—the members of the board, senior management and a few key investors—because they are the people who can replace them. Protesters on Wall Street have no ability to remove the CEOs. So in a lot of countries the masses are terrified but the supporters are not.
What about Stalin? Even his inner circle was terrified.
Well, the brilliance of the Soviet regime was not just that you relied on few people, but that there were lots of replacements. In a tsarist system you have to rely only on aristocrats, but in a Soviet system everyone can be your supporter. This puts your core circle on notice that they are easily replaced. That, of course, made them horribly loyal. The Mob are very good at this.
Suggested viewing: “On The Waterfront” (1954)
This sounds typically mammalian to me—just groups of gorillas with a silverback?
It is virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own self interest. If you are a democrat you want to gerrymander districts and have an electoral college. This vastly reduces the number of votes a president needs to win an election. Then tax very highly. It’s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren’t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can’t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas. This is always subject to the constraint that if you tax too highly people won’t work. This is the big debate in the US. The Republicans are saying that the Democrats have too many taxes and want to suppress workers. But when they were in power five years ago they had no problem with taxing and spending policies, but now it’s taxing their supporters to reward Democrats.
Suggested reading: “Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policy” by Robert Bates (2005)
Okay. So, I have a small group of rewarded cronies and a highly taxed population. Now what?
Don’t pay your supporters too much! You don’t want them saving up and forming their own power base. Also, don’t be nice to the people at the expense of your coalition. A classic example is natural disasters. Than Shwe was the ruler of Burma when Cyclone Nargis hit in 2008, and he did nothing to help the people. The Generals didn’t warn anybody; though they knew it was coming, they provided virtually no emergency protection. He sent the army in to prevent the people from leaving the flooded Delta areas. He was the perfect example of a leader who never made the mistake of putting the people’s welfare above himself and his coalition.
But what if you really are trying to work for the common good? Is there no way of doing that?
None. If you’re working for the common good you didn’t come to power in the first place. If you’re not willing to cheat, steal, murder and bribe then you don’t come to power.
What if you’re Lech Walesa?
I’m pretty certain he had his own political power base. He wanted to make society more inclusive. This is always the battle cry of revolutionary leaders. When they get into power they change their tune. The real question is what stops politicians from backsliding once they get in? Typically, it’s that the country is broke and the only way you can get people to work is by empowering them socially, but once you do that it becomes hard to take powers back from them. Broke countries are the ones that end up having the political reforms that make them nice places with good economic policy in the long run. Places where there is oil, like Libya, have a very low chance of having democracy. The leaders don’t really need the people to pay the bills of their cronies, because they have oil.
French speaking Professor Severine Autesserre had first hand experience in Congo.
Dr. Autesserre’s current research project examines how everyday elements influence international peacebuilding interventions on the ground. She has conducted extensive fieldwork for this project between 2010 and 2012, with a primary case study on the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and comparative research in Burundi, Cyprus, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste. Findings from this project have appeared in Critique Internationale and African Affairs, and Dr. Autesserre is finalizing a book entitled Peacebuilders: An Ethnography of International Intervention (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2014).
Professor Autesserre’s previous research project focused on local violence and international intervention in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she has traveled regularly since 2001. It culminated in the book The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The book won the 2012 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order and the 2011 Chadwick Alger prize presented by the International Studies Association to the best book on international organizations and multilateralism. Research for this project has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, International Organization, the Review of African Political Economy, the African Studies Review, the African Security Review, the Revista de Relaciones Internationales, and the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs.
Professor Autesserre’s work has been supported by two research awards from the United States Institute of Peace (2004-2005 and 2010-2012), two Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation research grants (2010 and 2011), a Presidential Research Award from Barnard (2010-2011), several grants from Columbia University (2010 – 2012), two Mellon Fellowships in Security and Humanitarian Action (2004-2006), and a Fulbright Fellowship (1999-2000). Her Ph.D. dissertation at New York University was nominated for the award for best dissertation for 2007 in the areas of in international relations, law, and politics. Her paper “Local Violence, National Peace? Post-war ‘Settlement’ in the Eastern D.R. Congo,” was awarded the Graduate Student Paper Prize Award of the African Studies Association in 2006.
Professor Autesserre has extensive experience working with international humanitarian and development agencies in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nicaragua, India, and the United States. She has worked for organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Doctors of the World.
Professor Autesserre says that in Congo a main problem was that outside intervention did very little work with grass-roots – it was rather a top-down story for a top-down solution.
Prof. Séverine Autesserre pens op-ed about Congo for The New York Times
Political science professor urges support of local grassroots efforts to establish peace.
Prof. Severine Autesserre comments on the case against Congo warlords
among Working papers:
The Responsibility to Protect in the Congo: The Failure of Prevention
Chapter in O’Bannon, Brett; Roth, John; and Bellamy, Alex (eds.) The Evolution of the Responsibility to Protect: Imperfect Duties?, Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect series, Routledge, accepted for publication, forthcoming 2014
French speaking Prof. Autresserre analyses the local reasons that in times of stress cause peaceful neighbors to turn against each other leading to scale-up, or if you wish a bottom-to-top fight. But she finds also the total lack of preventive work by outsiders that appear is if to help after the fact and address this as a top-to-bottom issue. Sustainable Development as a preventive means is the way to go but she makes it clear that we are in a two-way system – tus the title of our meeting.So in summary – LOCAL CONFLICT HINDERS DEVELOPMENT – MAKE PEACE SUSTAINABLE!
The Congo is her forte – it got disorganized via Belgium colonialism, and a question from the audience was about Mozambique – the former Portuguese colony. How is it that there the same post-colonialism period got its differences tamed down rather early. What else could one infer from this? The answer was not clear – it may be that a better local leadership evolved earlier. Whatever, the conclusion is still that conflict must be resolved from bottom-up and outside funding has to go to local support.
Professor Johannes Urpelainen of the Political Science Department at Columbia is closest to our own themes.
He spoke recently at Yale Climate& Energy Institute examining the potential for using renewable sources of energy, notably solar power, to combat energy poverty in India where two-thirds of the population relies on traditional biomass for cooking and one-third does not have access to basic household electricity. His presentation argued that solar power holds a lot of promise for providing deprived rural communities with basic electricity services, but power sector reforms are necessary for the provision of larger, productive loads of power.
He also described an experimental research design for identifying the socio-economic effects of solar power on rural communities in Uttar Pradesh.
Also of interest we found his:
Explaining the Schwarzenegger Phenomenon: Local Frontrunners in Climate Policy. 2009. Global Environmental Politics 9 (3): 82-105.
examines the potential for using renewable sources of energy, notably solar power, to combat energy poverty in India where two-thirds of the population relies on traditional biomass for cooking and one-third does not have access to basic household electricity. His presentation argues that solar power holds a lot of promise for providing deprived rural communities with basic electricity services, but power sector reforms are necessary for the provision of larger, productive loads of power. He also describes an experimental research design for identifying the socio-economic effects of solar power on rural communities in Uttar Pradesh. – See more at: the potential for using renewable sources of energy, notably solar power, to combat energy poverty in India where two-thirds of the population relies on traditional biomass for cooking and one-third does not have access to basic household electricity. His presentation argues that solar power holds a lot of promise for providing deprived rural communities with basic electricity services, but power sector reforms are necessary for the provision of larger, productive loads of power. He also describes an experimental research design for identifying the socio-economic effects of solar power on rural communities in Uttar Pradesh. – See more at: Can Renewables Address Energy Poverty in India?
Can Renewables Address Energy Poverty in India?
At the meeting at the UN he took for granted that Peace is a precondition for Sustainable Development but raised the question if indeed Sustainable Development is a pre-condition for Peace. This is more complicated and not so clear. In effect, just a few years ago it seemed not accepted yet that environmental dgradation leads to violence. This changed now with our awareness of Climate Change and its effects.
Higher temperatures in Africa co-relates with the starting of wars. He continued by saying:
“WE MUST CONSIDER WHAT WE DO HERE IN AMERICA AS A REASON OF WAR THERE IN AFRICA” – “WE MUST FIND NEW WAYS TO TREAT LOCAL ENVIRONMENTAL STRESS.” {I did the unusual thing and clapped my hands.}
“Green Growth is important also in the developing countries of the south. This because what happens in India will influence Africa and this will influence us here as well.”
If you are a poor country there is little you can do to prepare yourself – you find that misery is transferred to you from the outside via Global Warming.
For SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT THE ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSION MUST BE CONSIDERED IN THE SDGs,
he stressed.
In the discussion that followed it was stressed from around the table that Congo (and Mozambique) are among the wealthiest countries in the world because of the presence of large natural resources. In Congo the revenue flow to the government lets nothing for the people. This is actually a resource curse that is at the root of problems. AID is negative. The problem is that there are many rich people and their income is not taxed so there is no official money for the poor. This is an outside involvement problem and a lack of governance. It is the pits.
The Peace Islands hosts of the meeting mentioned here Syria where the conflict involves the people versus the government directly. To which Prof Autesserre said that you must have different policies for different dimensions of conflict. This gets us to the issue of how we react to the concept of the Sovereignty of the State. We must approach this in a way we support the local actors without creating the feeling that we take over the State. That was the problem that has led t people hating the US when it acted as a tool to regime change.
Migration was mentioned – also here the issue is internal migration as separate from international migration. Africa has a set of rules for internal migration under the Kampala agreement – but there is nothing in the books about external migration.
In relation to this panel, I will also include an official UN panel that made its work now that same day – actually in parallel – that same time.
Chaired by former South Africa President Thabo Mbeki with a Vice-President from business, Carlos Lopez, as his co-chair, and other 8 distinguished members, the UN High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows that leave Africa, was established by the UN Secretary-General and the UN General Assembly President. This Panel announced its findings – and they are atrocious – showcasing what our Panel was all about.
As said in the opening speech by Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson of Sweden, it is $50 billion per year that leave Africa – the damage to individuals and Africa’s development and governance agenda as a whole. This figure is much higher then the official ODA that goes to Africa – so is it not that Africa’s poor actually finance the World’s rich?
Eliasson continued and said that this is looked at by the Un, not just for Africa, in regard to the post-2015 Development Agenda that will have to address the illicit flows and tax evasions and help recover some of these stollen assets.
The Panel’s findings were that two thirds of the out-flow from Africa came from the two regions – West Africa (38% and North Africa 28%. The other regions were as follows: Southern Africa 13%, Eastern Africa 11%, and Central Africa 10%.
The money came from OIL and PRECIOUS METALS AND MINERALS – with 3-4% sourced each from categories – ores, machinery, fruits and nuts, copper, iron &steel, cocoa, textiles, fish and crustaceans.
This meaning that about 75% came from the exports of oil, gold, platinum, and diamonds.
Further – Corruption defined as – bribery, embezzlement – accounted only for 5% of the financial flows – with 35% defined as Criminal activities such as the trade in drugs, weapons, and people.
Astonishingly this leaves 60% as leaving the continent in Commercial transactions through multinational companies.
Under-Secretar-General Eliasson commended the Panel for their research and for reaching out to officials from: “the United States Government, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and others in Washington Dc – and looks forward to further insights the distinguished members of the Panel will have on this important issue.”
One last comment about all of this regards the UN Department of Public Information and the official UN Spokesman for the Secretary General.
That office’s MEDIA ALERT knew to announce only a 1:15 pm Panel discussion of “Decent Jobs in the Transition to a Sustainable Economy” – totally by-passing any reference to the PRESS about the Peace and Sustainable Development panel – but that is an old story – some at DPI just do not like the Sustainable Development concept – it is too closely related to a future decrease of oil money flows.
On the other hand – they had to make place for a few minutes to President Mbeki – that would have been too much to cut him out – but that same day they did cut out completely the event with the President of the UN General Assembly by first announcing 10 minutes with his spokesperson Ms. Afaf Konja and then pushing her out as it obviously was going to fall to the way-side because of “Stake-Outs” at the Security Council. Oh Well – did we ever believe the UN bureaucracy will help?
the potential for using renewable sources of energy, notably solar power, to combat energy poverty in India where two-thirds of the population relies on traditional biomass for cooking and one-third does not have access to basic household electricity. His presentation argues that solar power holds a lot of promise for providing deprived rural communities with basic electricity services, but power sector reforms are necessary for the provision of larger, productive loads of power. He also describes an experimental research design for identifying the socio-economic effects of solar power on rural communities in Uttar Pradesh. – See more at: Can Renewables Address Energy Poverty in India?
Posted in Africa, Archives, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Ethiopia, Global Warming issues, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC
At the Kreisky Forum, Vienna, January 13, 2014 a Discussion of the EU and the Crises in the SAHEL extending from Mali to the Central African Republic.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 7th, 2014
Monday, 13. Jänner 2014, 7 p.m.
Bruno Kreisky Forum for international Dialogue | Armbrustergasse 15 | 1190 Wien
R.s.v.p: Tel.: 3188260/20 | Fax: 318 82 60/10 | e-mail: einladung.kreiskyforum@kreisky.org
THE CRISES IN THE SAHEL REGION AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE FOR EUROPE.
Michel Reveyrand de Menthon
EU Special Representative for the Sahel
Günther Barnet
Federal Ministry for Defense and Sports; Head of Africa Policy Department
Georg Lennkh
Member of the Board of the Bruno Kreisky Forum
For some time now, the European Union has recognized the Sahel Region as an area where security and development are closely interlinked and where the EU can and should play an important role in bringing these two aspects together. The EU had therefore worked out a ‘Strategy for Security and Development in the Sahel’ and made this by Council decision an official part of European Common Foreign Policy. With the events in Mali, not even one year ago, this strategy took on a special significance and the EU decided, in March 2013, to nominate Michel Reveyrand de Menthon as EU Special Representative for the Sahel Region. The key aspect of his mandate is to contribute to the implementation, coordination and further development of the Unions comprehensive approach to the regional crisis, on the basis of its Strategy, with a view to enhancing the overall coherence and effectiveness of Union activities in the Sahel, in particular in Mali.
Although the Sahel region had designated as its primary focus namely Mali, Mauritania and Niger, it was clear that the regional ramifications would extend to the Maghreb and South and East to the adjacent African countries.
The presentation of M. Reveyrand de Menthon will therefore cover a wider geographical area, and will have a particular significance also in view of the very recent intensification of the conflict in the Central African Republic.
For Austria, the topic, and the visit of M. Reveyrand de Menthon has particular relevance because of the participation of a small contingent of troops in the EU Training Mission in Mali.
Karin Mendel
Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue
1190 Vienna, Armbrustergasse 15
Tel:+43-(0)1-3188260
Fax:+43-(0)1-3188260/10
www.kreisky-forum.org
Posted in Africa, Archives, Austria, Central African Republic (C.A.R.), European Union, Future Events, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Vienna
July was the US presidency month at the UN Security Council. That baton is being passed now to Argentina that restarts the alphabet. Matthew Lee offers a summary.
US Month Ends with Kerry – & Hate Speech? – in UNSC.
Samantha Power in Wings
By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, July 29 — As the United States’ month as President of the UN Security Council comes to a close, it’s time to review it as best as we can. Secretary of State John Kerry came once, on a July 25 day trip, to chair the meeting on Africa’s Great Lakes region.
While there, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s foreign minister said that all rebellions in the region bear the same “genetic signature.”
After diplomats from a number of member states complained this was hate speech, even “genocide talk,” Inner City Press asked the US Mission to the UN if it had a comment. Apparently it had none, as least as of yet.
And outside the US Mission on July 25, after a two hour wait for a 45 second photo op of Kerry and Syria oppositionist al Jarba, Kerry told Inner City Press he hadn’t heard the comment. Fine – but it was in the DRC’s written speech, and is on UN Webcast. UN video here at 1:06:20
(The US Mission did, we note, provide a response from Kurtis Cooper about cholera in Haiti at the beginning of the month, and from Payton Knopf about the rapes in Minova in November by the Congolese Army near the end of the month, here.)
Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo handled the presidency ably, held a number of stakeouts; Jeffrey DeLaurentis held one, and answered questions on Darfur. But what’s been done on the seven peacekeepers killed there?
Syria was and is the “big one.” Interesting, at the General Assembly session on July 29, the US was humble. While the UK’s Mark Lyall Grant and even France’s fill-in for Gerard Araud went to the front and inveigh, Ambassador DiCarlo spoke from her seat, later in the meeting. Will this be Samantha Power’s approach when, as seems sure to happen, she arrives?
Among diplomats asked Monday by Inner City Press about Samantha Power, a number noted things she’d said at her confirmation hearing. That the US has nothing to apologize for about the Rwanda genocide struck some more than others as a false note, inconsistent with her book “A Problem from Hell.” But what will she do, once at the UN? Watch this site.
Footnote: there are three mandate renewals to be “done” on July 30. Of them, Inner City Press is told that the Cote d’Ivoire renewal might, just might, have “explanations of vote,” on the draw-down of peacekeepers and on “ICC issues.” Others say it will just fly through without a single explanation. We’ll see.
Posted in Archives, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC
It would help if the UN could accept the idea of need for self criticism – specially on issues of “NEVER AGAIN” – as its record on Rwanda hampers its effectiveness when on-going wars are being considered.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 10th, 2013
On Rwanda Genocide, UN Silent on Its Own Role, So ICP Asks, Duhozanye Answers
UNITED NATIONS, April 9 — When the UN invited two Rwanda genocide survivors to speak on April 9, commemorating 19 years after UN peacekeepers left in the face of mass murder, one expected the “lessons learned” to also be about the UN.
But the formal presentation asked Daphrose Mukarutamu, founder of the Duhozanye organization, and her fellow survivor only about reconciliation in the country. The UN Women panelist, Nahla Valji, spoke about the gacaca courts.
But in terms of “Never Again,” what of the UN’s own performance, its abandonment of the victim, even helping the genocidaires to escape into Eastern Congo?
As we have noted, current chief of UN Peacekeeping Herve Ladsous in 1994 as Deputy Permanent Representative of France advocated for and facilitated this rescue of genocidaires, through “Operation Turquiose.”
Ladsous refused to answer Inner City Press questions about his role, then refused to answer ANY questions from Inner City Press, including about rapes by the Congolese Army, his partners.Video at On Tuesday night, the UN did not ask about these issues either. So Inner City Press did. YouTube video as above.
Daphrose Mukarutamu replied with dignity that members of Duhozanye have testified in Arusha against those who committed the genocide, and the government is trying to track more down.
But what of, for example, Callitxe Mbarushimana, who while working for UNDP in 1994 used UN vehicles and radios to kill at least three dozen Tutsis, including Florence Ngirumpatse, the director of personnel at UNDP’s office in Kigali?
The UN let him keep working for them, in Angola where he was not even language qualified, until he was outed in 2001 working for the UN in Kosovo. Even then, he was paid an additional $35,000.
After Inner City Press’ question, and Daphrose Mukarutamu’s answer, a participant hissed to Inner City Press, do you think that question elevated the discussion?
It had to be asked. It should have been in the introduction. It should have been in Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s canned statement over the weekend. And it will continued to be asked.
Duhozanye is composed of, and cares for, genocide survivors, now focusing on those who are aging without family members to take care of them. They want to start a retirement community. The event was strangely lacking in contact information for them. But we suggest an Internet search: Duhozanye. And check out, as well, Callitxe Mbarushimana and the history of Herve Ladsous, while you’re at it.
Footnote: the UN Department of Public Information, the evening’s host, does some good programs, and surely will do more. But they should have included some mention of the UN’s own role.
And, just within UN Headquarters itself, they should be more forthright about how and why they raided the office of Inner City Press without consent or even notice on March 18, and how photographs they took were leaked to BuzzFeed.com on March 21. The Rwandan mission is aware of what DPI did, even referred to it on UNTV earlier this month. Accountability, high and low. Or impunity?
Posted in Addis Ababa, Archives, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Geneva, Paris, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Rwanda, Vienna
The After-Life Bulb: Elmot Ltd. is selling in Uganda an Electric bulb that has built-in batteries so it can continue giving light for 6 hours when the wires go dead. It can be used also as a torch-light.
We find the following interesting for a different reason as well –
The use of these bulbs in relation to the introduction of decentralized solar and wind electricity. The bulb becoming its own battery! (ST editor)
?UMEME Blackouts? No Worries with a Rechargeable Bulb.
GreenPower Uganda, March 5, 2013,
Rechargeable BULB that gives U light When UMEME Power Goes OFF– Only Ugsh. 15,000/=
Rechargeable LED Bulb with inbuilt Battery at 15,500/=
1. Built in rechargeable battery, can last 4-6 hours when UMEME Power is off.
2. Screw the bulb into a bulb AC power holder for charging and at the same time as you use it for lighting the room.
3. When UMEME Power goes off, the Bulb Automatically continues giving you light for another 6 hours.
4. It Can also be used as a torch when power goes off; a lamp, emergency light, camping lamp and all kinds of light source,
5. Low power consumption- Only 3 watts compared to 100 Watts of Normal Bulbs.
6. LED super bright Technology with Built life of upto 100,000 hours- making it extremely durability.
7. Excellent Energy-Saving Performance upto 95%.
8. Easy mounting: can be mounted directly into a normal Lamp holder.
9. Remote Control: you can remotely turn on/off the bulb.
10. Simple to use, Convenient to carry
Green Power Solutions
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Elmot Ltd is a medium size company with 10 employees and looks forward to employing more dynamic and talented individuals as we grow towards our vision promoting the use and appreciation of ICTs in Uganda. www.elmot.ug
Posted in Addis Ababa, Africa, Archives, Futurism, Nairobi, Real World's News, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Uganda, Vienna
As Revolutionary as saying Good Morning: To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart. The continuing legacy of colonialism in Africa is to be found in the largest artificial States it left behind and at the UN where dictators are honored and supported.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on December 1st, 2012
WHY DOES NOT SOMEONE SPEAK THE TRUTH TO THE UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY AND ITS SECURITY COUNCIL?
THE LARGEST STATES OF AFRICA MUST BE BROKEN UP IN ORDER TO ALLOW THE PEOPLE CREATE THE GOVERNMENT THEY NEED SO THEY CAN THRIVE FROM THE HUGE RESOURCES THESE COUNTRIES POSSES. ANYTHING ELSE IS SIMPLY THE CONTINUATION OF COLONIALISM BY PROXY EMPIRES.
SUDAN FOR INSTANCE HAS FINALLY BEEN ALLOWED TO BREAK INTO TWO – BUT EVEN SO IT IS TOO LARGE TO BE GOVERNED OUT OF ARAB KHARTOUM. CONGO IS JUST AS BAD AND HIDING BEHIND THE WORDS DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC IS NOT EVEN A FIG LEAF OVER ITS NAKEDNESS.
The New York Times Op-Ed Contributor
To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart
J. PETER PHAM writes – Congo isn’t too big to fail; it’s too big to succeed. Rather than striving to hold it together, we should let it break up.
By J. PETER PHAM
Published: November 30, 2012 – in print December 1, 2012
THE Democratic Republic of Congo, which erupted in violence again earlier this month, ought to be one of the richest countries in the world.
Its immense mineral reserves are currently valued by some estimates at more than $24 trillion and include 30 percent of the world’s diamond reserves; vast amounts of cobalt, copper and gold; and 70 percent of the world’s coltan, which is used in electronic devices. Yet the most recent edition of the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index ranked Congo last among the 187 countries and territories included in the survey.
Congo has been poorly governed throughout its post-colonial history, and is chronically prone to violence. What is the secret to stabilizing the resource-rich country?
Instead of prosperity, Congo’s mineral wealth has brought only an endless procession of unscrupulous rulers eager to exploit its riches, from King Leopold II of Belgium to Mobutu Sese Seko, who was allowed by the logic of the cold war to rule the same area as a private fief. And last year, the current president, Joseph Kabila, who inherited the job from his assassinated father more than a decade ago, awarded himself another five-year term in elections that were criticized by everyone from the European Union to the country’s Roman Catholic bishops.
If some enterprises, public or private, can be said to be “too big to fail,” Congo is the reverse: it is too big to succeed. It is an artificial entity whose constituent parts share the misfortune of having been seized by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in the name of a rapacious 19th-century Belgian monarch. From the moment Congo was given independence in 1960, it was being torn apart by centrifugal forces, beginning with separatism in the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga.
The international community has repeatedly dodged this reality by opting for so-called peace deals with shelf lives barely longer than the news cycle. Rather than nation-building, what is needed to end Congo’s violence is the opposite: breaking up a chronically failed state into smaller organic units whose members share broad agreement or at least have common interests in personal and community security.
In recent weeks, a rebel group calling itself the March 23 Movement, or M23, has stormed through eastern Congo, scattering poorly trained units loyal to the government and reducing a huge United Nations peacekeeping force to a helpless bystander as M23 seized control of Goma, the capital of the resource-rich North Kivu province. The rebel advance rekindled fears of a renewal of the bloody 1998-2003 Second Congo War, which drew the armies of a host of African countries as well as countless local militias into what was aptly dubbed “Africa’s world war.”
The M23 rebels appear indistinguishable from the several dozen other armed groups lurking in or around Congo, but in many respects they are quite different. Many M23 members are veterans of an earlier insurgent group, the National Congress for the Defense of the People, known by the French acronym C.N.D.P., which consisted largely of ethnic Tutsi Congolese who had banded together to fight the former Hutu génocidaires who fled to Congo following the end of their killing spree in Rwanda in 1994.
In a peace deal that was reached nearly four years ago, the Kabila government promised to facilitate the return of more than 50,000 Congolese Tutsi refugees, to integrate C.N.D.P. fighters into the national army, and to share power with the group’s leaders. Mr. Kabila’s failure to honor these commitments led to the current M23 revolt.
A United Nations report has accused the Rwandan government of supporting M23. Although Rwanda has denied it, this may well be true, and it is perfectly understandable given that the M23 rebels are fighting former Hutu génocidaires who still dream of invading Rwanda and finishing what they started nearly two decades ago.
Others have dismissed the M23 leaders as “warlords.” But warlords, even if they do not acquire power through democratic means, tend to provide some sort of political framework, often based on kinship ties or ethnic solidarity, that is seen as legitimate. They also tend to provide some basic security — which is more than the questionably legitimate Kabila government in Kinshasa provides for most Congolese.
Whatever else Congo’s various armed groups may be, they are clearly viewed by large segments of some communities as de facto protectors — a point underscored by the several hundred government soldiers and police officers who recently defected to M23 and publicly swore allegiance to it after the fall of Goma.
If Congo were permitted to break up into smaller entities, the international community could devote its increasingly scarce resources to humanitarian relief and development, rather than trying, as the United Nations Security Council has pledged, to preserve the “sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity” of a fictional state that is of value only to the political elites who have clawed their way to the top in order to plunder Congo’s resources and fund the patronage networks that ensure that they will remain in power.
Despite its democratic misnomer, Mr. Kabila has repeatedly delayed holding local elections since 2005. For years, every last mayor, burgomeister and neighborhood chief in the entire country has been appointed by presidential decree.
Given the dysfunctional status quo and the terrible toll it has exacted in terms of lives and resources, the West should put aside ideological dogmatism in favor of statesmanlike pragmatism and acknowledge the reality that, at least in some extreme cases, the best way to break a cycle of violence is to break up an artificial country in crisis and give it back to its very real people.
J. Peter Pham is director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council.
Room for Debate
How to Stabilize Congo
Dire Scene in Congolese City as Rebels Prepare to Leave (December 1, 2012)
Posted in Africa, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Darfur, Peoples without a UN Seat, Real World's News, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC, South Sudan (Juba), Sudan
Hunting Lodges for Arab Kings that replace the Maasai of Tanzania is not Development. Avaaz.org points at renewed danger to the Maasai – the tribe that are the real owners of the land that is home to lyons and leopards.
from: Sam Barratt – Avaaz.org
Middle Eastern kings and princes are about to force up to 48,000 people in Tanzania from their land to make way for corporate-sponsored big game hunting. But Tanzanian President Kikwete has shown before that he will stop deals like this when they generate negative press coverage. Deliver a media blitz that will push President Kikwete to stop the landgrab and save these Maasai.
At any moment, a big-game hunting corporation could sign a deal which would force up to 48,000 members of Africa’s famous Maasai tribe from their land to make way for wealthy Middle Eastern kings and princes to hunt lions and leopards. Experts say the Tanzanian President’s approval of the deal may be imminent, but if we act now, we can stop this sell-off of the Serengeti.
The last time this same corporation pushed the Maasai off their land to make way for rich hunters, people were beaten by the police, their homes were burnt to a cinder and their livestock died of starvation. But when a press controversy followed, Tanzanian President Kikwete reversed course and returned the Maasai to their land. This time, there hasn’t been a big press controversy yet, but we can change that and force Kikwete to stop the deal if we join our voices now.
If 150,000 of us sign, media outlets in Tanzania and around the world will be blitzed so President Kikwete gets the message to rethink this deadly deal. Sign the petition now and send to everyone:
www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_maasai_a/?biFBDab&v=17057
The Maasai are semi-nomadic herders who have lived in Tanzania and Kenya for centuries, playing a critical role in preserving the delicate ecosystem. But to royal families from the United Arab Emirates, they’re an obstacle to luxurious animal shooting sprees. A deal to evict the Maasai to make way for rich foreign hunters is as bad for wildlife as it is for the communities it would destroy. While President Kikwete is talking to favoured local elites to sell them on the deal as good for development, the vast majority of people just want to keep the land that they know the President can take by decree.
President Kikwete knows that this deal would be controversial with Tanzania’s tourists — a critical source of national income — and is therefore trying to keep it from the public eye. In 2009, a similar royal landgrab in the area executed by the same corporation that is swooping in this time generated global media coverage that helped to roll it back. If we can generate the same level of attention, we know the pressure can work.
A petition signed by thousands can force all the major global media bureaus in East Africa and Tanzania to blow up this controversial deal. Sign now to call on Kikwete to kill the deal:
Representatives from the Maasai community today urgently appealed to Avaaz to raise the global alarm call and save their land. Time and again, the incredible response from this amazing community turns seemingly lost causes into legacies that last a lifetime. Lets protect the Maasai and save the animals for tourists that want to shoot them with camera lenses, rather than lethal weapons!
With hope and determination,
Sam, Meredith, Luis, Aldine, Diego, Ricken and the rest of the Avaaz team
The Guardian: “Tourism is a curse to us”
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/06/masai-tribesman-tanzania-tourism
News Internationalist Magazine: “Hunted down”
www.newint.org/columns/currents/2009/12/01/tanzania/
Society for Threatened People: Briefing on the eviction of the Loliondo Maasai
lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/UPR/Documents/session12/TZ/STP-SocietyThreatenedPeople-eng.pdf
FEMACT: Report by 16 human rights investigators & media on violence in Loliondo
www.pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/58956/print
Voices of Loliondo: Short film from Loliondo on impact of eviction on Maasai
Posted in Addis Ababa, Kenya, Peoples without a UN Seat, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Tanzania
UNIDO Director-General Yumkella, in Kinshasa, says Agriculture is the most important sector of the African economy, nevertheless he calls for diversification, sustainable industrial and agribusiness development in.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 1st, 2012
UNITED NATIONS INFORMATION SERVICE VIENNA (UNIS)
UNIS/OUS/154
Director-General Kandeh K. Yumkella calls for economic diversification, sustainable industrial and agribusiness development in Africa.
KINSHASA/ VIENNA, 1 August (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) – The Director-General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) said today that agribusiness and agro-industries and economic diversification were key factors that would put Africa on the road to prosperity.
“Agriculture is the most important sector of the African economy and will have to be its driving engine out of poverty. It accounts for 65 per cent of the continent’s employment and 75 per cent of its domestic trade. Africa is also urbanizing at a fast rate. In order to turn bright prospects into employment opportunities for its young people, Africa needs to embrace economic diversification,” said Director-General Kandeh K. Yumkella.
He was a keynote speaker at the Africa Caucus Meeting in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo which brought together Africa’s finance ministers, central bank governors, and representatives of international development agencies and financial institutions. The other keynote speaker was Justin Lin, the former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, who is working with UNIDO for several weeks as a senior strategic adviser.
Yumkella also said it was necessary to boost agricultural productivity in the continent in order to achieve sustainable industrial and agribusiness development as a means of wealth and job creation.
During his two-day visit, Director-General Yumkella will have meetings with President Joseph Kabila, and Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo Mapon.
“The transformation of agricultural raw materials into industrial products depends increasingly on the capacity of African entrepreneurs to participate and compete in global, regional and local value chains. Accordingly, African agribusiness value chains will have to adapt to changing market conditions, continuously improve efficiency and strive to meet consumer requirements in a competitive global trade system,” said Yumkella.
He added that “high performance agribusiness value chains need to be based on processes that guarantee the highest product quality in a challenging global marketplace. Africa needs new learning and innovation systems involving regional cooperation, new types of partnerships between farmers, sellers, investors and researchers, and the right incentives and public actions that crowd-in rather than crowd-out private investment”.
He urged African countries to strategically invest in transport infrastructure, access to energy and water, ICTs and management efficiency in order for agribusiness to thrive.
“Without decisive action towards economic diversification, improvements in agricultural productivity and increased resources, water and energy efficiency, the creation of ‘decent’ employment opportunities to address the fast growing population and urbanization trends will not be possible,” said Yumkella.
“A green industrial policy can put Africa on a virtuous growth path. Governments need to introduce mechanisms comprised of appropriate incentives, disincentives and regulations to attract investments in the desired manufacturing areas and in much needed economic and physical infrastructure.”
In 2012, in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNIDO launched the Accelerated Agribusiness and Agro-industries Development Initiative, or 3ADI, to promote value addition to agricultural commodities, with the added value being realized in domestic markets and through global supply networks. The initiative is now operational in 12 countries, including Afghanistan, the Comoros Islands, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Haiti, Liberia, Madagascar, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Tanzania.
The Africa Caucus Meeting was formed following the Monterrey Convention of 2002 in Mexico. It comprises of African member countries of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) seeking to engage other policy makers around the continent in addressing issues relating to Africa’s economic transformation.
Director-General Yumkella is co-editor of a recent UNIDO Publication, “Agribusiness for Africa’s Prosperity”.
Watch a video with Director-General Yumkella speaking about the new book:
www.youtube.com/user/UNIDObeta#p/u/6/C23tW_MjnFE
The book is available in English and French and can be downloaded here:
www.unido.org/index.php?id=1001692
To read the full speech by Director-General Yumkella, please go here:
www.unido.org/fileadmin/user_media/DG/2012-Kinshasa-AFRICAN%20CAUCUS%20MEETING%20Speech.pdf
* *** *For more information on UNIDO, please contact:
Mikhail Evstafyev – UNIDO Advocacy and Communications Coordinator
Telephone: (+43-1) 26026-5021
Mobile: (+43-699) 1459-7329
Email: M.Evstafyev@]unido.org
Posted in Africa, Austria, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Vienna
Africa has lost about $800 Billion in a decade of Kleptomaniac Governments. Think what this money could have done for Africa’s Development.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 11th, 2012
The May/June issue of the Austrian Business Magazine for Economy, Environment and Corporate Social Responsibility “corporAID” stayed that11% of total monetary transactions by African Governments vanish in dark alleys towards foreign banking deposits. The paper knows because much of the money ends up in Austrian Banks. Further – the article states that by 2006 $700 t0 $800 Billions nave vanished this way.
The article mentioned names:
Champion was Hosni Mubarak of Egypt who stashed away in his family foreign accounts during his 30 years of Government Service – a neat amount of $70 Billion.
He is followed by the Gaddafis of Libya who needed all of 42 years in order to stash away only $60 Billion.
The list of the first 10 highest Kleptomaniac African Heads of State is rounded up in the following order:
#3 – Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe — $10 Billion.
#4 – Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan – $9 Billion
#5 – Mobutu Sese Seko of the DR of Congo – $5 Billion
#6 – Sani Abacha of Nigeria – $5 Billion
#7 – Zine Ben Ali of Tunesia – $5 Billion
#8 – Yoweri Museveni of Uganda – $4 Billion
#9 – Charles Taylor of Liberia – $3 Billion
#10 – Omar Bongo of Gabon – $2 Billion
These evaluations are backed by the British All Party Parliamentary Group and by the Washington Global Financial Integrity GFI Group.
Posted in Africa, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Egypt, Gabon, Liberia, Libya, Nigeria, Southern Africa, Sudan, Tunisia, Uganda, Zimbabwe
Nigeria, Tanzania, Eritrea, Rwanda talk at the UN of Africa problems that include terrorism and piracy and show the need for education, as well conflict mediation and perhaps a UN CONFLICT MEDIATION COMMISSION.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 24th, 2011
NIGERIAN LEADER PROPOSES CREATION OF UN CONFLICT MEDIATION COMMISSION
Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan today proposed to the General Assembly the creation of a conflict mediation commission within the office of the United Nations Secretary-General to develop strategies for the resolution of disputes across the world.
Such a commission would be tasked with collating information on conflicts, identifying the parties to them and developing rules of engagement, including the sanctions that would apply to those who obstruct efforts to resolve disputes peacefully, Mr. Jonathan told the Assembly’s annual general debate in New York.
“For the world to move from a culture of response after conflict to that of a culture of prevention, the international community must muster the political will to promote preventive diplomacy, in particular through mediation,” said Mr. Jonathan.
He said conflicts were also linked to the proliferation of small arms and pledged that Nigeria remains committed to the implementation of the Arms Trade Treaty that addresses the problem of illicit trade in small arms and light weapons.
Mr. Jonathan also voiced concern over the increasing incidence of piracy and maritime crime in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea and expressed his support for the Secretary-General’s proposal to send a UN assessment mission to the region to study the situation and explore possible options for UN support and action.
He pointed that Nigeria had in the recent past faced an upsurge in incidents of terrorism, including the suicide bomb attack on UN House in the capital, Abuja, on 26 August that claimed the lives of 23 people, including 11 UN staff, and said his country will continue to work with the world body and other partners to combat the scourge.
He announced that the UN Counter Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF) will launch its first project in Abuja in November intended to prevent conflict and counter the appeal of terrorism to youth through education and dialogue.
AFRICA THE FOCUS AS UN CHIEF HOLDS TALKS WITH TANZANIAN AND ERITREAN LEADERS
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with the leaders of Eritrea and Tanzania today to discuss some of the many political and humanitarian challenges confronting Africa.
In a tête-à-tête with Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki, held on the sidelines of the General Assembly’s annual general debate, Mr. Ban discussed peace and security issues in the Horn of Africa, particularly Somalia, Sudan and the long-standing border demarcation issue between Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Separately, the Secretary-General also met Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete and offered his personal condolences following the boat accident off the island of Zanzibar on 10 September that claimed the lives of nearly 200 people.
Mr. Ban and Mr. Kikwete also discussed Tanzania’s constitutional review process, as well as regional peace, security and development, including the situation in Somalia.
HOME-GROWN METHODS OF MEDIATION WORK BEST, RWANDA TELLS GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Conflict mediation efforts will be far more successful if they are home-grown and harness the capacities of young people and regional groups or institutions, Rwandan President Paul Kagame told the opening of the General Assembly’s annual general debate today.
Speaking at United Nations Headquarters in New York, Mr. Kagame warned that traditional methods of diplomacy can frequently take a toll on the people they are supposed to help.
“Too often, while resolutions are being debated and refined, people are dying,” he said. “And sometimes when those resolutions are eventually adopted, enforcement is slow, or they only halt the conflict for a short time but with no sustainable solutions.”
The theme of this year’s general debate is the role of mediation in resolving conflicts and the Rwandan leader stressed in his remarks that national ownership of the process remains vital.
“Mediation efforts must be based on an over-riding desire to bring conflicting parties to resolve their differences. But this should not be confused with supporting one side in the conflict, or imposing a solution in the interests of the mediators.”
He said the most effective way to prevent conflict from even arising was to empower citizens, particularly young people, so that they feel they have an important stake in the management and stability of their community or country.
“This generation carries less historical and political baggage, and is more inclined to getting the most out of this global village we all find ourselves sharing.
“With social and communication tools, they are key innovators and thought leaders not only of tomorrow but right now. We have an important responsibility to empower them.”
Mr. Kagame said mediation processes must be based on “specific cultural and political contexts. In Rwanda, for instance, we have seen this produce long-lasting solutions and tangible results on the ground because they are home-grown.
“It is also important to involve regional and sub-regional players, who have ample knowledge of the often complex regional dynamics of the conflicts in the mediation efforts. These organizations should be supported expeditiously, before disputes escalate into intractable conflicts.”
Posted in Africa, Eritrea, Nigeria, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Rwanda, Tanzania
Southern Sudan Speaker of Parliament: “We, the democratically elected representatives of the people, hereby declare Southern Sudan to be an independent and sovereign state.” The UK found a high professional to head its Embassy in Juba – Dr Alastair McPhail OBE. We have no information yet of who will be US Ambassador. The UN Mission in Sudan terminates July 9th and President El-Bashir has said he expects UNMIS to leave after the independence of Southern Sudan.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 9th, 2011
“We, the democratically elected representatives of the people, hereby declare Southern Sudan to be an independent and sovereign state,” speaker James Wani Igga said, reading the formal proclamation of independence.
That is how the 54th African State was born today – Saturday, July 9th, 2011.
In the south’s capital Juba, people on the corners of dirt streets waved flags and danced in the lights of car headlights, chanting “SPLM o-yei, South Sudan o-yei, freedom o-yei”.
At the stroke of midnight the Republic of Sudan lost around three quarters of its oil reserves, which are sited in the south, and faced the future with insurgencies in its Darfur and Southern Kordofan regions.
But nevertheless – North Sudan’s Khartoum government was the first to recognize the new state, hours before the formal split took place, a move that smoothed the way to the division of what was, until Saturday, Africa’s largest country.
On Saturday, South Sudan become a free and independent country. It is a well-deserved victory for its people. Under a 2005 American-backed political accord that ended two decades of civil war, the people of the mainly Christian territory voted overwhelmingly in January to secede from the Arab Muslim north.
BUT PLEASE SEE ALSO:
www.opendemocracy.net/5050/fatin-abbas/sudan-secession-resolving-divisions?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_%272011-07-09%2005%3a30%3a00%27
and – www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/world/…
and our own: www.sustainabilitank.info/2011/07…
Is Sudan secession: resolving divisions?
Actually South Sudan’s secession is a mixed blessing. While it gives
Southerners their long overdue right to self-determination, in the
north it leaves the centre-periphery dichotomy intact. This is
indicated in the wars that have erupted or are threatening to erupt in
that region. The unresolved conflict in Darfur gives the lie to the
notion that the north constitutes a homogeneous, unified entity, one
that will be at harmony after secession. Millions of Darfurians remain
displaced in camps in Sudan and in Chad, fearful of returning to their
homes amidst the genocidal violence that began in 2003. In eastern
Sudan, rebel groups continue to mount opposition to the Khartoum
government, demanding equal access to development and economic
redistribution for their region.
This year, one of the eastern rebel groups – the Federal Alliance of
Eastern Sudan – joined forces with the Justice and Equality Movement,
the largest rebel group in Darfur, to oppose the Khartoum government.
Furthermore, the violent clashes that have erupted in recent days
between the government and the Nuba people (many of whom sided with
the SPLM during the north-south civil war but who, under the new
borders, will fall under the jurisdiction of northern Sudan) also
suggest that these divisions are set to intensify.
The government is not likely to respond kindly to continuing
resistance from these northern groups, especially in the wake of
Southern secession. Smarting from the loss of the oil-rich South, and
fearful that other marginalized regions such as Darfur or the state of
South Kordofan (the Nuba’s homeland) will follow suit and demand
secession, the regime is consolidating its oppressive hold over the
north by violently quelling opposition and further curtailing
democratic rights. The atrocities now being committed by the
government in South Kordofan, not for the first time, are an ominous
indication of the lengths to which it will go to quash resistance.
then continue:
Still, celebrations in the capital, Juba, cannot obscure a sobering
truth: building a functional new country will take decades of hard
work. Responsibility falls primarily on South Sudan, but also on the
United States and the international community that shepherded it.
Africa’s 54th state is at the bottom of the developing world. Most
people live on less than $1 a day. More than 10 percent of children do
not reach the age of 5. Some 75 percent of adults cannot read.
Meanwhile, festering disputes between north and south are stoking
chaos in a land already bloodied by two million deaths in civil war.
Sudan on Friday became the first state to recognize South Sudan.
Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, author of the murderous war
in Darfur, said he would attend the festivities in Juba. But he also
said he would continue the fight that erupted last month against
forces loyal to the south in South Kordofan, an oil-rich region still
under Khartoum’s control. Mr. Bashir’s decision to order the United
Nations to withdraw peacekeepers from South Kordofan is deeply
worrisome.
Major elements of the 2005 peace agreement are unresolved — such as
which side will control the oil-rich region of Abyei, where fighting
has also broken out; citizenship protections for minorities; where
final borders will be set; how oil earnings will be shared (the south
has 70 percent of the reserves).
The two sides are dependent on each other. South Sudan needs the
north’s pipeline to get its oil to market. Sudan needs oil money to
help pay its bills. Both need foreign investment and the north needs
debt relief. They have a better chance of winning international
support if they are at peace.
As an incentive, the United States and its partners have offered to
convene an international conference in September for South Sudan. That
will allow South Sudan’s leaders to present their plans for
encouraging desperately needed private investment. Washington gave
Juba $300 million for education and housing and is promising more.
International assistance should go forward only if South Sudan works
constructively with Khartoum to bring stability to both countries.
The Obama administration, correctly, is not taking Sudan off its
terrorism list and normalizing relations until Khartoum fulfills the
peace deal and ends the conflict in Darfur. China, Sudan’s main oil
investor and arms supplier, should deliver a similar message to Mr.
Bashir, who is under war crimes indictment, instead of receiving him
with fanfare in Beijing and promising him new oil deals.
The international community must persuade the two sides to avoid war
and work to build a future for both Sudans.
Speaking at the event in Juba, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also made a pointed reference to the fact that the Sudan agreement has not been fully implemented. He referred to the situation involving Abyei as well as the violence in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states where he said the “voices of the people” have not been heard. “Let differences be resolved around the negotiating table,” Mr. Ban said.
On the other hand President Omar el-Bashir reminded the UN that UNMIS has a mandate only till July 9th and he wants it to leave. It can be assumed that the UN Security Council will have now to pass new resolutions in light of continuing fighting in North Sudan’s border provinces with Southern Sudan, and in Abyei, that should be part of Southern Sudan. What is China’s position on this – we ask?
Appointment of Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan.
The British Foreign Secretary said in JUBA: “We congratulate the people of South Sudan on this historic achievement. It represents the triumph of peaceful negotiation over conflict and adversity, and is a moment of hope and optimism for the future.
In Britain we are proud to be among the first nations in the world to recognise the new Republic of South Sudan, and I thank His Excellency Salva Kiir Miyardit for his invitation to attend today. I offer you my heartfelt congratulations, Mr President, on behalf of my Prime Minister David Cameron and the whole of the British Government, as you become the first President of the Republic of South Sudan.
The Government of the United Kingdom stands with the people of South Sudan as they seek a future of stability and prosperity; one we hope of lasting peace with their neighbours, full integration into the region, and strong cooperation with Britain and other nations represented here today. We look forward to South Sudan taking its place as a full member of the United Nations.
We pay tribute to the enormous progress South Sudan has made since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement six and a half years ago. The 98% vote for secession in January’s referendum showed the unity of the people of South Sudan in their desire for self-government: today, that dream has become a reality. And we remember all those who died or were bereaved during the conflict. Their sacrifices should redouble the determination of all of us to support a peaceful future for South Sudan.”
Dr Alastair McPhail OBE has been appointed Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan. Dr McPhail has been serving as Her Majesty’s Consul General (HMCG) in the capital, Juba, since March 2011 and will take up this appointment on 9 July 2011 when South Sudan secedes from Sudan (North).
Dr McPhail studied modern languages, particularly Russian, at the University of Otago and then completed a PhD in Russian at Edinburgh University. After teaching Russian at Nottingham University and then working in publishing, Dr McPhail joined the FCO in 1994. He has worked in a wide range of FCO positions, with a focus on political/military work, security, development and peace processes, especially in northern Iraq and Sudan. Most relevant to his current role was Dr McPhail’s work on Sudan from 2000-2005, first as Head of the Egypt, Libya and Sudan Section in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, then as Head of the Sudan Unit – the UK’s interdepartmental team charged with supporting the Sudan peace process – and finally as the UK Special Representative for Sudan. Dr McPhail attended every round of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement from the first session at Machakos to the final session at Naivasha.
On his appointment as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan, Dr McPhail has said “I am delighted to have arrived in Juba to take up my post. This is an historic period for Southern Sudan and the United Kingdom is committed to supporting the peaceful and prosperous development of this new country. The upgrade of our mission to an Embassy is a key step in strengthening the relationship between our two nations. I look forward to the years ahead.”
Full name: Dr Alastair McPhail OBE
Married to: Jo McPhail
Children: 2 Sons, Angus and Callum
March 2011 – present Juba, Consul General
April 2009 – Aug 2009 Bamako, UK Special Envoy to Mali and Head Crisis Management Team
Jan 2006 – Mar 2009 Rome, Minister and Deputy Head of Mission
April 2005 – Dec 2005 Full-time Language Training (Italian)
July 2004 – April 2005 UK Special Representative for Sudan
April 2002 – July 2004 FCO, Head of Sudan Unit
Sept 2000 – April 2002 FCO, Head of Egypt, Libya and Sudan Section, Near East and North Africa Department
Nov 1996 – Aug 2000 Ankara, First Secretary (Political/Military)
Sept 1995 – Nov 1996 Full-time Language Training (Arabic)
Sept 1994 – Sept 1995 FCO, Nuclear Weapons Desk Officer, Security Policy Department
From the US we have the following but not yet an announcement of the appointment of an Ambassador.
WASHINGTON – Former Secretary of State Colin Powell will travel to Southern Sudan this week as part of the U.S. delegation attending ceremonies marking the independence of the world’s newest nation.
Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, will lead the delegation to Juba, capital of the newly formed state of Southern Sudan. Residents in the south voted in a January referendum to break away from the north and will officially celebrate their independence on Saturday.
Colin Powell, Secretary of State under former President George W. Bush, was instrumental in brokering the 2005 peace accord between the north and south that stopped a two-decade civil war in Sudan and paved the way for the independence vote.
The United States backed the south’s push for independence, and the Obama administration had long said it would recognize Southern Sudan formally.
In March, Obama named Princeton Lyman his new special envoy to Sudan, tasking him with helping oversee the creation of an independent Southern Sudan. Lyman also will be part of the U.S. delegation at the weekend ceremonies.
Southern Sudan will be born one of the poorest countries in the world. It has only a couple of dozen miles of pavement, and literacy levels are low. But the south does have oil, and those in control of government funds appear to be growing in prosperity.
Others who will represent the U.S. in Juba include:
—Democratic Rep. Donald Payne, senior Democrat on the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights
—Brooke Anderson, deputy national security adviser and chief of staff for the National Security Council.
—Gen. Carter F. Ham, Commander, United States Africa Command.
Posted in Beijing, Darfur, Latin America, Obama Styling, Peoples without a UN Seat, Reporting from Washington DC, South Sudan (Juba), Sudan, Uganda, United Kingdom
A Global University System with Global Early Warning programs is being suggested by Japanese Professor Takeshi Utsumi who is living now in New York City in proximity to the UN Headquarters. He prepared Concept Papers for projects in Bangladesh, DRC, Nigeria and Rwanda – that is individual African problem States and a South Asian Hub of Global Early Warning.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 6th, 2011
[gu-new] (20110606) Concept papers of GEWS/GUS projects for Bangladesh, DRC, Nigeria and Rwanda.
<<20110606>> Archived distributions can be retrieved at;
<tinyurl.com/2fzx23e> This archive includes a html version of this
list distribution and its MS/WORD version with its filename as
³year-month-date.doc.² You can also access all of its attachments, if any.
> (a) Concept Paper to Create a South Asian Hub of Global Early Warning System
> and Global University System in Bangladesh (June 6, 2011)
> tinyurl.com/4y2gz8t
> (b) Concept Paper to Create a Central African Hub of Global Early Warning
> System and Global University System in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (May
> 9, 2011)
> tinyurl.com/3tk9pvp
> (c) CLOUD COMPUTING SIMULATION CENTER FOR GLOBAL EARLY WARNING SYSTEM (GEWS)
> WITH GLOBAL UNIVERSITY SYSTEM (GUS) IN NIGERIA (May 14, 2011)
> tinyurl.com/3l5b2dn
> (d) Concept Note: The Global Early Warning System (GEWS) with Global
> University System (GUS) In Rwanda (May 1, 2011)
> tinyurl.com/3v6tta2
Dear E-Colleagues:
(1) I just came back from my very fruitful, two weeks trip to Japan.
(2) The References above are the concept papers of our GEWS/GUS projects in
Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, and Rwanda.
I sincerely thank you for those people who contributed to produce those
excellent concept papers.
(3) We will then forge ahead to raise funds with those papers.
(4) Pls feel free to contact me if you have any comments and suggestions to
improve them, and of course, any ideas about possible funding sources.
Best, Tak
* Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D., P.E., Chairman, GLOSAS/USA
* (GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A.)
* Laureate of Lord Perry Award for Excellence in Distance Education
* Founder and V.P. for Technology and Coordination of
* Global University System (GUS)
* 43-23 Colden Street, #9L, Flushing, NY 11355-5913, U.S.A.
* Tel: 718-939-0928; Skype: utsumi
* Email: takutsumi0@gmail.com, Web: www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/
* U.S./IRS Employer ID: 11-2999676 <tinyurl.com/534gxc>
* New York State Tax Exempt ID: 217837 <tinyurl.com/47wqbo>
* Brief bio and photo: <tinyurl.com/6jljtrd>
* CV: <tinyurl.com/2esr94l>
Posted in Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Bangladesh, Copenhagen COP15, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Nigeria, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Rwanda
Rabbi Gershom Sizomu of East Uganda comes May 3rd to the 92 Street YMHA in Manhattan to tell American Jews about one group of black brothers of Africa – the Abuyudaya Jews of Uganda.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 22nd, 2011
The Abayudaya Jews of Uganda
92Y Recommends:
20 Years After Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews and Jews of Color
Meet Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, leader of the Abayudaya Jews of eastern Uganda. Learn about the history of this unique Jewish community, its daily challenges and its relationships with its Muslim and Christian neighbors. Rabbi Sizomu also performs and teaches several original Abayudaya Jewish songs, featuring traditional Jewish liturgy set to African rhythms and melodies.
Part of the Upcoming Events of the Resource Center for Jewish Diversity.
Date & Time: Tue, May 3, 2011 , 8:15pm
Location: Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street Directions
Code: T-RC5JD04-01
Posted in Addis Ababa, Africa, Art Performance reviews, Ethiopia, Future Events, Kenya, Nairobi, New York, Uganda
The Hamburg based World Future Council has launched a campaign for the promotion of positions of Guardians for Future Generations on the European and National governance level. They have also staff working in Brussels, London, Washington and Addis Ababa.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 19th, 2010
The World Future Council (WFC) www.worldfuturecouncil.org consists of up to 50 respected personalities from all five continents. They come from governments, parliaments, the arts, civil society, science and the business world. Together they form a voice for the rights of future generations. The World Future Council is a charitable foundation dependent on donations.
The World Future Council Foundation is a registered charity in Hamburg, Germany where its head office is located. Additionally, staff is working in Brussels, London, Washington and Addis Ababa.
WFC works in close collaboration with civil society groups, members of parliament, governments, businesses and international organisations we research future just policies and legislation. We then advise political decision-makers, offer them tried and tested courses of action and support them in the concrete implementation of new policies. We make politicians aware that they have an ethical responsibility to assess every decision-making process on the basis of how it will affect future generations. As an independent non-profit organisation with no interest in short-term profit or prestige, autonomous from governmental and institutional interests, our organisation enjoys the highest level of credibility in its political advocacy. To identify holistic solutions on a wide range of issues and to enable the application of these solutions, the WFC has created the following programmes:
Future Justice
Sustainable Economies
Just Societies
Peace and Disarmament
What we want to achieve:
The lifestyle in industrialized countries has led to people using up natural resources at a threatening pace. Consequently, our environment is being destroyed and the unequal distribution of wealth and natural resources is increasing. Mankind today is living and consuming at the price of future generations. The World Future Council works to safeguard the rights of future generations. Our aim is to pass on a healthy planet and just societies to our children and grandchildren.
What makes us unique:
How we finance our international work:
The city of Hamburg and Hamburg entrepreneur Dr. Michael Otto provided initial funding for the period from 2007 to 2009. This has enabled the WFC to work effectively and professionally for the good of future generations. For us to continue our work in the years to come we are completely reliant on further donations by people who want to help us to protect the rights of future generations. We are committed to using donations conscientiously and utilize funds as efficiently as possible to realize our goal of creating a just and sustainable world.
More on organisation, council members and staff
Press release – Sustainability can be made a political reality.
WFC co-hosted in Lisbon a legal experts conference on intergenerational justice.
Lisbon, May 28, 2010. The international conference on “Ways to Legally Implement Intergenerational Justice“ brought international legal experts to Lisbon on May 27-28 in order to create anti-dotes to the political and economic short-termism that increasingly threatens our future living conditions.
The conference was co-hosted by the World Future Council and the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations.
Its goal was to discuss policy concepts and concrete law changes that would help to finally make sustainability a reality: “The term sustainability can be found in almost every declaration and corporate report now, but policy advances to implement sustainable solutions are regularly watered down”, summarizes Dr. Maja Göpel, Director Future Justice of the World Future Council.
“Democracies have a strong tendency to favour present voters and lobbyists over future citizens that have no political or financial power. But the results of this myopic game are that we are rapidly closing the options for our children and grandchildren.”
Among the delegates to the conference were personalities that have officially been given the role to defend such options. Dr. Sandor Fülöp, Ombudsman for Future Generations in Hungary, for example, pointed out that his mandate is to protect fundamental rights of every citizen when he is stopping projects destroying too much nature. “Every Hungarian has the right to life and to intact nature. We cannot irreversibly destroy natural wealth in order to realize high economic profit today. We determine the conditions for life tomorrow.”
While some speakers were more optimistic about the opportunities of technological revolution than others, consensus prevailed that we have to quickly change course to safeguard our environment and end poverty at the same time. Shlomo Shoham, former Commissioner for Future Generations in Israel, did not fall short from calling for changed future intelligence: “Humanity is facing a future in which change takes place at an ever-increasing speed. The unknown awaits us beyond the horizon and our ability to digest and deal with the sheer volume of change is diminishing. We need to find new paths, train ourselves to ‘let go’ of certain ideas, fears, and concerns and change not only our rules, but also the way we think and act. We need to create future intelligence – and use it.”
The World Future Council is currently launching a campaign on the promotion of such Guardians for Future Generations on the European and national governance level. In its most ambitious form these Guardians of the long view would not only speak up for long-term interests in decision-making, but also help develop the knowledge base we need to make sustainability a reality.
Posted in Brussels, European Union, Germany, Israel, Kenya, Portugal, Reporting from Washington DC, Rwanda, The ALBA Charge, Uganda, UN Commission on Sustainable Development, United Kingdom
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the post-WWII Austrian State have the same calendar birthday – October 26th – and Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger brought her a Sacher Torte upon the joint visit to the UN Security Council meeting on WOMEN AND PEACE AND SECURITY – a UN topic initiated by Austria. OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MINISTER SPINDELEGGER. Austria as Vienna host to the IAEA is important on the issue of a nuclear Iran.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 27th, 2010
Remarks by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger at a Joint Press Availability at the United Nations.
QUESTION: Madam Secretary – can we ask you a question or two?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, let – I think both Michael and I have a short statement to make.
And first, let me thank the foreign minister for his crucial help in getting this event organized. I believe very strongly that Austria’s leadership on behalf of this issue is essential because we need to form a strong global partnership to make clear that we are committed to bringing about peace, but in doing so, we want to empower women to not be victims, but agents of peace and ending conflict.
And I also want to wish Austria a very happy National Day. I’m sorry that this Security Council meeting coincided with National Day and that the foreign minister had to be here, but from our perspective, we’re very glad he is, and his leadership and the excellent commitment that were – commitments that were made by the Austrian Government in the intervention by the foreign minister. So I thank you very much for your leadership.
And I also want to say how pleased we are to have a strong, growing, even deeper relationship between the United States and Austria. The foreign minister and I have worked closely together on several key issues, from the Balkans to Iran and so much else. And we have a shared commitment to human rights and the rule of law and to nonproliferation. And I am very grateful that I will be having a bilateral, thorough discussion with the foreign minister in Washington, D.C. on November 17th.
FOREIGN MINISTER SPINDELEGGER: Thank you very much, Madam Secretary, ladies and gentlemen. For us, it’s a great pleasure to see how engaged Hillary Clinton is in this field – framework of 1325. And this gives us hope and this inspires us to be more active in this way. And of course, I think if you have a look, after all the events, we have to notice there is a lot of space for more engagement. We have to double our efforts to make, for the future, a better world for women and, of course, if you have a more close look to all these areas of conflict, we should now have these indicators, these 26 indicators, that gives us more tools and more information about that – what we have to do in all these areas.
And I think it’s wonderful to cooperate. Thank you very much for that. And of course, as I said, we are now celebrating the 10th anniversary, but we also are celebrating the birthday of Hillary Clinton here today.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Oh, dear.
FOREIGN MINISTER SPINDELEGGER: Twenty-fifth birthday. (Laughter.)
SECRETARY CLINTON: Coincides with National Austria Day. I’m very excited about that. (Laughter.)
FOREIGN MINISTER SPINDELEGGER: So it’s really a wonderful story and I would like to thank you also for this cooperation between the United States and Austria. We are very much happy with that and we would like to continue it in the future. Thank you very much.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you very much.
QUESTION: Madam Secretary, you’ve talked very passionately about the women of Afghanistan and not leaving them behind. I wonder if you had any comment on the comments by the president of Afghanistan, President Karzai, about the United States and it’s giving cash to him to run his office?
SECRETARY CLINTON: I do not. I have a very strong opinion about the work that we’re doing, which I think is critical for our national security, the national security of Europe. I work closely with our representatives in Afghanistan and with the Government of Afghanistan. It’s a very challenging and quite complicated situation, but I think we’re making progress, and I am very, very pleased to have the opportunity to try to support the women of Afghanistan while we do so.
QUESTION: Mrs. Secretary of State, the situation of women and also girls in many countries of the world, especially in Africa, but I would like to mention also Afghanistan, Iran, et cetera is very serious. Do you really think that resolution discussed today can make a difference, can change something? Or does this – it could be only done on the level of the government and the – on the politics?
SECRETARY CLINTON: I think it’s both. I think in my own lifetime – since it is my birthday, I can look back on it and see so much progress that has occurred. It has occurred both on the international level in beginning to look at women’s rights as human rights and to create coalitions around change on behalf of women, and of course, it’s happened in my own country.
So the progress that women have made in the last 50 years is remarkable when you consider it against the backdrop of the prior history of humanity. But as Michael and I have said, there is still much more to be done. And certainly, those of us who are fortunate enough to live in countries like the United States and Austria where there have been great advances on behalf of women’s rights and opportunities, I believe have an obligation to try to do more to help women and girls in countries where those rights and opportunities are not respected.
So yes, we’ve made progress and shining a bright light of international concern on these issues gives heart to women and men working on behalf of this cause all over the world and helps to move the progress, the trajectory, a little bit further along. So it’s all worth doing.
QUESTION: Madam Secretary, you have mentioned the special and growing relationship with Austria, and could you be more specific what has brought about this renewed friendship with Austria? And could you specify the areas of cooperation where the friendship with a small country like Austria could really make a difference?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I can give you two examples based on my own experience with the foreign minister. He and I spoke several times in depth on the necessity for sanctions on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He was very helpful in conveying the concerns not only of the United States but of the international community directly to representatives of the Iranian Government. And certainly, with the IAEA headquartered in Vienna, I’ve spoken with the foreign minister on nonproliferation, which is a key goal of President Obama. So those are two areas where Austria’s commitment and values, combined with its very strategic location, has been of benefit to our common cause.
Do you want to add anything to that, Michael?
FOREIGN MINISTER SPINDELEGGER: Yes, I think, of course, it was an area where we had to be in a close contact. It was a very sensitive moment, I think. And I only can give you back this was very good to have this close contact to inform each other what’s the next step forward, and I think we have reached a lot. If you have looked today, maybe Iran is ready to come to the table back, this is one of the results of our (inaudible).
QUESTION: You both mentioned Iran, though, and today the Iranians announced that they were going to restart refueling the reactor. Is this something that —
SECRETARY CLINTON: But that – let’s not confuse – Iran is entitled to the peaceful use of civilian nuclear power. They are not entitled to a nuclear weapons program. What they are doing is starting a reactor that is, based on everything we know about it and everything that the Russians have informed us about it since they have worked with the Iranians over many years to build this reactor, strictly for peaceful purposes. Our problem is not with their reactor at Bushehr. Our problem is with their facilities at places like Natanz and their secret facility at Qom and other places where we believe they are conducting their weapons program.
So I know – I heard some of the news coverage that oh my goodness, the Iranians are starting the reactor. That is not the issue. They are entitled to peaceful civilian nuclear power. They are not entitled to nuclear weapons. There’s two different processes. And so I’m glad you asked the question because I think it’s important to distinguish that. And as Michael said, we’re hoping that the Iranians will come back to the table soon with the – what we call the P-5+1 or the E-3+3, headed by Cathy Ashton, to begin an in-depth negotiation over their nuclear arms program.
Our own exclusive interview with Austrian Federal Minister for European and International Affair Mr. Michael Spindelegger, at the Austrian Consulate General in New York, during the reception on the occasion of the Austrian National Day 2010.
Q: Dear Minister, as the two years of Austria’s membership on the UN Security Council will end in two months, what could you tell me in a couple of sentences, for attribution, that were the main achievements of this membership from your point of view?
A: Specifically – our close relationship with the United States – I was just invited to Washington for November 17th for further policy discussions. Austria contributes to negotiations in South Europe – now with Serbia and Croatia- and on the Iran question.
Q: What will be the specifics?
A: In the Balkan it is the bringing in of Serbia and Croatia into the EU.
Q. On Iran is it about the sanctions, or a negotiated solution?
A. The Sanctions we have already, it is about the fact that Iran cannot go nuclear.
The reception was hosted by Consul General Mr. Ernst-Peter Brezovsky, and the Minister was accompanied by Austria’s Permanent REpresentative to the UN, Ambassador Thomas Mayr-Harting. Many Ambassadors from EU countries to the UN participated. The US flag was also displayed.
The Security Council meeting was opened by the November UNSC President from Uganda with the initial presentations by:
– The UN Secretary-General Mr. Ban Ki-moon, by video from Southeast Asia where he went to attend the ASEAN Summit. The Deputy SG Ms. Dr. Asha-Rose Mgiro represented him at the UNSC. He remarked that 20 countries have adopted National Action Plans on Women’s participation in programs according to resolution 1325 (2000). The recent mass-rapes in Congo are just a reminder of what can go wromg.
– UN Under-Secretary-General for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women Ms. Michelle Bachelet of Chile.
– The President of the UN Economic and Social Council Mr. Hamidon Ali of Malaysia.
– The Special Representative of the SG on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Ms. Margot Wallstrom of Sweden.
– Civil Society Advisory to the UN on Women, Peace and Security Ms. Thelma Awori. a a Liberian/Ugandan.
Followed by the Ministers of UNSC Member States in the following order: Austria, the US, Japan, and Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Turkey, Nigeria, UK, Brazil, Gabon, Lebanon, Russia, China, and the Chair – The First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for East African Community Affairs of Uganda.
These were followed by another 65 speakers from interested Nations that included Ministers Foreign Affairs (Sweden, Slovenia), Defense (Norway), of International Cooperation (Canada), of Equal Opportunity (Italy), of Equity, Human Rights and Integration (Ireland), of Gender and Development (Liberia), the Interior (Finland), Social Development (South Africa), to Tourism and Culture (The Gambia) – and so on – including the EU, the AU, the Red Cross.
Mr. Spinelegger, in his opening presentation, pointed out that in adopting the 1325 (2000) resolution 10 years ago, the UNSC recognized the equal participation of women in all aspects of peace-building and security and the protection of women from all sexual and all other violence in post-conflict situations.He pointed out that the resolution is not yet fully implemented to make a difference in conflict and post-conflict situations. The Council has the tools needed to hold accountable the transgressors he said.
He further said that the Arria meeting of October 19, 2010, cochaired by Austria, Mexico and the UK provided further tools – quantitative and qualitative – to judge deteriorating situations.
Austria offered the Austrian Diplomatic Academy in 2011 for training purpose and the services of his predecessor in the Foreign Ministry – Ms. Ambassador Dr. Ursula Plassnik as a Special envoy for International women issues, and an International network to promote Female Leadership in Intercultural and interreligious Dialogue” that first met in June 201o.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, used her speech at the UN to declare unequivocally that he United States will not support a peace in Afghanistan or any conflict zone that sacrifices women’s rights. Her speech was a no-nonsense presentation and stood out when compared to any of the other 80 speeches – most of them frankly useless me-toos! It was her speech that gave some justification to this UNSC exercise – something that we cannot overstate.
The Security Council presidential statement vowed life-less “enhanced” efforts to bring to justice those who attack women and girls and appealed for greater numbers of women peacekeepers in international forces and called, in UN fashion, a new review meeting in five years time, which brought a new rebuke from Clinton: “Well we had better have more to report and we had better have accomplished more between now and then, otherwise there will be those who lose faith in our international capacity to respond to such an overwhelming need,” she said.
Clinton said the mass rape of hundreds of women in Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year was a “tragic rebuke” of international efforts to help women caught in conflict zones.
Women’s involvement in peacemaking efforts is now a “necessary global security imperative,” the US Secretary of State told the UN Security Council.
Clinton — to many observers the world’s most powerful woman — highlighted US efforts to reinforce women’s representation in Afghanistan, where US-led international forces are battling the Taliban militia which repressed women when in power. “We believe the potential for sustainable peace will be subverted if women are silenced or marginalized,” Clinton said.
Posted in Austria, D.R.C./Kinshasa, Iran, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC, Sweden, Uganda, United Kingdom
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Looking Back At My 2014 Predictions. Did I Get It Right?
The 2014 LPGA season was full of surprises. We had 21 different winners. We had 8 multiple winners. Two winners were non LPGA members. We also had winners that came from 7 different countries. We had seven first time winners. It was a year that was almost impossible to predict, although I did give it a try.
Way back in January, before the season began, I made my predictions of who I thought would be the top players of 2014. I put it out there for the whole world to see. Let's see how I did:
Stacy Lewis - She won every major award possible. She was the top money winner of 2014. She won the Rolex Player of the Year, and won the Vare trophy. Needless to say, I got this one correct.
Suzann Pettersen - Suzann finished the 2013 season very strongly and figured to have a big 2014. Back problems slowed her down for a part of the year, and she never seemed to get on track. She did not have a win, but did finish #11 on the money list.
Lydia Ko - Predicting a rookie to finish #3 is usually not the thing to do. But this rookie was a really special one. She easily won the Rolex Rookie of the Year Award, and made me look great by finishing #3 on the money list.
Inbee Park - Inbee had a terrific year winning three times. She missed out on all the major awards on the last day of the season, finishing #2 on the money list.
Lexi Thompson - After finishing #7 in 2013, I figured a step up was in the making. She started quick when she won the first Major Championship of the year, and the first of her career. She had an up & down second half, which resulted in her finishing #12 on the money list.
Shanshan Feng - Shanshan seemed to be in contention all year long, but managed just one win. You can high five me on this one as she did finish #6.
Na Yeon Choi - Never seemed to be the threat to win that she was in past years. She wound up finishing #13 on the money list, leaving us wondering about next year.
So Yeon Ryu - Always dangerous, and almost always in contention in 2014, she finished #5.
Jessica Korda - Jessica won twice in 2014, so why do I feel like she didn't have that great a year? It was because she contended very few times. Her 16th place finish on the money list, although the best of her young career, is not that impressive for a multiple winner.
Paula Creamer - Just four top tens? She usually has that many by March. That 75 foot putt she sank to win in Singapore, which gave her win #10, sure saved her season. Has she fully healed from her hand injury? Has all those years on tour started to take its toll? Has she been distracted because of her impending marriage? Still one of the most popular players in the history of the women's game, we will have to wait until next year to see if her #22 money list finish was just a fluke.
I.K. Kim - She just never seemed to show up all year, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. She only showed up for 18 tournaments, and wasn't much of a factor when she did tee it up, finishing #48 on the money list.
Chella Choi - How could it possibly be that Chella has not yet won an LPGA event? She had 10 top ten finishes and 20 top twenties. It will come soon and when it does she will improve on her 10th place money list finish.
Beatriz Recari - I was way off on this one. After finishing #6 on the money list in 2013, I figured she would take a dip. I didn't think she would fall all the way to #53.
Amy Yang - Amy didn't contend nearly as much as I would have thought she would. She finished in the #25 spot.
Hee Young Park - With her sister on tour with her this year, maybe she can better her #40.
Pornanong Phatlum - Another player who seems to contend weekly but never win. I was close though, as she finished #20.
Caroline Hedwall - I seem to rate her much too high every year. Maybe she is not as good as I think she is. She finished in the #46 spot.
Gerina Piller - Still looking for that first victory, she took a step back this year finishing #39.
Lizette Salas - She did get her first win this year, but didn't contend enough. I was close to her actual finish at #24.
Carlotta Ciganda - Has as much talent as anyone on tour, but never seems to be able to put it all together. She finished at #44.
Karrie Webb - Karrie does this to me every year. She finished #8.
Ai Miyazato - I don't feel too bad about this one because nobody could have predicted such a complete meltdown. You thought her #40 finish in 2013 was a bad year? She finished the year without a top ten, and wound up #86 on the money list.
Anna Nordqvist - She started out real strong with two quick wins, then cooled off the rest of the season. Those wins were good enough for a 7th place finish on the money list.
Angela Stanford - It was a typical Angela season as she finished in the #19 spot.
Cristie Kerr - Christie didn't win in 2014, but her #15 finish was higher than Korda who won twice. She still has something left in the tank.
Jodi Ewert-Shadoff - Took 2 steps backward this past season as shown by her #52 finish.
Karine Icher - Was close on this one as she finished in the #33 spot.
Michelle Wie - Every year I predicted her to break out and she always disappointed me and made me look foolish. This year I gave in, and gave up on my high expectations of her. Of course she made me look foolish, finishing in the #4 spot.
Morgan Pressel - Came on strong the last part of the season and finished in the #35 spot.
Azahara Munoz - It was a big bounce back year for Azahara as she earned over 1 million dollars. Even though she is still looking for that first stroke play win, she was solid enough to finish at #9.
There you have it. Although it wasn't a complete disaster, I have had better years. I will be posting my predictions for the 2015 season very shortly.
Other Tidbits:
Now that the results of the Final Phase of Qualifying Tournament are known, it is going to be one hell of race for rookie of the year in 2015.
You have heard me say that the 2014 rookie crop was the best in quite sometime. The 2015 rookies might be the best ever! It will include 8 players that already ranked in the top 100 in the world.
Here they are listed according to their world ranking:
Hyo Joo Kim - Rolex Ranked #9 (Winner on LPGA Tour in 2014)
Kyu Ju Baek - #11 (Winner on LPGA Tour in 2014)
Ha Na Jang - #25
Charley Hull - #37
Sei Young Kim #40
Sakura Yokomine #44
Minjee Lee - #82
Ariya Jutanugarn - 91
Although there will be quite a number of American rookies in 2015, none of them are on the above list.
Laetitia Beck is the first Israeli to earn an LPGA playing card.
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Golf Predictions Tony Jesselli
Labels: Golf Predictions Tony Jesselli
Rolex Rankings Movers of the Year 2014 - Final
How Well Were My Pre-Season Questions Answered?
Surprises & Disappointments - Final 2014
Looking Back At My 2014 Predictions. Did I Get It ...
LPGA Qualifying School: The Final Stage
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Board/Staff
Tag Archive | "School Segregation"
Tags: Education, School Segregation, Sheff v. O'Neill
New Federal Lawsuit Takes on Hartford’s 30-Year School Desegregation Effort — and Challenges the Value of Integration Itself
By Mark Keierleber
Standing outside one of the city’s high-performing magnet schools, LaShawn Robinson decried an enrollment process she believes was stacked against her black son.
Year after year, her oldest son, Jarod, applied to attend one of the city’s magnet schools, which enroll pupils through a competitive lottery. First on a waiting list three times, he was never selected. Without a chance for a quality education, he dropped out of school.
On this chilly October afternoon, Robinson spoke at a press conference outside Kinsella Magnet School of Performing Arts to explain why she is bringing a federal lawsuit against the state, its education department, and Hartford’s board of education.
The legal battle follows years of efforts to integrate Connecticut’s public school system, among the nation’s most segregated, with one of the widest racial achievement gaps.
But this isn’t your typical school desegregation lawsuit. It’s the process to integrate Hartford schools that Robinson is fighting.
In the federal lawsuit filed earlier this year, Robinson and seven other Hartford parents allege the magnet schools employ an unconstitutional “racial quota” that limits the number of black and Latino students to 75 percent of total enrollment while the lottery system to select students gives preference to white and Asian students from the more affluent suburbs.
“There are hundreds of empty seats, and we’re telling kids, ‘No, you can’t come in there because your quota is already met,’” said Robinson, a mother of five.
The suit is only the latest chapter in a thorny legal saga that has dragged on for close to three decades and has raised tough questions about the meaning and value of integration. The magnet school system, Robinson and her fellow plaintiffs allege, violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Relying on that same amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that intentional racial segregation is unconstitutional because “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
The lawsuit could have major ramifications, not just for Connecticut’s magnet schools but for the future of desegregation efforts nationwide as well. Attorneys with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law firm based in California that represents the parents pro bono, make no secret of their aim to use the case to set a federal court precedent. Should the case progress to the Supreme Court, said Pacific Legal attorney Joshua Thompson, it could set a new standard that education leaders are “not permitted to discriminate against black or Hispanic kids in order to achieve a diverse student body.” In other words, they aim to prohibit educators from considering race as a factor when assigning students to schools.
If some of Thompson’s rhetoric sounds familiar, it’s not by accident. The legal battle in Connecticut is unfolding against the backdrop of a federal lawsuit challenging Harvard University that could reshape affirmative action admissions policies in higher education. In that lawsuit, Asian-American plaintiffs argue that Harvard’s admissions process, which considers a student’s race among other factors, is discriminatory. That case is largely expected to send the question of affirmative-action-based admissions back to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cara McClellan of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an attorney for the plaintiffs in Connecticut’s decades-long segregation battle, also represents Harvard student and alumni organizations that claim the elimination of race as a factor would lead to further discrimination against applicants of color.
Traveling from Boston to attend a recent Hartford town hall devoted to the Robinson case, McClellan argued that segregation is at the heart of academic achievement gaps between white and minority students.
“As long as we continue to segregate kids and send them to school based on segregated housing patterns, we’re going to continue to see the achievement gap play out,” she said. That inequity, she continued, is present in everything from resource allocations to hiring quality teachers.
A generation-long battle
In order to understand the stakes in the Robinson case, it is necessary to go back almost 30 years to an earlier — and still ongoing — lawsuit. In many ways, the fate of LaShawn Robinson and her son is bound up with that of another African-American family: Elizabeth Horton Sheff and her son, who began the legal fight to integrate Connecticut schools in 1989.
In its decision in that case, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that segregation between the city schools, which primarily serve low-income students of color, and those in the whiter, more affluent suburbs, violated the state constitution. As a result, Hartford’s magnet schools and an interdistrict transfer program, both designed to encourage voluntary integration, were created. A controversial part of the agreement declared a school segregated if its black or Latino student enrollment exceeds 75 percent.
Horton Sheff acknowledges that the magnet system is imperfect — in fact, her desegregation lawsuit is back in court nearly three decades later. But she argues that the plaintiffs in the Robinson suit, if successful, could dismantle years of progress at the expense of thousands of children in integrated schools.
“It is a voluntary system, so if people choose to stay in segregation, that is their right,” she said. “But they should not try to thwart the efforts of people who want a different kind of education, of families who seek choice.”
Elizabeth Horton Sheff speaks during a recent town hall event at the Hartford Public Library about her 30-year fight to desegregate the city’s public school system. A new federal lawsuit challenging the schools’ enrollment process threatens to derail efforts to integrate the city’s schools, she said. (Mark Keierleber)
Over the past decade, Connecticut has spent $3 billion on the desegregation effort. Nearly half of Hartford’s students — 22,000 in total — are enrolled in integrated schools, said Deuel Ross, an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Although the Defense Fund deems the effort a success, several recent investigations by the local media have offered a more critical appraisal.
One report by the Hartford Courant challenged whether half of Hartford students actually attend integrated schools, putting the percentage closer to a quarter. Another found that the state hasmanipulated the enrollment lottery to benefit white and Asian students at the expense of black and Latino students in segregated neighborhood schools. Because some magnet schools struggle to enroll enough Asian and white children, the investigation found, some minority students have been stuck on the waiting list.
The result is that some schools have eliminated entire grades and others have lost their magnet status altogether. Critically, according to the Courant, some magnet schools that are unable to attract enough white or Asian children leave desks unfilled rather than enroll additional minority children, in order to maintain diversity. Meanwhile, the Connecticut Mirror found that while more suburban students applied to attend the schools last year than children from the city, Hartford youth have better odds of winning than those from the suburbs.
A state education department spokesman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on the lawsuits.
The Courant investigations drew the attention of Pacific Legal’s Thompson. “I thought it was a grave injustice,” he said, adding that children should be able to attend the magnet schools without race being a factor. “Schools are there to educate the kids, and the kids that are most in need of this education are being kept out because of their skin color.”
Ross rejects the notion that Hartford’s schools are constrained by quotas set in the Horton Sheff agreement. Schools are under-enrolled, he said, because the state caps the number of magnet seats it’s willing to fund. Moreover, he said, a handful of magnet schools each year are noncompliant, enrolling minority students at rates higher than 75 percent.
This year, with thousands of students on the magnet school waiting list, state officials aimed to increase the 75 percent segregation threshold to 80 percent but were rejected by a Hartford Superior Court judge.
“Does anybody like the lottery?” Horton Sheff asked during the recent town hall. “The devil himself doesn’t like the lottery. Give me an alternative way to provide this opportunity. I can name one: Have the state fully fund all of the seats that are in demand.”
‘Unintended consequences’
Just hours after the press conference in front of Kinsella Magnet School, plaintiffs and attorneys from both the Horton Sheff and Robinson lawsuits sat at the same table and offered their perspectives to a crowd of about 50 people who showed up at the public library on Main Street. The town hall discussion was designed as an opportunity to hear arguments from both perspectives and to reach some common ground.
Dubbed “The True Cost of Integration,” the event, if anything, seemed only to underscore the pervasive divisions between the two sides. Participants vehemently disagreed, not only about the facts surrounding Hartford’s magnet schools and the state’s desegregation efforts but about the value of integration itself.
Horton Sheff believes that integration helps children become global citizens, regardless of their race and ethnicity. “If you are in a diverse setting and you are exposed to people who think differently than you, then that promotes your own awareness,” she said. “You can’t do that in isolation.”
That notion, however, was not self-evident to some who were featured at the event, including Chris Stewart, a Minnesota-based education reform advocate.
“Nobody goes to Idaho and goes to all-white schools and says, ‘Y’all need some Negroes in here,’” said Stewart, who noted that a similar desegregation lawsuit is ongoing in his state. “I don’t want this, and I don’t want it for you either.”
On a national level, a significant body of research supports the notion that integration offers educational benefits for students of color and from low-income families. One study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that desegregation increased educational and occupational attainment among black youth and improved adult earnings while reducing the probability of incarceration.
Connecticut’s efforts to encourage integration have been lauded as a national model, including by John King, who served as education secretary under then-President Barack Obama. But earlier this year, the Trump administration scrapped Obama-era guidance that outlined strategies for schools to consider race as a way to promote student diversity, such as by looking at the racial composition of neighborhoods — a strategy used in the Hartford magnet school lottery.
What’s clear is that the continued negotiations have major implications, not just for Hartford children but for desegregation efforts nationwide.
For Robinson, victory in the federal courts would eliminate a system that’s keeping black and Latino students from quality schools. Although Robinson’s son Jarod dropped out of school after being denied admission into a magnet school, he now attends an adult education program. Meanwhile, her three youngest children had better luck and now attend Kinsella Magnet School.
Magnet schools were designed to encourage integration, and Horton Sheff worries that a Robinson victory would come at the expense of children currently enjoying an education at one of the city’s integrated schools.
“You’ll totally destroy the magnet school system and disrupt the lives of 22,000 children,” Horton Sheff said, pivoting to a Pacific Legal video that was presented during the town hall. “When the video said, ‘No racial quotas will mean Jarod can go to a magnet school,’ well, there won’t be any magnet schools for Jarod to attend.”
At the end of the day, both sides may be right, said Hartford School Board Chairman Craig Stallings, a defendant in the Robinson lawsuit. In Hartford, he sees a system beset by unintended consequences. Although he recognizes the value of integration, he said the district’s students would be better served if the system focused on improving quality in all district schools.
“Those unintended consequences translate to young men and women being stranded in the inner city,” Stallings said. “You can go to any desolate, blighted block in our city and you’re going to find young men and women standing there because they didn’t get a quality education.”
Mark Keierleber is a senior writer-reporter at The 74, where this was first published.
Posted in Featured, Hartford, Nation, Neighborhood, YouthComments (0)
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The original Mind the Gap returns ...
London Underground and the recording engineer's widow
Wonderful news from the northbound platform of the Northern Line at Embankment Tube station. London Underground have reinstated the original Mind the Gap announcement - just so that the widow of the man who said it can go and hear his voice.
The story of how Peter Lodge came to record the message in the late 1960s is quite well known to Tube fans. An actor had already done a version, but his agent was demanding royalties every time it was played. London Underground replied, understandably, that it was going to be aired thousands of times a day across the system, and they couldn't possibly afford it. So someone from their office who had a nice voice was dispatched to do another version. As the studio engineer, Peter Lodge, waited for him, he recorded himself saying it, just to get some microphone level. When Mr London Underground arrived Lodge played him the recording, and got the reply ‘that's as good as anything I could do, let's just use that'.
Over the decades Lodge's ‘Mind the gap, please' became a world-famous catchphrase. But times change, and so gradually new recordings were introduced across the system. Eventually the Northern Line's northbound platform at Embankment was the only place left where you could hear Lodge's original. Mentioning this at a talk a couple of months ago, I added that I hadn't actually checked it for a while - did anyone in the audience know if it was still true? A woman told us that sadly, no it wasn't - even there a new recording had been introduced. We all groaned in disappointment.
Last night I used the platform for the first time since then. I got talking to a member of staff, and said how sad it was that Lodge's voice had gone forever.
‘It had,' he said.
‘Sorry?'
‘They did replace it. But then they got a letter from his widow. She said that after he died she used to come here just to hear his voice, and now she couldn't. So they decided to put it back for her.'
‘Brilliant.'
The guard smiled. ‘I know. That's what I thought. And what's more, they're planning to reinstate it on some more platforms too.'
A minute later the train pulled in. The guard and I were respectfully silent, then Lodge's voice rang out: ‘Mind the gap, please.' Which, of course, I did.
So thank you, Mrs Lodge. Not only have you brought back a piece of the Tube's history, you've given it an even stronger presence than it had before. Here's to your late husband, and the icon he created.
*UPDATE: Slight change to the story - it turns out that the widow in question is actually that of Oswald Laurence, whose recording is the one London Underground are reinstating. The TFL press office don't seem to have much information about Laurence - any Tube buffs out there who know about him? (FURTHER UPDATE: More info now found - details here, including a lovely interview with his widow.)
I had the pleasure of talking to Peter Lodge's son yesterday, who confirmed that his mother sadly died a few years before his father, so couldn't have been the widow in question. But it was fascinating to hear him talk about his father's work with such pride - and of the time in the 1980s when his brother (Peter's other son) took his children to London. When they heard the ‘mind the gap' announcement they shouted out ‘Grandpa!'
And of course the other story I should have mentioned was that of Tim Bentinck, who I interviewed for ‘Walk the Lines'. As well as being David in The Archers, Tim was also the ‘mind the gap' voice on the Piccadilly Line for a few years. He too was gradually phased out, until his last remaining station was Russell Square. This just happened to be the station that his wife used for work. Judy told me that whenever she heard the recording of her husband telling her to mind the gap, she'd think: ‘Thank you darling, I will.'
Showing comments 1 to 4 of 10 | Next | Last
Tim Bentinck
My version
Reply #10 on : Sun March 17, 2013, 21:33:15
Thanks for the mentions Mark. Doing an interview for World at One tomorrow. if anyone would like to hear my Gap announcement, here it is:
www.bentinck.net/voices/sounds/mindthegap.mp3
Black Plaques
Reply #9 on : Sat March 09, 2013, 09:06:22
Isn't it the voice of Oswald Lawrence? Peter Lodge's version didn't say 'please'.
Recording of the announcement
Is available on youtube, ofc!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ojomTUt0X4
JdeTx
Really - fantastic!
Reply #7 on : Fri March 08, 2013, 19:04:21
anyone got a link or a recording of this please?
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Atte Surname Ancestry Results
Our indexes 1000-1999 include entries for the spelling 'atte'. In the period you have requested, we have the following 162 records (displaying 141 to 150):
Buying all 162 results of this search individually would cost £952.00. But you can have free access to all 162 records for a year, to view, to save and print, for £100. Save £852.00. More...
atta-ullah attanesse attaoullah attar attarbothele attard attas attasio attaslade attaullah attawall attaway attawell attawode attay attayholdham attcell attchison attcliffe attcombe atte aisshe atte assh atte asshe atte bache atte bachous atte bakehouse atte banke atte barnate atte barnet atte barnette atte barre atte basket atte bataylle atte bathe atte beche atteasche atteback attebank attebarre attebeck
Hampshire and Surrey clerks, clerics, monks and clergy (1395)
Ordinations as acolytes, subdeacons, deacons and priests, from the register of bishop William de Wykeham of Winchester. Winchester diocese covered Hampshire and Surrey; the ordinations also attracted many persons from distant dioceses bearing letters dimissory from their ordinaries, and these are duly noted in the text. Many of these clerks would not go on to obtain benefices and remain celibate. The lists of subdeacons, deacons and priests state the clerks' respective titles, i. e., give the names of the person or religious house undertaking to support them. Monks and friars are indicated ('f.' = brother). The acolyte lists usually give parish of origin or title. The sample scan is from 1404.
ATTE. Cost: £6.00.
Inhabitants of Cheshire and North Wales (1390-1399)
The county of Cheshire had palatine status, being in some measure independent of the rest of England: moreover, from the Statute of Wales of 1284, after king Edward I's subjugation of North Wales, until the union of England and Wales in 1536 to 1543, much of the administration of North Wales (county Flint in particular) was directed from Chester. When the Chester Recognizance Rolls were moved from Chester to the Public Record Office, they were placed among the Welsh Records. These rolls, so called because they do include recognizances (of debts &c.) among their contents, are in fact the Chancery Rolls of the palatinate, containing enrolments of charters, letters patent, commissions and other documents issued under the seal of the palatinate. Deeds and other evidences of a private nature were also enrolled on them. A calendar of the Recognizance Rolls from their commencement to the end of the reign of Henry IV was prepared by Peter Turner and included in the 36th Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records in 1875. We have now indexed this, dividing the enrolments into decades. This is the period from the 13th year of king Richard II, who had intended to raise the earldom of Chester into a principality, to his overthrow by Henry IV.
Grantees of offices, commissions and pardons (1413-1416)
The Patent Rolls are the Chancery enrolments of royal letters patent. Those for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd years of the reign of king Henry V (21 March 1413 to 20 March 1416) were edited for the Public Record Office by R. C. Fowler, and published in 1910. The main contents are royal commissions and grants; ratifications of ecclesiastical estates; writs of aid to royal servants and purveyors; and pardons. The commissions of the peace issued for the English towns and counties and entered on the rolls, being largely repetitive, have been consolidated in a single appendix.
The English in France (1415-1416)
King Henry V of England claimed the throne of France (and quartered the fleurs-de-lis of France with the lions of England on the royal standard) as had his predecessors since Edward III, as descendants of Philip IV of France. He married Katherine, youngest daughter of king Charles VI of France in 1420, and thereafter styled himself 'heir and regent of France'. The English had real power or influence in Brittany, Normandy, Flanders and Gascony, and actual possession of several coastal garrisons, in particular Calais, where the French inhabitants had been replaced by English. The English administration kept a series of records called the French Rolls. On these are recorded royal appointments and commissions in France; letters of protection and safe-conduct to soldiers, merchants, diplomats and pilgrims travelling to France from England and returning, and to foreign legations. There are also licences to merchants to export to the Continent, and to captains to transport pilgrims. This calendar of the French Roll for the 3rd year of the reign of Henry V (21 March 1415 to 20 March 1416) was prepared by Alexander Charles Ewald and published in 1883. The battle of Agincourt took place on 25 October 1415, so this roll has many letters of protection for soldiers, and various letters and orders relating to the ransoming of French prisoners.
King Henry V of England claimed the throne of France (and quartered the fleurs-de-lis of France with the lions of England on the royal standard) as had his predecessors since Edward III, as descendants of Philip IV of France. He married Katherine, youngest daughter of king Charles VI of France in 1420, and thereafter styled himself 'heir and regent of France'. The English had real power or influence in Brittany, Normandy, Flanders and Gascony, and actual possession of several coastal garrisons, in particular Calais, where the French inhabitants had been replaced by English. The English administration kept a series of records called the French Rolls. On these are recorded royal appointments and commissions in France; letters of protection and safe-conduct to soldiers, merchants, diplomats and pilgrims travelling to France from England and returning, and to foreign legations. There are also licences to merchants to export to the Continent, and to captains to transport pilgrims. This calendar of the French Roll for the 4th year of the reign of Henry V (21 March 1416 to 20 March 1417) was prepared by Alexander Charles Ewald and published in 1883.
The English in France (1425)
King Henry VI of England (one of the grandsons of Charles VI of France) claimed the throne of France (and quartered the fleurs-de-lis of France with the lions of England on the royal standard) as had his predecessors since Edward III, as descendants of Philip IV of France. The English had real power or influence in Brittany, Normandy, Flanders and Gascony, and actual possession of several coastal garrisons, in particular Calais, where the French inhabitants had been replaced by English. Henry VI came to the throne only seven years after his father had trounced the French at Agincourt; but his cousin, Charles VII, who became king of France in the same year, spent his long reign rebutting the English king's claim to his throne by territorial reconquest and consolidation. The English administration kept a series of records called the French Rolls. On these are recorded royal appointments and commissions in France; letters of protection and safe-conduct to soldiers, merchants, diplomats and pilgrims travelling to France from England and returning, and to foreign legations. There are also licences to merchants to export to the Continent, and to captains to transport pilgrims. As Henry VI's reign progressed, and the English grip on northern France loosened, the French Rolls also increasingly include entries concerning the ransoming of English prisoners.
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"Qatar National Day 2018" Marked in Seoul
Amb. Mohamed Abdulla Al- Dehaimi Hosts Reception
HE Mohamed Abdulla Al-Dehaimi, ambassador of the State of Qatar to S. Korea delivers a speech at the dinner reception held at Shilla Hotel in Seoul on Dec. 10, 2018 on the occasion of the national day of the State of Qatar.
HE Mohamed Abdulla Al-Dehaimi, ambassador of the State of Qatar to the Republic of Korea, hosted a dinner reception at Shilla Hotel in Seoul on Dec. 10, 2018 on the occasion of the national day of the State of Qatar.
Qatar National Day or Founder's Day is celebrated annually on Dec. 18. It is a national commemoration of Qatar's unification in 1878.
HE Vice Minister Kwon Deok-Cheol of the Ministry of Health and Welfare represented South Korean government. He delivered a congratulatory speech in front of nearly 600 guests including numerous top envoys serving in Seoul.
Country Profile: Qatar
HE Mohamed Abdulla Al-Dehaimi (2nd from right), ambassador of the State of Qatar to S. Korea, poses with others at the dinner reception held at Shilla Hotel in Seoul on Dec. 10, 2018 on the occasion of the national day of the State of Qatar. To his left is HE Vice Minister Kwon Deok-Cheol of the Ministry of Health and Welfare represented South Korean government
The State of Qatar is located on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. its total population is of 2.6 million. However, this Muslim Country has the highest per capita income in the world. Also, the State of Qatar has the world's third-largest natural gas reserves.
Based on its high income, the State of Qatar is regarded as the most advanced Arab state in the field of human development.
The State of Qatar became a significant power with the launch of the global news media group, Al Jazeera Media Network.
Dependent long time upon fishing and pearl hunting, the Qatari economy changed completely and dramatically after oil was discovered in 1940.
Currently Qatari citizens enjoys highest standard of living in the world. The State of Qatar is one of the states in the world which has no income tax. The unemployment rate hovers no higher than 0.1 percent.
The State of Qatar is expected to invest more than 120 billion US dollars in the energy sector in the next 10 years. It is world's leading exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
It national flag carrier, Qatar Airways, is one of the world's largest airlines. It links over 150 international destinations from its base in Doha.
Qatar has developments plans for the future. Qatar's "National Vision 2030" is one of them. Investment in renewable resources is Qatar's major goal for the next two decades. Qatar is set to host the 22nd FIFA World Cup in 2022.
Growing Ties between Doha and Seoul
Qatar Ambassador to S. Korea Mohamed Abdulla Al- Dehaimi (right) meets with former UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-Moon in a recent Seoul event. Ban is just one of the numerous political and social leaders the Qatari envoy meets as part of ambassadorial activities in Seoul.
On the strengths of the strong economic cooperation, the bilateral relations between the State of Qatar and economically dynamic Republic of Korea have been fast developing over nearly four decades.
In particular business ties have been impressive in the energy and construction sectors, with their bilateral trade volume reaching 11.7 billion US dollars in 2017.
The following is the overall review of the bilateral ties and fast growing cooperation in economic areas between Doha and Seoul.
The official ties between the State of Qatar and Republic of Korea started since 1974. However, the bilateral relations between Doha and Seoul began to develop since 1992 when Doha opened its embassy in Seoul.
The mutual cooperation have been on the dramatic increase since the exchanges and visits of high-level officials and heads of states in recent years.
As recently as in the middle of August, 2018, HE Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani visited Seoul for talks with South Korean Premier Lee Nak-Yeon.
Earlier in November 2014, His Highness The Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani made a two-day state visit to the Republic of Korea.
Two months later Her Highness Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser visited Seoul for four days to attend global conference. H.H serves as chairwoman of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.
The bilateral ties have been fast developing based on the mutual visits by each other's leaders and high-profile officials. A series of memorandums of understanding (MOUs) and agreements boosted the blossoming mutual ties.
In this year, the State of Qatar imported some 435 million US dollars' worth of goods and products from the Republic of Korea. Main import items are vehicles, heavy construction equipment, and transformers.
The State of Qatar exported $11.3 billion US dollars' worth of mostly energy products to the republic of Korea including liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), crude oil, and Naphtha.
Currently, The State of Qatar is the biggest supplier of LNG to South Korea. Most of Qatar’s LNG carriers are made by South Korean shipbuilding companies.
The State Of Qatar is also the fifth largest supplier of oil to South Korea. It is the eighth largest foreign construction market for South Korea.
Some 50 South Korean companies are now operating in the State of Qatar mostly involved in the construction and energy areas.
Ties between Doha and Seoul Fast Developing
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St Paul and Ecumenism
Posted on: 23rd January 2009 |
Author: Bishop John Arnold
Category: Scripture, Church and Papacy
Tags: Ecumenism, St Paul, Christian Unity
As we approach the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Bishop John Arnold asks us to remember and be encouraged by the diversity that was a feature even of the early Church. What challenges were faced by the different Christian communities that Saint Paul wrote to?
Has the focus of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity changed? There are those who look on the more recent years of progress in ecumenism with a degree of disappointment. After some initial advances in friendliness and shared celebration, there is the feeling that things have slowed down so that ecumenical gestures are now only repeats of things that we have done before – no new ground has been broken, no watershed statements made. No doubt important work still goes on in the Secretariat for Christian Unity and similar places but, somehow, we do not feel the effects of any further progress.
I think it is true to say that I shared in this sense of impatience. In a world which has so much tension and strife, it seemed to me to be a great disappointment that the Gospel message, which should be The Word of God uniting us in His Son, is expressed in so many different ways and that various Churches and denominations live with a sense of distrust and suspicion between them. Far from being able to confront the injustice and the suffering of our world as Paul would have us do, as ‘ambassadors for Christ’, we seem to be caught up in the distractions of our own divisions, wasting our energy when there is so much that we should be saying and achieving in our world of need. While secularism seems to gain ground, we are often hindered by being unable to speak with a common Christian voice.
But things are looking a little different for me now. Although I am far from complacent about the progress of ecumenism in the second half of the 20th century, I now feel a little more peaceful about the state of inter-Church relations today.
My consolation comes from The Year of St Paul which has caused me, happily, to take time simply reading his letters and trying to place myself in the world in which he lived. I am almost embarrassed by the naivety that coloured my knowledge of St Paul over the years. It was not that I did not know about him, it was rather that I had taken so much for granted, without thinking. Coming from Pharisaism, a group in which he was not merely comfortable but a positively enthusiastic member, Paul has to begin to question everything. Suddenly, the hundreds of laws and regulations that had shaped his childhood, adolescence and early manhood have lost their foundation. He has a personal encounter with Christ and he has to try to work out what that means. Of course, there was almost nothing to assist him. The Gospels were still unwritten. There were no guides to Christian prayer or Christian living; this new faith was discovering itself. Paul, and the first generation of Christians, had to find out for themselves what it meant to believe in Christ and to put that belief into practice in their lives.
While it is true that Paul carried a simple message of faith, it was no easy matter to apply it in all cases in a similar way. Near the end of his life, Paul writes to Timothy and helps to prepare him for his growing responsibilities as a community leader. He says: ‘Remember the Good News that I carry, “Jesus Christ risen from the dead, sprung from the race of David”.’ (2 Tim 2:8). Working that out would mean dealing with diversity on a grand scale.
Imagine the world of St Paul. There were immense distances between communities with all communication by word of mouth or by letter carried by hand, on land or by sea. Communities were insular in a way that we cannot imagine in our world of global communications and 24 hour news. Paul is well aware that the communities that he first visits and to whom he later writes are the products of their own history and tradition. In each place the Word of God must grow as and where it is planted.
We should remember that the communities that embraced the faith were only tiny groups of people in the cities in which they lived. When Paul writes, for example, to the Corinthians, he is not writing to the majority of the inhabitants of that large city but to a small community, a tiny minority of the whole population. And how different those cities were! Take Corinth, for example. This had been a prosperous port under Philip and Alexander but as their empire declined, so did the port. It was almost derelict when the Romans began to expand their empire to the East and found Corinth to be an ideal location for a port for supplies and military expeditions. They re-opened the old port and built a second one. The city had to grow rapidly. That meant migration. People came from the East and the West: freed slaves, rural workers, anyone with an eye to commerce. And of course they brought their traditions and their cultures with them. Forging a Christian community among such diversity was going to be a long-term project. Paul reputedly stayed in Corinth for many months but he still writes letters to them after his departure concerning their progress. If they are really to embrace a Christian ethos then they must set themselves apart from the immorality, violence and drunkenness of the port city in which they live and set themselves altogether different standards. But the task was greater still. They had to find a common understanding among themselves, even though they had such different origins and culture. The Word of God would have to take root in the place where it was sewn, with all the challenges to be found in that place.
Philippi was a very different place and the difficulties for the Christian Philippians would be quite different from those facing the Corinthians. Here was a city which had first prospered because of the nearby silver mines. Then it found economic growth because it was placed on a major trade route between East and West. Philip of Macedon had given the city his own name, for its loyalty to him in his campaigns. But the current status of Philippi, as Paul arrived to preach the Good News, lay in the fact that Philippi had been named a Roman Province, which meant that all its citizens were Roman citizens by right. Paul found himself in a place that was proud of its political status and its loyalty to Rome. It was going to be more difficult to found a Christian community here, where Caesar and the “Pax Romana” were so cherished.
Ephesus, again, was another case entirely. A very wealthy city, it founded much if its prosperity on being the home of the goddess Artemis; much of the local economy thrived on accommodating the pilgrims who came to the shrine. It would be no easy business for a small community of Christians to thrive when all around are concerned with their jobs and economy. The Ephesians could only see the Christians as a threat to their livelihood. The community would need to concentrate hard on the essentials of their faith – and Paul knows this.
Recognising the diversity of the Early Church is something of a consolation and a comfort. We have all sorts of problems but it was always thus. In our celebration of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity we are right to encourage one another and seek a way forward, but we also need to give thanks that, even in the midst of the confusion and complexities of our modern world, there is much to celebrate in the different ways we are confronting our problems, living with the difficulties and looking patiently but persistently for solutions and progress.
We feel we must be continually thanking God for you, brothers; quite rightly, because your faith is growing so wonderfully and the love that you have for one another never stops increasing; and among the churches of God we can take special pride in you for your constancy and faith under all the persecutions and troubles you have to bear. (2 Thess 1:3-4)
The Right Rev John Arnold is Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster and Titular Bishop of Lindisfarne.
Read more of Thinking Faith’s series on Saint Paul:
Who Was Saint Paul? – Peter Edmonds SJ
The Long Road to Damascus – Bishop John Arnold
Paul the Pastor – Jerome Murphy-O’Connor OP
The Vision of Saint Paul – Nick King SJ
Getting to know Saint Paul today – David Neuhaus SJ
Paul, Trinity and Community – Michael Mullins
Power in Paul – David Harold-Barry SJ
The Letter of Paul to the Philippians – Peter Edmonds SJ
Thinking about Christ?s Resurrection in the Year of St Paul – Gerald O?Collins SJ
The Letter to the Colossians: Jesus and the Universe – Brian Purfield
Global Godliness ?
Paul and Christian Disunity
Vive le Tour!
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The Official Internet Home of Warren Haynes
WarrenBase
WarrenTracks
Xmas Jam
Mountain Jam
02.19.19 Warren Haynes & Brandi Carlile Team With Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds In Mexico
Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds closed out their third annual destination event in Riviera Maya, Mexico on Sunday. The duo mined their repertoire for a number of deep cuts and rarities along with welcoming both Warren Haynes and Brandi Carlile during last night’s finale.
Matthews and Reynolds got their evening going with “Don’t Drink The Water.” “When The World Ends” occupied the second slot and was offered up for just the second time by the pair since 2017. Fan-favorite “Crash Into Me” came ahead of “Raven.” The Busted Stuff track was dusted off for the first time in nearly two years and played for just the third time ever by Dave and Tim. Three songs later the pair served up the traditional folk song “Worried Man Blues” and Daniel Lanois’ “The Maker” back-to-back. The former had been sitting on the shelf since 2017, while the latter was delivered for just the fifth time since 2010.
The longtime collaborators continued to dig for lesser played tunes offering up the fifth take on “Lover Lay Down” together since 1999, along with versions of the unreleased song “Death On The High Seas” and “Fool To Think” from Everyday. The final stretch of the evening found Dave and Tim welcoming Carlile out for a three-song stretch. With the singer-songwriter in tow, the trio teamed up on “Come Tomorrow” and “Spoon.” Carlile then stepped up to sing lead on “The Joke” from her Grammy-winning album By the Way, I Forgive You.
After reaching for another rarity with “Sister,” Haynes emerged returning a favor from earlier in the night when Matthews sat in with him during his solo set for a version of Gov’t Mule’s “Forsaken Savior.” The threesome dug in on set-closing takes of Neil Young’s “Cortez The Killer” and Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower.” Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds brought their time in Mexico to an end with a three-song encore looking to “Some Devil,” “Granny” and “Stay (Wasting Time).”
Bring On The Music Out June 28
New live release features over 5 hours of music. Available on CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, Vinyl and Digitally.
Hensville Park 07.16.19 Toledo, OH Crossroads 07.18.19 Kansas City, MO Treasure Island Resort & Casino 07.19.19 Welch, MN
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EXPECT ANYTHING
at IFC Center
Say Hello to What The Fest!?
Sign up for festival news
Thu Mar 21, 2019, 7:00 PM | IFC Center
Expected to Attend: Director Pollyanna McIntosh
BEFORE THE FILM: Jack Ketchum tribute in collaboration with the world’s longest-running educational organization devoted to the study of horror history – The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies.
EAST COAST PREMIERE When we last came upon Darlin’, she was leaving her seemingly ideal suburban family life behind to live in the wilderness with The Woman (writer/director Pollyanna McIntosh, perhaps best known for her role on The Walking Dead), who came into her life when her depraved father captured The Woman and kept her chained up in the family barn. It’s eight years later and Darlin’ is a teenager not unlike any other, except for the fact she’s been raised in the wilderness by a feral woman. Now separated from her family and placed in a Catholic girls reformatory (never a good idea, but that’s the Catholic Church for you), she’s being assimilated back into society and taught the ways of the Lord. But the feral part of Darlin’ is never far away, and neither is The Woman who loved, nurtured and cared for her, hoping to bring her family back together.
The Woman, the late novelist Jack Ketchum’s most twisted creation, was first introduced in his 1991 novel Offspring, and when that tale came to the screen in 2009, Pollyanna McIntosh brought the character to life so vividly that Ketchum and Lucky McKee wrote the 2011 film THE WOMAN (later novelized by Ketchum) to continue her story. Now McIntosh herself has taken the reins as writer/director and made a stunning debut feature that honors the author and this demented family saga. McIntosh has assembled a first-class cast, with Irish actress Lauryn Canny excelling in the title role and Nora-Jane Noone and Cooper Andrews (McIntosh’s co-star on The Walking Dead) both lending fine support as Darlin’s few adult sympathizers. And then there’s McIntosh returning as The Woman, fiercer and more feral than ever, but also filled with the love and purity of a devoted mother that makes this her best performance in the series yet. As dark and violent as anything you’ll find at this year’s What The Fest?, DARLIN’ is both a satisfying continuation of the saga of The Woman and her demented family and a terrific directorial debut for its star.
– Matthew Kiernan
Director: Pollyanna McIntosh
Producer: Andrew van den Houten
Cinematographer: Halyna Hutchins
Editor: Julie Garcés
Copyright © 2019 IFC Center LLC. All rights reserved.
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Why I left London
I awoke groggy, alcohol still lingering in my system from last nights leaving drinks. Co-workers, senior management, ex-colleagues, all of whom I class as friends were there to give me the best send off by buying me endless drinks, recounting my first days at the company and eagerly questioning where my next adventure lays…
Reaching my usual London underground station, I pass the crowds of busy people, rushing to get to work and suddenly feel the urgency in my pace slow. This is the last time I’ll be here, going on this route to work. I look around me at the faces of strangers, tired eyes burning into phone screens and newspaper articles, and wonder: have I travelled with them before? Was I always in too much of a rush to notice? Why do they never look back at me? Why do we never speak? The tube pulls into the station and the all familiar uncomfortable shoving begins, it seems us Londoners forgot what English folk are well known for; queuing.
My thoughts shift, showing a petite girl, timidly stepping aside for people to enter the tube, not wanting to be a part of the awkward intimacy that came with forcing herself onto the packed carriage. She held her head low, trying to hide the panic that she felt rising within herself. For a girl who used to be too scared to even talk to a sales person behind a counter, moving to London as the first time of living away from home was a BIG deal, one that would change me forever. I’ve come so far from being that timid girl, afraid of the sweaty confrontation within rush-hour on the London Underground.
So many times that girl wanted to escape London, to run from the stresses of a new environment, to run from the expectations of a fresh and fast-paced job role in the advertising world, to run from the loneliness of being in a city which held so many people who ironically were so distrusting and ignorant of one another as strangers.
Now, two years on from the timid girl who entered London for the first time, I have left. But I haven’t escaped. I left because of what London had taught me, how it moulded me, and I will never forget that.
What did it teach me?
London is filled with success. It’s a city that’s known for it’s opportunities, career-focused inhabitants, innovative events and luxurious life style. This is all true, although the life style is far from ‘luxurious’ if you can’t afford it. The most luxuries my house shares offered were the rare moments when the mice decided to move on to another home and the boiler worked for more than a few weeks, but that was all part of my character building. (Plus the mice were actually kinda cute.)
Coming from the laid-back seaside city of Plymouth, Londoners were the most ambitious people I had ever met and I couldn’t help but look at them in awe. From the ‘big-shots’ with their fancy job titles, to the creative ‘hipsters’ with a vision who seemed to simply have luck on their side, but always knew deep down what they were doing. It’s true, Londoners might not seem like the most considerate and friendly of people when they’re rushing to their next conference meeting or in heavy thought over their next ‘big idea’; but these people know success, they’re surrounded by it every day! Within this lifestyle it is the norm to dream big and to work hard for it. Where else would you hear of a successful cereal café or an over-the-top cinema experience that makes you dress up and gives you roles before you even reach the event?
You’re probably wondering why I left such an inspiring city. But that’s just the thing, I don’t believe it’s the city, I believe it’s the mindset that makes these successes. The people I met in London are so positive about their visions and aren’t afraid to take chances and fail a few times before they get to where they envision themselves being. They simply won’t settle for anything less than their own aspirations.
That’s where moving comes into this. I may seem ‘successful’ to others by having a job as a Developer in a well-known advertising company and living in this fast-paced city that others only dream to live in; but that’s not my aspiration. I have a need to travel, a longing to explore overgrown forests and jump into the chilly English waters, a want to embrace strangers and fill their lives with a little more joy. I have a dream to understand narrative, play with storytelling mediums and create things for myself; to work hard but with a passion and a love for the work that I produce.
Living in London has taught me to chase my dreams and never give up. That with hard work come great rewards. Leaving the city that opened my eyes to how attainable success really is was scary, and I’m still not 100% sure of where I will end up to obtain my goals; but I know that I can, and I know that I will. I’ll take this essence of London life and keep it with me throughout my life-long adventures.
I will not settle for anything less than my own aspirations. Nobody should. We are all worthy of success if we just believe it.
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1 2 3 4 5 [6] 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Reviews: 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ywP8g9xf8E
" I don't do stunts [...] in terms of the maths of it, I did about 97% of the action scenes in JW2 "
... only Keanu :)
Reviews: 13 http://collider.com/john-wick-2-chad-stahelski-interview/
Reviews: 0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojdxL4d46Ak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6hxE4SCgZk
Reviews: 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8rYaIu3hI0&feature=youtu.be
http://www.empireonline.com/people/keanu-reeves/exclusive-new-look-john-wick-chapter-2/
The second shows new baddies, Riccardo Scamarcio and Ruby Rose, in what is likely to be the film’s signature set piece: a showdown in a blinding hall-of-mirrors art installation. “The mirror room was Chad’s idea,” says Reeves. “It’s his homage to Bruce Lee at the end of Enter The Dragon. The whole installation is a maze of mirrors where guys can pop out and disappear. It’s very cool and a lot of fun to fight in.”
Asian cinema remains a major influence second time around. “You go watch any of the great Hong Kong guys,” says director Chad Stahelski, “[you’re watching] wider shots; you're watching an extremely talented individual. If you're using fast editing to hide things, I call bullshit. That's cheating. Luckily, we have a cast member that can do it. Keanu’s been doing martial arts for 25 years. He's been trained by us, he's been trained by Yuen Wo Ping. He's been trained by Chen Yen.”
Reeves succinctly sums up the sequel: “It’s like going back to your favourite restaurant but this time, instead of getting to the fillet, you’re getting the porterhouse.”
http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/779171-more-john-wick-chapter-2-photos-with-keanu-reeves#/slide/1
Reviews: 0 http://www.film-news.co.uk/news/UK/41817/Keanu-Reeves-impressed-John-Wick-sequel-director-with-martial-arts-talents?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Reviews: 13 http://www.hollywoodoutbreak.com/2016/10/10/wick-ipedia-everything-keanu-reeves-loves-about-the-character/
MmeRenard 2016-11-07 04:18:20
Reviews: 0 For anyone who's curious about locations for the Montreal shoot, while I couldn't get there, yeah, I know the locations. "Oh, look, that's Olive et Gourmando! Oh look, that's right outside Gibby's steakhouse!" etc. I spend about two weeks in Montreal every year, and have for the past ten years or so, so I know it pretty well.
Reviews: 13 http://www.maxim.com/entertainment/10-movie-trailers-2016-12
Let's be real: the trailer for John Wick: Chapter 2 is completely over the top. The operatic chorus on the soundtrack, more gun play than you see in some full-length action films, Keanu Reeves's proto-Batman like growl — and it's still balls-out great. The first John Wick was more spare an action film than it gets credit for, while it looks like Chapter 2 has decided to go big. And we are just fine with that.
Reviews: 0 http://comicbook.com/2016/12/16/new-john-wick-chapter-2-trailer-coming-monday/
Reviews: 13 https://twitter.com/JohnWickMovie/status/810892476412149760
http://screenrant.com/john-wick-2-trailer-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChpLV9AMqm4
Reviews: 13 http://www.cinemablend.com/news/1603140/john-wick-has-another-story-coming-in-an-unexpected-way
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/john-wick-comics-launch-2017-958564
... and it all started with a small movie Keanu was filming in December 2013, while the media was busy trashing 47 Ronin....
Reviews: 0 "Impressive" that anyone gets paid for writing:
"Barrucci insisted that as he left the cinema following John Wick, he pined for more story regarding the assassin, before clocking that it was "obvious they had the makings of a franchise." Lionsgate clearly agreed because they quickly handed over the rights for the character to Dynamite, allowing them to tell brand new stories with John Wick."
Where's my red pen? but the typewriter and the advice are very cool.
Reviews: 13 http://lionsgatepublicity.com/theatrical/JohnWickChapter2/
Reviews: 13 ... now that's tactical advertising for a movie :)
the Wick universe surely is expanding... video games, VR games, comic books, now this
http://www.continentalquarterly.com/
Reviews: 1 ...oh. :D
Reviews: 13 https://www.inverse.com/article/25638-keanu-reeves-john-wick-2-meme
... I haven't read so much condescension and so many backhanded compliments in a long time.
It's still good. Keanu Reeves is launching the third franchise of his career, and this time he's the center of it. The driving force. The third phase of his career is looking sharp and tactical.
Bring on the memes. They just help build his immortality ;)
Taluthah 2017-01-01 01:53:56
Reviews: 0 third franchise, ok the Matrix, any hint on the third one?
Taluthah
Reviews: 13 Bill and Ted :)
it was a franchise, too :)
two movies, cartoons, even cereals named after them...
Reviews: 0 it's going to be a Happy Wick Year then
Reviews: 13 oh, yes....
a wicked happy one :)
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181: Don’t let FOMO hold you back (w/ Dan Lydersen)
http://traffic.libsyn.com/yourcreativepush/YCP_181_Dan_Lydersen.mp3
Dan Lydersen is a painter who draws influence from a variety of contemporary and historical sources, from the Renaissance to modern cinema, literature, and popular culture. Both theatrical and satirical, comical and somber, the paintings pose a view of humanity that is steeped in the existential turmoil that lies between materiality and spirituality, where society trudges persistently forward into the future while the human search for meaning and purpose as mortal animals remains unresolved.
In this episode, Dan discusses:
-The influence that his mother and theater had on him as a creative person.
-His balance between tragedy and comedy that he has found in his paintings.
-The lack of authenticity that comes when you are doing things that you think other people want to see rather than what you want to make.
-The importance of not being too influenced by your teachers or predecessors.
-How you can use older styles to say something about newer ideas.
-The notion of using a two-dimensional rectangle to capture a moment in time.
-How spending a lot of time on something and then throwing it away is actually a good habit.
-His process of coming to an idea and then planning it out before starting the actual painting.
-Some of the moments of self-doubt that he deals with and how he gets through them.
-The advantage that we have in modern times to be able to create whatever we want without needing permission from anyone else.
-Why he doesn’t spend much time or energy on social media.
-The idea of FOMO (fear of missing out) and how it can sometimes overwhelm you into doing nothing at all.
-How a piece of his art randomly became a Japanese meme.
Dan’s Final Push will inspire you to get to work first. The creativity will come.
“I’m a very silly person but a very serious person at the same time, so I don’t put a separation between tragedy and comedy. They’re one in the same.”
“I’ve gotten into a groove of being able to say what I want to say through visual art.”
“I think I was trying to make paintings that I thought the art world wanted to see or wanted an artist to make and not paintings that I really wanted to make. There was a lack of authenticity in them.”
“It’s dangerous to be too precious with your art and to think, I’ve invested all this time and energy to this; it must be carried through.”
“I wouldn’t say that ideas come to me. It’s more like I come to the ideas.”
“Ideas don’t just come to you like a light bulb turning on. You have to work at them.”
“I’m a pretty logical person and it’s kind of hard to attach logic to art because it doesn’t necessarily function logically.”
“It’s a big world. If you get your work out there, there’s going to be people who see the world in the same way you do and appreciate your art.”
“You tend to focus more on other people’s achievements than your own.”
“It’s a matter of numbers. You’re perceiving this unified body of other people doing all of these amazing things versus you, as one person, doing what you’re doing. And even if you’re doing something great, it will never amount to the sum of what everybody else is doing.”
“At this point I feel like me and my work are indistinguishable. If you take my art out of the equation, I don’t really know what’s left of me.”
“Creativity and art aren’t cause and effect, they’re more like a feedback loop. Creativity feeds the art and then the art feeds the creativity and it’s all one body.
“Just get working and the creativity will come.”
“It’s faulty reasoning to assume that you’re creative or inspired and then you make artwork. It’s more the reverse. You start making artwork and then that leads you to feel inspired or creative.”
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker
Website / Facebook
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Summer Rain at Anderson Center
featuring Zeitgeist & Nirmala Rajasekar
May 11, 2018 at 7:30 p.m.
Anderson Center
163 Tower View Drive, Red Wing, MN
$20 / $15 students & seniors
$18 Anderson Center Members
General $20.00 USD AC Member $18.00 USD Student/Senior $15.00 USD
Zeitgeist is joined by veena virtuoso Nirmala Rajasekar and mridangam player Thanjavur Murugaboopathi for a production that blends Indian Classical music (Carnatic tradition) and Western classical new music. Summer Rain features five musical compositions designed to bring all of us a greater understanding of the two traditions.
Nirmala Rajasekar began her training in Veena at age 6 from well-known practitioners such as Sri Deva Kottai Narayana Iyengar and Smt. Kamala Aswathama. After moving to Bangalore, she learned at the Gana Mandira School in Basavangudi Smt. G Chennama and Smt. E. P. Alamelu. The violinist Vidwan Sri A. D. Zachariah also guided her, and she began her career as a soloist at age 13. Later in Chennai, she was guided by the revered veena vidushi for Smt.Kalpakam Swaminathan who passed away on April 6 2011. Nirmala trained with her for nearly 30 years. Her vocal Gurus are Sri B.Sitarama Sarma and Sri T.R. Subramanyam. Nirmala travels around the world teaching and performing Carnatic Music vocally and on her veena She is an active collaborator with other forms of art as well including western Classical music, Jazz, Chinese poetry. She is the artistic director of the school Naadha Rasa (Essence of Tone), Center for Music.
Zeitgeist’s Summer Rain tour is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
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Walpole is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States and also encompasses the entirely distinct entity of Walpole (CDP), with its much smaller area of 2.9 square miles and smaller population of 5,198 at the 2010 census. Walpole Town, as the Census refers to the actual town, is located about 13 miles (21 km) south of Downtown Boston and 23.5 miles (37.8 km) north of Providence ...
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MCI-Cedar Junction (MCI-CJ) is a maximum security reception and diagnostic center, with a minimum component, housing criminally sentenced males. The Department Disciplinary Unit (DDU) for the most serious discipline issues is also located here.
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A Historian of Power and Its Discontents
Michael Kazin
Alan Brinkley, 1949–2019
Eileen Barroso/University Archives/Rare Book & Manuscript Library/Columbia University Libraries
Alan Brinkley, who died on June 17 after a lengthy illness, was among the most influential American historians of his generation. What made him so?
Brinkley wrote two books on the politics of the 1930s and ’40s that profoundly changed the way scholars understand the New Deal era. Voices of Protest, which won the National Book Award, explained why Huey Long and Charles Coughlin attracted millions of followers during the Great Depression, revealing the power of a populist tradition most of Brinkley’s academic counterparts assumed had died out years before. I got in touch with him soon after reading that book; it inspired my own work on the “populist persuasion,” and Alan and I became friends. The End of Reform examined how New Dealers abandoned their anti-corporate agenda late in the 1930s and during World War II. In the age of Amazon and Walmart, the consequences of their decision affect us still.
In both works and in the essays collected in Liberalism and Its Discontents, Brinkley showed an unmatched talent for marrying the perspective of his generational peers, the New Left historians who championed “history from the bottom up,” with a critical understanding of the achievements and limits of power in the American state and mass culture. Growing up the son of David Brinkley, the celebrated TV news anchor, helped Alan borrow from both perspectives while avoiding their shortcomings. Gary Gerstle, a fine historian who went to grad school with Brinkley, wrote to me after his death:
Alan’s proximity to power growing up made him a critic of power; it did not seduce him. He saw it, dissected it, understood it. And it gave him, too, a sympathy for the outsider, which explains his openness to we social historians, and his willingness to promote us at a critical time when we were young and on the margins—even as he always positioned himself at some distance from the New Left.
As Gerstle suggests, Brinkley’s greatness as a historian transcended the subjects he viewed afresh and the cogent arguments he made about them. He had a rare sensibility that informed everything he wrote. It embodied the best of the liberal intellectual tradition—committed to egalitarian change, yet skeptical of unbridled passion in pursuing it and suffused with an integrity and generosity of spirit that, in his hands, turned the writing of history into a moral endeavor.
Brinkley’s sensibility, expressed with quiet eloquence, appealed to general readers who cared about history as much as it did to academics who make their living writing about the past. Alan wrote frequently for progressive magazines like this one and was, for a time, a regular commentator on NPR. He was the model of a politically engaged historian who never yoked his work to a narrow political agenda and managed to instruct a large public without demanding that anyone take his side.
A crystalline example of his approach was published back in 1990, in the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times. The occasion for the brief piece was a theatrical adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, starring Gary Sinise as Tom Joad. In less than 1,500 words, Brinkley managed to communicate a subtle but powerful set of insights about: Steinbeck’s work, the Dust Bowl migration, how Americans experienced the Great Depression, and how all these subjects should still matter to people midway through the administration of George Bush the First.
Brinkley began by quoting the adapter’s rather banal motivation about why he was drawn to the novel: “We are on the threshold of a new world, at the end of a catastrophic century” [the Cold War was ending]. “This story comes back to us … from a dark time to invite us to reflect on what we really value.”
Alan segued from that comment to an explanation of why “what we really value” about how Americans endured the Great Depression is beset by contradictions and paradoxes, which Steinbeck’s novel memorably, if sentimentally, captures. On the one hand, Brinkley argued, Steinbeck articulated the widespread anger of Americans against a cabal of cruel and venal authorities. He had expressed that anger in two previous, inferior novels about agricultural workers and the forces arrayed against them in California during the 1930s.
Yet that anger did not, for the most part, find expression in mass uprisings or in the making of a mass left dedicated to a radical version of social justice. Tom Joad announces to his mother in that famous speech, “wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.”
Unromantically, Alan nails this for what it is: a “muddled and at times naive” political message, articulated by a man who is about to run away from his family and, on his own, risk “descend[ing] into helplessness and paralysis.” But in showing that women like Ma Joad and her daughter Rose of Sharon “have the strength to endure,” Steinbeck found a redemptive message that both rejected individualism and spurned what Brinkley called “the Marxist dream of a great collective future driven by history and ideology.”
Steinbeck recognized, as did most of those who read his book or saw the film version directed by John Ford, that “neither despair nor rage adequately expressed the real meaning of the Depression.” The novelist thus evoked the existence of what might be called a populist community—one based on, in Alan’s words, “a faith in the simple decency of common men and women.” Brinkley made clear that such a faith could serve the right as much as the left. He mentioned Ronald Reagan’s “examples of spontaneous neighborliness” and George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light.” Indeed, Gary Sinise himself soon became one of the most stalwart Republicans in Hollywood.
In a short piece, Alan had done something many historians struggle to do in an entire book. He did not just analyze a major American writer’s attempt to craft a credible portrait of a suffering people who he wished had revolted in greater and more purposeful ways. Steinbeck’s struggle, Alan reflected, also mirrored that of the mass of his fellow citizens at the time.
Brinkley concluded the piece by capturing an essential reason why The Grapes of Wrath and its characters remained symbols of the 1930s both for Americans who lived through that era and for many who did not. “Steinbeck’s novel,” he wrote, “is more than an intriguing period piece. Despite its many flaws it speaks to modern audiences, as it did to audiences in the 1930’s, by evoking one of America’s most powerful and cherished images of itself. It suggests that running like a river beneath the surface of the nation’s cold, hard, individualistic culture lies the spirit of Ma Joad, a spirit of ‘fambly’ and community that, once tapped, might redeem us all.”
While few historians may have the ability to write so elegantly for those outside their profession, Brinkley forcefully argued, in another essay written a quarter-century ago, that engaging their fellow citizens cannot be an optional task:
The attempt to understand the past … is not an arcane academic activity. It is part of a society’s struggles over policy and belief and present action. It is part of the effort to enable individuals to resist power, to make independent judgments, to evaluate for themselves the claims and counterclaims about the past that form the core of much public discourse. … If historians choose not to play a role in that struggle, we can be sure that others, not of our choosing, will take our place.
Scholars alarmed by the prospect of a second term for a man who understands nothing about the history of the nation he prattles about “making great again” had better take the advice of this extraordinary historian to heart.
Becoming Obama
Alan Brinkley
The life of Barack Obama is a tale of post-civil rights movement racial politics.
Liberty, Community, and the National Idea
Is a renewed emphasis on the value of community the answer to our political woes? Not if it's defined in purely local terms.
Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of Dissent. His most recent book is War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918.
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Consultation opens over the UK’s carbon price future
|In Energy news
|By AEadmin
by New Power May 4, 2019
The UK government is consulting, along with the devolved administrations, on a new UK carbon pricing scheme that would be employed in the event the UK could not take part in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) after Brexit.
The consultation reiterates that a linked UK ETS is the preferred carbon pricing option, because it allows:
access to a larger market
increased abatement opportunities
more cost-effective emissions reductions for UK businesses
If that is not possible the government has promised that there would be a new arrangement that “would be at least as ambitious as the current EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) and will provide a smooth transition for relevant sectors”. Fall-back options include the UK introducing its own domestic trading system, which would not be linked to the EU ETS or the introduction of a tax on carbon. It also considers the implications if the UK participates in Phase IV of the EU ETS (as the UK is still in the UK, regulations for this phase have to be transposed into UK law during 2019).
A UK ETS would follow the EU model in auctioning allowances, but with some free allocations which the government said would help stop ‘carbon leakage’ when industries move to countries with no emission limits. Free allocation would not apply to the power sector. The auction would have a reserve price that would take into account recent prices for carbon emissions, which have ranged from £4.70 to £13.70.
Government is also considering a decarbonisation fund and considers whether such a fund should be set up and whether it should be funded from free or auctioned allowances.
An initial review of the new system would take place in 2023.
The consultation does not include detail of the carbon tax option, but it says responses may feed into further work on this alternative. It said if the option went forward, government would explore ways of incentivising installations to reduce emissions, how the rate would be set and how to ensure that businesses would have sufficient visibility of future costs.
See the full consultation here. The closing date is 12 July.
See the HMRC technical note on a carbon tax here
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al-Nānautawī: Why modern sciences were excluded from the syllabus of Dār al-‘Ulūm Deoband
April 15, 2014 August 7, 2014 ‘Abd Allāh 5 Comments
By Sayyid Mahbūb Rizwī
Translated by Prof. Murtaz Ḥusayn F. Qurayshī
On seeing the syllabus of Dār al-‘Ulūm Deoband, the question arises: ‘Why were the modern sciences, which had already reached India at the time this syllabus was compiled, not included in it?’ The reason for this non-inclusion, according to Mawlānā Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautawī, was that these subjects were being taught in the government schools that had been established in the country at various places and everyone could take advantage of these. On the contrary, the old (sacred) sciences were in a state of abandonment and there was not even an inferior arrangement for teaching these. Moreover, in this syllabus itself attention had been paid to the creation of so much ability in the student that he might acquire knowledge of other sciences through self-study. This question had also cropped up at the inception of the Dār al-‘Ulūm itself; on the convocation of 1290 AH Mawlānā Nānautawī threw full light on this question. He said:
“For the education of all the rational and traditional sciences and to acquire competency therein, this madrasah and the madrasah at Saharanpur (Maẓāhir ‘Ulūm) are, no doubt, an excellent provision; and if it please Allah, the alumni here, provided they complete the curriculum, can easily and quickly acquire the remaining ancient and modern sciences by dint of the power of their ability. The reason therefore is that in these madrasahs, the greatest objective, besides the religious education, is the attainment of the power of ability. We did not rest content with only the religious sciences but as per the old system, have also provided subjects that develop intelligence, an excellent result of which in the former times was that great savants and polymaths possessing prodigious abilities were produced in legions amongst the followers of Islam. Hence, we understand with certainty that though the students here may not have succeeded with some of the modern arts and sciences, the ability of theirs may prove sufficient like a perfect teacher for their education. In other schools, though, due to the teaching of some modern subjects, the students thereof may have acquired some new acquaintance of those subjects which the students here may be wanting in, the latter, in fact, in the eyes of the just, would be considered, by virtue of their ability, superior to the former in these subjects also.
“Notwithstanding all this, even if some loss is conceivable supposedly due to lack of practice in some of the modern subjects, then due to want of ability and absence of the knowledge of religious sciences the students of those schools ought to be considered inferior to the students of this madrasah.
“Now we also point out this thing so that it may be known why in respect of acquirement (of knowledge) this special method was proposed and why the modern subjects were not included. The main reason, inter alia, for this is that whether training be special or general that aspect should be borne in mind from which crack may have developed in their accomplishment. Accordingly, it is manifest upon men of intelligence that nowadays education in modern subjects is making rapid progress due to the outnumbering government-run-schools. Indeed the old sciences must never have declined so much as they did now. Under such circumstances the people looked upon the founding of schools for modern sciences as an exercise in futility. Hence, it was considered necessary to spend money for the traditional sciences, as also for those disciplines which certainly develop ability for the conventional (religious) as well as the modern sciences.
“Secondly, the acquisition of numerous sciences at one and the same time proves detrimental to ability in respect of all the sciences. Of course, after acquiring the knowledge of intelligence-developing subjects, which have been prescribed especially for the acquisition of ability, if the old and new arts (subjects) too are acquired, the span of time required for their acquirement will, of course, remain equal. The objective will be achieved well enough through its antecedence and subsequence, as the ability of each science and hence the reason-developing sciences were introduced, along with the traditional sciences, in the curriculum. Hereafter, if the students of this madrasah, joining government schools, acquire knowledge of the modern subjects, this thing would more shore up their accomplishment.” (Rūdād Dār al-‘Ulūm Deoband, 1290 AH, p. 15-6)
On another occasion, replying to the objection that modern sciences have not been included in the curriculum of Dār al-‘Ulūm, he says:
“There is no arrangement here at all for the teaching of the worldly sciences. The answer (to this objection) firstly is that there ought to be a treatment of the disease. To take medicine for a disease, which is not there, is useless. The crack in the wall should be filled in; it is necessary to fill the kiln. What is it but foolishness to be anxious about the brick that has not fallen down? Of what earthly use are the government schools? If the profane sciences are not taught there, what else is done?” (Rūdād Dār al-‘Ulūm Deoband, 1292 AH, p. 13)
Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob (1981). History of the Dār al-‘Ulūm Deoband, Volume 2. Deoband: Idara-e Ihtemam. p. 211-3.
Related article(s):
Concerning the avoidance of “English Education” in 19th century Muslim India
ʻAllāmah Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī on learning of English and secular sciences
Contemporary, Misconceptions
← Moderation of the ‘Ulamā’ of Deoband
Concerning Imām Abū Ḥanīfa’s title of al-Imām al-Aʻẓam →
5 thoughts on “al-Nānautawī: Why modern sciences were excluded from the syllabus of Dār al-‘Ulūm Deoband”
archerofmusings says:
I believe this whole quotation has bee misunderstood. If the original urdu texts are referred to it will be easily understood.
Modern sciences were introduced to the syllabus and this is an accepted fact amongst the ulama of Deoband at this present time. Please check records of the early syllabus in the annual reports of darul uloom.
Sciences included:
Elements of physics
Principles of logic
This was taught in a book called naqsh fil hajar. This is what the above text is referring to when stating that this will not be enough but will give then the keys and ability to harness into further development. It is not a general statement. Furthermore, sir John strachs report on Deoband easily clarifys this matter that euclids fith postulate was being taught. Also Professor ridha al masri of al-azhar on his visit commended the book and said we need such sciences to combat such ilhaad and apostasy from modern academics.
Please research further.(for reference ml.sajjad nomani DB s.o ml.manzoor nomani has well researched this issue.)
Friends of Deoband says:
Assalaamu ‘Alaykum
Jazak Allah khayr for your input and comments on this topic.
If you do have any references, quotes, books, or any other info on this please post here so that the original article can be edited and updated.
Was-salaam
Walykumus salaam
Refrences:
Rudaad mu’tamar al-ansaar muradabaad (1911)
Al-qasim monthly journal,Deoband, special edition of Darul uloom. (1360 AH)
Rudad darul uloom (1330 AH)
Al-furqan monthly journal, Lucknow, pg.27, July 2007
Al-furqan monthly journal pg 4-14, March 2014
I forgot to mention above that my point is more towards an introductory syllabus to ‘secular’ sciences being introduced and not a detailed syllabus and it is this that hazrat RA may be referring to in the second qoute. Wallahu alam.
The time when the Dar al-Ulum, Deoband was established only nine years had passed over the fight for freedom of A. D. 1857.
Since the common Muslims and the elders at the Dar al-Ulum had taken up arms and ranked against the English in this fight for freedom, the English government was very much antagonistic to the Muslims, suspicious of and ill-disposed towards them.
The Muslims activities and movements were being kept under strict surveillance.
On this account a series of investigations, secret and open, in respect of the Dar al-Ulum continued for a long time. As such, in 1291 / 1875, the governor of Uttar Pradesh (formerly, the United Provinces), Sir John Strachey, sent a trusted man of his, John Palmer, to visit the Dar al-Ulum with the purpose of making secret investigations and report about the objective behind the establishment of the Dar al-Ulum and about the thought and activity the Muslims Ulamah [a term used for Scholars] were engaged in under the cover of this institution.
The report that John Palmer prepared and the impressions that he gathered, he has described in detail in a letter that he wrote to a friend.
The interesting and scholarly manner in which John Palmer has expressed his observations and impressions, comparing the educational condition of the Dar al-Ulum with the English universities, helps a good deal in understanding the educational position of the Dar al-Ulum. This incident occurred during the incipience of the existence of the Dar al-Ulum.
It can be estimated from this as to what the educational standard of the Dar al-Ulum has been from the very beginning.
While this letter consists of details of the Dar al-Ulum’s educational and some other particulars as well as review and criticism, it also brings forth an interesting album of the Dar al-Ulum’s features and its educational peculiarities, based on very profound impressions from the pen of a man,who had had an adverse view-point.
Hence it seems apt that the whole text of the letter is reproduced here.
In a tour with the Lt Governor of the western and northern provinces I happened to stay at Deoband on January 30, 1875. The Governor told me:
“The Muslims here, at Deoband, have started a madrasah against the government. Go there incognito and find out what is taught there and what the Muslims are after”.
Accordingly, on Sunday, 31st January, I reached the habitation. The village is quite clean, the inhabitants are courteous and pious but are poor and miserable.
Making enquiries, I reached the madrasah. Having reached there, I saw a large room in which boys were sitting on a palm-mat with books open before them, and an older boy was sitting in their midst. I asked the boys who their teacher was? One boy pointed out and then I came to know that the fellow sitting in the middle was himself the teacher. [1]
I wondered what kind of teacher he might be.
I asked him, “What do your boys read?”
“Persian is taught here”, he replied.
When I proceeded from here, a man of medium height but very handsome was sitting at one place, with a row of older boys before him. Approaching near, I heard that the science of triangle was being discussed.
It was my guess that considering me to be a stranger they would be startled, but no one paid any attention to me at all.
I went near, sat down and began to hear the teacher’s lecture.
My astonishment knew no bounds when I saw that such strange and difficult theorems of the science of triangles were being expounded that I had never heard even from Dr. Sprenger.
Rising from there when I went to a courtyard. I saw that students, wearing ordinary clothes, were sitting before a Maulvi (Honorific Islamic religious title given to Sunni Muslim religious scholars or Ulamah). Here the variants of the second figure of the sixth article of Euclid were being stated and the Maulvi was speaking off-hand in such a way that it appeared as though Euclid’s soul had entered his body?. [2]
I was agape with wonder.
Meanwhile, the Maulvi sahib asked the students such a difficult question on the first grade of equation from Todd Hunter’s Algebra that I was in a sweat at my own knowledge of mathematics and I was astounded.
Some students solved it correctly.
From here I reached a third courtyard. One Maulvi [3] was teaching a thick tome of Hadith and was all smiles while lecturing.
Climbing a staircase from here, I reached the 1st floor. There were elegant houses on its three sides and in the centre was a small courtyard in which two blind men were chattering.
In order to hear what they were saying, I went near stealthily.
I came to know that they were committing to memory some lesson from a book of astronomy. Meanwhile one blind man said to the other: “Brother! In yesterday’s lesson I could not understand the bridal figure properly. If you have understood it, please explain it to me”.
The other fellow first stated the claim and then proceeded to prove it by drawing lines on his palm and when their mutual discussion was going on, I was wondering, bringing before my eyes the scene of Principal Breggar’s lecture.
Getting up from there I went to a 5 doored room. Small children sitting very respectfully before the teacher were reading books of grammar. In Class III a traditional science was being taught.
I came down by another stair-case. I was under the impression that the madrasah was only this much. By chance I met a man and sought confirmation of my impression from him. He said: “No. The Holy Quran is taught at another place”. When I asked him where?, he took me to the mosque.
In the courtyard of the mosque, many small children were reading the Quran before a sightless Hafiz. [4]
I said that “Last year I had seen in newspaper [5] that four students had been awarded ‘the turban of proficiency’. Is any one of them present here?”.
“Yes”, he said, “there is one, come along with me and I will introduce you to him”. He took me to a house where a young man was sitting. A thick book was lying before him and ten to twelve students were sitting and reading. Two guns were also lying on one side. I saluted him and he responded with utmost courtesy. I asked him,
“Was the turban of proficiency tied on your head last year”?
“It is”, he replied, “my teachers favor”.
“What’s this book”? I asked him.
“It is”, he said. “a technical book in the Arabic language. The manager of a press has sent it for translation. Its remuneration has been settled at Rs. 1000/-, I have been translating it for three months and nearly three-fourth of it is finished. The remaining, if it please Allah, will be completed in a month”.
“How are these guns here”? I asked.
“I am fond of hunting. From seven to ten I teach, from eleven to one I go on hunting and from two to five I translate”.
I asked: “Why don’t you take up same service”?
He said: “God gives me Rs 250/- per month while I sit at home. Why should I then serve?” [6]
Rising up from here I came to the library. The librarian, welcoming me, showed me the catalogue of books.
I was amazed. There was no subject on which a book was not there.
He showed me another register. It was a muster-roll for the students and was written in a very neat hand. Out of the 210 students on the roll, 208 were present.
I was about to get up when a young man with an incipient beard came and, having saluted, sat down. I asked him who he was.
He said: “I am the vice-chancellor”. [7]
Then he placed three large registers before me and said: “Please see it; this is the account of income and expenditure for the whole year”.
I saw that the account was written date wise with extreme soundness. From the abstract I learnt that at the end of the last academic year some money had remained in balance after the expenses.
I wished to have a look at the books but the time was short and evening was about to set in. I was obliged to return.
The results of my investigations are that the people of this place are educated, well behaved and very gentle. There is no necessary subject which is not taught here. The work that is being done in big colleges at the expense of thousands of rupees is being clone here by a Maulvi for forty rupees. There cannot be a better teaching institution than this for the Muslims and I can even go to the extent of saying that it even if a non-Muslim takes education here, it will not be without benefit. I had heard about the existence of a school for the blind in England, but here I saw with mine own eyes two blind men prove mathematical figures on their palms in the way it should be!
I regret that Sir William Muir is not present today otherwise he would have inspected this madrasah with great zest and eagerness and would have given prizes to the students”.
1. He was Maulana Munfi’at Ali Deobandi, teacher of Persian who had been appointed the same year (A.H. 1291 / 1874) after the completion of his education. Initially he served as a Persian teacher and after some years was made Arabic teacher in which capacity he served the Dar al-Ulum till 1318 / 1900.
2. He was Maulana Sayyid Ahmed Dehelvi who was appointed second teacher in A. H. 1285 / 1868 and was made Vice-Chancellor on Maulana Muhammad Yaqub Nanautavi’s demise in A. H. 1302 / 1884. He continued on this post till A. H. 1307 / 1889. He was a matchless scholar of the time in mathematical sciences. Maulana Muhammad Oasim Nanautavi remarks “The Beneficient Lord has endowed Maulavi Sayyid Ahmed with such ability in and affinity with the mathematical arts that the inventors of these sciences too perhaps had had this much only.” (Report for A. H. 1293 / 1876, p. 13).
3. This is a reference probably to Maulana Muhammad Yaqub Nanautavi, the vice-chancellor. From the very inception he had been appointed to this post. – Sayyid Mahboob Rizvi.
4. That is Hafiz Namdar Khan, a resident of Bassi, District Muzatfarnagar. In the second year of the establishment ot the Dar al-Ulum, when the Quran class was started in 1284 / 1867, he was appointed its teacher and for nearly 55 years i.e till 1339/1920, he taught this class and produced a vast circle of Huffaaz including several teachers of the Dar al-Ulum.
5. This was the earliest stage of the life of the Dar at-Ulum but it seems from John Palmer’s sentence that the conditions and particulars of the Dar al-Ulum were published prominently in the newspapers, which means that even in those incipient days the Dar at-Ulum was deemed to have achieved a central and distinguished position.
6. Most probably he was Shaikh al-Hind. He had completed his studies in 1290/1874 and had been appolnted as teacher without pay in A.H. 1291. Among those who graduated in A. H. 1290 / 1873, Shaikh al Hind alone was an inhabitant of Deoband. And he was very fond of hunting also. It is regrettable that the book under translation referred to by John Palmer could not be traced.
Note: Shaykh al-Hind Maulana Mahmud Hasan [may Allah be pleased with him] is not to be confused with another great Islamic scholar, Mufti Mahmud al-Hasan popularly referred to with the title ‘Faqeeh ul Ummah’ meaning ‘Jurist of the Muslim community’ who is also a graduate of Deoband. – Blog author.
7. That is Maulana Rafi al-Din, Vice Chancellor of the Dar al-Ulum from 1284 / 1867 to 1286 / 1869 and again from 1288 / 1871 to 1308 / 1888.
This letter is a translation from the Urdu version of John Palmer’s letter. As a spy he might have known Urdu and Persian well. Unfortunately the compiler of this history. Maulana S. M. Rizwi died of heart failure on 25th March, 1979 otherwise he could have supplied the original English text, if there was any. – Murtaz Husain F. Quraishi, the translator of the book into English.
[Source: Pg. 135, Volume 1, History of Dar al Ulum Deoband, by Sayyid Mahboob Rizvi and translated into English by Prof. Murtaz Husain F. Quraishi]
Concerning the avoidance of “English Education” in 19th century Muslim India | Taṣawwuf, Psuedo-Ṣūfīs and Bidʻah! says:
[…] al-Nānautawī: Why modern sciences were excluded from the syllabus of Dār al-‘Ulūm Deoband […]
ʻAllāmah Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī on learning of English and secular sciences | Taṣawwuf, Psuedo-Ṣūfīs and Bidʻah! says:
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also available: Paperback Hardcover
publisher: Dundurn
Getting Back in the Game
A Foreign Policy Handbook for Canada
by Paul Heinbecker
diplomacy, post-confederation (1867-), national
Paul Heinbecker has a compelling vision for the future of Canadian foreign policy and argues that Canada still has a role to play in the rehabilitation of global governance.
Has Canada lost its place in the world? Are we destined for a future as a middle power, denied a seat at the "grown-ups table"? Some would argue yes, that decades of neglect and inattention have rendered Canadian foreign policy ineffective at best and non-existent at worst.
Paul Heinbecker disagrees. The golden days of Lester B. Pearson may be long gone, he contends (and perhaps they weren’t quite as "golden" as we’d all like to remember), but Canada still has a part to play.
In Getting Back in the Game, Heinbecker presents his compelling vision for the future of Canadian foreign policy, a future in which Canada can work both with the United Nations and apart from it; in which our government can take a stand and effect change on issues of the day from climate change to the Middle East; in which this country has a key role to play in the rehabilitation of global governance.
Paul Heinbecker is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and director of the Laurier Centre for Global Relations, Governance, and Policy, both located in Waterloo, Ontario. He was Canada’s ambassador to the UN from 2000 to 2003, where he supported creation of the International Criminal Court and advocated compromise on Iraq. He has also worked as chief foreign policy advisor to former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and as ambassador to Germany.
A career diplomat, Paul Heinbecker has served both at home and abroad, in positions as varied as Director of the United States General Relations Division, Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to Brian Mulroney, and as the head of the Canadian delegation to Kyoto. In 2000, Heinbecker was appointed Ambassador of Canada to the United Nations. He is the inaugural director of the Centre for Global Relations at Wilfrid Laurier University and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo.
Other Titles by Paul Heinbecker
Irrelevant or Indispensable?
The United Nations in the Twenty-first Century
edited by Paul Heinbecker & Patricia Goff
tagged : social services & welfare, human rights
Canada and the Middle East
In Theory and Practice
edited by Paul Heinbecker & Bessma Momani
Included in the sponsored collection: New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Canada Among Nations, 2009-2010
As Others See Us
by Fen Hampson & Paul Heinbecker
tagged : diplomacy
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May 16, 2014 by A Breach of Trust - Blog Writer
The entrance to the Humana headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky.
Brian Bohannon/AP
Giant health insurer Humana Inc. faces multiple federal investigations into allegations that it overbilled the government for treating elderly patients enrolled in its Medicare Advantage plans, court records reveal.
The status of the investigations is not clear, but they apparently involve several branches of the Justice Department. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami wrote in a court document filed in March that officials expect that at least one of the probes will be completed and the findings made public “in the next few months.”
The U.S. Attorney’s branch office in West Palm Beach, Florida has opened a criminal case involving overbilling allegations that the government says is similar to the Miami investigation. Meanwhile, the criminal division of the Justice Department in Washington has reviewed fraud allegations against the company, according to court records.
Humana, which insures more than 2 million people through the Medicare Advantage plans, is also the target of two Florida whistleblower civil lawsuits that allege similar overcharges.
Federal officials disclosed their legal actions in a series of documents unsealed April 30 in one of the whistleblower suits. That suit alleges that a doctor at a clinic in South Florida inflated billings for two dozen or more Humana patients. The case, filed in September of 2010, was unsealed in federal court in Miami earlier this month. The whistleblower added new allegations of overbilling to the Miami lawsuit on Wednesday.
Humana acknowledged the unsealing of the Miami case in a May 7 Securities and Exchange Commission filing, saying it “was continuing to cooperate with and respond to information requests from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” Humana disclosed in 2012 SEC filings that federal officials were seeking documents “relating to several matters including the coding of medical claims,” an admission that was reported at the time. But the company has offered no details.
Full Article & Source & to Continue Reading:
Posted in Blog, Commentary, Educational Material, News. Tagged Complaint, Humana, Medicare Advantage, Medicare Advantage Plans, overbilled, Whistleblower
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A brief golden age
The threat to Central America’s prosecutors
Attorneys-general in the countries of the northern triangle have made war on corruption. Politicians are itching to get rid of them
The AmericasMay 10th 2018 edition
ON MAY 7th hundreds of officials gathered in the ballroom of the Camino Real hotel in Guatemala City to pay tribute to Thelma Aldana, who was stepping down at the end of her four-year term as the country’s attorney-general. A Powerpoint presentation touted her prosecutorial feats. They included jailing the country’s president, Otto Pérez Molina (pictured) in 2015, and the vice-president, Roxana Baldetti. Last year she began an investigation of the current president, Jimmy Morales, on suspicions that he had paid for his campaign illegally. The front-row seat intended for him was empty.
The corruption that Ms Aldana pursued is not new. In Guatemala, as in the other countries in Central America’s “northern triangle”, El Salvador and Honduras, it infects the highest levels of government. Attorneys-general have mostly ignored the crimes of the politicians who appoint them. This contributes to the lawlessness and violence that impel people to flee the region and go to the United States.
But in all three countries recent holders of that office have fought impunity. Prosecutors in Honduras uncovered embezzlement at state agencies. In El Salvador a former president is in jail, another fled to Nicaragua and a third died before his trial. The region’s prosecutors have become “effectively a fourth branch of government”, says Charles Call of American University in Washington, DC. In Guatemala and Honduras they have had vital support from anti-corruption agencies backed by the UN and other international bodies.
Their successes are fragile. By early next year the three countries will have new chief prosecutors. El Salvador is due to replace five supreme-court justices. Politicians want to appoint tamer successors. The United States, which has helped in the fight against corruption, is retreating from the fray. All this threatens progress.
Northern tangle
The main target in Guatemala is the International Commission against Impunity (CICIG), the UN-backed agency that helped Ms Aldana lock up the former president. Its enemies are getting help from an unexpected quarter: Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida.
CICIG was set up in 2006 to help prosecutors dismantle “illegal security organisations” and related networks of businessmen and politicians. It has the backing of more than 70% of Guatemalans. Mr Morales, a comedian who had never held office, was elected in 2015 on a promise to fight the graft that CICIG and Ms Aldana uncovered. But when they scrutinised the financing of his campaign, he struck back. In August he tried to expel from the country CICIG’s boss, Iván Velásquez, but relented in the face of protests.
Mr Morales has a new ally in Mr Rubio, a member of the Senate’s appropriations committee, which authorises the American contribution to CICIG. That help is part of the United States’ strategy to discourage illegal migration by bolstering the rule of law. On May 4th Mr Rubio suspended the $6m grant, nearly half the agency’s budget.
He is taking his cue from Bill Browder, a foe of Vladimir Putin who contends that Russia is manipulating CICIG. Mr Browder bases that claim on CICIG’s role in prosecuting the Bitkov family, who have antagonised President Putin. The Bitkovs were given harsh sentences for using false documents to get residency in Guatemala. No other compelling evidence has emerged to support Mr Browder’s claim. A Guatemalan court recently ordered the Bitkovs’ retrial. Mr Rubio cut off the money anyway.
Some Guatemalans think he and Mr Browder are unwitting pawns of CICIG’s enemies. “Someone astutely planted the seed,” says a business lobbyist. Mr Rubio’s attack on CICIG may make it easier for Mr Morales to force out its director or let its mandate expire next year. The fight against corruption would then depend on Ms Aldana’s successor, María Consuelo Porras.
She is not well known. Her career as a judge and prosecutor suggests that she can do the job. “We’re giving her the benefit of the doubt,” says Helen Mack, a human-rights activist. Ms Porras will benefit from progress made during the CICIG era, including better prosecutors. But, like Ms Aldana, she will have to choose between CICIG and a tainted president, says Ms Mack.
In Honduras the battle may already be lost. The president, Juan Orlando Hernández, controls most of the country’s institutions, including the judiciary. Political control of the attorney-general’s office weakened for a time after the discovery in 2013 of massive corruption at the social-security agency. Protests led to the creation in 2016 of MACCIH, a CICIG-like commission with weaker powers, under the aegis of the Organisation of American States. It has investigated corruption allegations against congressmen and a former first lady, in partnership with the attorney-general, Óscar Chinchilla. Political elites fought back after Mr Hernández was re-elected last November. Though the vote was widely thought to be fraudulent, the United States endorsed it. In January Honduras’s congress passed a law that transfers investigations of the misuse of public funds from prosecutors to an audit body influenced by the president. MACCIH’s chief, Juan Jiménez Mayor, quit in February. Mr Hernández has not replaced him.
He is in a bigger hurry to replace Mr Chinchilla, whose term ends in September. Most of the 26 candidates have ties to the president’s National Party. One is rumoured to be involved in organised crime. Whoever is appointed, argues Edmundo Orellana, a former attorney-general, for MACCIH “it’s over.”
El Salvador’s attorney-general, Douglas Meléndez, has no help from an outside agency. He got the job in 2016 because the two main political parties, the left-wing FMLN and the right-wing Arena, could not agree on anyone else. He surprised them by going after former presidents from both parties: Tony Saca, from Arena, who is in jail awaiting trial on charges of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of public money; Mauricio Funes, from the FMLN, who fled to Nicaragua in 2016 when prosecutors began investigating him for illegal enrichment; and Francisco Flores (Arena), who was accused of embezzling millions of dollars meant for earthquake relief. After Flores died in early 2016, Mr Meléndez filed a suit against his estate.
Mr Meléndez has been criticised for self-promotion and for prosecuting more FMLN officials than Arena ones. But he is vastly better than his predecessor, Luis Martínez, who is in jail. The United States embassy has backed Mr Meléndez strongly. Arena, which gained control of congress in an election in March, has signalled that it may try to reappoint him when his term ends in December.
A bigger worry is who will replace five supreme-court justices in July. Four of them have been unusually feisty in defending human rights and loosening the stranglehold on politics of the two big parties. An international panel of experts will help vet the candidates to succeed them but congress will make the final choice. The parties regret naming independent-minded judges in 2009. “They won’t make that mistake again,” says Abraham Abrego of Cristosal, a human-rights group. In the northern triangle, a golden age of judicial independence may be ending.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The threat to Central America’s prosecutors"
More from The Americas
Cocaine production in Colombia is at historic highs
AMLO’s populism is both rampant and constrained
Jesus on the run
The disappearance of Jesús Santrich threatens Colombia’s peace deal
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Bridging the Gap: The Honda / Acura Legend and Rover 800
Luxury Cars, Model Histories
Japanese cars have a reputation for appliance-like reliability, but are often criticized (fairly or not) for lacking character. Character is a quality of which British cars have rarely been short, but dependability is quite another matter. In the early eighties, Honda and Rover decided to collaborate on two shared-platform luxury cars that promised to bridge that gap: the 1986–1990 Honda / Acura Legend and 1986–1999 Rover 800 (a.k.a. Sterling 800). The long and complicated story of how that project came about and what became of it is our subject in this installment of Ate Up With Motor.
The British Leyland Motor Corporation — successively known as British Leyland, Austin-Rover Group, and finally Rover Group — was born in 1968 through the merger of BMC (Austin, Morris, MG, Jaguar, et al) and Leyland Motors (which among other things owned Triumph and Rover). Despite controlling a huge slice of the British market and a host of prestigious marques, the new corporation staggered through the early seventies, shedding market share and nearly collapsing before its 1975 nationalization.
British Leyland was still far from healthy by the late seventies. Storied brands were abandoned or left to rot because they were deemed low priorities or because BL simply didn’t have the money to keep them competitive. Build quality, never a strong point, sank to a low ebb while new products were delayed or canceled. New models that did appear seemed to have either come out of the oven too soon or else not soon enough.
From 1968 until the early eighties, British Leyland encompassed much of the British motor industry, including not only automakers but also truck and bus manufacturers and a variety of automotive suppliers. (author photo)
One of British Leyland’s numerous product development headaches in this period was the Rover SD1. Launched in 1976, the SD1 was a charismatic executive car offering an appealing blend of performance and luxury, but it was hampered by persistent reliability woes and various minor design deficiencies, some of which were never really corrected.
As had become all too common, BL lacked the resources to develop a credible successor. By 1980–1981, the likeliest options were to re-skin the existing car (a project codenamed Bravo) or else replace it with a stretched version of the forthcoming Montego. Both plans smacked of desperation and it’s hard to envision either finding much success in the ferociously competitive executive car market of the mid-eighties. BL needed a better alternative.
Similar concerns had already led British Leyland to an agreement with Honda to produce licensed versions of the Honda Ballade (a restyled version of the Civic sedan). In the fall of 1981, Edwardes suggested to Honda president Kiyoshi Kawashima that BL and Honda collaborate on a new executive car, which would give the British the benefits of Honda’s technological expertise while ensuring that BL didn’t have to foot the entire bill.
According to Edwardes, Kawashima was initially hesitant, but Honda directors had already been contemplating such a move. The Honda Civic had been very successful, completing Honda’s recovery from a difficult period in the early seventies, and the Accord was doing extremely well in both the U.S. and Japan. Honda had recently added a second JDM sales network and was gradually expanding its offerings. A larger, more expensive model was a logical next step.
However, as Honda’s directors were well aware, the company’s automotive success to date had been based entirely on smaller cars. The four-door Accord, introduced in late 1977, had edged into the Toyota Carina/Nissan Stanza class, but Honda had nothing to offer in the larger, more prestigious segment represented by the popular Toyota Mark II/Chaser/Cressida and Nissan Laurel, much less a big luxury car like the Toyota Crown or Nissan Cedric/Gloria.
Borrowing its name from the coachbuilder Austin had acquired after the war, the Vanden Plas was the Rover SD1’s top trim level. By the end of the line, the Vanden Plas was available with the 2,597 cc (159 cu. in.) OHC six as well as the 3,528 cc (215 cu. in.) aluminum V-8 in either carbureted or fuel-injected forms. The SD1 was longer and wider than the later Rover 800 — 186.1 inches (4,730 mm) long and 69.6 inches (1,770mm) wide on a 110.8-inch (2,810mm) wheelbase — and was offered only as a five-door, a somewhat daring choice for the late seventies. (Photo: “1985 Rover Vanden Plas” © 2011 AlfvanBeem; dedicated to the public domain by the photographer under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, resized and modified 2014 by Aaron Severson)
Another consideration was the North American export market. Honda’s annual U.S. sales were rapidly approaching 400,000 units, more than 40% of the company’s total automotive volume, but the new Voluntary Restraint Agreement (VRA) between Japanese automakers and the Reagan administration would be a barrier to future growth until Honda could get its factory in Ohio online. In the meantime, Honda needed to focus on products that could sell for higher prices.
If Honda were to develop a bigger car, it made sense to collaborate with a partner more familiar with larger vehicles. As clever as Honda’s engineers were, they had no practical experience with the structural engineering of big executive cars; most of Honda’s water-cooled production models to that point had been essentially scaled-up or scaled-down versions of the original Civic. BL’s body engineering knowledge would be a definite asset and if nothing else, few companies knew more than British Leyland about what not to do in the executive class.
That November, Honda and British Leyland signed a letter of intent to jointly develop a new platform for two executive sedans codenamed XX and HX. That deal would be followed in 1983 by a production agreement for Austin Rover — as British Leyland was officially renamed in May 1982 — to build HX sedans for European sale and Honda to assemble “XX” Rovers for sale in Asia.
BRITAIN VS. JAPAN
There’s a common misconception that the XX — known in production as the Rover 800 — was a made-over or even badge-engineered Honda design. In fact, the project was jointly financed by both companies and developed collaboratively by engineers and designers who at some points worked side by side. While the HX and XX did have considerable commonality, the production cars were actually less alike than originally planned, sharing no exterior panels. Nonetheless, it would be fair to say that Honda was the more dominant partner and where there were disagreements, Honda got their way more often than not.
There was no disagreement about the cars’ drivetrain layout, which would use a front engine and front-wheel drive. This was not solely Honda’s idea; even if the XX deal had never happened, the only way Rover seriously envisioned retaining rear-wheel drive for its flagship was in the form of a carryover SD1 platform, and then only as a cost-saving measure. The general feeling in the late seventies and early eighties was that FF layouts were the way of the future, so many automakers were investing heavily in FWD. Most executive cars of the time were still RWD, but the success of Audi had demonstrated that FF cars could be competitive in that segment.
The real disagreements began with the new cars’ intended market position. British Leyland officials insisted early on that the XX not challenge Jaguar, which at the time was BL’s senior brand. Honda reluctantly accepted that dictum and development continued along those lines, but in mid-1984, after the HX and XX designs were more or less final, Jaguar regained its independence and Rover decided the XX needed to become a Jaguar XJ6 rival after all. That would be more easily said than done.
While the Rover 800 was created as an SD1 successor, its closest conceptual predecessor was the 1983 Rover 200, an entry-level Rover based on the second-generation Honda Ballade sedan and using a mixture of Rover and Honda components. The Rover 213, which replaced the similar Triumph Acclaim (based on the previous-generation Ballade), shared the Civic 1300’s 1,342 cc (82 cu. in.) OHC engine while the more powerful 216 had a Rover engine. (Photo: “Rover 213 Jesus Lane” © 1985 Charles01, modified 2007 and 2010 by the photographer; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized 2014 by Aaron Severson)
Another point of contention concerned the dimensions of the shared platform. Honda wanted to sell the HX in the Japanese domestic market, where automobile taxes and fees are based on size, weight, and engine displacement. For the HX to have any chance of commercial viability in Japan, the cheaper versions needed to stay within the small car (“5-number”) class, which meant a maximum width of 66.9 inches (1,700 mm), a maximum overall length of 185 inches (4,700 mm), and an engine displacement not exceeding 2,000 cc (122 cu. in.).
Like most other Japanese automakers in that class, Honda planned to straddle the line: Cheaper grades would be in the small car class with a smaller engine, shorter bumpers, and narrower fenders, while higher trim levels (and export cars) would fall into the more expensive ordinary car (“3-number”) class. However, that strategy required the inner body shell — which the HX and XX were to share — to be narrower than Austin Rover designers and engineers would have preferred from either a styling or packaging standpoint.
The vagaries of Japanese tax law were hardly of Honda’s making, but a more philosophical dispute arose over suspension design. Honda’s seventies cars had all used MacPherson struts, but by the early eighties, Honda was becoming enamored of double wishbones, which would be used both front and rear on the new Accord and Vigor (chassis code E-CA), slated to bow a few months before the HX. Naturally, Honda wanted to use the same layout for the flagship HX, arguing that the superior geometry of double wishbones would provide more precise handling and a more comfortable ride while allowing a lower hood line and smaller frontal area.
The new CA Honda Accord and Vigor, launched in June 1985, won great critical acclaim for their technical sophistication, including four-wheel double wishbone suspension and, in some markets, four-wheel wheel disc brakes with ABS. North American Accords of this generation all had popup headlights and 1,955 cc (119 cu. in.) SOHC engines, but European cars and some late JDM sedans had fixed halogen lights and a variety of other engine options, including a 16-valve, twin-cam B20A shared with the contemporary Prelude. (Photo: “1988-Honda-Accord-Sedan” © 2007 IFCAR; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized and modified 2014 by Aaron Severson)
Austin Rover engineers (excepting those at Jaguar) were less enamored of double wishbones, maintaining that the theoretical advantages were not worth the tradeoffs. The British wanted to use struts and a beam axle, which A-R felt would provide perfectly adequate handling and better packaging at lower cost. Struts would mean a higher hood line, but would also provide greater wheel travel for a better ride on rough surfaces.
The difficulty with that approach, from Honda’s perspective, was that greater wheel travel requires firmer damping to maintain body control. Honda engineers also argued that struts suffered a high level of initial friction that made them inherently harsher than double wishbones over small bumps. Those were compromises to which Europeans were accustomed, but that many American and Japanese buyers perceived as too hard. The head of Honda’s R&D organization, Nobuhiko Kawamoto, later explained to the press that he’d deliberately sought to avoid giving the HX the stiff-legged feel of high-end German sedans.
The eventual compromise was to use double wishbones up front and struts in back. The front suspension was much like the Accord’s: an anti-roll bar, a lower control arm triangulated by a radius rod, an upper wishbone connected to a curved steering knuckle extension (which Honda called a twisted upper arm), and a strut-like coil-over shock absorber mounted between the inner fender and the lower control arm. In back, the coil spring was divorced from the strut and mounted on the lower control arm, which was triangulated by a trailing link and fitted with a rear anti-roll bar. Honda specified special reduced-friction rear dampers while the Rover used progressive-rate springs and, on senior models, BOGE Nivomat self-leveling struts like those offered on some SD1 models.
GO AND STOP
Along with their basic platform, the HX and XX would share a new Honda-designed, fuel-injected V-6. The open-deck, die-cast aluminum block had a 90-degree bank angle, which reduced engine height but required offset crank pins to provide even firing intervals. As was becoming customary Honda practice in this era, the heads had pentroof combustion chambers and four valves per cylinder. Unlike many early four-valve engines, Honda used only one belt-driven camshaft per bank, actuating the intake valves via rocker arms and the exhaust valves via short horizontal pushrods. Hydraulic lash adjusters eliminated the need for the routine valve adjustments required by most contemporary Honda fours.
Although the “C” block V-6 would be quite reliable in service, it was Honda’s first engine of this type and its development was troublesome. Durability problems prompted extensive redesign work in the summer of 1984 and the resulting increases in the engine’s exterior dimensions required last-minute styling changes for both the HX and XX. (We assume this was particularly galling to Austin Rover designers already frustrated by the earlier arguments about overall width, although Honda did pay for the additional work.)
The 2,493 cc (152 cu. in.) Honda C25A V-6 was widely criticized for lackluster low-speed torque, in part because it lacked the three-mode, dual-runner intake manifold fitted to the smaller C20A and later C27A engines. Japanese, North American, and Australian versions of the C25A engine had catalytic converters to meet local emissions standards, but markets like the U.K. (where unleaded gasoline was not widely available until a few years later) received a uncatalyzed C25A2 version with a higher compression ratio (9.6:1 versus 9.0:1 for catalyzed cars) and a bit more power. (Photo: “1986 Rover 825 Sterling 1990 Rover 827 Vitesse” © 2013 Tim Hunter; used with permission)
Honda had no interest in offering the HX with either a four-cylinder engine or a diesel, which Austin Rover would have eagerly supplied. Big Japanese cars did offer fours and/or diesels in the home market, but they went mainly to fleet buyers; the prestige market demanded six cylinders even for 5-number cars. To that end, Honda created two versions of the V-6: a 1,996 cc (122 cu. in.) C20A for the cheaper 5-number JDM grades and a 2,493 cc (152 cu. in.) C25A for 3-number and export cars. Save for bore and stroke, the two engines were very similar, but the C20A added a computer-controlled dual-runner intake manifold to boost low-end torque.
Senior Rovers would share the C25A, but the European market also demanded cheaper four-cylinder options. To that end, Austin Rover developed the M16 engine, a new DOHC, 16-valve version of the 1,994 cc (122 cu. in.) O-series four (itself a distant descendant of the old BMC B-series engine). With its iron block, the twin-cam M16 was only 35 lb (16 kg) lighter than the all-aluminum C25A.
All five-speed Rovers had Honda-designed gearboxes, but four-cylinder automatic cars had a four-speed ZF transmission while V-6 Rovers shared the new four-speed Honda automatic. The latter was an unusual two-shaft, constant-mesh transmission — more like an automated four-speed manual with a torque converter than a conventional planetary-gear automatic — with torque converter lockup in all gears but first to reduce slippage. Equal-length halfshafts were specified to reduce torque steer.
Both cars would have four-wheel disc brakes. In Japan, senior HX grades would use Honda’s peculiar two-channel antilock braking system, also available on some non-U.S. Accords and Preludes, but Austin Rover rejected that system, which had been roundly criticized in the British press for allowing one front wheel to lock if the other was still turning, and opted instead for a four-channel Bosch system. Honda, whose directors were philosophically resistant to licensing other companies’ technology unless absolutely necessary, decided not to offer ABS on export cars until the company’s new three-channel system was ready.
Due to supplier difficulties in the U.K., the HX bowed some seven months before the Rover version, debuting at the 1985 Tokyo auto show. The new sedan, which Honda boldly christened “Legend,” went on sale through the new Japanese-market Honda Clio network on November 23.
At launch, the JDM Honda Legend was available in three grades. The cheaper 5-number V6Zi and V6Gi (chassis code E-KA1) had the C20A engine, rated at 145 PS JIS (107 kW) and 123 lb-ft (168 N-m) of torque. The top-spec, 3-number V6Xi (E-KA2) had the C25A, which in Japan was rated at 165 PS (121 kW) and 156 lb-ft (211 N-m) of torque. Starting prices ranged from ¥2,480,000 to ¥3,135,000 (equivalent to about $12,000 to $16,000), which put the Legend in same realm as a six-cylinder Nissan Cedric or Toyota Crown. (For comparison, the most expensive JDM Accord listed for around ¥2 million at that point.) A stripped-down Legend V6Mi price-leader was added about a year after launch.
An early KA2 Legend V6Xi in Honda’s collection. JDM Legends had a little more brightwork than export cars — note the chrome stripe through the front bumper — and used one-piece headlights and a different grille than early Acura-badged cars. (Photo: “Honda Legend Honda Collection Hall” © 2014 Rainmaker47; resized and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)
Honda recognized that they were not going to crack the stratified Japanese luxury market overnight and, unlike Toyota and Nissan rivals, the Legend would not have taxi and fleet sales to bolster sales volume. Initial sales target was a modest 1,500 units a month, and even that proved optimistic.
Japanese auto magazines like Jikayousha praised the JDM Legend for its impressively smooth engines, but even the 2.5-liter version had no surplus of torque and the Legend was heavy enough to make the smaller C20A feel gutless, particularly with the automatic that Japanese luxury car buyers preferred. Moreover, the Legend’s exterior styling was on the bland side and the cabin, though ergonomically excellent, seemed spartan and down-market next to the plush velour interiors of rivals like the Toyota Crown Royal Saloon. While the sleek, sophisticated new Accord and Vigor were standouts in their class, the Legend seemed too cautious for its own good.
THE BIRTH OF ACURA
Honda probably recognized that the Legend’s best hopes lay in the U.S., where the new model debuted in early 1986. In Japan, Honda was an upstart; in Europe, a foreign interloper. In the U.S., it was now a serious player. The latest Accord and Civic had been ecstatically received and the VRA restrictions had boosted transaction prices to enviable levels. Honda executives had some trepidation about offering a model as large or expensive as the Legend, but Honda could hardly have asked for a better moment to try.
Nonetheless, the executives of American Honda identified several potential flies in the ointment. The first and most obvious was brand credibility. American buyers liked Hondas, but it was still unclear if the goodwill Honda had developed in that realm would translate into higher price classes.
A second issue was the danger of demoting the Accord to second banana in the U.S. lineup. Even in Japan, where larger dimensions and a six-cylinder engine were enough to put a car into a distinctly different class, the Legend was perceived as being a little too similar to the Accord. That risk was particularly acute in the U.S., where the Legend was smaller than some cheaper domestic family sedans. American Honda was concerned that dealers would shift emphasis away from the company’s most popular model to a more expensive car that would not (and could) not sell in the same numbers.
The first-generation Legend was accompanied in Acura showrooms by the compact Integra, a sporty four-cylinder hatchback sold in Japan as the Honda Quint Integra. The North American Integra was a solid commercial and critical success, although it was far from an obvious companion for the bigger, softer, and generally milder Legend. This U.S. car is actually a late (1988–1989) example, distinguishable by its restyled front airdam. (Photo: “1st Acura Integra — 03-31-2012” © 2012 IFCAR; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized 2014 by Aaron Severson)
A third concern was the size of Honda’s dealer network. Honda then had around 800 U.S. dealers, which wasn’t enough for the kind of volume the company was after. The simplest way to add more dealers without stepping on existing franchise holders’ toes was to set up a new dealer network with its own products. Honda and most other Japanese automakers had done that repeatedly in the home market, but in Japan, each network was clearly identified as a Honda channel (Honda Verno, Honda Clio, and so on). American Honda officials warned that the new U.S. network and its products should not carry the Honda name, which would do little to mitigate the brand credibility issues — not to mention courting trouble with local franchise laws.
Honda’s Japanese directors were resistant to this line of reasoning in no small part because they feared Soichiro Honda’s reaction. The company’s retired founder had little if any actual authority by then, but Soichiro was both outspoken and fearless, so failing to secure his blessing would have been imprudent as well as disrespectful. Fortunately, Soichiro responded with surprising equanimity, so Honda’s senior executive conceded the point.
The result was a new division called Acura, which opened its first 60 dealerships in March 1986. They initially had two products: the Legend sedan and the Integra, a sporty hatchback based on the Civic platform.
The first Acura Legend sedan was similar to the JDM Legend V6Xi, differing mostly in trim and equipment details (and of course having left-hand drive). The sole engine was the 2,493 cc (152 cu. in.) C25A1, which in U.S. form had SAE net ratings of 151 hp (113 kW) and 154 lb-ft (209 N-m) of torque.
Export versions of the Legend were the same size as the “3-number” Japanese-market V6Xi, which was 68.1 inches (1,735 mm) wide and 54.7 inches (1,390 mm) high. The JDM “5-number” cars were the same height, but had a 0.4-inch (10mm) narrower track and narrower fenders that trimmed overall width to 66.7 inches (1,695 mm), just under the 66.9-inch (1,700mm) limit of the small car tax class. Note the two-piece headlamps, which were specific to early North American cars, as was the grille. Legends in other markets had one-piece halogen lights, which were added to Acura Legends for 1989. (Photo: “IMG_0332” © 2008 Karl Schultz; used with permission)
The Legend’s starting price with manual transmission and destination charge was $2 shy of the $20,000 mark, making the Legend the most expensive Japanese car ever offered in the U.S. As was Honda’s U.S. practice, there were no factory options; even Legends with automatic transmission were listed as separate models.
Despite its Acura badge, boxy flared fenders, rectangular grille, and exposed halogen headlights, the Legend was unmistakably a Honda and bore a clear stylistic relationship to the Accord. The Legend drove like the contemporary Accord, too. Ultimate handling limits were nothing special, but road manners were quite polished despite the soft springs. The Legend also had a plush ride at legal speeds, although rough pavement showed up the relatively flaccid damping and the fact that the suspension provided less wheel travel than some European rivals. The Legend’s biggest dynamic flaw was the speed-sensitive power steering, which was over-light at low speeds and then weighted up in abrupt, noticeable steps.
With the slick five-speed gearbox, most U.S. testers bettered Honda’s official 9.2-second 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) time by a half-second or so and equaled or exceeded the claimed 126 mph (203 km/h) top speed, competitive for the time. Even with manual transmission, however, the C25A didn’t have a lot of grunt at lower engine speeds. The added multiplication of the automatic’s torque converter helped, but Legends with automatic were notably slower than manually shifted cars; Honda quoted 10.2 seconds for the automatic Legend’s 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) sprint. Testers found the automatic Legend could nearly equal the manually shifted car’s unrestricted top speed, but, as on the contemporary Accord, the automatic tended to be both indecisive and jerky.
All first-generation Legends (and early Rover 800s) rode a 108.7-inch (2,760mm) wheelbase. Export and 3-number Legends were 189.4 inches (4,810 mm) long, but the 5-number JDM cars, with shorter bumpers, were only 184.7 inches (4,690 mm) overall, again for tax classification reasons. Note the gap between the front wheel and the wheelhouse: In stock form, the Legend had 7.1 inches (180 mm) of front wheel travel, about an inch (25 mm) less than an E28 5-Series BMW and 1.7 inches (40 mm) less than the E32 7-Series released in mid-1986. Although the Legend was often criticized for its lack of suspension travel, the owner of this car later elected to lower it about 2 inches (51 mm) for autocross duty. (Photo: “IMG_0334” © 2008 Karl Schultz; used with permission)
Even so, most U.S. critics were pleased with the Legend, if not quite as rapturous as they had been about the new Accord. Some complained that the Legend wasn’t much fun to drive, but reviewers generally respected that Honda had deliberately chosen a middle ground between American and European luxury car standards. The Legend couldn’t match the performance, solidity, or snob appeal of a Mercedes 300E or BMW 535i, but in the U.S., the Acura was more than $10,000 cheaper than either. Its most direct rivals were the Audi 5000, Saab 9000, and Volvo 700-Series, against which the Acura could offer a six-cylinder engine (something that at that time only the Volvo 760 could match) and Honda-style quality and reliability in a class not noted for trouble-free ownership experiences.
The Legend had also obvious appeal to Honda owners. Had it been introduced five years earlier, it might have greeted with puzzlement, but now there were people lining up to pay full list price or more for a $13,000 Accord and some of those buyers were more than happy to spend still more for a bigger, fancier version. Acura sold around 25,000 Legends in 1986, almost 55,000 in 1987, and more than 70,000 in 1988. However, while officials boasted of strong conquest sales, we can’t help thinking that Honda could have sold nearly as many Legends if they’d been branded as super deluxe V-6 Accords.
The North American Acura Legend received only very minor cosmetic changes throughout its life. This is actually a 1988 Acura Legend, retaining the rear strut suspension and original exterior, but with the new 2.7-liter (163 cu. in.) C27A1 V-6. Starting in 1988, Acura Legends were offered in several trim levels with different standard equipment, in keeping with American Honda’s no-factory-options policy; the LS was the top trim level, with leather upholstery and Honda’s three-channel ABS. One easy way to identify North American Legends, at least from the rear, is the center high-mounted stop light (CHMSL), added to meet a new U.S. safety requirement. (Photo: “IMG_0358” © 2008 Karl Schultz; used with permission)
The Rover 800 debuted in the U.K. in July 1986, shortly after Austin Rover changed its name to Rover Group.
As with the SD1 a decade earlier, Rover launched the 800 with the largest, most powerful engine: in this case, the Honda V-6. With a manual gearbox, the uncatalyzed C25A2 had 173 PS DIN (127 kW) and 160 lb-ft (217 N-m) of torque. Automatic cars had a different cam that reduced peak power to 167 PS DIN (123 kW), but provided slightly more torque — 163 lb-ft (221 N-m) — at lower RPM. Cars for certain export markets, including Australia, retained the catalyst and were rated at 150 PS DIN (110 kW) and 153 lb-ft (207 N-m) of torque. (Those figures, incidentally, make us question Honda’s JDM power ratings, which although ostensibly net figures seem rather generous.)
Early Rover 800s are now thin on the ground; this 1986 Rover Sterling (foreground) is the oldest still on British roads. The car behind it is one of the final pre-facelift cars, a 1991 Vitesse fastback. The early 800 was a bit smaller than the contemporary Legend in most dimensions and looks notably crisper. Rover claimed a Cd of 0.32, very good for the time. In Sterling form, the early four-door weighed around 3,150 lb (1,430 kg) with a full tank of fuel, roughly the same as a 2.5-liter Legend. (Photo: “1986 Rover 825 Sterling 1990 Rover 827 Vitesse” © 2013 Tim Hunter; used with permission)
Initially, Rover offered two grades: the 825i and the top-of-the-line Sterling, which had leather upholstery, self-leveling rear struts, power seats, sunroof, alloy wheels, and Bosch ABS, most of which were optional on the 825i. Both grades were expensive; although the 800 was assembled in Cowley, its dependence on components imported from Japan undoubtedly did its price no favors. In the U.K., the 825i started at nearly £16,000 (about $23,500) with tax and the Sterling added another £3,000 (about $4,400) on top of that. In the U.K., either was more than a BMW 528i SE and the Sterling was priced very close to the Mercedes 300E.
Perhaps the Rover’s bitterest rival in the British market was the new Jaguar XJ40, a car with which the 800 was not originally supposed to compete. The Rover was better equipped than the Jaguar, but that didn’t really soften the blow of the 800’s list price, which was actually higher than that of the XJ6 3.6, a bigger car with 50 more horsepower (38 kW) than the V-6 Rover. The fact that the government-owned Rover Group had produced a luxury car more expensive than the latest product of the re-privatized Jaguar went over poorly with the British press and didn’t endear Rover to the Tories, who had unhappily inherited the nationalized automaker from the previous Labour government.
At 184.8 inches (4,694 mm) overall, the Rover 800 was only fractionally longer than 5-number JDM Honda Legends, although it was wider (68.1 inches/1,730 mm) and a bit taller (55 inches/1,398 mm) on an identical wheelbase. V-6 Rover 800s had 15-inch wheels rather than the 14-inch wheels on early JDM cars, but air conditioning, standard on Japanese Legends, was an expensive option on the Rover. (Photo: “1986 Rover 825 Sterling 1990 Rover 827 Vitesse” © 2013 Tim Hunter; used with permission)
In general, the V-6 Rover drove much like the Legend did. (The uncatalyzed engine’s extra power appears to have had little effect on performance, presumably because torque output was little changed.) There was cautious praise for the Rover’s handling and smooth-road ride, but even the most generous European critics complained that the Rover’s firmer damping wasn’t enough to keep the car off the bump stops over rough surfaces, particularly at higher speeds. There were persistent complaints about inadequate suspension travel and the numb power steering, which some reviewers thought spoiled the handling. Mostly, though, the 800 was branded with that most damning of road tester epithets: bland.
Considering the 800’s Japanese roots — of which testers were well aware — that was predictable and to some extent a matter of taste. More worrisome was the 800’s haphazard build quality, which suggested that not all of the SD1’s gremlins had yet been banished. (On the other hand, Jaguar had nothing to brag about in that department either, but those shortcomings had failed to noticeably dampen British critics’ initial enthusiasm for the XJ40.)
The Rover 800 didn’t share the Legend’s dashboard and, particularly in Sterling trim, offered a richer ambiance that Honda only came close to emulating on later JDM Exclusive models. The Rover instrument panel also featured full instrumentation while the Legend’s ancillary gauges were limited to fuel level and water temperature. (Photo: “Rover 825 Sterling Cabin” © 2009 M. Mobarak; used with permission)
The 800’s bigger problem was that the luster of the Rover brand had been fading for some time and the 800 simply wasn’t exciting enough to restore that shine. In some ways, the new car was superior to the SD1 it replaced, but critics had wanted to like the SD1, whereas many of the plaudits the 800 received were guarded and grudging. Had it enjoyed the sort of price advantage the U.S.-market Legend did, the 800 might have been received more charitably, but against the formidable competition, Rover was asking too much for too little.
Much the same could be said of the European Honda Legend, which arrived in late 1986. The Legend had little price advantage over the Rover (in Germany, the Honda was actually more expensive), offered fewer features, and had even less appeal for status seekers. The Legend’s softer ride won few friends among European testers, and even Germany’s auto, motor und sport preferred the Rover’s wood and leather to the comparatively dour Honda cabin.
The first-generation Legend sedan’s cabin was well-assembled and ergonomically sound, but not that fancy. Leather upholstery became available about a year after launch and later in the run, senior grades could be dressed up with wood interior trim, but the four-door Legend’s interior was not as rich as some European rivals or as flashy as many Japanese ones. Acura-badged cars had a minor interior restyling for 1989, including a standard driver’s airbag. (Photo: “car2” © 2007 Hey Paul; used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
The Legend’s main advantage was noticeably better assembly quality than the Rover’s. Although European Legends were also built in Cowley, Honda took the sensible precaution of establishing its own U.K. inspection center in Swindon to correct defects before shipping cars to dealers. For many European buyers, that wasn’t worth the sacrifice in brand prestige or the loss of items like ABS, compounded by the unavailability of more economical, affordable engine options.
Both Honda and Rover were interested in offering coupe versions of the XX and HX, but the two companies decided to go their own ways on the two-door models. Rover showed a flashy, futuristic concept car called CCV at the 1986 Turin show, months before the launch of the 800, but Honda would be the first to put a coupe into production.
The Honda Legend coupe (chassis code E-KA3) arrived at Japanese Clio stores in February 1987. The coupe had all-new exterior panels and was shorter, lower, and more aerodynamic than the sedan, with a claimed drag coefficient of 0.30. Coupes also had a new dashboard and distinct interior trim.
The KA3 Legend coupe was 0.8 inches (20 mm) lower than the sedan and had a smaller frontal area with a lower drag coefficient. How much lower is debatable. Honda claimed a Cd of 0.32 for the four-door Legend, the same as the Rover 800, but Rover engineers alleged that the Legend sedan’s actual Cd was more like 0.35. The 800 sedan looks sleeker than the Legend, but appearances can be deceiving; the bluff-looking Lexus LS400/Toyota Celsior had a lower Cd than either the Legend or the 800. (Photo: “1989 Honda Legend 2.7i immaculate and rare car in UK” © 2014 mangopulp2008; used with permission)
The coupe had some structural differences as well, in part to accommodate a new double wishbone rear suspension. Predictably, this was similar to the Accord’s: a trailing arm, two unequal-length lower lateral links, a twisted upper arm, and a single upper lateral link; a rear anti-roll bar was retained, but was 18% thicker than the sedan’s. The front suspension was similar to the Legend sedan’s, although the mounting points were altered and a larger front anti-roll bar was now connected with ball joints. Coupes also had firmer damping, bigger disc brakes, and wider tires on 15-inch wheels. Honda’s new three-channel ABS was standard on JDM coupes and optional elsewhere.
The revised chassis was accompanied by a new 2,675 cc (163 cu. in.) C27A engine with a dual-runner intake manifold like the C20A’s. On JDM cars, the C27A1 was rated at 180 PS JIS (132 kW) and 166 lb-ft (226 N-m) of torque; Honda said 85% of maximum torque was available from 1,500 rpm, providing much-improved low-speed muscle. In Japan, the bigger engine was offered only with a new dual-mode, electronically controlled four-speed automatic. Honda claimed the new engine and transmission trimmed 0.8 seconds from the sedan’s 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) acceleration time. Export cars could also be ordered with the same five-speed manual gearbox offered the 2.5-liter sedans, which made the coupe capable of 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) in around 8 seconds and a top speed of more than 130 mph (210 km/h).
The two-door Honda Legend had a distinct interior with camphor wood trim on the console, which also featured a motorized concealer panel for the manual climate controls. The later JDM Exclusive trim level added additional wood trim on the instrument panel and doors plus various dress-up options seldom seen on export cars. Leather upholstery was an extra-cost option in most markets, although it was relatively common. (Photo: “1989 Honda Legend 2.7i immaculate and rare car in UK” © 2014 mangopulp2008; used with permission)
Unlike the sedan, the JDM Legend coupe was offered only in a single well-equipped 3-number grade with the C27A1 engine and a hefty ¥3,850,000 price tag (around $21,500). Later in the year, Honda added a new Exclusive grade, which cost an additional ¥280,000 (about $1,600). Either grade actually cost more than a Toyota Soarer 3.0GT, which had substantially more power and greater prestige.
The two-door Legend was sleeker, faster, and sportier than the sedan, helping to endear the coupe even to British critics who’d been ho-hum about the four-door. Although the coupe was actually more expensive than the sedan — an Acura Legend LS coupe with leather and driver-side airbag listed for about $27,000 in the U.S. and the equivalent Honda-badged car cost £24,000 in the U.K. — the two-door Legend was cheaper than rivals from BMW or Mercedes.
In Japan, Honda marketed the two-door Legend as a hardtop, and from this view, it’s easy to see why. (Two- and four-door hardtops were very popular in Japan in the late eighties, although only a few were actually pillarless.) All KA3 Legend coupes were 188 inches (4,775 mm) long on a 106.5-inch (2,705mm) wheelbase, 68.7 inches (1,745 mm) wide, and 54 inches (1,370 mm) high — Honda didn’t bother with a smaller 5-number version — and were slightly heavier than the equivalent sedan. (Photo: “1989 Honda Legend 2.7i immaculate and rare car in UK” © 2014 mangopulp2008; used with permission)
Legend sedans initially retained the smaller engine, but the C27A replaced the C25A on export Legends and the JDM V6Xi (chassis code E-KA4) in September 1987 and on V-6 Rovers in early 1988. The bigger engine was accompanied by the new automatic, although most non-JDM cars could still be ordered with manual transmission. Legend sedans also gained three-channel ABS, optional leather upholstery, and, in some markets, the airbag.
ROVER FASTBACK AND VITESSE
Four-cylinder Rover 800s were previewed at the 800’s press introduction in 1986 and began arriving at dealers later in the year. First up was the 820i, which had the M16i engine with 140 PS DIN (103 kW) and 131 lb-ft (178 N-m) of torque. A five-speed 820i gave away little to the automatic 825i in straight-line performance, was more economical, had slightly better steering feel (thanks to a different TRW Cam Gears power steering system), and was significantly cheaper, albeit still on the pricey side for this class.
In early 1987, the 820i was joined by the 820E, which had less equipment and a simpler single-point injection system that reduced output to 120 PS (88 kW) and 119 lb-ft (161 N-m) of torque. Surprisingly, the 820E’s real-world performance wasn’t far behind that of the 820i, whose advantage was mostly at higher engine speeds. By mid-1988, there would also be an even cheaper 820 price-leader powered by the carbureted O-Series engine, here making only 100 PS (74 kW). The 820 was noisier and slower than the injected cars and wasn’t substantially less expensive.
The Honda C27A V-6 engine, seen here in a U.S.-spec 1989 Sterling 827SLi. Honda (and later Rover) quoted the same output figures for the JDM C27A1 and the uncatalyzed European C27A2 — odd considering that uncatalyzed export cars were almost certainly more powerful — and 169 PS DIN (124 kW) and 167 lb-ft (226 N-m) of torque for catalyzed European engines. The U.S. version was rated at 161 hp SAE (120 kW) and 162 lb-ft (220 N-m) of torque. The variation had little impact on performance, the similarity in torque proving more significant than the difference in horsepower. (author photo)
The 800 coupe was still years away, but in 1988, Rover introduced a new five-door body, which the company called a fastback. Although the SD1 had been offered only as a five-door, Rover approached the 800 fastback with trepidation because the British executive car market of the mid-eighties was still ambivalent about hatchbacks. Those fears proved unfounded; the fastback 800 sold well in the U.K. and Europe.
Although the five-door was offered with the same engine options as the sedan (and eventually the same trim choices as well), there was also a new performance-oriented Vitesse model, reviving a badge previously used on the SD1. The Vitesse had equipment comparable to the Sterling’s, but added 205/60VR15 tires, a stiffer suspension, and bigger disc brakes, plus the obligatory spoilers and ground effects. Power came from the same 2.7-liter (163 cu. in.) V-6 as the latest 827i and Sterling.
The Vitesse drew mixed reactions from automotive critics. British testers appreciated the firmer damping (which some American reviewers found unduly harsh), but the overall handling balance was little changed and the steering was as lifeless as ever. Reviewers still mourning the old V-8 Vitesse also bemoaned the new car’s comparatively lackluster torque.
Although it wears a Rover tail badge, this car is actually a LHD Sterling 827SLi, with longer bumpers that bring its overall length to 188.8 inches (4,796 mm), 4 inches (102 mm) longer than the European car. (author photo)
The specter of the old Vitesse was probably the new car’s greatest enemy. The SD1 Vitesse was flawed, but critics had always been fond of its booming V-8 and well-tuned live-axle chassis, which represented a novel alternative to the high-end Germans. The new Vitesse remained a middle-of-the-road car that desperately needed some defining virtue to stand out in a crowded pack.
To some extent, the rest of the line still suffered the same problem, although by the time the fastback was introduced, the 800’s fortunes were steadily improving. Rover’s early export efforts had been hampered by the senior models’ high running costs — the V-6 was an expensive proposition in many European markets — while the early cars’ poor repair record had scared British fleet buyers. The addition of the cheaper four-cylinder models helped and by 1988, reliability had improved enough for Rover to make inroads in the important British company car market. In 1989, the 800 briefly displaced the Ford Granada Scorpio as Great Britain’s bestselling executive car, due mainly to sales to business users. The Rover still wasn’t a compelling choice for private buyers, but for fleet customers concerned about benefit-in-kind tax, four-cylinder 800s were a decent value.
The five-door Rover 800 was versatile as well as sporty-looking, although its utility was compromised by the narrow load opening, bulky rear strut towers, and one-piece folding rear seat. A split-folding rear seat was added with the 1992 facelift. (author photo)
By this time, Rover was no longer a ward of the state. The company had finally returned to profitability in 1987, but by March 1988, the government had arranged to sell Rover Group to the aviation firm British Aerospace.
ROVER AND STERLING
Although the European market had been Rover’s first priority for the 800, they also hoped to use the new car to return to North America, from which Rover Group had been absent since Jaguar was spun off in 1984.
Like Honda, Rover decided to market its car under a different brand name in the U.S., although Rover’s reasons were somewhat different. While Honda had an excellent reputation in the U.S., Rover’s two previous North American landings had ended badly: Reliability problems had soured American buyers on the Rover P6, prompting British Leyland to withdraw Rover from the U.S. market in the early seventies, and a brief attempt to return in 1980 with a federalized SD1 had been a disaster.
North American Sterling 800 emblems traded Rover’s traditional Viking ship for this stylized British lion. (author photo)
To avoid reminding buyers of those ventures — and/or to avoid courting the wrath of potentially litigious former dealers — Rover established a new U.S. sales organization, Austin Rover Cars of North America (ARCONA), and a new U.S. brand: Sterling, borrowing the name of the top European 800. By the January 1987 introduction date, ARCONA had lined up almost 150 dealers to sell the new Sterling 825S and 825SL.
The Sterling made a good first impression. It had a firmer ride and crisper handling than the Acura Legend and offered features not yet available on the Legend sedan, including the wood-and-leather ambiance American buyers expected of British luxury cars. Moreover, the Sterling was actually a little cheaper than a Legend — $19,000 to $23,000 to start — and vastly less expensive than a U.S.-market Jaguar XJ6 while promising the same Japanese-style reliability as the Acura.
The interior of the North American Sterling 800 was very similar to that of LHD Rover 800s, although equipment levels were generally higher on the Sterling-badged cars. The buttons on the center steering wheel spoke are for the cruise control, a standard feature on U.S. cars. (author photo)
Unfortunately, that promise was not fulfilled. While the Legend topped J.D. Power & Associates customer satisfaction surveys for four consecutive years, the Sterling was consistently at or near the bottom. Early Sterlings were plagued with mechanical and electrical problems, which soured critics otherwise inclined to view the British car favorably. Motor Trend‘s early test car, for example, overheated after mere blocks.
There were improvements throughout the Sterling’s life and ARCONA kept insisting that each year’s model had finally sorted all the earlier problems, but Sterling’s reliability and assembly quality still lagged behind the Legend’s. Since the main reason many American buyers were willing to consider the Legend over established European rivals was Honda’s reputation for reliability, the Sterling’s lapses boded ill for its chances in the U.S. market, particularly since the more trustworthy Legend was available concurrently.
The four-door Sterling 800 sedan was initially offered in base S and better-equipped, leather-trimmed SL grades. The five-door 827SLi arrived for 1989 and a sporty four-door 827Si was added for 1990. Confusingly, on Sterlings, the “i” suffix did not signify fuel injection, but rather the Vitesse-style sport suspension. (author photo)
ARCONA had hoped to sell 30,000 cars a year in the U.S., but the Sterling’s best sales year amounted to less than half of that. Things got worse from there as word of mouth began to spread about the Sterling’s problems. The addition of the bigger 2,675 cc (163 cu. in.) engine didn’t help, nor did the introduction of the five-door body. Even sizable rebates and an assortment of special editions didn’t reverse the downward spiral. Discounts didn’t compensate for dismal resale values or the mounting sense that Sterling wasn’t long for the world.
Rover offered the promised 800 coupe as a carrot for Sterling dealers willing to stay the course, but the CCV concept did poorly in U.S. marketing clinics, prompting a time-consuming redesign. ARCONA announced that the coupe would finally arrive in 1992, but it was too late. Rover shuttered the Sterling brand in November 1991 after selling fewer than 35,000 cars in five model years.
Unlike the more luxury-oriented Rover 827SLi, the North American Sterling 827SLi was essentially a rebadged LHD Rover Vitesse with the federalized C27A engine (making the same 161 hp SAE/120 kW as in the contemporary Legend). Even if the Sterling brand had been a greater success, the five-door 827SLi would still have been a dicey commercial proposition in the U.S., where buyers tended to associate hatchbacks with economy cars. (author photo)
HONDA WING TURBO
In Japan, the Legend sedan received a mid-life facelift in October 1988, coinciding with the adoption of the coupe’s double wishbone rear suspension across the line. The update brought new chassis codes: E-KA5 for 2-liter cars, E-KA6 for 2.7-liter sedans.
Late export Legends did not adopt the restyled nose applied to JDM KA5 and KA6 Legends, but did get the new bumpers, decklid, and tailights; a revised hood and grille; and, for North American cars, the one-piece headlights already used elsewhere. The revised bumpers made the KA6 sedan 1.2 inches (30 mm) longer and 0.8 inches (20 mm) wider than the KA4, bringing overall length to 190.6 inches (4,840 mm) and overall width to 69.1 inches (1,755 mm). This Acura Legend sedan’s body-colored side mirrors, a one-year-only feature, mark it as a 1990 model. (Photo: “1990 Acura Legend” © 2007 Kentaro Matsui; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized 2009 by Aaron Severson)
Along with the facelift, the JDM line also added a new engine option: a turbocharged version of the 1,996 cc (122 cu. in.) C20A.
Back in 1983, Honda had returned to Formula 1 as an engine builder, finding great success with a small-displacement turbocharged V-6. Honda advertising implied that the Legend’s V-6 was descended from that F1 engine, although any real connection between the production V-6 and the 80-degree, 1.5-liter (91 cu. in.), iron-block racing engines was remote. (Author Masaaki Sato says Honda actually selected the V-6 layout for the racing engines to tie into the already-in-development production V-6 rather than the other way around.) Nonetheless, the F1 program had nonetheless given Honda R&D considerable experience with turbocharging, something Honda had used very little in its production engines. The only turbocharged car Honda had ever offered for public sale was the City Turbo, offered from 1982 to 1986.
Aside from reinforcing the marketing connection between the racing engines and the Legend V-6, the turbocharged engine was likely prompted by a recognition that the JDM Legend was handicapped by the lack of engine choices between the overmatched C20A and the expensive-to-own C25A and C27A. Rivals’ base 2-liter sixes weren’t any stronger than the C20A, but Toyota, Nissan, and Mazda all offered turbocharged and/or supercharged versions to bridge the gap between the base engines and the pricier 3-number grades. From a commercial standpoint, the C20A turbo was long overdue.
While late to the party, Honda was not to be outdone in technology. The Legend’s intercooled “Wing Turbo” engine had four airfoil-shaped vanes — which Honda called wings — mounted around the turbine. Half of each “wing” was fixed while the other half pivoted like an aircraft flap, allowing the engine computer to optimize the flow of exhaust gas to the turbine under different operating conditions; the goal was to make the turbocharger more responsive at low rpm without restricting high-end power. Nissan’s 1,998 cc (122 cu. in.) VG20ET “Jet Turbo” engine had used a similar principle for several years, but the Jet Turbo provided only two A/R ratios (the ratio of effective inlet size to inlet-to-turbine distance) while the Wing Turbo’s was continuously variable. There was no wastegate, but the wings were programmed to limit boost to a maximum of 8.7 psi (0.6 bars). Knock sensors were provided to allow the use of a 9.0:1 compression ratio, only slightly lower than the normally aspirated C20A’s.
The Wing Turbo engine was rated at 190 PS JIS (140 kW) and 178 lb-ft (241 N-m) of torque, making it the most powerful production engine Honda had yet offered. It was available only with the dual-mode automatic transmission in a new V6Ti grade available in plain or Exclusive trim, priced at ¥2,960,000 or ¥3,360,000 (approximately $22,000 to $24,500) respectively. Either included sport seats, a shorter axle ratio, and wider tires on alloy wheels. Since it was still in the 5-number tax class, the V6Ti looked like the best deal in the line, at least on paper.
How the turbocharged Legend’s performance compared to that of the 2.7-liter sedan is hard to say. We’ve yet to find any instrumented Japanese road tests and the Western journalists who sampled the V6Ti confined themselves to driving impressions. Subjective reports suggest that the Wing Turbo did indeed minimize the turbo lag common to turbocharged engines of that era and offered strong mid-range punch. However, the Wing Turbo still didn’t produce enough boost at low rpm to match the Legend’s weight. (Thanks to the added weight of the intercooler and turbo hardware, the Legend V6Ti was as heavy as a 2.7-liter V6Xi.) Nonetheless, the more powerful engines prompted Honda to add traction control to the Legend’s options list in mid-1989. Similar systems had been offered on RWD cars since at least 1971, but Honda claimed the Legend system was a first for FF cars.
The Wing Turbo engine appears to have been a dead end. It was never officially exported, didn’t continue into subsequent Legends, and as far as we know hasn’t been used on any subsequent Honda production car (although Honda has since offered other turbocharged engines). Chrysler’s conceptually similar Variable Nozzle Turbocharger, offered briefly during the 1990 model year, was dropped after a few months due to durability concerns, which makes us wonder how reliable the Wing Turbo was in service.
The primary reasons for the turbocharged car’s early demise were probably the advent of Honda’s pioneering VTEC variable-valve timing system and extensive changes in Japanese tax law that went into effect in April 1989. The new rules reduced the cost penalties for 3-number cars with engines over 2,000 cc (122 cu. in.), which in short order led to the demise of many of JDM turbocharged and supercharged 2-liter (122 cu. in.) sixes in favor of normally aspirated or turbocharged 2.5-liter (152 cu. in.) engines. The Wing Turbo’s place in the Honda lineup (albeit not in the Legend line) was effectively taken by the normally aspirated G-block fives, the first of which debuted on the E-CB5 Accord Inspire and Vigor in September 1989.
THE HEAVYWEIGHTS
In August 1989, Toyota and Nissan introduced their new Infiniti Q45 and Lexus LS400. Although both would be sold in Japan (the latter as the Toyota Celsior), they were very much aimed at the U.S. market, following the model Honda had established with Acura. The difference was that the Q45 and LS400 were bigger, more expensive cars with V-8 engines.
Legend sales declined for 1990, although it’s hard to say how much of that was due to the arrival of Lexus and Infiniti. Although we don’t think the JDM Legend sedan’s 1989 facelift would have gone over well in most export markets, skipping it emphasized the fact that the existing car was getting old. Even so, Acura sold more than 50,000 Legends in 1990, which certainly wasn’t bad.
Still, the obvious question was what Honda was going to do next. The American press expected great things, particularly following the debut of the NSX sports car, which showed what Honda engineers could do when given a free hand. Rumors flew that Honda’s next flagship might even trump V-8 rivals with a V-10 engine based on the G-block five.
The cautiously styled KA7 Legend sedan was bigger than its predecessor in every dimension: 194.9 inches (4,940 mm) long on a 114.6-inch (2,910mm) wheelbase, 71.3 inches (1,810 mm) wide, and 55.3 inches (1,405 mm) high, weighing between 3,500 to 3,615 lb (1,590 to 1,640 kg). Japanese-market Honda Legend sedans were available in Type β (beta) and Type α (alpha) grades, the latter offering a CD-based navigation system with an antenna for picking up local TV broadcasts. A Legend Type α with leather and navigation listed for ¥5,425,000 (around $39,000) in Japan, about as much as a Toyota Celsior B Type. (Photo: “1991-1996 Honda Legend sedan 01” © 2010 OSX; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized and modified 2014 by Aaron Severson)
The reality was less exciting. The new “Super Legend” sedan (chassis code E-KA7), introduced in Japan in October 1990, was bigger than the old car — there were no more 5-number Legends — but was still smaller than the LS400 or Q45 and had neither a V-10 nor a V-8. At launch, the sole engine was the new 3,206 cc (196 cu. in.) C32A, an enlarged version of the previous C27A engine with 215 PS JIS (158 kW; 200 hp SAE/149 kW for U.S. cars, 205 PS DIN/153 kW for European Legends). Japanese-market cars were offered only with the four-speed automatic, although a manual gearbox remained available in North America.
The new Legend retained front-wheel drive, but its V-6 engine was now mounted longitudinally rather than transversely. The transmission was behind the engine, using a short longitudinal shaft to route power back to the differential, which was was located under the engine’s right cylinder bank, passing one halfshaft through the sump. The rationale for this complex layout, which Honda had previously adopted for the five-cylinder Vigor and Accord Inspire, was not to facilitate the use of all-wheel drive (which wouldn’t be available on the Legend until much later), but to bring weight distribution closer to the 60/40 split Honda claimed was optimal for FWD. Suspension was again by double wishbones, although the layout was extensively revised. Unlike the cheaper Accord and Prelude, the Legend didn’t offer four-wheel steering.
Early KA8 Legend coupes had the same engine as the KA7 sedans, but a more powerful Type II engine was added for 1993. In Japan, the hotter engine was restricted to a new α (alpha) Touring grade with stiffer suspension and bigger tires, but in some export markets — including the U.S. — the Type II engine became standard on late Legend coupes as well as a new Legend GS sedan, both of which offered a six-speed manual gearbox unavailable on JDM cars. (Photo: “1991 Honda Legend Coupe” © 2012 GPS 56; used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
The KA7 Legend sedan and the new Legend coupe (chassis code E-KA8) that arrived in Japan in early 1991 were fundamentally conservative but perfectly competent cars — better than their predecessors in almost every respect — that had been thoroughly overshadowed before they ever went on sale. Even with automatic, the Legend could outrun the heavier Lexus LS400 to any speed legal in the U.S. or Japan, but having only six cylinders immediately signaled that Honda was not aspiring to the first rank of prestige cars.
Honda maintained throughout the nineties that adding a RWD V-8 car like Toyota and Nissan had done would be a money-loser, which was probably true so far as it went; Mazda shelved its planned Amati luxury brand for similar reasons. However, Honda’s refusal to enter the fray left the Legend without a clear direction. The Legend had superb ergonomics, fine build quality, and commendable reliability, but the same was true of Lexus, so that was no longer the unique selling point it had been. The new Legend handled well, but it felt too bulky and nose-heavy to qualify as a sports sedan while its fidgety low-speed ride and less-than-seamless automatic fell short of the LS400’s extraordinary cruising refinement. Despite the KA7 sedan’s 114.6-inch (2,910mm) wheelbase, rear seat room wasn’t generous either; whatever marginal benefits the Legend gained from its longitudinal engine were achieved at the cost of packaging efficiency.
Honda sold more than 65,000 Legends for 1991, the model’s second-best year, but sales dropped off rapidly after that and never recovered. Despite the addition for 1993 of a more powerful Type II engine option (making 235 PS JIS (173 kW) in Japan, 230 hp SAE (172 kW) in the U.S.) and, on export cars, an available six-speed manual gearbox, even American buyers were losing interest. The JDM Legend, meanwhile, never approached the success of better-established big car rivals from Toyota and Nissan, much less the LS400/Celsior, which was surprisingly popular in Japan.
The KA8 Legend coupe was shorter than the KA7 sedan — 192.1 inches (4,880 mm) overall on a 111.4-inch (2,830mm) wheelbase — and more aggressive-looking despite its size and mass. It was reasonably sporty, particularly with manual transmission, but softer and inevitably more understeer-biased than RWD rivals. (Photo: “1992 & 1991 Honda Legend Coupe’s” © 2014 GPS 56; used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
FACELIFT AND ROVER 800 COUPE
The relationship between Rover and Honda had grown considerably closer since the Legend and 800 debuted. By the early nineties, Honda owned a 20% equity stake in Rover Group, which under BAe ownership had become increasingly reliant on the Japanese for product development. Much of Rover’s lineup now consisted of restyled Honda products, sometimes with Honda engines.
Nonetheless, Rover decided not to develop its own version of the new Legend. Company officials told the press the latest Legend was simply too big, but we suspect the main concerns were cost and the Legend’s longitudinal powertrain, which would have complicated the use of non-Honda engines and transmissions.
Rover opted instead for an extensive facelift of the original car, adding the modern interpretation of the traditional Rover grille previously introduced on the Accord-based Rover 600. The updated 800, which arrived in the fall of 1991, retained the original’s inner structure, but was 7.4 inches (188 mm) longer than the original; in fact, the new car (known internally as R17/R18) was fractionally (0.08 inches/2 mm) longer than the latest Legend coupe. Along with the new styling, the facelifted 800 also got an updated interior with new switchgear and seats, a reshaped tail for more trunk space, and a split-folding rear seat.
The facelifted Rover 800 sedan was 192.2 inches (4,882 mm) long on a 108.9-inch (2,766mm) wheelbase. Overall width was unchanged at 68.1 inches (1,730 mm). (Photo: “Rover827siA” © 2005 Seventies; resized and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)
The 827Si, 827SLi, and Sterling retained the Honda C27A engine, now with a catalytic converter in most markets, but the SOHC O-Series was dropped and the four-cylinder M16 engine was replaced by the updated T16 with 136 PS DIN (100 kW) and 136 lb-ft (184 N-m) of torque, now peaking at only 2,500 rpm. For European buyers who favored diesel, there was also a 2,498 cc (152 cu. in.) four-cylinder turbodiesel (actually introduced back in 1990) with 118 PS (87 kW) and 199 lb-ft (270 N-m) of torque.
The Vitesse, initially absent from the new lineup, returned in February 1992, trading the Honda V-6 for a turbocharged version of the T16 four with a single intercooled Garrett T25 that boosted output to 180 PS DIN (132 kW) and 160 lb-ft (217 N-m) of torque. The turbo engine was offered only with a five-speed gearbox and included a sport suspension and Recaro sport seats. A turbo Vitesse wasn’t much quicker than the earlier V-6 car — Rover claimed 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) in 7.9 seconds and a top speed of 137 mph (220 km/h) — but it was at least distinct from the 827SLi. One tradeoff was that the turbocharger hardware left no room for air conditioning.
Still displacing 1,994 cc (122 cu. in.), the all-aluminum T16 engine was essentially a scaled-up version of the Rover K-series four designed to share the tooling of the M16 (which remained in production for the Rover 220GTI). The T16 had a catalytic converter, a new eight-counterweight crankshaft, a long-runner intake manifold, and camshaft and combustion chamber revisions to improve low-end torque. (Photo: “Rover T-series insitu.” © 2012 Greggz1970; resized and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)
Some critics found the new grille a bit much, but build quality was much improved thanks to a sizable investment in the production facilities at Cowley. Still, while the changes were mostly for the better, the Rover 800’s position in the market hadn’t really changed. In middle age, the 800 was settling into its role as an upmarket “repmobile” for mostly British business users, vying more with the Ford Scorpio and Vauxhall Senator than with BMW or Mercedes-Benz. (As badly as the ARCONA venture had turned out, it was nonetheless Rover’s most numerically successful export effort. Annual sales in most other markets appear to have been measurable in the hundreds.)
The T16 wasn’t the sweetest engine and here wasn’t much Rover could do about the 800’s suspension travel deficit or anesthetized steering (although the 2-liter cars were a little better in the latter respect), but the Rover had decent showroom appeal and the 820Si and 820SLi were well-equipped for the money. The V-6 cars were smoother and quicker, but not enough so to overcome their higher price, greater running costs, and depressing residuals.
The much-delayed Rover 800 Coupe was quite attractive and boasted an impressive 0.29 Cd, but was let down by a disappointing chassis, unspectacular performance, and, at least early on, an eye-widening price tag. The coupe body eventually became available in a broader range of trim levels and with most of the 800’s engines, making it somewhat more accessible. (Photo: “Rover827coupe” © 2005 alexander; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized 2014 by Aaron Severson)
The long-awaited Rover 800 Coupe finally made its public debut at the Geneva auto show in March 1992 and went on sale in the U.K. that summer, almost six years after the original CCV concept and nine years after Rover first started thinking about a two-door 800. In its final production form, it was less striking than the earlier CCV, but was nonetheless a very handsome car inside and out.
In most markets, the coupe was initially offered only in fully equipped V-6 form with equipment comparable to the Sterling’s. (In Italy, where the tax penalties on engines over 2 liters (122 cu. in.) were prohibitive for most buyers, the coupe was available with the turbocharged T16 engine, but that combination wasn’t offered in the U.K. until 1996.) Most coupes had automatic transmission, but the five-speed manual gearbox was a no-cost option.
Attractive as it was, the 800 Coupe was a disappointment. With automatic, Rover claimed 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) in 9.2 seconds, lackluster for this class. Worse, the coupe’s chassis suffered the same faults as the V-6 sedans — inert, over-light steering and too little wheel travel — and if anything had poorer body control, discouraging even moderately enthusiastic driving. The same was true of Rover’s smaller 220 Turbo Coupe, but the 220 was at least cheaper; the 800 Coupe started at £30,770 in the U.K., DM 69,950 in Germany, about 15% more than the Sterling sedan. Coupe sales were predictably dire.
The interior of the Rover 800 Coupe was nicely furnished, although the two-door body style lacked the other models’ folding rear seat and some front seat travel was apparently sacrificed to improve legroom for back seat passengers. (Photo: “Interior827coupe” © 2005 Rover800; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized 2014 by Aaron Severson)
In the summer of 1994, Rover added a new 800 model, the Vitesse Sport. Offered in sedan and hatchback forms, the Vitesse Sport used the more powerful turbocharged engine of the 220T coupe, 220T GSi, and 620Ti. The uprated engine had the same 1,994 cc (122 cu. in.) displacement as the standard Vitesse (which remained available), but more boost brought peak output to 200 PS DIN (147 kW) and 177 lb-ft (240 N-m) of torque. The hotter engine was mated with the 220T’s five-speed gearbox and Torsen limited-slip differential along with a retuned sport suspension.
After the critical savaging the 220 Turbo Coupe and 800 Coupe had received, reviewers were prepared to give the Vitesse Sport more of the same, but Autocar & Motor testers were astonished to find that Rover had convincingly transformed the 800’s chassis and even its much-maligned steering. Greater mass meant the Vitesse Sport wasn’t as quick as the smaller cars (Rover claimed 7.3 seconds for the 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) sprint, compared to 6.4 seconds for the 220T), but the improvements in steering, handling, and ride were well worth the price premium of around £1,500 (about $2,300) over the standard Vitesse. The real question was why Rover hadn’t done it sooner. Had the 800 Coupe offered the Vitesse Sport chassis, its reception might have been much warmer.
Considered as a driver’s car, the turbocharged Rover Vitesse Sport was probably the most credible iteration of the Rover 800, offering ample performance, improved steering feel, and better body control than the standard car. The turbocharger also helped to mask the T16 engine’s gruffness, although the aggressive 17-inch Z-rated tires induced more road noise. The Vitesse Sport naturally had a firmer ride than other 800s, but some critics actually found it more comfortable because it was less crashy than its softer brethren over bumpy roads. (Photo: “1 60 Rover 800 vitesse sport P172MRW” © 2005 Guy Laister; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized and modified 2014 by Aaron Severson)
ROVER AND BMW
Shortly before the Vitesse Sport debuted, Rover Group changed hands again. The new owner was BMW, which promptly installed Wolfgang Reitzle as Rover’s new chairman.
BMW’s main objectives in buying Rover were to acquire brands like Mini and Triumph and expand the Bavarian company’s reach into cheaper price classes without taking BMW’s existing lineup any further down-market. Rover, however, saw the deal as an opportunity to improve the standing of its senior models. Reitzle told journalist Georg Kacher that the British ambitions for an 800 successor had involved a Rover version of BMW’s forthcoming E39 5-Series, which Rover hoped to offer at a lower price than the BMW version. Reitzle didn’t consider that a very funny joke and instead ordered Rover to develop an 800 replacement based on the E48/E49, an abortive BMW proposal for a FWD 3-Series.
Rover had contemplated an in-house V-6 back when the K-series was first developed in the mid-eighties — the K-series originally included both three- and four-cylinder versions — but the availability of the Honda engine had put the project on the shelf. BMW agreed to finance the development of the KV6 because it was slated to power senior versions of the 800’s eventual successor. In addition to the 2,497 cc (152 cu. in.) version used in the 825, the 75 would offer a smaller 1,991 cc (121 cu. in.) KV6, echoing the long-departed (and never exported) Honda C20A. (Photo: “Rover 825 KV6” © 2014 Alan Chang; used with permission)
The Rover 800’s modest sales (and the fact that it was a direct competitor, albeit not a very threatening one, for the 5-Series) made it a low priority for BMW, so the existing car would soldier on for another five years, receiving a final update in early 1996.
The biggest change to the final 800s was the replacement of the Honda C27A with a new internally developed V-6 based on Rover’s K-series four. The new 2,497 cc (152 cu. in.) KV6 also traded the dual-shaft Honda automatic for an optional four-speed JATCO unit. Although the KV6 was 60 lb (27 kg) lighter than the C27A and had slightly more power — 173 PS DIN (127 kW) and 177 lb-ft (240 N-m) of torque — taller gearing made the latest 825 Sterling a bit slower than before.
Late in its life, the British-market Rover 800 had more of a price advantage over premium German rivals than had originally been the case, but the Rover was still expensive given its age. An 825 Sterling like this one listed for almost £26,000 (equivalent to more than $42,000 at the contemporary exchange rate), thousands more than a loaded Ford Mondeo or Volkswagen Passat V-6. We doubt many Rovers of this vintage sold for anything close to list price, however. (Photo: “Rover 825 Sterling” © 2013 free photos & art/free photos; resized and modified 2014 by Aaron Severson and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license with modifications offered under the same license)
The less-powerful Vitesse was dropped when the KV6 arrived, although the Vitesse Sport continued, dropping the “Sport” from its name to become the 820T Vitesse. The 800 Coupe was now available with both the normally aspirated and turbocharged T16 engines, although unfortunately not as a Vitesse, which probably would have been the most desirable combination.
The 800 was feeling its age — by 1996, the platform on which it was based was not one but two generations out of date — and the market for Ford Scorpio/Vauxhall Omega-type executive cars was being eaten alive by the German premium brands. Nonetheless, the Rover remained in production through the summer of 1998 and in showrooms well into 1999, held over by delays in the launch of the new Rover 75. By that time, the Germans were ready to wash their hands of Rover entirely. In 2000, BMW sold Rover Group to a private investment group for a pittance.
One piece of wisdom Rover took from the 800 was the danger (at least in the European market) of tying more expensive, more profitable trim levels to specific engines. While this 1999 Sterling five-door has the KV6, late-model Rover Sterlings were also available in 820 form, which was about £3,500 cheaper than the 825 Sterling. Continuing that trend, each of the later Rover 75’s trim levels could be combined with any of the four available engines. (Photo: “Rover 825 Sterling” © 2013 free photos & art/free photos; resized and modified 2014 by Aaron Severson and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license with modifications offered under the same license)
BLAND LEADING BLAND
Meanwhile, the conservative streak that Honda had displayed with the second-generation Legend had come into full blossom. Anyone hoping that Honda would take a lesson from the outgoing car’s declining sales and fading critical acclaim was to be sorely disappointed by the third-generation Honda Legend (chassis code E-KA9) that debuted in early 1996.
The new Legend was still front-wheel-drive and still offered only a V-6 engine, although both car and engine were a bit bigger than before. The coupe was gone, as were the hotter engine option and most remaining steering feel. The sole powertrain was a 3,473 cc (212 cu. in.) C35A V-6 linked to a four-speed automatic transmission. The new engine was no more powerful than the milder C32A, offering the same 215 PS JIS (158 kW), but now had 230 lb-ft (312 N-m) of torque.
When the KA9 Legend/RL debuted, the new car was widely perceived to be significantly larger and heavier than the KA7, but that’s not borne out by the specifications. The KA9 was 0.6 inches (15 mm) longer and 0.8 inches (20 mm) taller than the KA7, but other exterior dimensions were identical and the factory curb weights differ very little. The biggest change was the drag coefficient, which climbed from 0.34 for the KA7 to an unimpressive 0.37 for the KA9. (Photo: “Acura RL” © 2006 IFCAR; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized 2014 by Aaron Severson)
The KA9 continued to be marketed as the Honda Legend in Japan and Europe, but in North America, Acura abandoned most of its existing model names in favor of alphanumeric designations, presumably in an effort to seem more like high-end Japanese and European rivals. (The sole holdout was the sporty Integra, which didn’t succumb until 2002.) In the States, the new Legend, which arrived later in the year as an early 1997 model, was now called Acura 3.5 RL.
Regardless of badge, the Legend/RL embodied most of the old stereotypes about Japanese cars: It was well-made, reliable, viceless, and relentlessly dull to look at and drive. The KA9 seemed like a conceptual return to the era when senior Japanese businessmen bought big six-cylinder sedans simply because those cars’ size and higher running costs correlated directly with the owner’s social status. Even in Japan, those days had passed, which made the operative question, “Why bother?”
Aside from its restyled grille and lights, the KA9 Legend/RL’s 1999 facelift tidied up the aerodynamics, dropping the claimed drag coefficient to 0.32. Most of the other changes the KA9 received throughout its long lifespan were equipment- and trim-related, although there were also suspension and safety improvements, including the addition of side airbags. (Photo: “AcuraRL” © 2006 IFCAR; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized 2014 by Aaron Severson)
Further complicating that question was the fact that the smaller Honda Inspire/Saber (the latter replacing the outgoing Vigor) now offered most of the Legend’s virtues in a cheaper, more conveniently sized package. The Inspire and Saber, sold in North America as the Acura TL, weren’t notably more exciting than the Legend, but they were less ponderous and much less expensive, which made them reasonably successful in the Japanese market.
In the U.S., both the Acura RL and TL also faced new competition from Honda dealers, which could finally offer a V-6 Accord. The Accord V-6, added for the 1995 model year, used the C27A engine, which Honda had continued to manufacture for Rover. (The late arrival of the Accord V-6, which bowed a year after the rest of the CD Accord line, makes us wonder if its introduction — or at least the timing of its introduction — was occasioned by BMW’s decision to switch senior Rover 800s to the KV6.) Updated for the latest U.S. emission standards, the Accord’s C27A4 V-6 had 170 hp SAE (127 kW) and 165 lb-ft (224 N-m) of torque and was mated only with a four-speed automatic.
The first V-6 Accord was nearly as big as the original Acura Legend and could be had with most of the same features for roughly $6,000 less (in real dollars) than the final 1991 Legend LS — and about $3,000 less than the five-cylinder Acura 2.5 TL. (Photo: “Photo 291” © 2005 Austin Delk; modified 2015 by Aaron Severson and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license with modifications offered under the same license)
With the Accord V-6, it seemed Honda had finally given U.S. buyers what they’d wanted all along. Throughout the late nineties, the Accord remained one of the bestselling cars in the U.S. (although most sales were still of the cheaper and thriftier four-cylinder models) while the RL sank to around 15,000 units a year, less than half the average of either previous Legend. The bigger, blander Legend was also a marginal player in Japan and Europe, handicapped by high running costs and near-catastrophic depreciation.
The Rover 800’s successor finally debuted at the 1998 London Motorshow and went on sale in June 1999. Called Rover 75, a name borrowed from the earlier P3 and P4 — where the designation originally referred to bhp — the new car was an interesting if contrived attempt to revive the traditional comfort-oriented Rover formula. (It seems there’s nothing like foreign ownership to make a company self-conscious about its heritage.) It was not a great commercial success, hampered by heavy-handed retro styling cues, too much weight for the available engines, and the fact that no one was exactly crying out for a nouveau “Auntie” Rover. In 2001, a new MG version, the aggressive and extroverted MG ZT190, swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, earning critical respect but failing to convince buyers. Both versions have now expired, although their underpinnings have since been resurrected in China.
Auntie, indeed. In standard form, the Rover 75 was a deliberate throwback to the stodgy conservatism that characterized production Rovers before the P6, with proportions and styling that we would delicately call an acquired taste and a suspension tuned for leisure rather than sport. As the later MG ZT derivative demonstrated, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the sophisticated chassis, but Rover Group’s former owners had presumably wanted to ensure no one would mistake the 75 for a serious BMW alternative. (Photo: “2001-2004 Rover 75 Connoisseur sedan” © 2010 OSX; released to the public domain by the photographer, resized and modified 2014 by Aaron Severson)
The Honda Legend/Acura 3.5 RL lingered into the new century with several rounds of minor changes, none of which reversed the downward sales spiral. In October 2004, Honda made a valiant attempt to revive interest with a more sophisticated platform; more power; Honda’s SH-AWD (Super Handling All-Wheel Drive) system; and a vast array of high-tech features, including available infrared night vision, radar cruise control, and Lane-Keeping Assist System.
The new Legend/RL (chassis code DBA-KB1) was better-looking and more technically interesting than before, which helped it win Japan’s 2005 Car of the Year Award, but the new model was at least 265 lb (120 kg) heavier than its already-portly predecessor and still had only a 3.5-liter (212 cu. in.) V-6 engine to contend with V-8 rivals. Sales improved a little — which wasn’t hard to do — but the big car remained a rare sight even after a 2008 makeover that added a larger 3,664 cc (224 cu. in.) engine. The Legend gradually disappeared from many European markets and was withdrawn from Japan in 2012, although a new Acura RLX arrived in North America in late 2013, continuing the previous formula, but adding a Sport Hybrid version. [Author’s note: Shortly after this article was published, Honda belatedly announced that a new Legend, similar to the RLX but offered only in Sport Hybrid form, would be introduced in the Japanese domestic market from January 2015.] Without a major sales turnaround, the current generation may well be the last.
The KB1 Legend/RL’s 3,471 cc (212 cu. in.) J35A V-6 had 300 PS JIS (221 kW), but was peaky for a car of this weight despite variable valve timing and a variable-length intake manifold; torque output was 260 lb-ft (353 N-m) at 5,000 rpm. The 2008 3,664 cc (224 cu. in.) J37A had 273 lb-ft (370 N-m) (and 309 PS JIS/227 kW), but the updated KB2 Legend was also up to 130 lb (60 kg) heavier than the KB1. (Photo: “Honda Legend 2007 087” © 2007 Kārlis Dambrāns; modified 2014 by Aaron Severson and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license with modifications offered under the same license)
The irony of the Legend story is that in some ways, the one to benefit most from the early American success of the Acura Legend was Toyota. The first Lexus LS400 was an exceptional car, but Toyota would have had a much harder time establishing the credibility of Lexus in the U.S. market if Acura hadn’t been there first. That isn’t to say Honda got nothing out of the experiment: Acura sales crossed the 100,000-unit mark in the brand’s second year and remained above that line into the 21st century. True, many of those sales were of the cheaper Integra, but the original Legend sold more than half a million copies in five years.
As for the Rover 800, it sold more than 317,000 units over its protracted life — fewer than Rover had hoped, but certainly not a complete rout. The old Rover P6 had done only slightly better in a similar span of time even though the P6 had spent the first half of its life with only one serious competitor. We also think the 800 was probably a better car than anything Rover could realistically have afforded to develop without Honda’s involvement. Even so, the 800 isn’t remembered as fondly as its predecessors and will probably be forever haunted by its Japanese origins: in the U.K. for being too Japanese and in the U.S. for not being Japanese enough.
The unfortunate thing is that both the Legend and the Rover 800 could have been considerably more successful had Honda and Rover been able to better integrate their respective strengths. The idea of a luxury sedan combining British character and road manners with Japanese reliability, assembly quality, and technology is still an appealing one. Had the two companies been able to build on that formula, they could have given the Germans and Lexus a real run for their money.
For that matter, Honda would have stood a good chance of challenging Toyota and Nissan (if not necessarily BMW and Mercedes-Benz) in the luxury car league had the second-generation Legend been less plain-vanilla. The conservative route was probably the right choice for the Accord, at least for North America, but in the luxury arena, Honda chose to coast when they needed to climb.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND AUTHOR’S NOTE
The author would like to thank Dan Sherman (owner of the white Sterling), Alan Chang, Tim Hunter, Erik Langerak, ‘mangopulp2008,’ and Karl Schultz for their assistance with this article.
In the interests of full disclosure, your author has never owned a Legend, but has owned both a Honda Accord and Honda Prelude of similar vintage.
NOTES ON SOURCES
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The online dictionary Jisho (jisho.org) was also a big help in deciphering Japanese-language information.
Some historical exchange rate data came from Lawrence H. Officer, “Exchange Rates Between the United States Dollar and Forty-one Currencies” (2011, MeasuringWorth, https://www.measuringworth.org/exchangeglobal/, used with permission). Exchange rate values cited in the text represent the approximate dollar equivalency of prices in non-U.S. currencies, not contemporary U.S. suggested retail prices, which are cited separately. Please note that all equivalencies cited herein are approximate and are provided solely for the reader’s general reference — this is an automotive history, not a treatise on currency trading or the value of money, and nothing in this article should be taken as financial advice of any kind!
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Tags: British cars, British Leyland, Honda, Japanese cars, Rover
Roger Gurr
The British version of the Honda Ballade you referred to was the last car marketed as a Triumph, sold in the UK as the Triumph Acclaim. Later editions were rebadged as Rovers two hundred series cars.
I had talked about the Acclaim in the Ballade/CRX article earlier this year (which even includes a picture of it), so I didn’t want to belabor the point, but I did add a clarification to the Rover 213 caption for the benefit of those joining us late. The reason I cited the Rover 200 rather than the Ballade as the antecedent of the 800 is that the 200 had a bit more Rover content, including the 1.6-liter engines, whereas the Acclaim was really just a Ballade with new badges and whatever minor changes Rover had to make for local type approval.
Shane O. Laake
Another great article. I love my 2005 RL, which was one of the most brilliant (the SH-AWD in the RLs is amazing for dry cornering and not bad in wet/snow), yet bland and poorly marketed vehicles ever (towards the end of its like it was barely selling hundreds of cars a year in the whole US). Still see more older Legends than RLs here in the states.
Such a shame Honda chose not to give everyone what they wanted (or thought they needed) in a V8 and RWD, but they also didn’t try to really explain how a V6 (and a relatively high performing one in 2005) and AWD (with unique RWD bias as needed) could be a better solution.
The AWD RL wasn’t a bad car and in some ways it was kind of handsome, but it smacked too much of trying to talk a nightclub bouncer into letting you into the posh nightclub after he’s already said no.
It’s not that RWD vs. FWD (or even AWD, except for certain types of really high-performance car) makes that much of a difference to the way most people drive or that anyone really needs a V-8. (Even with the 5-Series and E-Class, the large majority are sold with sixes or fours.) But that class is all about perception, particularly when you don’t have pedigree to fall back on.
Outside the scope of the article, but when the British government was looking to off-load Rover Group, Ford was the first company that stepped forward to buy. But, the government was aware of the potential public relations problem of selling Britain’s largest automaker to a foreign firm and was under pressure to find a British buyer. British Aerospace had no interest at all in getting into the automotive business, but as a defense contractor heavily dependent on government contracts, they could be “persuaded” into taking the company off the government’s hands.
By then, Rover had a relatively modern and competitive model range and was making money, but BAe was unwilling to make any significant investment in the business and kind of starved it. When they were looking to sell in 1994, they tried to interest Honda, but the most Honda was willing to do was raise their stake from 20% to 40% and BAe wanted to dispose of the whole thing. So, BMW it became.
For their part, Ford went on to buy Jaguar instead and was later able to grab Land Rover when BMW broke up the Rover Group.
I think Rover Group ended up spending much of its later existence as a sort of perpetual white elephant. Each of its successive owners recognized (or at least hoped) that it had value, but saw that value as either notional or hypothetical: “This will certainly be worth a lot to someone, somewhere, following some reversal of fortune we would rather not have to pay for.” BAe is often criticized for not investing more in development, but the same could be said of BMW. Other than the MINI — a saga in itself — the main additions were the 75, which began as a BMW castoff, and the MGF, which I assume must have been largely done by the time the BMW deal was closed. There was the KV6, but that was a derivative of an existing Rover engine and something that, as I understand it, Rover only hadn’t built previously because it was simpler to use the Honda V-6.
I’m honestly not sure what Ford would have had to gain by buying Rover at that time other than some of the shuttered brands (which it’s not easy to envision Ford actually reviving). Of course, they later bought Land Rover, but the high-end SUV market wasn’t yet looking as gold-plated as it did a decade or so later. As much hindsight-driven criticism as the acquisition of Jaguar has since received, the original rationale isn’t hard to grasp. Rover, though… hmmm.
In the ’80s, Ford was coveting a European prestige brand of its own due to the success of the Germans, and to a lesser extent the Swedes, in the US, and the Rover brand, though tarnished, still had some upscale equity in it at that point. Plus, it could potentially be had for cheap. The courting of Rover, the acquisition of Jaguar, and the creation of Merkur all stemmed from the same desire to appeal to a different sort of customer than Lincoln-Mercury was chasing.
A final bit of irony is that the Sterling name was created partly to avoid any connections with Rover’s past bad reputation in the US, but soon developed such a poor image itself that Rover Group was seriously considering dropping Sterling in favor of Rover for 1992. By then, the Range Rover had been launched here and had been favorably received, helping to remove some of the name’s taint.
The MGF and Rover 75 were both supposedly developed with US sales in mind, but BMW’s fears of internecine competition followed by the loss of the Land Rover dealer network in 2000 prevented that from ever happening. I believe there were some images of 75 styling clays that showed US-spec reflectors and lights in place.
The idea of getting a premium brand to take over the niche of the Granada would have made some sense for Ford, since (as is mentioned in the text) the high-end Germans essentially devoured the “big, non-premium exec” niche. Whether replacing the 800 and Granada with a what presumably would have been essentially a new Granada with a Rover badge would have worked commercially is an interesting question, although I don’t think it would have done Rover’s image any more harm than was done by slapping the Rover badge on the Metro. (Creating a premium supermini is one thing, but the Metro was past its sell-by at that point.)
The confusing bit is what Ford would have done with the rest of Rover Group. Ford certainly had no need of Austin or Morris and while the MG badge obviously had (and still has) some cachet, it’s hard to envision Ford doing anything with it or reviving Triumph or Riley.
I heard rumors of Rover bringing the MGF to the U.S., which would have made a modicum of sense were the timing right (of which I’m not so sure). MG and the pre-TR7 Triumph sports cars were about the only BL products that consistently sold well here. (American buyers didn’t know what to make of the big Triumph sedans and to the extent that there was a market for the P6, it was torpedoed by reliability problems.) I think the decision not to try to federalize the 75 was the correct one. Americans would have perceived the 75 as underpowered, and since it would have had to vie with Acura, Infiniti, and Lexus, any reliability or service weaknesses would have been fatal in very short order. (The American luxury buyer mindset is that if you’re not getting a brag-worthy German or Italian brand, it had better be bulletproof and the dealers had better offer lavish VIP treatment.)
John F, Quilter
And as to the Rover, 75 or an MG variant, they really needed a more robust engine than the KV6 which came to the USA in the Freelander and had significant engine reliability issues.
karonetwentyc
I recognise that white Sterling badged as a Rover; it was at last April’s Queen’s English show in Los Angeles – and I have to give the owner full credit for persistence, obstinance, and perseverance.
Rover (in its many incarnations) was a company that never figured out how it should capitalise on the engineering virtues of its vehicles through superior build quality, and this shows in the progression of their models from the P6 to the SD1 through to the 800-series – they just couldn’t make the cars <b>work</b>, at least not consistently – even when Honda was giving more than just assistance at the start of the end.
In many ways, it pains me to say this because I am the past owner of a Rover P6. It was a great car, and mine was clearly built on a good day because it was incredibly reliable and a fantastic driver. But I also grew up with Rover at the end of the P6 era, through the SD1 into the 200-, 400-, and 800-series cars, as well as into the twilight days with the 100/Metro, and 45 and 75.
With a bit more effort, Rover could have been where BMW is now, instead of ultimately being a part of them – and then nothing except a phonetic variation of the name in China. But no matter how much brilliance may shine through from time to time, if you can’t learn from history’s mistakes you will be doomed to repeat them.
Stirling. I was excited as all get out when the car first arrived. Japanese reliability coupled with British class.
To this day I still remember the one page Car and Driver review of the 825. They were reasonably impressed . . . . . . and then in the middle of the test drive, the electrics suddenly cut out (completely) and a second or so later, came back on again. Never to happen again, of course. While C&D had enough class not to start making Lucas jokes, the did make this incident the closing couple of paragraphs in the review.
And my though upon reaching the end was, “It’s dead Jim.”
406 Driver
Very interesting article. Good to read about the Japanese market products. Inevitably some errors creep in and where it says “Four-cylinder Rovers had either an Austin Rover-supplied five-speed gearbox…” although this is true it gives the wrong impression. The PG1 manual box, although built by Austin-Rover was a Honda design manufactured under license.
A work colleague bought, new, one of the last Legends sold in the UK in 2009. Honda had to discount the price of the new car to the level of a well-used car to shift them. Given that this was during the financial crisis just after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers the timing wasn’t great and the price cut understandable.
Thanks for the note on the manual gearbox. I double-checked and you’re quite right (I’d misread my own notes on that point). I’ve amended the text.
Bajan Dave
This article was well worth the wait, especially in terms of filling in the blanks relating to the Legend. I didn’t know there was one with a smaller engine available on the Japanese market. I remember when the turbo version came out; “Car’s” comment after testing it was “Not as good as we had hoped”.
Despite the technological advances in the latest model (I much prefer names rather than the alphanumeric thing everyone is doing these days), I don’t think enough is done to market the RL and I am surprised it hasn’t been dropped entirely.
Did CAR at some point test the Japanese-market Wing Turbo Legend? Or did you mean the Rover Vitesse turbo? I haven’t read their test of the latter, although their reaction to the 220TC was quite harsh and they were never especially fond of the 800 in any form.
I think the dilemma for the RLX now is that while some of its technology is impressive, most modern big executive cars could do double duty as a rolling display room for a consumer electronics chain. What Honda desperately needs is some compelling reason for a buyer to choose the RLX over, say, an Audi A6. Unfortunately, I don’t know how willing Honda is to sink more money into that platform (especially since I think the current RLX is now limited to North America). Given its sales, I can’t exactly blame them, but at present it seems likely that the RLX will just fade out, probably without replacement.
The test of the Legend Wing Turbo was more of a driving impression than a full test in the “Newcomers” section of either the January or March 1989 issue of “Car”. Of course that was when Honda was on a high after having dominated F1 in 1988 with Senna and Prost and the McLaren Honda team. The January issue cover was a feature on the Cizeta-Moroder V16T (which was hailed as the new Lamborghini Countach), while the March issue was headlined “Japan Shows Europe How to Build Sports Cars”, which dealt with the Acura NSX, Mazda Miata and the 1990 Nissan 300ZX. Hope this helps.
Thanks — that does help. I keep hoping that at some point I’ll find either factory performance figures or a Japanese road test with same. I’ve seen several driving impressions, but they don’t offer any factory or measured figures. The gist I’m getting from the impressions is that the V6Ti felt a bit like some later turbodiesel cars: somewhat lethargic off-idle and then robust mid-range. (The C20A actually claimed a bit more torque than the 2.7-liter normally aspirated engine and the torque peak was 1,000 rpm lower.) I suspect one of the reasons for only offering the turbo with automatic was to try to use the torque converter to bolster low-RPM response.
I can certainly understand why Western automotive writers would be a little disappointed; one might initially assume “Legend turbo” would be a sportier edition, which really wasn’t the point. Most of these engines were driven by the desire to maximize performance within the bounds of the five-number class, which produced some fascinating solutions. During that era, Toyota simultaneously offered plain SOHC, cooking or performance-oriented DOHC 24-valve, twin-turbocharged, and supercharged versions of its 2-liter 1G engine — in some lines, you could take your choice!
Mervyn Scott
In the early 90’s there was a used Rover 800 sitting in the company carpark, which I drove a couple of times. Lovely interior, quite nice to drive, and it would have been even better if it ran on all four cylinders.Finding someone willing to work on a BL engine was proving difficult for the owner, who had already found a replacement car. I can recall long-term tests of the 800 in the 80’s commenting that the reason the electric windows sometimes ceased working was because the relay fell out of its’ intended location! In later years I was a real fan of the Rover 600, but when I found someone to let me drive one, there was no clutch pedal – just a metal spike to which the pedal had once been ( poorly) welded.
As a true Brit, I have only bought Japanese-built cars for the last 20 years or so.
ExPatBrit
Been watching Season 6 of the detective series George Gently.
There is an eye catching blue 1964 Rover 2000 (P6) driven by George, featured in the shows. P6s were very stylish and Rover’s follow up SDI model despite it’s build issues was still an eye catcher. There were long waiting lists for these cars when they were introduced.
Then we have the 800 and Sterling, “115% sized Accord”. Bland and anonymous. White bread. Only the fastback Vitesse looked decent.
Rover and Triumph should have stayed well away from BMC.
Certainly, I don’t think there are many (any?) people now who would argue that Leyland merging with BMC was a good idea — certainly not as far as Rover and Triumph were concerned. Of course, the point of the merger was that the government was understandably worried about BMC collapsing or ending up foreign-owned, fates the marriage didn’t so much prevent as protract.
How well Rover and Triumph would have fared sans BMC is an interesting and difficult question. They would still have had a tough road after the U.K. entered the Common Market, which put the P6 and 2000/2500 into more direct competition with BMW, Mercedes, and Audi, and neither Rover nor Triumph had had much luck in the U.S. market beyond the TR and Spitfire. It would have been a tough road in any case.
I think it’s important to emphasize that Rover’s alternatives as regards an SD1 replacement/successor were not encouraging. Whatever one thinks of the 800, it’s hard to argue that a thinly veiled SD1 re-skin (still with live axle but probably minus V-8) or a 115% Montego with a V-6 engine would have been better…
Leyland motors needed some lower priced models below their Herald and Triumph 1300 (another interesting car that started off FWD and became RWD).
Tony Benn and the UK Government of the time brokered the Leyland deal, when Leyland found out how much BMC was really worth they wanted to back out. Not a merger of equals. BMC was already in a big mess.
The tie up killed a lot of new Rover models that the tooling was already purchased and done.
There is no doubt that Rover needed Honda , just a shame the cars were so bland.
The Rover P6 was one of the stars of the Movie Gattaca, along with an Avanti and a Citroen DS. Iconic vehicles. Not so the 800.
Yeah, I know the merger did for the Rover P8 and the revival of Alvis as an automaker. (I think they kept making armored fighting vehicles for some time afterward.) I’ve never been sure exactly how serious Rover was about the P6BS mid-engine car; whether Rover- or Alvis-badged, it just seems like an unlikely idea.
Honestly, I don’t know how much sense it would have made for Leyland to get into a lower-priced market than the 1300/Toledo/Dolomite. There was certainly more money to be made from those and the bigger sedans, and going lower just meant clashing with Ford, Vauxhall, Austin, and later the Japanese, the French, and the Germans. I think one of the various problems hampering BL was that they desperately wanted mass-market, low-priced cars even at the expense of the posher brands; the former were obviously more politically desirable, but significantly harder to achieve than it would have been to sustain/salvage the latter.
Icons are a tricky thing. It’s difficult to create one on purpose (and trying too hard at it is a good way to become a joke) and if you have a few, they can handcuff you to your past whether you want them to or not. There are quite a few automakers who’ve fallen into the trap of clinging to iconic themes because any deviation from them elicits cries of outrage from loyalists while failing to convince anyone who finds the look dated or trite. It’s all the more difficult if you’re trying to make it in a class that has already become disinclined to take you seriously…
Maynard's Dad
Speaking of jokes, I remember a car book that described the Sterling this way: “If it was trying any harder to be British, it would be Madonna!”
(This does remind me that I still want to do the Rover P5…)
This site is great, please do something on the P5 , when you put the P5 and P6 alongside each other it’s difficult to believe they came from the same company. The P4 and P5 is definitely “Aunty Rover”.
Without BMH, who knows what could have happened but Leyland , Rover, Triumph might have become the UKs own BMW.
And in 1968 BMW was a niche player.
That’s true, although by 1968, BMW was already more successful in the U.S. market than Rover (and certainly far more than the Triumph sedans, which never sold well in the States). Leyland certainly had a head start insofar as Rover and Triumph had well-established credentials in the British 2-liter prestige class, which those two marques essentially owned until around the mid-70s, and because prior to Britain’s entry to the ECE, BMW (and Mercedes) was more expensive than domestic rivals. The price of a 2002 in the U.K. would get you a Triumph 2.5 PI, which otherwise would be more comparable to a BMW 2500 in size and performance. The erosion of that price advantage was a major challenge for Triumph and Rover, compounded by the reliability problems and lower assembly quality. (The early SD1 3500 was really quite cheap for what it offered, but I think its problems ended up becoming a de facto advertisement for buying German.)
The T series was not all aluminium. Like the M16 before it, it was a cast iron (O-series derived) block, and an aluminium head. In fact the T16 was a development of the M16.
You’re right about the block material — that was a bit of confusion on my part and I’ve amended the text. Regarding the design, my impression was that while the T16 was designed to share some of the tooling of the M16 (derived, as you note, from the older O-series, which I think in turn had its roots in the ancient BMC B-series), the block and head architecture owed a lot to the much newer K-series and was to some extent a K-series/M16 hybrid.
Bill Malcolm
A very good article on the Honda side. However, there is, in my opinion, much more comprehensive information on the Austin/Rover O, M and T series engines at AROnline.co.uk.
Also some reasonable criticism of the Honda approach to things, which has always seemed overly idiosyncratic to me, relying on things like Double A arms good, McPherson strut bad, 60/40 weight distribution ideal for FWD and other maxims that are more opinion than fact. Rather like BMW’s cuurrent insistence that 500cc is the ideal cylinder volume which has zero engineering basis I’m aware of. Why not 397.5 cc?
I find that reading aronline’s numerous articles on the whole BL saga gives a good understanding of all the troubles, financial, political, personalities than the usual “once over lightly approach” of most magazines and books. You can read all the sagas on Rover, Triumph, Jaguar as well as Austin and Morris.
I mention this aronline resource because I see only one reference to it in your source list.
I’m a great admirer of AROnline’s and would certainly recommend them to anyone interested in learning more about the labyrinthine saga of British Leyland/Austin Rover/Rover Group. In this case, I delved into a lot of what I’m reasonably sure were AROnline’s original sources, including the many contemporary reports in the British press on the development of the XX and Austin-Rover’s ongoing travails in that period. The BL/AR saga is obviously very complex and there’s a lot of stuff that’s really beyond the scope of this article, which was already straining the limits of reasonable length. (As it is, it’s more than 12,000 words and left me asking myself difficult questions like, “Is anyone really going to care this much?”)
I strongly disagree that this article is Honda-centric. Considering the circumstances of their development, I think the 800 and first-generation Legend really have to be considered together. The Rover side is much better-documented in English-language sources, but English-language sources are often hazy on why Honda was insistent on certain things, such as the width issue. I’ve also noticed over the years that British sources in general tend to take a decidedly chauvinistic attitude toward all things Japanese. Particularly in the ’80s and ’90s, British reviewers might praise a Japanese car’s gearbox or perhaps the engine, but beyond that, kind words are rare unless the reviewers have reason to think the car was developed in Europe (which is a fascinating contrast with the almost fetishistic admiration American reviewers had for Japanese cars in the ’80s).
I’ve read the criticisms from Austin Rover engineers, some of which I’m inclined to take with a grain of salt. It’s not that I think Honda is above criticism, because I don’t, but a distinction must be drawn between quality of execution and differences of priority or approach. I don’t subscribe to the common car buff assumption that sophisticated = good / unsophisticated = crap; the well-considered application of a comparatively rustic principle may well be superior to the indifferent execution of a new and brilliant idea. However, I don’t think anyone would deny that certain technologies do have specific, quantifiable advantages. The eternal question of all production engineering is whether those advantages (which may be incremental) are worth the tradeoffs involved. Those questions have been raised about MacPherson struts versus double wishbones, live axles versus independent rear suspension, and overhead cams versus pushrods, and the answers are not always clear cut. For instance, the idea that 60/40 weight distribution is ideal is not necessarily an ill-founded one, but whether that ideal was worth the expensive contortions Honda went through to achieve it with the company’s longitudinal-engineed FWD cars is quite another matter.
As for the cylinder volume issue, that particular maxim is not original to BMW, although the way I’ve usually heard it applied is to say that 500 cc is really the MAXIMUM desirable swept area of a single cylinder, beyond which combustion roughness and other drawbacks begin to outweigh the additional potential power. I’m not an engineer and so am not really equipped to comment on the theoretical foundation of that idea, although I can think of various examples of production engines that are sweet and smooth at around 500cc/cylinder that become noticeably less so above that threshold. On the other hand, some engines are noticeably smoother than others of similar displacement and there are certainly engines that are sweeter at 600cc/cylinder than rivals are at 400cc/cylinder. All else is not necessarily equal, in other words.
Fascinating and well written story, but please fix the photos–most do not match their legends (eg, showing a Sterling badge but talking about a Legend, showing a coupe and talking about a sedan…).
I’m concerned about the photo issue you mention, which I’m not seeing. I was tinkering with the photos early today to address a technical issue with the ALT tags, but I don’t think that should have caused the captions to be assigned to the wrong photos. May I ask which OS and browser you’re using? I checked the page in all the browsers available to me and didn’t see the problem you’re describing, but if you’re using a tablet or mobile device, I don’t have a way to test that behavior myself. Feel free to send me a note via the Contact Form and I’ll see if I can sort it out. (It’s conceivable that something very stupid happened as a result of my editing the tags, but if so, I can’t see what…)
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HANSARD 1803–2005 → 1890s → 1899 → August 1899 → 2 August 1899 → Commons Sitting → MANCHESTER CANONRIES BILL.
COLONIAL LOANS BILL.
HC Deb 02 August 1899 vol 75 cc1152-99 1152
§ Considered in Committee.
§ (In the Committee.)
§ [Mr. J. W. LOWTHER (Cumberland, Penrith) in the Chair.]
§ Amendment proposed— In page 1, line 6, to leave out the words 'the Colonies,' and insert the words 'Barbados and St. Vincent.'"—(Captain Sinclair.)
§ Question again proposed, "That the words 'the Colonies' stand part of the clause."
§ THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES (Mr. J. CHAMBERLAIN,) Birmingham, W.
I am in hopes that the hon. Gentleman will now withdraw his Amendment.
§ CAPTAIN SINCLAIR (Forfarshire)
The character of the discussion is entirely altered by the statement which the right hon. Gentleman made to the Committee yesterday to the effect that this is an emergency Bill indemnifying certain Governments in regard to certain steps taken by the Crown agents. I do not, therefore, propose to press the Amendment. I may, however, be allowed to say that the right hon. Gentleman cannot hold the House responsible for the step the Government has taken.
§ MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN
I am quite ready to accept all responsibility.
§ Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 1, line 7, after 'Act,' to insert 'over the finances of which the Secretary of State for the Colonies, as representing Her Majesty's Government, has complete control.'"—(Captain Sinclair.)
§ MR. BUCHANAN (Aberdeenshire, E.)
These words were in the other Bill, 1153 but on the principle of this Bill I would rather object to them, for they might affect the growing revenues of these colonists. I may add that in one of the Papers issued to us Sir David Barbour, speaking of the Home Government giving some aid to Jamaica, said that the Secretary of State should obtain a greater control over the finances of Jamaica than he possesses.
I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman, but it is unnecessary to put these words into what has become an emergency Bill. But as a matter of fact, the Government have control over the Colonies specified in the Bill.
§ Amendment negatived.
MR. J. H. ROBERTS (Denbighshire, W.)
I should be out of order in making any remarks as to the policy of granting these loans. But taking that for granted, it is very necessary that we should discuss the conditions under which the loans should be granted. The principal ground on which I ask the Committee to agree with the Amendment I now rise to move is, that it is necessary in the interest of the British taxpayer. No one will deny that in regard to these loans there is a greater element of risk than if the loans were made on home securities. First of all, there is the fact that the very position of the countries for which these loans are to be made is such that they are far more liable to changes in their financial condition than England. My second point is that, so far as I can understand, no real searching inquiry has been made into the position of, at all events, a number of the investments proposed in the Bill. If a similar loan were proposed to a local authority in England, the Local Government Board would inquire very carefully as to the exact conditions under which the loan would be made. No one in this House is more willing than I am to admit the exceptional business capacity of the right hon. Gentleman the Colonial Secretary; but it is not a question of his personal capacity, it is a question of principle. In the interests of financial security, the rate of interest should be higher than 2¾ per cent. The security cannot be so good as in a case where money is advanced on the security of local rates in 1154 England; the nature of the undertaking prevents it; and, moreover, there is no practical security outside the undertaking itself. Take the case of the loan to the Gold Coast. In the year 1896–7 there was a deficit in the revenue of £45,000. It is true that, according to the statement distributed yesterday, the revenue for 1898 had gone up from £237,000 to £267,000, but there was no information given as to the expenditure, so that it is impossible to see whether that increase is any proof of enhanced security. In the case of Jamaica, it is proposed to advance a sum of £150,000. Since 1891 up to the present time, with the exception of the years 1894 and 1895, there has been a very large annual deficit, which, last year, amounted to the huge sum of £154,000. Under these circumstances, how can it be said that it is a sound transaction financially to advance this sum at such a low rate of interest? It is proposed to advance to the railway £88,000 for arrears in debenture interest, and £110,000 for the further construction of the railway. The Government of the colony is involved in an annual charge amounting to something like£35,000 in respect of that railway. Again I ask, how can this proposal be defended on financial grounds? Then it must be remembered that these loans do not form a first charge upon these undertakings. In Clause 2 it is provided that these loans should have priority over subsequent charges, but everyone knows that the security for a loan of this kind depends, not upon subsequent charges, but upon what comes before. I have tried to measure the element of risk involved, and now comes the question whether the minimum rate of interest which I propose is too high. In reference to loans made upon the security of local rates in this country, the scale of the Public Works Loans Board, under the Education Act and the Public Health Act, was, for loans to be repaid in thirty-five years, 3½ per cent.; forty years, 3¾ per cent.; fifty years, 4 per cent. That was prior to 1897, in which year the rate of interest was altered in the case of a thirty years' loan to 2¾ per cent.; forty years, 3 per cent.; fifty years, 3¼ per cent. That brings it to within ¼ per cent. of the minimum rate which I propose. The nature of the securities upon which we propose to advance money to the colonies, and the position of the 1155 colonies themselves, make it necessary to provide a reserve against loss; and, taking the average rate of interest as being 3 per cent., I do not think that ½ per cent, is too large a percentage for that purpose. Another reason why this rate of interest should be higher is in the interests of justice to the field of home investments. It seems to me that there are a great many classes of investments in this country upon which money of this kind could be lent, and it is rather unjust to our own people to go out of our way to lend it at a low rate of interest outside the country, unless you base the whole of the policy upon the necessity of doing something by way of relief to these colonies. From the purely business standpoint, my case is a very strong one. With regard to the Malay Straits, is is proposed to advance half a million upon a railway. That railway has been constructed for 175 miles at a cost of £850,000, and has paid on an average 8 per cent. upon the cost. It is surely unnecessary for Parliament to sanction a loan of British public money to an undertaking in that position. I submit that if the security upon which these loans are to be made is a good one, there ought to be no difficulty in getting money through the ordinary channels of investment. On the other hand, if the security is a bad one, or not in every way a sound one, the money should not be lent without providing a certain margin to correspond with that greater element of risk. I hope the right hon. Gentleman, if he cannot agree to the full Amendment I propose, will, at all events, make the minimum rate of interest something above 2¾per cent., as it now stands in the Bill.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 1, line 15, to leave out the words 'two and three quarters,' and insert the words 'three and one-half.' "—(Mr. J. H. Roberts.)
§ Question proposed, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the clause."
The acceptance of the Amendment would unnecessarily fetter the discretion of the Treasury, and I hope, after the explanation I made earlier in the discussion, the Amendment will not be pressed. We are not now attempting to lay down the principles of any 1156 great scheme of loans to colonies, but are dealing with an emergency Bill. The hon. Member in his concluding observations said, if the security by the colonies was good, he could see no reason why they should ask for Government assistance. That the security is good is proved by the fact that the colonies have been enabled to contract similar loans at 3 per cent., but the market would only take a certain amount of stock in a given period, and owing to the delay, to which frequent reference has been made, the amount the Crown agents have to place is very much above the average, and these able officials have found it impossible to place it all. It is for this reason, and for this reason alone, that we ask the House to provide the means, and I sincerely hope I shall never have to come again for such assistance, for though there are advantages on both sides, seeing the objections raised, it would probably not be worth while to raise the question again. The hon. Member says that 2¾per cent, is too low a rate, but that is the limit at present of the Public Works Loan Commissioners, and the practice is to vary the interest according to the terms of the loan, a practice that will be followed under the Bill. It is not to be assumed that the minimum will be the actual rate in all cases. Two colonies have been mentioned by way of illustration, and it may interest the Committee and tend to shorten discussion if, in anticipation of the discussion on the schedule, where these points may more properly arise, I refer to these cases. Taking first the Gold Coast, I find that colony in a most prosperous condition. True, it has a debt, and that may seem inconsistent with my last statement, but the debt arises from the deficits created by the Ashanti war and expenditure in the northern parts of the territory, separate items unconnected with the ordinary balance of accounts, for the territory may be considered as a separate colony, though for convenience the accounts have been mixed up with the administration of the southern portion. It is the intention of the Government to introduce a separate administration for the northern territory, when the accounts will be kept separate. But for the deficits arising from the Ashanti war, and expenditure in connection with the French proceedings in the hinterland of the Gold Coast, there would have been a large surplus. In 1897 the revenue was 1157 £287,000, and in 1898 it was £267,000; while in the first half of the present year it was £169,000, and it is estimated for the year at £338,000, an increase of something like 40 per cent. On the other hand, the expenditure for the first half of 1899 was £142,000, or for the year £284,000, and if this continues there will probably be a surplus of £54,000 on the year as between revenue and expenditure. The loan which is required is for a railway, which there is every reason to believe will be an extremely profitable undertaking. My opinion is based on the report of an expert who has made an exhaustive examination as to the probable cost of construction of the line and its returns. So that, quite independently of the fact that the colony is in a good financial condition, there is every reason to believe that the expenditure now contemplated will add to the revenue. The security will be the whole of the assets, the whole of the revenue of the colony; any surplus from the railway will go to the assets, and thus become answerable for the whole of the loan. In my opinion this is the best security that could be found, and I have not the slightest doubt that the money could be obtained in the market at 3 per cent., and I hope when the emergency is overcome by what I hope will be the decision of the House it will be unnecessary to come to Parliament again. Then the hon. Member went on to speak of the case of Jamaica. Jamaica is a typical case of a colony at present in great financial stress and needing help. There can be no doubt whatever in the mind of anyone who has read Sir D. Barbour's Report that Jamaica will be able to pay its own way in time, though for a year or two the colony will be in considerable straits. I have given a great deal of anxious attention to the condition of things in the colony, due probably to insufficient control on the part of the home Government. But it must be borne in mind that a constitution was deliberately conferred on Jamaica the defect of which was to give to the elected members control of finances, and I cannot help saying they have made an "awful mess of it," and the time will soon come when it will be necessary for the home Government to have larger control, especially if they are to have responsibility. Prosperous times, with large surpluses, are followed by bad times, and instead of decreasing expenditure and increasing taxation the local Govern- 1158 ment relied on its surplus, and having spent that began to create a deficit, which after several years has accumulated to the amount of£150,000. The bad state of affairs arose from the falling off in revenue due to general depression of trade in the West Indies, and more especially in the sugar industry. But at present things are better, trade with the United States is prosperous, and so long as this continues Jamaica will not only be able to make ends meet, but probably in a short time will arrive at a surplus. The local Government has been impressed with the necessity for economising expenditure and increasing taxation, and next year it is hoped the returns will show an equilibrium between revenue and expenditure. In the more prosperous times the elected members have made a somewhat improvident bargain in regard to a railway. Some American speculators issued debentures for the construction of the line, and the local Government gave a guarantee that if interest on the debentures failed they would take over the responsibility and give the debenture holders 3½per cent. stock of the colony. I have nothing to say as to this bargain; it was disapproved of at the Colonial Office, but my predecessor felt that, in the circumstances, a constitution having been granted to the colony, it was not his duty to do more than point out the objections, without putting a veto on the proposal. I do not in the least dispute the accuracy of the decision at which my predecessor arrived, though personally I regret it did not prevent the bargain being concluded. Ultimately no doubt the local Government will take over the railway, and that will for a time involve an annual deficit. The line has got into great disorganisation, the rolling stock is insufficient, and the expert sent out, having advised what should be done, thinks that in course of time, with proper management, the line can be made to pay. Meantime Jamaica will be put to additional expenditure to provide the deficit between cost of working and receipts, and will be called upon to pay the arrears of interest, £88,000, and to find £100,000 odd for the equipment of the railway. Jamaica is in the position that, if not assisted, it must become bankrupt. Does anybody in the House contemplate that, in the case of a Crown colony over which this country has a large measure of control—a control we should have to increase and probably will increase by an addition 1159 to the number of official members on the local Government—does anybody contemplate our allowing such a colony to become bankrupt? I have made inquiry into this subject, for I am anxious to distinguish between the responsibility of the home Government and that of the colony, and I find that practically no distinction exists, except that under the present system we pay a higher rate of interest than we need. The actual state of affairs is this. Whether we do or do not guarantee a loan, we assume responsibility. We pay a higher rate in the market because we will not give in terms a guarantee which really in practice we have to maintain. No one can contemplate our allowing one of our colonies to repudiate its obligations, and that is a justification in my mind for the Bill. If the loan were not made, then I should have to ask the House to make a grant in aid, as in the case of smaller colonies in a bankrupt condition. I believe that if the loan were given at a reasonable rate of interest, in the course of two or three years, with the savings made and the reforms to be made, and the greater control the Colonial Office would be able to exercise, we should be able to bring this colony round without ultimate cost to the British Exchequer. I would suggest that the Amendment should be withdrawn, and that it should be left to the discretion of the Treasury what the rate of interest for a particular loan should be.
§ MR. LABOUCHERE (Northampton)
We cannot allow a Crown colony to go bankrupt, and, whether we give a specific guarantee or not, if a Crown colony does not pay we shall have to pay. If the railroad paid they would derive the benefit of it; if it did not pay then the colony is to take it over. The Colonial Office was against that arrangement, and yet, if this doctrine be a true one, every Crown colony might enter into some sort of bargain of that kind and expend its credit in this reckless manner; and although the Colonial Office may protest against it we must make the loan. In Jamaica the Budget is voted by the elected Members, and they have spent money in the most reckless manner, and we are making ourselves liable for all their faults, and will have to pay if they cannot. The right hon. Gentleman says that this Bill is an emergency Bill, and 1160 that it does not lay down any general principle of colonial loans. The colonies have been advised that a Bill was going to be brought in by which we would give our direct security for the loans, and they have not in consequence gone to borrow money in the open market, although, assuming that their security is as good as the Colonial Secretary suggests it is, the colonies could probably borrow for the next six months from banks and other sources at a cheaper rate than the Government could borrow on its own security. We are told that this is an emergency Bill and must be carried this session. I do not see the force of that contention, and I would suggest to the right hon. Gentleman as a compromise, having regard to the small number of Members now in the House, the majority having left because they understood that no contentious Bills would be taken at this period of the session, that in the interests of peace and harmony, he should provide for any loan that may be urgent, and that this Bill should be left until another time. We would agree to that course. This Bill does require great discussion, and I do not think that it should be forced through the House in this manner at this period. I trust that the Colonial Secretary will see his way to enter into some amicable arrangement such as I suggest.
§ MR. MONK (Gloucestershire)
When I saw the schedule I must admit I stood aghast at the amount that was required for these loans, and the lack of information respecting them. We have now had some information, but, agreeing as I do with a great deal which fell from the hon. mover of this Amendment, I think the Committee are entitled to further information than they have received with regard to which of these loans will be made at 2¾per cent., and which will be made at the higher rate. No doubt some of these eleemosynary loans will be a total loss to this country. A portion of them will be really gifts, and not loans at all.
I think not. On the contrary, there will be no loss at all. The eleemosynary loan made to Barbados has been repaid.
§ MR. MONK
Of course, we are a wealthy country, and we ought to support our colonies in times of stress; but I do not see why so low a price should be charged for these loans. If the hon. Member had moved that the minimum rate should be 2 per cent. I should have gone into the Lobby with him. My reason for rising is to ask, first of all, what amount of these loans will be made at 2¾per cent. and what amount will be made at the higher rate. If we can get that information now, or when we come to the schedule, it will greatly facilitate the matter we are discussing.
§ * THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER (Sir M. HICKS-BEACH,) Bristol, W.
I shall be happy to give the House any information in my power. I would remind the Committee that in introducing the Bill I stated that we should not make loans to the colonies under the Bill on better terms than to local authorities in the United Kingdom, and in certain cases I should think it right to require higher terms. In regard to Barbados and St. Vincent it is intended that the hurricane loan should be at 2¾per cent., repayable in twenty-three years. These are less favourable terms than are given to local bodies in England who repay in thirty years, and do not compare unfavourably, so far as the Treasury is concerned, with the Government guarantee of 3 per cent. given some years ago to the Mauritius under circumstances similar to those on which these loans are to be made to Barbados and St. Vincent. The loan to the Mauritius, I might remind the Committee, has never cost the United Kingdom a penny. With regard to the other cases, I think their governing principle will be that which I have already stated. I do not wish to make any undue profit out of these loans. It would be absurd to attempt to do so, and it would be grossly unfair to the colonies. But in each case I shall have to consider the position of the colony, the security offered, and, particularly, the length of time for which the loan may be desired. If a colony, owing to the nature of the work, desires that the repayment of the loan shall be extended over as long a period as fifty years, then we shall have to charge a higher rate of interest, just as we do in the United Kingdom. In each case the Treasury 1162 and the Colonial Office will carefully examine into all the circumstances, with the view of fixing the interest and the repayment of principal on the basis I have indicated to the Committee.
§ MR. BUCHANAN
The explanation of the right hon. Gentleman meets in a measure the object which my hon. friend had in view. As I understand, the loans to Barbados and St. Vincent are given for twenty-three years. In regard to the Local Loans Act, the Treasury drew up a sliding scale, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in this Bill appears to have started on the same lines, and I should like to ascertain from him that in the future he will continue to work on similar lines. There is just one other thing I should like to say. In the beginning of his statement, the Colonial Secretary told us that he hoped this Bill would be a final one, and would not be followed by similar Bills in coming years. But these loans, I take it, will occupy the same position as the loans made to the colonies by the Treasury under the old Act. I think the discussion would be greatly facilitated if we had an assurance from him that, so far as he was concerned, this Bill will not be followed by similar Bills in coming sessions.
§ Question put, and agreed to.
The Amendment which I now wish to propose is to insure that the rate of interest for the loans shall be fixed by the Treasury alone. In cases of this sort, the Colonial Secretary is in the position of borrower; he makes a complete statement of what he believes to be the goodness of the security offered, and under those circumstances I think the Treasury alone should fix the rate at which the money is to be advanced. I anticipate that I shall get the support of the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer, having regard to the remarks he made just now, in which he implied that it was the work of the Treasury to fix the amount, and that they should accept the responsibility of so doing.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 1, line 16, to leave out the words 'and the Secretary of State.'"—(Mr. Buchanan.)
§ Question proposed, "That the words 'and the Secretary of State' stand part of the clause."
§ * SIR M. HICKS-BEACH
I am afraid I cannot agree with my hon. friend in this. It would not be fair that the Treasury alone should settle the matter. The colony will have to pay, and the Secretary for the Colonies is responsible for the colonies. I therefore do not think it right that he should be omitted from all voice and control in the matter.
§ CAPTAIN SINCLAIR
I see from the clause that these loans are to be regarded as local loans within the meaning of the Local Loans Act. In that Act alone the Treasury is responsible for fixing the interest. In this case there will be, of course, communication between the two offices, and the Treasury would be
AYES.
Aird, John Duncombe, Hon. Hubert V. Lockwood, Lt.-Col. A. R.
Arnold, Alfred Finch, George H. Loder, Gerald Walter Erskine
Arrol, Sir William Finlay, Sir R. Bannatyne Long, Col. Charles W (Evesham
Atkinson, Rt. Hon. John Fisher, William Hayes Long, Rt. Hn. W. (Liverpool)
Bagot, Capt. J. FitzRoy Fison, Frederick William Lowe, Francis William
Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J. (Manchr Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond Macartney, W. G. Ellison
Balfour, Rt. Hn. G. W. (Leeds Flannery, Sir Fortescue Macdona, John Cumming
Balfour, Rt. Hon. J. B. (Clackm. Flower, Ernest MacIver, David (Liverpool)
Banbury, Frederick George Fowler, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry Maclure, Sir John William
Barnes, Frederick Gorell Fry, Lewis M'Crae, George
Barton, Dunbar Plunket Galloway, William Johnson Monk, Charles James
Bathurst, Hon. Allen Benj. Gedge, Sydney Moon, Edward Robert Pacy
Beach, Rt. Hn. Sir M. H. (Brist. Gibbons, J. Lloyd Moore, William (Antrim, N.)
Bhownaggree, Sir M. M. Giles, Charles Tyrrell More, Robt. Jasper (Shropshire)
Bigwood, James Goldsworthy, Major-General Morgan, W. P. (Merthyr)
Blundell, Colonel Henry Gordon, Hon. John Edward Morton, A. H. A. (Deptford)
Bond, Edward Gorst, Rt. Hon. Sir John E. Moss, Samuel
Boulnois, Edmund Goschen, Rt. Hn. G. J (St George's Murray, Rt. Hn. A. G. (Bute)
Brodrick, Rt. Hon. St. John Goulding, Edward Alfred Murray, Col. Wyndham (Bath)
Brookfield, A. Montagu Gourley, Sir Edw. Temperley Newdigate, F. Alexander
Campbell, J. H. M. (Dublin) Greville, Hon. Ronald Nicholson, William Graham
Cayzer, Sir Charles William Griffith, Ellis J. Nicol, Donald Ninian
Chaloner, Captain R. G. W. Hanbury, Rt. Hon. Robt. Wm. Oldroyd, Mark
Chamberlain, Ht. Hon J (Birm.) Harwood, George Parkes, Ebenezer
Chamberlain, J. A. (Wor'cr.) Hatch, Ernest Frederick Geo. Perks, Robert William
Chaplin, Rt. Hon. Henry Hayne, Rt. Hon. Chas. Seale- Pierpoint, Robert
Cochrane, Hon. Thos. H. A. E. Hedderwick, Thomas C. H. Pryce-Jones, Lt.-Col. Edward
Coghill, Douglas Harry Holland, Hon. Lionel R. (Bow) Purvis, Robert
Collings, Rt. Hon. Jesse Howard, Joseph Rentoul, James Alexander
Curzon, Viscount Johnston, William (Belfast) Richards, Henry Charles
Dalkeith, Earl of Kenyon, James Ridley, Rt. Hon Sir Matthew W
Dickson-Poynder, Sir J. P. Knowles, Lees Russell, T. W. (Tyrone)
Donkin, Richard Sim Lafone, Alfred Sharpe, William Edward T.
Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers- Lawrence, Sir E Durning-(Corn. Sidebottom, William (Derbsh.
Doxford, William Theodore Lawrence, Wm. F. (Liverpool) Stanley, Edw. Jas. (Somerset)
§ advised as to the opinion of the Colonial Office, and under the circumstances I do not think the Colonial Secretary should have any voice as to the interest to be paid.
Under the Local Loans Act the Treasury lays down certain rates of interest, that is all. The application of those rates of interest to particular cases does not depend upon them at all, but upon an entirely different body.
§ MR. PERKS (Lincolnshire, Louth)
The rates would vary according to the credit of the colony, and if the colony has not an advocate in the shape of the Colonial Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer might fix a rate of interest which would be unjust to the colony, whilst at the same time this Bill precludes the colony from borrowing in the open market.
§ Question put.
§ The Committee divided:—Ayes, 124; Noes, 27 (Division List, No. 329).
Stanley, Lord (Lancs.) Ure, Alexander Wylie, Alexander
Stone, Sir Benjamin Valentia, Viscount Wyndham, George
Strutt, Hon. Charles Hedley Vincent, Col. Sir C. E. Howard Wyndham-Quin, Major W. H.
Talbot, Lord E. (Chichester) Warde, Lieut.-Col. C. E. (Kent)
Talbot, Rt. Hn. J. G. (Oxf. Univ. Williams, Joseph Powell-(Birm TELLERS FOR THE AYES—Sir William Walrond and Mr. Anstruther
Thornton, Percy M. Wilson-Todd, Wm. H. (Yorks.) Sir William Walrond and Mr. Anstruther
Tomlinson, Wm. Ed. Murray Wodehouse. Rt. Hn. E. R.. (Bath
Tritton, Charles Ernest Wortley, Rt. Hn. C. B. Stuart-
NOES.
Bayley, Thomas (Derbyshire) Holland, Wm. H. (York, W.R. Pirie, Duncan V.
Billson, Alfred Horniman, Frederick John Roberts, John H. (Denbighs)
Blake, Edward Jones, W. (Carnarvonshire) Sullivan, Donal (Westmeath)
Broadhurst, Henry Labouchere, Henry Whiteley, George (Stockport)
Caldwell, James Lawson, Sir W. (Cumberland) Williams, John Carvell (Notts.
Channing, Francis Allston Macaleese, Daniel Wilson, Henry J. (York, W. R.)
Curran, Thomas (Sligo, S.) M' Leod, John Yoxall, James Henry
Dilke, Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Maddison, Fred TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Mr. Buchanan and Captain Sinclair.
Donelan, Captain A. Maden, John Henry
Healy, Timothy M. (N. Louth) Moore, Arthur (Londonderry)
I now move to insert the words "together with the annual interest accruing thereon." I will ask the right hon. Gentleman whether they are necessary having regard to the last words of the sub-section, for it is clear that in a considerable number of cases the colony will not be expected to pay the annual interest on the loan from the beginning.
§ Amendment proposed:— In page 1, line 18, after 'and,' to insert 'together with the annual interest accruing thereon.'"—(Mr. Buchanan.)
§ Question proposed, "That those words be there inserted."
§ SIR M. HICKS-BEACH
said the words were not necessary.
MR. J. H. ROBERTS
I have now to move an Amendment limiting the period for the repayment of loans to thirty years. I do not think that that term should be exceeded except under very exceptional circumstances. In this case the security is very inferior to the security given by our own local authorities for loans, the repayment of which is spread over longer periods, and I therefore trust the Government will make some concession, otherwise I shall be compelled reluctantly to divide the committee.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 1, line 19, to leave out 'fifty' and insert 'thirty' "—(Mr. J. H. Roberts.)
§ Question proposed, "That the word 'fifty' stand part of the clause."
I am afraid we cannot accept this Amendment. I may, however, point out that the Colonies may be induced to borrow for shorter periods by the fact that in such cases a lower rate of interest is charged.
Although I feel strongly on this point, I am aware it is quite hopeless to press the Amendment, and I therefore ask leave to withdraw it.
§ Question proposed, "That Clause I stand part of the Bill."
I think we have reason to complain of the course which has been pursued by the Government in regard to this Bill. They have delayed giving us the necessary explanations of its provisions, and certainly that is not a way calculated to commend this legislation to the favour of the House. It is incumbent on us to protest against the introduction of an important measure like this at the fag end of the session, and without adequate explanation, and I therefore think we should divide against this clause as a whole.
§ MR. LABOUCHERE
The Chancellor of the Exchequer said that this is an emergency Bill, and that the Government did not anticipate a large extension of the loans. But £3,300,000 is a very large 1167 extension indeed. The right hon. Gentleman also said that we should have a full explanation of all the different items. Most unquestionably we have not had that, or any explanation of any sort or kind. As to the Bill being an emergency Bill, it is not an emergency Bill in the sense in which that word is generally applied, because the colonies could get on very well by borrowing the money until next year, and we could then discuss whether or not we should give them a guarantee. The colonies would not be in any sort of way damnified by the Bill being carried over. In view of the fact that we had no explanation on the Second Reading, we are bound to do our utmost at this late period of the session to protest against everything in connection with this Bill. The minority in the last Division was not what I would call large, but that was because a great many Members on this side of the House have gone away, leaving us to keep watch and ward over the public expenditure. We therefore represent not only ourselves and our constituents, but also the vast mass of Members who confided their interests to us, and under these circumstances I think my hon. friend ought to go to a Division.
The Party of which the hon. Member is a distinguished member does not appear any more united on this question than on most others. A full explanation has been given to the House of the proposals of this Bill.
In the Paper which has been circulated among hon. Members. Some hon. Members appear to think that the sum of £3,300,000 is enormous, but it compares favourably with the loans to local authorities which have been sanctioned by Parliament, and which this year have reached a total of £7,000,000.
I am sure the House is ready to extend every consideration to the Government for carrying on the business of the country. The Secretary of State for the Colonies has told us that the finances of Jamaica are very 1168 intricate. The Blue Book containing Sir David Barbour's Report was only issued to us on Monday, and in debating these intricate proposals we are placed at a very considerable disadvantage by not having had the necessary information supplied to us. Though the Secretary of State for the Colonies has declared that this Bill is an emergency Bill, yet long after these debates are forgotten the Act will remain on the Statute Book, and it will open the door to consequences which none of us are able to foresee or prevent. The hon. Member for Lincoln pointed out that this Bill practically closed the old method of borrowing for the Crown Colonies, and last year the Chancellor of the Exchequer pointed to the possibility of consolidating the debts of all the Crown Colonies. These are two very large consequences flowing from this measure, and I think we are justified in the interests of the one man who seems to be forgotten in this Debate, namely the taxpayer of this country, in making a very strong protest against this proposal being brought before the House at so late a period of the session.
§ SIR H. H. FOWLER (Wolverhampton, E.)
I quite appreciated the objection raised on the Second Reading of the Bill with reference to the non-presentation of information in respect to the loans in the schedule, and I think the House generally concurred in the view suggested by the Leader of the Opposition yesterday, that the Committee stage should not be undertaken until the document prepared for the Secretary of State for the Colonies was in the hands of the Members. We all know the delay which has occurred is not the fault of the Colonial Office or of the Government, but of the printers of the House. ("No, no.") Well, I am speaking from my own experience. What I want to say, without expressing any opinion on the items, is that this Bill was fully discussed on the Second Reading, and that the House of Commons assented to and approved its principle. The Amendment now before us to leave out Clause I is really a proposal to reverse the previous decision of the House. I claim myself to be as strong an advocate of economy and of strict supervision of public expenditure as any man in the House, but I have come to the conclusion, which I think it is my duty to state, that this is a very 1169 desirable change in our fiscal system. I am not going into the question of the Colonial Funds Bill, which the Chancellor of the Exchequer has withdrawn, but I hope he will bring it in again next year. I think it will be an improvement so far as the colonies are concerned, and also so far as our general fiscal system is concerned. But, at all events, that stands over, and the question now before us is whether we will or will not pass what appears to me to be an administrative Bill in order to enable the colonies to carry out their more or less pressing obligations. The present motion before the Committee is whether or not we are going to reject the Bill altogether, because if this Amendment is carried there is an end to the whole measure. I am not prepared to reject the Bill. I think there are a great many loans in this schedule which ought to be made, but that is a question of detail, and I appeal to my right hon. friends not to ask the Committee to again decide what has been already decided by the House on the Second Reading.
I am sorry I cannot respond to the appeal of my right hon. friend. One of his statements
Aird, John Dalkeith, Earl of Johnston, William (Belfast)
Arnold, Alfred Dickson-Poynder, Sir John P. Kenyon, James
Arrol, Sir William Donkin, Richard Sim Knowles, Lees
Atkinson, Rt. Hon. John Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers- Lafone, Alfred
Bagot, Capt. Josceline Fitz Roy Doxford, William Theodore Lawrence, Sir E. Durning-(Corn
Balfour. Rt. Hn. A. J. (Manch'r) Duncombe, Hon. Hubert V. Lawrence, W. F. (Liverpool)
Balfour, Rt. Hn. G. W. (Leeds) Finch, George H. Leigh-Bennett, Henry Currie
Balfour, Rt. Hn. J Blair (Clackm Finlay, Sir Robert Bannatyne Llewelyn, Sir Dillwyn-(Sw'ns'a
Banbury, Frederick George Fisher, William Hayes Loder, Gerald Walter Erskine
Barnes, Frederic Gorell Fison, Frederick William Long, Rt. Hn. Walter (Liverp'l)
Barton, Dunbar Plunket Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond Lowe, Francis William
Bathurst, Hon. Allen Benjamin Flannery, Sir Fortescue Macartney, W. G. Ellison
Beach, Rt Hn. Sir M. H. (Bristol) Flower, Ernest Macdona, John Cumming
Bigwood, James Fowler, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry MacIver, David (Liverpool)
Billson, Alfred Fry, Lewis Maclure, Sir John William
Blundell, Colonel Henry Gedge, Sydney M'Crae, George
Bond, Edward Gibbons, J. Lloyd Monk, Charles James
Boscawen, Arthur Griffith- Giles, Charles Tyrrell Moon, Edward Robert Pacy
Boulnois, Edmund Goldsworthy, Major-General Moore, William (Antrim, N.)
Brodrick, Rt. Hon. St. John Gordon, Hon. John Edward More, Robt. Jasper (Shropshire)
Brookfield, A. Montagu Gorst, Rt. Hon. Sir John Eldon Morton, Arthur H. A. (Deptford
Caldwell, James Goschen, Rt. Hn. G. J (St Ge'rg's) Murray, Rt. Hon. A. G. (Bute)
Campbell, J. H. M. (Dublin) Goulding, Edward Alfred Murray, Col. Wyndham (Bath)
Causton, Richard Knight Gray, Ernest (West Ham) Newdigate, Francis Alexander
Cayzer, Sir Charles William Greville, Hon. Ronald Nicholson, William Graham
Chaloner, Captain R. G. W. Hanbury, Rt. Hn. Robert W. Nieol, Donald Ninian
Chamberlain, Rt. Hn. J. (Birm. Harwood, George Oldroyd, Mark
Chaplin, Rt. Hon. Henry Hatch, Ernest Frederick Geo. Parkes, Ebenezer
Cochrane, Hon. T. H. A. E. Hayne, Rt. Hon. C. Seale- Perks, Robert William
Coghill, Douglas Harry Holland, Hon. Lionel R. (Bow) Pierpoint, Robert
Collings, Rt. Hon. Jesse Holland, W. H. (York, W.R.) Pryce-Jones, Lt.-Col. Edward
Curzon, Viscount Howard, Joseph Purvis, Robert
§ astonishes me. He said that the principle of the Bill had been fully discussed on the Second Reading. But the discussion only lasted an hour and a half, and the speeches of the Leader of the Opposition and the hon. Member for Poplar occupied a third of that time.
THE CHAIRMAN
The hon. Member cannot review the Debate on the Second Reading.
I have no desire to review the Debate, but I maintain that the principle of the Bill was not discussed on the Second Reading, and that we are justified in opposing the details on the ground that the Bill was introduced at the end of the session, and was not fully explained, as was promised by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. On these grounds, and in defence of the interests of the British Treasury and of good legislation, I shall most certainly divide the Committee.
§ The Committee divided:—Ayes, 123; Noes, 30. (Division List, No. 330.)
Rentoul, James Alexander Stanley, Edw. J. (Somerset) Warde, Lieut.-Col. C. E. (Kent)
Richards, Henry Charles Stanley, Lord (Lancs.) Williams, Jos. Powell-(Birm.)
Robson, William Snowdon Stone, Sir Benjamin Wilson-Todd, Wm. H. (Yorks.)
Runciman, Walter Strutt, Hon. Charles Hedley Wortley, Rt. Hon. C. B. Stuart-
Russell, Gen. F. S. (Cheltenham Talbot, Lord E. (Chichester) Wylie, Alexander
Russell, T. W. (Tyrone) Thornton, Percy M. Wyndham, George
Sharpe, William Edward T. Tomlinson, Wm. Edw. Murray Wyndham-Quin, Major W. H.
Sidebottom, Wm. (Derbysh.) Tritton, Charles Ernest TELLERS FOR THE AYES—Sir William Walrond and Mr. Anstruther.
Simeon, Sir Barrington Ure, Alexander
Spencer, Ernest Valentia, Viscount
Bayley, Thomas (Derbyshire) Hedderwick, Thomas C. H. Moss, Samuel
Blake, Edward Horniman, Frederick John Pirie, Duncan V.
Broadhurst, Henry Joicey, Sir James Roberts, John H. (Denbighs.)
Channing, Francis Allston Jones, William (Carn'rvonshire Sullivan, Donal (Westmeath)
Crilly, Daniel Labouchere, Henry Wallace, Robert
Curran, Thomas (Sligo, S.) Lawson, Sir Wilfrid (Cumb'l'nd Williams, John Carvell (Notts.
Dilke, Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Lewis, John Herbert Wilson, Henry J. (York, W. R.)
Donelan, Captain A. Macaleese, Daniel Yoxall, James Henry
Evans, Sir Francis H. (South'ton M' Leod, John TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Mr. Buchanan and Captain Sinclair.
Griffith, Ellis J. Maddison, Fred.
Healy, Timothy M. (N. Louth Maden, John Henry
§ Clause 2:—
The object of the Amendment I now move is to prevent the legislative authority from passing any Act diminishing the security. The words of the Statute could not be too precise, and my Amendment, I think, will infuse more precision into the somewhat vague words of the clause.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 1, line 25, to leave out from 'made' to end of line 26, and insert, 'has passed an Act or Ordinance which provides.' "—(Mr. Buchanan.)
I do not quite understand the meaning which the hon. Member has in his mind. The words in the Bill are very plain, requiring that the loan should be provided for in a legal way; and the colonial authority cannot do that except by an Act, Ordinance, or something corresponding to an Act or Ordinance. I do not think the words are necessary.
The words in Sub-section 2 are very definite indeed, and I thought there was probably some reason for that.
§ * SIR M. HICKS-BEACH;
That is obvious, because there you have to refer to an Act or Ordinance.
My object in moving this Amendment is, if possible, to increase the security to the Treasury in advancing the money. In cases in which the loans are to be made for the construction of reproductive works, such as a railway, I think the money advanced from the British Treasury ought to be so advanced not only on the security of the Colony itself, but on a first charge on the works themselves, and the revenue from them. I think in 1885, in the case of a Cape Act, a loan for the construction of the railway to Kimberley was made, not only on the security of the Colony, but on that of the revenue of the railway itself.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 1, line 27, at end to insert '(b) for securing the loan as a first charge upon any works which may be created out of the proceeds of the said loan, and for applying the surplus revenues of such works in repayment of the loans.' "—(Mr. Buchanan.)
§ Question proposed, "That these words be there inserted."
I think I answered this by anticipation earlier in the day. As a matter of fact, any such surplus or profit will go to the general revenue, and the whole of the general revenue and the whole of the assets of the colony will be pledged. Therefore, 1173 it is quite unnecessary to put in these words. I may point out as an analogous case that the security of the assets of a corporation or local authority is considered sufficient for loans under the Public Works Loans Act.
§ MR. CALDWELL
I had an Amendment of this kind on the Colonial Loans Fund Bill, which was withdrawn. I think the Amendment is a very reasonable one. Supposing the Government advances money to make a railway, the loan ought to be made a first charge on the railway, in order to secure the money to the State. It is obvious that what is intended by the clause is that there should be priority at the time of the advance, but there could not be any priority, because if the colony had no assets they could not pay anything, and the priority would go. I think the Amendment is a reasonable one, and I trust the right hon. Gentleman will accept it.
MR. J. H ROBERTS,
in moving to substitute "Parliament" for "the Treasury and the Secretary of State," said his object was to secure that, in the
Aird, John Dalbiac, Colonel Philip Hugh Lafone, Alfred
Allsopp, Hon. George Davies, Sir H. D. (Chatham) Lawrence, Sir E Durning-(Corn)
Arnold, Alfred Dickson-Poynder, Sir John P. Lawrence, Wm. F. (Liverpool)
Arrol, Sir William Donkin, Richard Sim Leigh-Bennett, Henry Currie
Atkinson, Rt. Hon. John Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers- Llewelyn, Sir Dillwyn- (Swan.
Bagot, Capt. Josceline FitzRoy Doxford, William Theodore Loder, Gerald Walter Erskine
Balfour, Rt. Hn. A. J. (Manc'r Duncombe, Hon. Hubert V. Long, Col. Chas. W. (Evesham
Balfour, Rt. Hn. G. W. (Leeds Finch, George H. Long, Rt. Hn. Walter (L'pool)
Banbury, Frederick George Finlay, Sir Robert Bannatyne Lowe, Francis William
Barnes, Frederic Gorell Fisher, William Hayes Macartney, W. G. Ellison
Barton, Dunbar Plunket Fison, Frederick William Macdona, John Cumming
Beach, Rt Hn Sir M. H. (Bristol Flannery, Sir Fortescue Maclure, Sir John William
Bigwood, James Flower, Ernest Manners, Lord Edw. Wm. J.
Blundell, Colonel Henry Fry, Lewis Mellor, Colonel (Lancashire)
Bond, Edward Gedge, Sydney Monk, Charles James
Boscawen, Arthur Griffith- Gibbons, J. Lloyd Moon, Edward Robert Pacy
Brodrick, Rt. Hon. St. John Giles, Charles Tyrrell Moore, William (Antrim, N.)
Campbell, J. H. M. (Dublin) Goldsworthy, Major-General More, R. Jasper (Shropshire)
Carlile, William Walter Gordon, Hon. John Edward Morton, A. H. A. (Deptford)
Cayzer, Sir Charles William Gorst, Rt. Hon. Sir John Eldon Murray, Rt Hn A Graham (Bute
Chaloner, Captain R. G. W. Goulding, Edward Alfred Murray, Col. Wyndham (Bath)
Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. J. (Birm Gray, Ernest (West Ham) Newdigate, Francis Alexander
Chaplin, Rt. Hon. Henry Greville, Hon. Ronald Nicholson, William Graham
Cochrane, Hon. Thos. H. A. E. Hanbury, Rt. Hon. R. W. Nicol, Donald Ninian
Coghill, Douglas Harry Hatch, Ernest Frederick Geo. Oldroyd, Mark
Cohen, Benjamin Louis Hoare, Edw. Brodie (Hampst'd) Parkes, Ebenezer
Collings, Rt. Hon. Jesse Holland, Hon. Lionel R. (Bow) Perks, Robert William
Colomb, Sir John Charles R. Holland, Wm. H. (York, W. R.) Pierpoint, Robert
Cox, Irwin E. Bainbridge Johnston, William (Belfast) Pryce-Jones, Lt.-Col. Edward
Curzon, Viscount Knowles, Lees Purvis, Robert
§ event of any alteration in the conditions of the security, the matter should first come before Parliament.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 2, line 17, to leave out the words 'the Treasury and the Secretary of State,' and insert the word 'Parliament'—(Mr. Herbert Roberts)—instead thereof.
§ Question proposed, "That the words 'the Treasury and the Secretary of State' stand part of the Clause."
said that he could not accept the Amendment. It would be an absolutely unconstitutional and novel procedure for Parliament to have anything to say as to the voiding of the Ordinances of Colonial Legislatures. That power was vested in the Secretary of State. The Treasury was added in order to safeguard the matter from a financial point of view.
Rentoul, James Alexander Stone, Sir Benjamin Wilson-Todd, W. H. (Yorks.)
Russell, Gen. F. S. (Cheltenh'm) Strutt, Hon. Charles Hedley Wylie, Alexander
Russell. T. W. (Tyrone) Thornton, Percy M. Wyndham, George
Scoble, Sir Andrew Richard Tollemache, Henry James Wyndham-Quin, Maj. W. H.
Sharpe, William Edward T. Tomlinson, Wm. E. Murray Wyvill, Marmaduke d'Arcy
Sidebottom, W. (Derbyshire) Tritton, Charles Ernest Young, Commander (Berks, E.)
Spencer, Ernest Valentia, Viscount TELLERS FOR THE AYES—Sir William Walrond and Mr. Anstruther.
Stanley, Edw. Jas. (Somerset) Warde, Lt.-Col. C. E. (Kent)
Stanley, Lord (Lancs.) Williams, J. Powell- (Birm.)
Austin, M. (Limerick, W.) Harwood, George Moore, Arthur (Londonderry)
Balfour, Rt. Hon. J. B. (Clackm. Hayne, Rt. Hon. Charles Seale- Moss, Samuel
Bayley, Thomas (Derbyshire) Hazell, Walter Norton, Capt. Cecil William
Billson, Alfred Healy, Timothy M. (N. Louth) Robson, William Snowdon
Birrell, Augustine Hedderwick, Thomas Chas. H. Runciman, Walter
Broadhurst, Henry Horniman, Frederick John Sinclair, Capt. John (Forfarsh)
Buchanan, Thomas Ryburn Joicey, Sir James Soames, Arthur Wellesley
Caldwell, James Jones, Wm. (Carnarvonshire) Souttar, Robinson
Cameron, Sir Chas. (Glasgow) Kay-Shuttle worth, Rt Hn Sir U Sullivan, Donal (Westmeath)
Causton, Richard Knight Langley, Batty Tennant, Harold John
Cawley, Frederick Lawson, Sir W. (Cumberland) Wallace, Robert
Channing, Francis Allston Lewis, John Herbert Walton, J. Lawson (Leeds, S.)
Curran, Thomas (Sligo, S.) Macaleese, Daniel Yoxall, James Henry
Dilke. Rt. Hon. Sir Charles M'Crae, George
Evans, Sir Francis H. (South'ton M' Leod, John TELLERS FOR THE NOES.—Mr. Herbert Roberts and Mr. Labouchere.
Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond Maddison, Fred
Griffith, Ellis J. Maden, John Henry
§ Clause agreed to.
§ Schedule:—
§ MR. LABOUCHERE,
in moving the omission of the Gold Coast as one of the colonies entitled to participate in the loans both in respect of its railways and the Accra harbour works, said the right hon. Gentleman had inferred that the finances of that colony were in a flourishing condition, and that we should be repaid every penny of the loan, and that the security offered was in fact A 1 security. In his opinion the published Returns of 1897 hardly bore out the view of the Colonial Secretary as to the peculiarly excellent financial position of this colony. In 1887 there was a deficit of£17,000, in 1888,£35,000, in 1889,£19,000, in 1894,£8,000, in 1895,£35,000, and in 1896,£44,000. The total revenue was£237,000. Customs produced£199,000, and the spirits imported paid in Customs duties£132,108. Their object was, as far as they could, to prevent spirits from being imported, and if the revenue from spirits was taken away there was an enormous deficit. Really they ought to look a little into what some of those colonies were. The official population of the Gold Coast was 160, of whom last year six died and 31 were invalided; the non-official white 1176 population was 362, of whom 34 died and47 were invalided. The fact was, there were hardly any Europeans who would go there, because they would not risk the climate, and it was hardly a place that was likely to be converted into a wealthy colony. At all events, he saw no reason why this country should step in and find the money for making a railway there, because there was no probability that it would pay or extend the trade of the country. The Secretary for the Colonies was a good business man, but he had a fad in his head; he wanted to develop the colonies. This was a rotten place to develop. It was not worth while to expend£500,000 on the security of the revenues of this colony, which were not sufficient to meet the present expenditure. In these circumstances he begged to move his Amendment.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 3, line 6, to leave out the words from the word 'Gold' to '£98,000,' both inclusive,"—(Mr Labouchere.)
§ Question proposed, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the schedule."
said the hon. Gentleman, who rather regarded himself as 1177 [...] of advanced views, was, on the [...] occasion, nothing but a fossil. [...] views were the views which were held by his predecessors in the early sixties, and had been altogether altered and changed, so far as the majority of the people were concerned, by subsequent experience. It was perfectly true that there were few Europeans in this particular colony, and he did not suppose there ever would be a large European colonisation of tropical Africa; but if the hon. Gentleman inferred from that that tropical Africa was of no advantage to Europeans because there was no trade worth having, he was entirely mistaken. So far from the Gold Coast being a bankrupt colony, the trade, imports and exports, is at the rate of£2,400,000 per annum. For a long series of years it had surpluses, and it was only in 1894 that the deficits began; and how did they begin? The colony, having procured surpluses amounting in the total to £139,000, began to feel itself justified in embarking upon large expenditure on public works, and, above all, sanitary improvements. For some time the amount so expended did not swallow up the surpluses; but then came the Ashanti war, and the deficit mounted up to £168,000. That left a debt which—although he was convinced it was a good debt—the Treasury would probably have to allow to run for a year or two until they gained back a period of surpluses, when they would pay it off as rapidly as possible. Why was this place called the Gold Coast? Because, as had been perfectly well known for centuries and centuries back, it was a great place for gold; the gold of our early days always being derived from the washings of the rivers. But now, with modern machinery and the advantage of modern science, we were able to deal with the places from which the gold comes from the quartz in the rocks, and many persons who had gone into the interior prospecting had returned very sanguine as to the investment of their money. The public took a similar view, because, in regard to some of these companies, although subsidiary companies were not issued, so well did the investing public look upon the undertakings, that the shares had gone up 1,500 and 2,000 per cent. That showed that in the belief of those who were well-informed there was a splendid opportunity for gold mining over this large area. Ten years ago the export of gold 1178 from the Transvaal was £80,000, and who could say that ten years hence the gold from West Africa might not bear a similar proportion to the growth of the gold export from the Transvaal? The reason why the export up to the present was so small was that they had not got up the heavy machinery required for modern gold mining, owing to the primitive method of transport which prevailed in those tropical climates. The Colonial Office had taken the best advice, and had good authority for assuming that the proposed investment would be an admirable one for the colony, and a perfectly sound one for this country to guarantee. As regards the harbour at Accra, it was a misfortune that there was no good harbour there, the bar constituting a difficulty. In the opinion of the great engineers who had been consulted, great improvements might be made by deepening the harbour. A moderate sum was asked for that, and here again the expenditure was fully justified by the condition of the colony. He recognised that the hon. Gentleman had the power of causing a great deal of unnecessary trouble to a good number of hon. Members. He implored him, as he was strong, to be merciful. Their advisers, the Crown Agents, who, he thought, were entitled to speak with authority on the subject, told them that they would be placed in a most serious and embarrassing position if the Bill were not passed. Therefore the Government were obliged to press the Bill, and no good would be gained by delaying its progress, so far as regarded any alteration of its terms. Hon. Gentlemen had expressed themselves aggrieved by what they regarded as arbitrary conduct on the part of the Government; but he appealed to the Committee whether there was any ground for a punitive expedition on the present occasion. The Government had yielded to the Opposition. They understood it would materially promote the rapid progress of this Bill if they abandoned the Colonial Loans Bill. They had withdrawn the latter Bill, and, as he had said, there was no prospect of its re-introduction; at least, he did not favour such a course. Again, yesterday, in deference to the Leader of the Opposition, who also assured them they would materially promote the conduct of public business by yielding to his request, they agreed to postpone the discussion on this Bill, in order that hon. Members 1179 might have an opportunity of studying the information they had provided. They had in every way endeavoured to meet the Opposition. He quite recognised that hon. Members like the hon. Members for East Aberdeenshire and Forfar might desire to make a solemn protest against the principle of the Bill. He hoped they had a distinguished career before them, and, if they had, he ventured to think that they would regret the course they had taken to-day, and that they would find themselves some day or other in a position in which they would have to take a totally different line. But perhaps that was too far off to look forward to. In any case, granted the perfect right of those hon. Members to make their protest, he appealed to them whether they had not now made a sufficient protest. As to the hon. Member for Northampton, he would say, let him by all means take a Division upon the Amendment he had moved, which would be a typical Division. If there was any other colony as to which he had any particular Amendment to move, it would be perfectly reasonable he should take a Division upon it, but he hoped the hon. Gentleman would not put the Committee to the trouble of walking through the Lobbies indefinitely with no practical result, especially in view of the conciliatory attitude which it must be allowed the Government had adopted.
The right hon. Gentleman says he has adopted every plan to meet our objections, but there is one plan he has not tried—that of withdrawing the Bill.
I cannot.
I have already shown how it can be done. These colonies can carry over; they have borrowed at a little under the bank rate, and can go on till next year. Our primary complaint is that the Bill is brought in at a time when we are left here to carry on the discussion without those Gentlemen who have gone away supposing there were no controversial matters to come forward. The right hon. Gentleman asked me to make this a test Division, and only to divide upon any loan to which I particularly objected. But what am I to do if I particularly object to all of them?
§ MR. J. CHAMBERLAIN.
[...] as a sample.
I have gone diverse and special reasons to submit against each. It is suggested that I should take a Division against the items altogether. That appears reasonable at first sight, but, while there are excellent reasons against all, there are stronger arguments against some than, against others, and therefore, in regard to particular items, I should get a better Division, and accentuate my views more by dividing upon the different items. But, after all, the right hon. Gentleman will get away on Wednesday; there is nothing else to do to-day. We are not obstructing; we are simply carrying out what we believe to be our duty.
I wish to assist the hon. Gentleman in his desire to get through the business as quickly as his conscience will allow him. I therefore suggest to the hon. Member that he should take a Division against the schedule as a whole, and then anyone who objects to any particular item will vote against the schedule, and in that way he will get a bigger Division than he could get under any other circumstances.
After the speech of the right hon. Gentleman it is a most invidious task for anyone to stand here to make any remarks upon this Bill, but I submit that the responsibility rests with the right hon. Gentleman himself. I would challenge him to find any previous instance of such a measure as this, involving such a large financial burden on the country, being given so short a time for its discussion. Certainly no suggestion of obstruction can be justified. If, however, the House shows any decided feeling in favour of terminating the Debate I shall not stand in the way, but I am entitled to make a few observations upon the Amendment which has been moved, and the reply which has been made. The question we have discussed is whether this railway should be made. The proposal can be divided distinctly into two parts. One half is a railway which has already been begun, and which the Colonial Office have approved, and the other half is an undertaking which the. 1181 Colonial Office have not approved, and which has in no sense been accepted as a wise investment or undertaking. The basis of profits in regard to this railway is practically the gold mines. The right hon. Gentleman submitted that it was a very good investment, and that there would be no difficulty in getting that loan taken up in the open market. That obviously calls forth the retort that it is a pity it was not left to the open market to take up. Development is going on in all parts of the world, and it is only natural that the Colonial Secretary should wish to develop as quickly as possible those parts with which he is specially concerned. But we are going too fast. If we are to dash in at once wherever there is a prospect of a remunerative investment in any part of the world, we shall be landed in very large undertakings, which at a future time it may be very difficult to fulfil. Another aspect of the question is that the revenue of this colony depends very largely on spirits, from 60 per cent. to 70 per cent. of the revenue being derived from that source. If we raise this loan and make the colony liable for it, we shall be practically riveting upon the colony the present methods of raising the revenue, and it will be very difficult to free them from this liquor traffic, or to proceed in the direction in which the right hon. Gentleman wishes to proceed, viz., of the restriction of the importation and sale of spirits. I am not one who would wish to restrict the expenditure on the colonies, but I certainly think, on the grounds I have put forward, there is some reason for hesitating to confirm, at any rate, the latter part of this proposal. I should also like to ask how it is proposed to construct these railways, and by what labour the existing portion has been constructed.
The right hon. Gentleman himself told us that the time for discussing this Bill was on the schedule. We have now just reached the schedule, and we are endeavouring to extract some information with regard to the different loans. The proposals under this first item are of two kinds. First, to complete and go on with railways already in course of construction. That railway is to go to the gold mines, and if the gold mines are successful the railway will be successful; if there is not paying gold 1182 there the railway will fail. That means that this railway is part of a gold mining speculation. Why should the Government with the aid of the Imperial Treasury step in to assist individuals who, no doubt, with a view to their own interests have gone into a gold mining speculation on the Gold Coast of Africa? The portion of this undertaking which has been sanctioned by the Colonial Office stands on an entirely different foundation from the other. In regard to the latter there is no emergency, and the right hon. Gentleman ought not to endeavour to get upwards of half a million of money when he has only a fair claim to about half that sum. We should also like to have some information as to what form of labour is being used in the construction of this railway, and is to be used on future railways. There is an Ordinance in the Gold Coast Colony which enables forced labour to be used. What security have we, if Imperial money is advanced for this purpose, that these railways will be constructed under conditions which will give no encouragement, either direct or indirect, to the employment of forced labour or any form of slavery?
§ MR. LEWIS (Flint Boroughs)
The latest Returns that we have appear to contradict the statement which has been made with regard to the decrease in the trade in spirits. In the year 1896 833,000 gallons of rum were imported, in 1897 878,000, showing an increase of 44,000 gallons, while there was a total increase in the importation of liquor of nearly 50,000 gallons. The right hon. Gentleman seemed to imply that the revenue from liquor did not form a large proportion of the total revenue of the country, but a reference to figures shows that while the total Customs receipts amounted to £193,000, the receipts in respect of spirits amounted to £132,000. It is, therefore, obvious that as far as its revenue is concerned the colony is now practically on a basis of liquor. The present proposals tend to perpetuate that, just as the large revenues derived by India from the opium trade have tended to perpetuate that trade, with all its baneful effects. The official Return with regard to the revenues shows that the security is not a good one for the amount which is being advanced. It is also perfectly true that a large portion of the money may not be required at all, as 1183 the construction of certain lines has not yet been decided upon. Is it not therefore reasonable that we should wait before we vote this amount in order to ascertain whether these undertakings will be proceeded with or not? The whole question is of such a speculative character that I
Aird, John Finlay, Sir Robert Bannatyne Murray, Rt Hn A Graham (Bute
Allsopp, Hon. George Fisher, William Hayes Murray, Col. Wyndham (Bath)
Arnold, Alfred Fison, Frederick William Newdigate, F. Alexander
Arrol, Sir William Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond Nicholson, William Graham
Asher, Alexander Flannery, Sir Fortescue Nicol, Donald Ninian
Atkinson, Rt. Hon. John Flower, Ernest Oldroyd, Mark
Bagot, Capt. Josceline FitzRoy Fowler. Rt. Hon. Sir Henry Parkes, Ebenezer
Balfour, Rt. Hn. A. J. (Manch'r Fry, Lewis Perks, Robert William
Balfour, Rt Hn Gerald W. (Leeds Gibbons, J. Lloyd Pierpoint, Robert
Balfour. Rt. Hon. J. B. (Clackm. Giles, Charles Tyrrell Pryce-Jones, Lt.-Col. Edward
Banbury, Frederick George Gilliat, John Saunders Purvis, Robert
Barnes, Frederic Gorell Goldsworthy, Major-General Ridley, Rt. Hon. Sir M. W.
Barton, Dunbar Plunket Gordon, Hon. John Edward Robertson, Herbert (Hackney)
Bathurst, Hon. Allen B. Gorst, Rt. Hon. Sir J. Eldon Rollit, Sir Albert Kaye
Beach, Rt. Hn. Sir M. H. (Bristol Goschen, Rt. Hn G J (St. George's Russell. Gen. F. S. (Chelt'nh'm)
Beach, W. W. B. (Hants.) Goulding, Edward Alfred Russell, T. W. (Tyrone)
Bhownaggree, Sir M. M. Gray, Ernest (West Ham) Scoble, Sir Andrew Richard
Bigwood, James Greville, Hon. Ronald Sharpe, William Edward T.
Blundell, Colonel Henry Hanbury, Rt. Hon. R. W. Sidebottom, William (Derbysh.
Bond, Edward Harwood, George Simeon, Sir Barrington
Boscawen, Arthur Griffith- Hayne, Rt. Hon. Chas. Seale- Smith, James P. ((Lanarks.)
Brodrick, Rt. Hon. St. John Hill, Arthur (Down, West) Soames, Arthur Wellesley
Brookfield, A. Montagu Hoare, Edw. B. (Hampstead) Spencer, Ernest
Campbell, J. H. M. (Dublin) Houlds worth, Sir Wm. Henry Stanley, Edward Jas. (Somerset
Carlile, William Walter Howard, Joseph Stanley, Lord (Lancs.)
Cayzer, Sir Charles William Hozier, Hn. James Henry Cecil Stirling-Maxwell, Sir John M.
Chaloner, Capt. R. G. W. Johnston, William (Belfast) Stone, Sir Benjamin
Chamberlain, Rt. Hn. J. (Birm.) Kay-Shuttle worth, Rt. Hn Sir U Strutt, Hon. Charles Hedley
Chamberlain, J. A. (Worcester) Knowles, Lees Talbot, Rt. Hn. J. G. (Oxf. Univ.
Chaplin, Rt. Hon. Henry Lafone, Alfred Thornton, Percy M.
Cochrane, Hn. T. H. A. E. Lawrence, Sir E. Durning-(Corn Tollemache, Henry James
Coghill, Douglas Harry Lees, Sir Elliott (Birkenhead Tomlinson, W. E. Murray
Cohen, Benjamin Louis Leigh-Bennett, Henry Currie Ure, Alexander
Collings, Rt. Hon. Jesse Llewelyn, Sir Dillwyn-(Swans.) Valentia, Viscount
Colomb, Sir John Charles R. Loder, Gerald Walter Erskine Vincent, Col. Sir C. E. Howard
Cook, Fred. Lucas (Lambeth) Long, Rt. Hn. Walter (Liverp'l) Warde, Lieut.-Col. C. E. (Kent)
Cox, Irwin Edw. Bainbridge Lowe, Francis William Williams, Joseph Powell-(Birm
Curzon, Viscount Macartney, W. G. Ellison Wilson-Todd, Wm. H. (Yorks.)
Dalbiac, Colonel Philip Hugh Macdona, John Cumming Wodehouse. Rt. Hn. E. R.(Bath
Dalkeith, Earl of Maclure, Sir John William Wylie, Alexander
Davies, Sir H. D. (Chatham) Manners, Lord Edward W. J. Wyndham, George
Dickson-Poynder, Sir John P. Mellor, Colonel (Lancashire) Wyndham-Quin, Major W. H.
Donkin, Richard Sim Monk, Charles James Wyvill, Marmaduke D'Arcy
Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers- Moon, Edward Robert Pacy Young, Commander (Berks, E.
Doxford, William Theodore Moore, William (Antrim, N.)
Duncombe, Hon. Hubert V. More, Rbt. Jasper (Shropshire) TELLERS FOR THE AYES—Sir William Walrond and Mr. Anstruther.
Fellowes, Hon. Ailwyn Edwd. Morrell, George Herbert
Finch, George H. Morton, Arthur H. A. (Deptford
Bayley, Thomas (Derbyshire) Dillon, John M'Crae, George
Billson, Alfred Evans, Sir F. H. (Southampton) M' Ewan, William
Birrell, Augustine Fenwick, Charles M' Leod, John
Broadhurst, Henry Healy, Timothy M. (N. Louth) Maddison, Fred.
Buchanan, Thomas Ryburn Hedderwick, Thomas C. H. Maden, John Henry
Caldwell, James Holland, Wm. H. (York, W. R.) Mappin, Sir Fred. Thorpe
Cameron, Sir Charles (Glasgow) Horniman, Frederick John Molloy. Bernard Charles
Cawley, Frederick Jones, William (Carnarvonsh.) Morgan, W. P. (Merthyr)
Channing, Francis Allston Langley, Batty Moss, Samuel
Curran, Thomas (Sligo, S.) Lawson, Sir Wilfrid (Cumb.) Norton, Capt. Cecil William
Dalziel, James Henry Macaleese, Daniel Palmer, Sir Charles M. (Durh'm
§ think we are justified in making a reason able protest against the proposal.
Pirie, Duncan V. Sullivan, Donal (Westmeath)
Robson, William Snowdon Tennant, Harold John TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Mr. Labouchere and Mr. Herbert Lewis
Runciman, Walter Walton, John Lawson (Leeds, S.
Sinclair, Capt. John (Forfars.) Williams, J. Carvell (Notts)
Steadman, William Charles Yoxall, James Henry
I move to omit "Niger Coast Protectorate Harbour Works, £43,500." The arguments are to a considerable extent the same as on the previous item. There is no reason if you make railways on the Gold Coast why you should make harbours at Accra and Calabar. The right hon. Gentleman has given up the point that these places are in any way fit for habitation by Europeans. The white population, exclusive, I presume, of officials is stated to be 200, and the revenue is£153,000, of which£116,730 is derived from spirits. The right hon. Gentleman said that it was his desire that the liquor traffic should be reduced. But most unquestionably it has not been reduced in those parts, because the amount of liquor sold in 1897–98 was a little over£23,000 more than was sold in 1896–97. We do not profit ourselves by this huge liquor traffic; it is the Germans who send liquor from Hamburg that profit, £63,861 worth of gin being introduced by other countries as against £1,331 worth by us. I will put the matter on a practical basis. Is a colony with a population of two hundred Europeans, with the revenue dependent on the duty charged on liquor, good security for the expenditure of money in that particular colony?
§ Amendment proposed— In page 3, line 8, to leave out the words from the word 'Niger,' to '£43,500,' inclusive."—(Mr. Labouchere.)
Aird, John Bhownaggree, Sir M. M. Coghill, Douglas Harry
Allsopp, Hon. George Bigwood, James Cohen, Benjamin Louis
Arnold, Alfred Blundell, Colonel Henry Collings, Rt. Hon. Jesse
Arrol, Sir William Boscawen, Arthur Griffith- Colomb, Sir J. Charles Ready
Asher, Alexander Brodrick, Rt. Hon. St. John Cook, Fred. Lucas (Lambeth)
Atkinson, Rt. Hon. John Brookfield, A. Montagu Cox, Irwin Edward Bainbridge
Bagot, Capt. Josceline FitzRoy Bryce, Rt. Hon. James Curzon, Viscount
Balfour, Rt. Hn. A. J. (Manch'r) Burdett-Coutts, W. Dalbiac, Colonel Philip Hugh
Balfour, Rt Hn Gerald W.(Leeds Caldwell, James Dalkeith, Earl of
Balfour, Rt. Hon. J. B. (Clackm. Campbell, J. H. M. (Dublin) Davies, Sir H. D. (Chatham)
Banbury, Frederick George Carlile, William Walter Dickson-Poynder, Sir John P.
Barnes, Frederic Gorell Cayzer, Sir Charles William Donkin, Richard Sim
Barton, Dunbar Plunket Chaloner, Captain R. G. W. Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers-
Bathurst, Hon. A. Benjamin Chamberlain, Rt Hn. J (Birm. Doxford, William Theodore
Beach. Rt. Hn. Sir M. H. (Bristol Chamberlain, J. A. (Worc'r) Duncombe, Hon. Hubert V.
Beach, W. W. B. (Hants.) Cochrane, Hn. Thos. H. A. E. Dunn, Sir William
I cannot say much in answer to the right hon. Gentleman, because it will only be a repetition of what I have said already. The Niger Coast Protectorate is a promising colony, and there is no reason to believe that there will be any deficit. These works are eminently necessary, some of them were commenced before I had any control over the Protectorate, and I am not answerable for them in that sense, although I thoroughly approve of them. They are necessary works, they will be remunerative, and I think there is ample security.
§ MR. LEWIS
The right hon. Gentleman has said that these works will be remunerative, but there is no note to that effect in the statement which has been issued. Will there be any income to justify the British taxpayer in paying this money?
I hope so. I take exception to the words "British taxpayer" because he is not asked to spend anything, and I do not think he will be called upon to do so.
§ Committee divided: Ayes, 148; Noes, 39. (Division List, No. 333.)
Evans, Sir F. H. (Southton) Leigh-Bennett, Henry Currie Sidebottom, William (Derbysh.
Fellowes, Hon. Ailwyn Edward Llewelyn, Sir Dillwyn-(Swans'a Simeon, Sir Barrington
Finch, George H. Loder, Gerald Walter Erskine Sinclair, Louis (Romford)
Finlay, Sir Robert Bannatyne Long, Rt. Hn. W. (Liverpool) Smith, Jas. Parker (Lanarks.)
Fisher, William Hayes Lowe, Francis William Soames, Arthur Wellesley
Fison, Frederick William Macartney, W. G. Ellison Spencer, Ernest
Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond Macdona, John Cumming Stanley, Edward Jas. (Somerset
Flannery, Sir Fortescue Maclure, Sir John William Stanley, Lord (Lancs.)
Flower, Ernest Manners, Lord Edward W. J. Stirling-Maxwell, Sir John M.
Fowler, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry Mellor, Colonel (Lancashire) Stone, Sir Benjamin
Fry, Lewis Mendl, Sigismund Ferdinand Strutt, Hon. Charles Hedley
Gibbons, J. Lloyd Monk, Charles James Talbot. Rt. Hn. J. G. (Oxf'd Uni.
Giles, Charles Tyrell Moon, Edward Robert Pacy Thornton, Percy M.
Gilliat, John Saunders Moore, William (Antrim, N.) Tollemache, Henry James
Goldsworthy, Major-General More, R. Jasper (Shropshire) Tomlinson, Wm Edw. Murray
Gordon, Hon. John Edward Morrell, George Herbert Ure, Alexander
Gorst, Rt. Hn. Sir John Eldon Morton, A. H. A. (Deptford) Valentia, Viscount
Goschen, Rt. Hn. G J (St. George's Murray, Rt. Hon. A. G. (Bute) Vincent, Col. Sir C. E. Howard
Goulding, Edward Alfred Murray, Col. Wyndham (Bath) Walton, John L. (Leeds, S.)
Greville, Hon. Ronald Newdigate, Francis Alexander Warde, Lieut.-Col. C. E. (Kent)
Hanbury, Rt. Hn. Robert Wm. Nicholson, William Graham Whitmore, Charles Algernon
Harwood, George Nicol, Donald Ninian Williams, Jos. Powell-(Birm.)
Hayne, Rt. Hon. Charles Seale- Oldroyd, Mark Wilson-Todd, Wm. H. (Yorks.)
Hill, Arthur (Down, West) Parkes, Ebenezer Wodehouse, Rt. Hn. E. R. (Bath
Hoare, E. Brodie (Hampstead) Perks, Robert William Wortley, Rt. Hon. C. B. Stuart-
Houlds worth, Sir Wm. Henry Pierpoint, Robert Wylie, Alexander
Howard, Joseph Pryce-Jones, Lt.-Col. Edward Wyndham, George
Hozier, Hon. James H. Cecil Purvis, Robert Wyndham-Quin, Major W. H.
Jackson, Rt. Hon. W. Lawies Ridley, Rt. Hn. Sir Matthew W. Wyvill, Marmaduke D'Arcy
Johnston, William (Belfast) Robertson, Herbert (Hackney) Young, Commander (Berks, E.)
Kay-Shuttle worth, Rt Hn Sir U Robson, William Snowdon
Knowles, Lees Russell, Gen. F. S. (Cheltenham TELLERS FOR THE AYES—Sir William Walrond and Mr. Anstruther.
Lafone, Alfred Russell, T. W. (Tyrone)
Lawrence, Sir E. Durning-(Corn Scoble, Sir Andrew Richard
Lees, Sir Elliott (Birkenhead) Sharpe, William Edward T.
Atherley-Jones, L. Horniman, Frederick John O'Brien, James F. X. (Cork)
Billson, Alfred Joicey, Sir James Palmer, Sir Chas. M. (Durham)
Birrell, Augustine Jones, Wm. (Carnarvonshire) Pirie, Duncan V.
Broadhurst, Henry Langley, Batty Runciman, Walter
Buchanan, Thomas Ryburn Lawson, Sir Wilfrid (Cumb'land Sinclair, Capt. John (Forfarsh.
Cameron, Sir Charles (Glasgow) Macaleese, Daniel Steadman, William Charles
Channing, Francis Allston M'Crae, George Sullivan, Donal (Westmeath)
Curran, Thomas (Sligo, S.) M' Ewan, William Tennant, Harold John
Dalziel, James Henry M' Leod, John Williams, John Carvell (Notts)
Dillon, John Maddison, Fred. Wilson, H. J. (York, W. R.)
Fenwick, Charles Maden, John Henry Yoxall, James Henry
Healy, Timothy M. (N. Louth) Mappin, Sir Fred. Thorpe TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Mr. Labouchere and Mr. Herbert Lewis.
Hedderwick, Thos. Chas. H. Morgan, W Pritchard (Merthyr
Holland, W. H. (York, W R.) Moss, Samuel
I propose to leave out the various loans in the schedule with reference to Jamaica. This is one of the largest items, and includes sums for public works, aid to revenue, the completion and equipment of the railway, interest on railway debentures and water works. Whenever it has been desired to advance money to certain of the West Indian Colonies after hurricanes and other exceptional circumstances, it has been done by a Vote on the Estimates, and full particulars have been laid before us. I believe this is the first occasion on which we have been asked to lend an individual colony money in aid of its annual revenue. With 1188 reference to the amount for public works, this loan has already been expended, and therefore it will come to a certain degree within the emergency category mentioned by the right hon. Gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman explained in an earlier part of the Debate that the Colonial Office considered itself under an obligation to relieve the colony from the speculative company which contracted for the construction of its railway; but if a colony with its eyes open enters into an arrangement of that sort, it ought to bear the consequences, and the Treasury ought not to be asked at the last moment to step in and indemnify it. Then there is an 1189 advance for rolling stock, which appears a very curious purpose to which to devote a portion of this loan. We had laid before us on Monday night Sir David Barbour's Report on the financial condition of Jamaica. It is a very interesting document and shows, what we have been endeavouring to urge, that Jamaica, like many of the other colonies, has had its ups and down. Sir David Barbour points out that, although its financial condition at the present moment is very bad, still it had in the past a great many ups as well as a great many downs. I have an Amendment down to the effect that we should only advance these sums if the Colonial Office obtained control of the finances of the colony. This is one of the essential recommendations of Sir David Barbour's Report, and the right hon. Gentleman the Colonial Secretary has not yet told us whether he intends to adopt it. For my part, I should certainly be prepared to urge that the necessity of the Colonial Office getting greater control over the Colonies than it at present possesses is a very essential objection to this Bill, because I believe the proper Colonial policy to be to encourage as much as possible Colonial independence—even in the Crown Colonies—with a view to making them capable of managing their own financial and domestic affairs. Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us what further security he hopes to be able to offer for this advance to Jamaica, which constitutes one of the most objectionable features of this Bill?
§ Amendment proposed— In page 3, line 9, to leave out the words from the word 'Jamaica,' to '£40,000,' in line 13, both inclusive."—(Mr. Buchanan.)
The hon. Member for East Aberdeenshire seems to think that a change in the Constitution of Jamaica is necessary in order to give the Colonial Office control over the expenditure of the money raised on the guarantee afforded by the Bill. This is not the case. The Colonial Office has the right to appoint a majority of the members of the Council, and I would not hesitate to exercise that power if necessary.
Was that not attempted last year and dropped?
In connection with the Tariff Bill I did appoint some official Members. The elective Members took objection to that course, but they finally agreed to pass the Tariff Bill, so my object was attained, and there was no reason for continuing the appointments. I should, however, reappoint them at once if I deemed it necessary. I must say that I differ entirely from the view of the hon. Member that what he calls constitutional rights should be extended to the West Indies. I think, on the contrary, that we have already gone too far in that direction. As is shown by the very small number of persons who take part in the elections, it is evident that the people who constitute the electorate do not care for the privilege, and the consequence is that these so-called liberal constitutions are really nothing more nor less than oligarchies. Under all these circumstances, I am convinced that a Crown Government which pays attention to such public opinion as exists in the colony is the best form of government possible.
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his views with regard to constitutional government. We complain here of the House of Lords, but in Jamaica, under the auspices of the right hon. Gentleman, the people are infinitely worse off, as if they do not act as he directs, he says he will introduce into their Assembly four or five nominated members in order to create a majority. I only hope this action will be confined to Jamaica, and that the right hon. Gentleman will not seek to introduce it into this country. We are carrying out his wishes now by taking all these grants to Jamaica in a lump sum, instead of dividing on each of the five items. But let us see what is the position of this remarkable Colony. It already owes £1,740,000; its finances show a perpetual deficit, and yet we are asked to advance it more money! And for what? In the first place we are invited to guarantee the interest on a loan for sewering and street re-construction in Kingston. What would be said if the London County Council came and asked us to guarantee a loan for such works in London?
Many towns in England, including, I think, the borough of Northampton, have obtained loans for a similar purpose.
Yes, and that is exactly my point. I do not object to spending the money in this country; what I do object to is to guarantee the interest on a loan to such a colony as Jamaica, with its stupid and ridiculous financial system. I would not lend money to that colony at 10 per cent. The next item is a grant in aid of the revenue. The right hon. Gentleman seems to be under the impression that Sir David Barbour takes a favourable view of the future finances of Jamaica, and that he thinks an equilibrium will be established in a short time. But it seems to me that Sir David is the reverse of sanguine on that point, and he suggests that we should come to the aid of the colony. There seems to be every prospect that if we guarantee this loan we shall have to pay it ourselves. Then I come to the item for railroads. The thing is perfectly monstrous. Jamaica entered into an arrangement with some speculative Americans by which the latter were to keep the railway if it succeeded, but by which Jamaica was to become responsible, if the railway failed, to pay 3½ per cent. on a million and a half of capital. As Sir David Barbour points out, this adds largely to the obligations of the country without in any way benefiting it. This railroad has not been able to pay its way or even to pay the interest on its debentures. Sir David Barbour does not suggest that it will pay, and as I understand it the arrangement is that we are to advance this money to a railway with this first charge of 3½ per cent which it cannot pay. Under those circumstances the Colonial Secretary threw up the sponge as far as the contention that this was a business matter was concerned, and he now appeals to us in formâ pauperis for Jamaica. I entirely disagree with the Colonial Secretary that we are bound to come to the rescue of these reckless colonies who make bargains with American companies, and get into financial difficulties through their own bad management and speculation. I think the best thing would be to hang one of them up as an example to the others, and if Jamaica were allowed to incur the odium of 1192 bankruptcy it would be an object lesson to the other colonies. If you lay down the principle that whether these colonies do well or ill we will pay their debts, you will have them perpetually outrunning the constable and making faults and errors of finance.
The right hon. Gentleman has made a very important statement. He has taken an opportunity of indicating his policy with regard to these Crown colonies—that is, direct control on the part of the Colonial Office. Of course the provision of funds will, rightly or wrongly, put it in the power of the right hon. Gentleman and his successors in office to exercise a more direct and potent influence over the Governments of these colonies. The circumstances in Jamaica are different in nearly every respect from the circumstances in other colonies. It is not a case of a Governor and a nominated council, but of a legislative assembly and local institutions throughout the colony; and it seems to me to be a very important matter for consideration as to what the future of Jamaica is to be. We have had no opportunity of discussing the West Indies on the Estimates this year, and I do not know if the right hon. Gentleman can on this occasion give us any further indication of what he proposes to do regarding the report of Sir David Barbour.
§ MR. PERKS
I desire to sever myself from the financial policy with regard to our colonies which has been laid down by the hon. Member for Northampton. He said that it would be better to have a colony end in disaster in order that it should serve as an object lesson to other British colonies. Is that a policy likely to commend itself to the commercial common-sense of this country? I venture to say a more fatal policy could hardly be conceived. It endangers the whole position which this country holds by the enterprise of its merchants and traders in various parts of the world. We must not hesitate to lend the credit of this country—especially when we get good sound security—to those of our British colonies which may be emerging, not perhaps always from depression, but from the consequences of unsuccessful commercial adventures. I observe that the hon. Gentleman referred to the loan for Kings- 1193 ton, but he omitted to state that the rates from the town of Kingston are sufficient to cover the charge of this loan. We are told that these loans ought not to be granted, but the same system is applied to many large municipalities in this country, some of which have been notoriously on the verge of financial difficulties, and surely there can be no reasonable objection to extending the same indulgence to an old British colony. What would be the effect of driving these colonies into bankruptcy? They would have to go to the lending agencies of the world—some British, some French, some German, and some, possibly, American, and raise loans at exorbitant rates of interest. That policy would redound against this country, because how are the colonies going to raise the revenue to pay for these loans? Partly by local taxation and partly by increased import duties. Who would have to bear the burden of the latter? The manufacturers of Manchester, Sheffield, and other large towns, who are already complaining of the heavy import duties in some of these Crown colonies. But the colonies could turn round on us and say, "We have had to raise heavy loans at big rates of interest, as you refused to lend us your credit, and therefore we require these heavy import duties. I have
Aird, John Cayzer, Sir Charles William Gedge, Sydney
Allsopp, Hon. George Chaloner, Captain R. G. W. Gibbons, J. Lloyd
Arnold, Alfred Chamberlain, Rt. Hn. J. (Birm. Giles, Charles Tyrrell
Arrol, Sir William Chamberlain, J Austen (Worc'r Gilliat, John Saunders
Asher, Alexander Chaplin, Rt. Hon. Henry Gladstone, Rt. Hn. Herbt. John
Atkinson, Rt. Hon. John Cochrane, Hon. Thos. H. A. E. Goldsworthy, Major-General
Bagot, Capt. Josceline Filz Roy Coghill, Douglas Harry Gordon, Hon. John Edward
Balfour, Rt. Hn. A. J. (Manch'r Cohen, Benjamin Louis Gorst, Rt. Hon. Sir John Eldom
Balfour, Rt. Hon. G. W. (Leeds) Collings, Rt. Hon. Jesse Goschen, Rt. Hn. G J (St George's
Balfour, Rt Hn J. Blair (Clackm. Cook, Fred. Lucas (Lambeth) Goulding, Edward Alfred
Banbury, Frederick George Cox, Irwin Edward Bainbridge Gourley, Sir Edw. Temperley
Barnes, Frederic Gorell Curzon, Viscount Greville, Hon. Ronald
Barton, Dunbar Plunket Dalbiac, Colonel Philip Hugh Halsey, Thomas Frederick
Bathurst, Hon. Allen Benjamin Dalkeith, Earl of Hanbury, Rt. Hon. Robert Wm.
Beach. Rt. Hn. Sir M. H. (Bristol Davies, Sir H. D. (Chatham) Harwood. George
Bhownaggree, Sir M. M. Dickson-Poynder, Sir John P. Hayne, Rt. Hn. Charles Seale-
Bigwood, James Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers- Hazell, Walter
Billson, Alfred Doxford, William Theodore Heaton, John Henniker
Birrell, Augustine Duncombe, Hon. Hubert V. Hill, Arthur (Down, West)
Blundell, Colonel Henry Dunn, Sir William Hoare, E. Brodie (Hampstead)
Bond, Edward Fellowes, Hon. Ailwyn Edward Houlds worth, Sir Wm. Henry
Boscawen, Arthur Griffith- Fenwick, Charles Howard, Joseph
Boulnois, Edmund Finch, George H. Hozier, Hon. James Henry Cecil
Brodrick, Rt. Hon. St. John Finlay, Sir Robert Bannatyne Johnston, William (Belfast)
Brookfield, A. Montagu Fisher, William Hayes Knowles, Lees
Bryce, Rt. Hon. James Fison, Frederick William Langley, Batty
Burdett-Coutts, W. Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond Lees, Sir Elliott (Birkenhead)
Caldwell, James Flannery, Sir Fortescue Llewelyn, Sir Dillwyn- (Sw'nsea
Campbell, J. H. M. (Dublin) Flower, Ernest Loder, Gerald Walter Erskine
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir H. Fowler, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry Long, Col. C. W. (Evesham)
Carlile, William Walter Fry, Lewis Long, Rt. Hn. Walter (Liverp'l)
§ not a penny invested in Jamaica, and none of my friends have, as far as I am aware. The colony no doubt made a huge blunder in connection with the railway. An enormous sum was expended on it. I observe, however, that the gross revenue amounts in some years to £90,000 or £100,000 a year, but the extraordinary part of it is that four-fifths of this revenue is absorbed in working expenses, showing bad management somewhere. If this loan is granted, and if the Colonial Secretary exercises commercial control, as we know he will, and if he sees that effective conditions are imposed to secure the working of the railway on reasonable rates, it does not seem to me to be taken for granted that the security is of such a character as has been represented. I rose mainly for the purpose of absolutely disassociating myself from the policy laid down by the hon. Member for Northampton, viz., that this great, ancient colony should be allowed to drift into bankruptcy and hopeless financial confusion, just to hold it up as an object lesson to British colonies in every part of the world.
§ The Committee divided:—Ayes, 158 Noes, 38. (Division List No. 334.)
Lowe, Francis William Perks, Robert William Talbot, Lord E. (Chichester)
Macartney, W. G. Ellison Pierpoint, Robert Talbot, Rt Hn. J. G. (Oxf'd Univ.
Macdona, John Cumming Pirie, Duncan V. Thornton, Percy M.
MacIver, David (Liverpool) Pryce-Jones, Lt.-Col. Edward Tollemache, Henry James
Maclure, Sir John William Purvis, Robert Tomlinson, Wm. Edw. Murray
M'Crae, George Ridley, Rt Hon Sir Matthew W. Valentia, Viscount
Maden, John Henry Robertson, Herbert (Hackney) Vincent, Col. Sir C. E. Howard
Manners, Lord Edward W. J. Runciman, Walter Walton, Jn. Lawson (Leeds, S.
Martin, Richard Biddulph Russell, T. W. (Tyrone) Warde, Lt.-Col. C. E. (Kent)
Mellor, Colonel (Lancashire) Scoble, Sir Andrew Richard Whitmore, Charles Algernon
Mendl, Sigismund Ferdinand Sharpe, William Edward T. Williams, John Carvell (Notts)
Monk, Charles James Sidebottom, William (Derbysh. Williams, J. Powell-(Birm.)
Moon, Edward Robert Pacy Simeon, Sir Barrington Wilson-Todd, W. H. Yorks.)
Moore, William (Antrim, N.) Sinclair, Louis (Romford) Wodehouse, Rt. Hn. E. R. (Bath
More, Robt. Jasper (Shropshire Smith, James Parker (Lanarks. Wortley, Rt. Hn. C. B. Stuart-
Morgan, W Pritchard (Merthyr Soames, Arthur Wellesley Wylie, Alexander
Morrell, George Herbert Spencer, Ernest Wyndham, George
Morton, Arthur H. A. (Deptford Spicer, Albert Wyvill, Marmaduke D'Arcy
Murray, Col. Wyndham (Bath) Stanley, Edward Jas. (Somerset Young, Commander (Berks, E.
Newdigate, Francis Alexander Stanley, Lord (Lanes.)
Nicholson, William Graham Stone, Sir Benjamin TELLERS FOR THE AYES—Sir William Walrond and Mr. Anstruther.
Nicol, Donald Ninian Strauss, Arthur
Parkes, Ebenezer Strutt, Hon. Charles Hedley
Atherley-Jones, L. Hedderwick, Thomas C. H. Norton, Capt. Cecil William
Austin, M. (Limerick, W.) Horniman, Frederick John O'Connor, James (Wicklow, W.
Bayley, Thomas (Derbyshire) Joicey, Sir James Oldroyd, Mark
Broadhurst, Henry Jones, Wm. (Carnarvonshire) Palmer, Sir Chas. M. (Durham)
Cameron, Sir Chas. (Glasgow) Lawson, Sir W. (Cumberland) Robson, William Snowdon
Channing, Francis Allston Lewis, John Herbert Sinclair, Capt. John (Forfarsh.
Crilly, Daniel Macaleese, Daniel Steadman, William Charles
Curran, Thomas (Sligo, S.) M' Ewan, William Sullivan, Donal (Westmeath)
Dalziel, James Henry M' Leod, John Tennant, Harrold John
Dillon, John Maddison, Fred. Yoxall, James Henry
Donelan, Captain A. Mappin, Sir Fred. Thorpe
Evans, Sir Francis H. (South'ton Molloy, Bernard Charles TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Labouchere.
Fox, Dr. Joseph Francis Moss, Samuel
Healy, Timothy M. (N. Louth) Moulton, John Fletcher
I wish to ask whether the House would agree to the proposal that we now take a Division against the remainder of the Schedule, instead of dividing against each separate item of it. We have now done our best, and the discussion cannot be prolonged with benefit.
§ SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN (Stirling Burghs)
I am glad my hon. friend has made this proposal, which, I think, has not come at all too soon. My hon. friends have, in the exercise not only of their rights but of their intelligent judgment, exhibited a very great interest in the subject, and a great deal of knowledge upon it—much of it recently acquired, thanks to the assistance of the right. hon. Gentleman opposite. But so far as I have observed—I had not the advantage of being present during the whole of the Debate, which enables me to speak with all impartiality, for if I had been here my mind might have been warped—but I think enough has now been said and done, I will not say for 1196 glory, but to vindicate the right of the House of Commons to discuss such important details as are contained in this Bill and Schedule. I said yesterday, in regard to the question of the hurried manner in which the Bill has been introduced, and the lack of information, that that ground of complaint was removed by the action of the Secretary of State for the Colonies; but, of course, there still is the right and duty of examining closely all these particular loans. Now, I appeal to anyone who has heard even as much as I have, if there is not a great deal to be said on the subject of these loans—I do not mean of an obstructive character, because I do not believe there has been any obstruction or waste of time, but in the way of serious and deliberate discussion of these very important matters. Having, however, gone so far, and having found the sense of the House so uniformly expressed in favour of these items in the Schedule, I think the proposal of my hon. friend is a wise one, that we should regard the rest of the Schedule as having one head, and make one final effort to have that head cut off. 1197 I think that even the stern sense of public duty which always animates the hon. Member for Northampton will discern some reason for what I am saying. I daresay he is conning the Bill, and looking with a longing eye on items still to come on; but I think he will consult, not only the convenience of the House, but the general opinion of the House, if he will forego the pleasures of further detailed criticism, and confine himself to the one opportunity which my hon. friend offers him.
I recognise the friendly character of the interposition of the right hon. Gentleman, and I hope it will commend itself to other Gentlemen in the House. I have had the advantage, which the right hon. Gentleman has not enjoyed, of being present during the whole of this Debate, and I desire to bear my testimony to the assiduity with which some of the followers of the right hon. Gentleman have carried out his suggestion that they should examine carefully all the details of the Bill. I am quite sure their loyalty to the right hon. Gentleman has been shown by the extremely emphatic nature of the protest they have thought it their duty to make. I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that a great deal is to be said on this subject, and that a great deal has been said, but I feel sure now that hon. Members will be satisfied, and may feel that they can go home having done their duty and shown their great objection to the principle as well as to the details of the Bill. I believe they will agree with the right hon. Gentleman opposite that
Aird, John Boulnois, Edmund Dalbiac, Colonel Philip Hugh
Allsopp, Hon. George Brodrick, Rt. Hon. St. John Dalkeith. Earl of
Arnold, Alfred Brookfield, A. Montagu Davies, Sir H. D. (Chatham)
Arrol, Sir William Bryce, Rt. Hon. James Dickson-Poynder, Sir John P
Asher, Alexander Burdett-Coutts, W. Douglas, Rt. Hon. A. Akers-
Asquith, Rt. Hon. Herbert H. Caldwell, James Doxford, William Theodore
Atkinson, Rt. Hon. John Campbell, J. H. M. (Dublin) Duncombe, Hon. Hubert V.
Bagot, Capt. J. Fitzroy Campbell-Bannerman, Sir H. Dunn, Sir William
Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J. (Manch'r Carlile, William Walter Fellowes, Hon. Ailwyn Edward
Balfour, Rt. Hn. G. W. (Leeds) Cayzer, Sir Charles William Finch, George H.
Balfour, Rt. Hon. J. B. (Clackm. Chaloner, Captain R. G. W. Finlay, Sir Robert Bannatyne
Banbury, Frederick George Chamberlain, Rt. Hn. J. (Birm) Fisher, William Hayes
Barnes, Frederic Gorell Chamberlain, J. Austen (Worc'r Fison, Frederick William
Barton, Dunbar Plunket Chaplin, Rt. Hon. Henry Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond
Bathurst, Hon. Allen Benj. Cochrane, Hon. Thos. H. A. E. Flannery, Sir Fortescue
Beach, Rt. Hn. Sir M. H. (Bristol Coghill, Douglas Harry Flower, Ernest
Bigwood, James Cohen, Benjamin Louis Fowler, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry
Billson, Alfred Collings, Rt. Hon. Jesse Fry, Lewis
Birrell, Augustine Cook, Fred. Lucas (Lambeth) Gedge, Sydneyd
Blundell, Colonel Henry Cox, Irwin Edw. Bainbridge Gibbons, J Lloyd
Boscawen, Arthur Griffith- Curzon, Viscount Giles, Charles Tyrrell
§ nothing can be gained by any further detailed criticism, which must necessarily follow the lines of what has already taken place.
I feel we can go home with a good conscience. We have done our duty. There are several items yet, and, as the Leader of the Opposition said, we ought, by rights, to discuss every one of those items. But, when he made those suggestions, the Leader of the Opposition ought to be here to help us. The right hon. Gentleman has been kept away, leaving the hard work to us. I gather from the Leader of the Opposition that his conscience will allow him to go away, and that he does not wish himself to discuss these items. For my own part, I am against every one of the items, but, so far from being an obstructive, I should be very happy to vote against the whole of the items en bloc. In conclusion, I will only say that a more monstrous, a more wicked, and more scandalous Bill was never brought into the House. In local matters we ought to run ourselves, and the colonies ought to run themselves.
§ Amendment proposed— In page 3, line 14, to leave out the words from the word 'Lagos,' inclusive, to the end of the Schedule."—(Mr. Labonchere.)
§ Question put, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Schedule."
Gilliat, John Saunders MacIver, David (Liverpool) Simeon, Sir Barrington
Goldsworthy, Major-General Maclure, Sir John William Sinclair, Louis (Romford)
Gordon, Hon John Edward M'Crae, George Smith, James Parker (Lanarks)
Gorst, Rt. Hn. Sir John Eldon Manners, Lord Edw. Wm. J. Soames, Arthur Wellesley
Goschen, Rt. Hn. G. J. (St Geo's.) Martin, Richard Biddulph Spencer, Ernest
Goulding, Edward Alfred Mellor, Colonel (Lancashire) Spicer, Albert
Gourley, Sir Edward Temperley Mendl, Sigismund Ferdinand Stanley, Edward J. (Somerset.)
Greville, Hon. Ronald Monk, Charles James Stanley, Lord (Lanes.)
Halsey, Thomas Frederick Moon, William Robert Pacy Strauss, Arthur
Hanbury, Rt. Hon. Robt. Wm. Moore, William (Antrim, N.) Talbot, Lord E. (Chichester)
Harwood, George More, Robt. Jasper (Shropshire) Talbot, Rt. Hn J. G. (Ox. Univ.)
Hayne, Rt. Hon. C. Seale- Morgan, W Pritchard (Merthyr) Thornton, Percy M.
Hazell, Walter Morrell, George Herbert Tollemache, Henry James
Heaton, John Henniker Morton, A. H. A. (Deptford) Tomlinson, Wm. Edw. Murray
Hill, Arthur (Down, West) Murray, Col. Wyndham (Bath) Valentia, Viscount
Hoare, E. Brodie (Hampstead) Newdigate, Francis Alexander Vincent, Col. Sir C. E. H.
Houlds worth, Sir Win. Henry Nicholson, William Graham Walton, J. L. (Leeds, S.)
Howard, Joseph Nicol, Donald Ninian Warde, Lt.-Col. C. E. (Kent)
Hozier, Hon. James Hy. Cecil Oldroyd, Mark Whitmore, Charles Algernon
Johnston, William (Belfast) Parkes, Ebenezer Williams, Jos. Powell-(Birm.)
Joicey, Sir James Perks, Robert William Wilson-Todd, W. H. (Yorks.)
Jones, William (Carnarvonsh. Pierpoint, Robert Wodehouse, Rt. Hn. E. R. (Bath.
Knowles, Lees Pirie, Duncan V. Wortley, Rt. Hon. C. B. Stuart-
Lees, Sir Elliott (Birkenhead) Pryce-Jones, Lt.-Col. Edward Wylie, Alexander
Llewelyn, Sir Dillwyn- (Swan.) Purvis, Robert Wyvill, Marmaduke D'Arcy
Loder, Gerald Walter Erskine Ridley, Rt. Hn. Sir Matthew W. Young, Commander (Berks, E.)
Long, Col. C. W. (Evesham) Robertson, Herbert (Hackney)
Long, Rt. Hn. Walter (L'pool.) Robson, William Snowdon TELLERS FOR THE AYES—
Lowe, Francis William Russell, T. W. (Tyrone) Sir William Walrond and Mr. Anstruther.
Macartney, W. G. Ellison Scoble, Sir Andrew Richard
Macdona, John Cumming Sidebottom, W. (Derbyshire)
Atherley-Jones, L. Fenwick, Charles Norton, Capt. Cecil William
Austin, M. (Limerick, W.) Fox, Dr. Joseph Francis O'Connor, Arthur (Donegal)
Bayley, Thomas (Derbyshire) Healy, Timothy M. (N. Louth) O'Connor, Jas. (Wicklow, W.)
Bolton, Thomas Dolling Hedderwick, Thomas Chas. H. Palmer, Sir Charles M. (Durham
Broadhurst, Henry Lawson, Sir W. (Cumberland) Roberts, John Bryn (Eifion)
Buchanan, Thomas Ryburn Lewis, John Herbert Steadman, William Charles
Cameron, Sir C. (Glasgow) Macaleese, Daniel Sullivan, Donal (Westmeath)
Channing, Francis Allston M' wan, William Tennant, Harold John
Curran, Thomas B. (Donegal) M' Leod, John Williams, John Carvell (Notts.)
Curran, Thomas (Sligo, S.) Maddison, Fred. Yoxall, James Henry
Dalziel, James Henry Maden, John Henry
Dilke, Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Mappin, Sir Frederick Thorpe TELLERS FOR THE NOES—Mr. Labouchere and Captain Sinclair.
Donelan, Captain A. Molloy, Bernard Charles
Evans, Sir F. H. (S'thampton) Moss, Samuel
§ Schedule agreed to.
§ Bill reported, without Amendment; read the third time, and passed.
Back to PUBLIC WORKS (LOANS) BILL.
Forward to POOR LAW ACTS AMENDMENT BILL [Lords.]
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HANSARD 1803–2005 → 1980s → 1984 → July 1984 → 26 July 1984 → Lords Sitting
Car Mileage Allowance
HL Deb 26 July 1984 vol 455 cc406-20 406
§ 3.39 p.m.
§ Viscount Whitelaw rose to move, That this House approves the following proposals with respect to the rates of the car mileage allowance available to Members of this House—
§ (1) The allowance payable in respect of a journey commenced in the period beginning with 1st 407 October 1984 and ending with 31st March 1985 shall be payable—
(a) subject to the limit specified in paragraph (3) below, at the rate per mile shown in column 2 of the following Table in relation to the engine capacity of the vehicle used for the journey; and
(b) in respect of miles in excess of that limit, at the rate per mile shown in column 3 of that Table in relation to that engine capacity.
Engine capacity Mileage up to limit Further mileage
1300 cc or less .. .. 18p 11.3p
More than 1300 cc and not more than 2300 cc 25.9p 14.7p
More than 2300 cc .. 39p 19.5p
§ (2) Paragraph (1) above shall have effect in relation to journeys commenced in the year beginning with 1st April 1985 and each subsequent year with the substitution, for the rates shown in the Table, of rates calculated, on the principles exemplified in Appendix I to the Report of the Independent Inquiry, from the figures in the edition of the Royal Automobile Club's Schedule of Estimated Vehicle Running Costs published in or about the April of the year in question.
§ (3) For the purposes of this Resolution the limit on the number of miles in respect of which car mileage allowance may be paid at the rate specified in column 2 of the Table shall be 10,000 miles for the period beginning With 1st October 1984 and ending with 31st March 1985 and 20,000 miles for the year beginning with 1st April 1985 and for each subsequent year.
§ (4) In this Resolution— the Report of the Independent Inquiry" means the Report of the Independent Inquiry into Motor Mileage Allowance for Members of Parliament to the Leader of the House of Commons (H.C. 469 of Session 1983–84); "year" means a year beginning wih 1st April.
§ The noble Viscount said: My Lords, I beg to move the second Motion standing in my name on the order paper. The purpose of this Motion is simply to bring the motor mileage allowance in your Lordships' House into line with new arrangements which have recently been agreed to in another place. It may be helpful if I explain a little of the background to the changes made in another place.
§ Last year the Civil Service moved to a two-tier system of motor mileage rates. Mileage over and above an annual limit of 9,000 miles was made subject to a lower rate. The reason for this was that the normal rate includes a contribution towards the annual standing charges incurred in running a car. If this rate were paid in full to those travelling very long distances, they could make a profit which would be liable to tax. The two-tier system prevents such profits from being made, and thus ensures that no tax liability arises. In July last year, the Government proposed in another place that a similar arrangement should be introduced for the mileage allowance payable to Members of Parliament. But the Government's proposals were not 408 acceptable to Members in another place, and my right honourable friend the Lord Privy Seal undertook to set up an independent inquiry into the most appropriate means of reimbursing members the cost of their motor mileage.
§ The inquiry was undertaken by my noble friend Lord Peyton of Yeovil, the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, and Mr. Richard Wilkes, under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Peyton of Yeovil. Their report was published last month. It recommended the introduction of a two-tier system of mileage allowance, with a reduced rate for travel over 20,000 miles in any year. The report proposed that the allowance should be calculated by reference to the table of vehicle running costs issued by the RAC in April each year. It proposed that the basis of calculation should be one vehicle of 2600 cc, replaced every three years. On that basis, the report proposed a rate of 39p per mile for the first 20,000 miles, and thereafter 19.5p per mile.
§ The report indicated that these figures were intended to be an upper limit, and that Members with smaller cars would be expected to limit their claims to the amount of their costs. The Government felt, however, that in the interests of public accountability, and of the proprieties being not only observed but seen to be observed, it would be appropriate to formalise such an arrangement and to lay down lower limits for smaller cars. Accordingly, the resolution which was approved in another place last Friday laid down different rates for three ranges of engine size. The rates are set out in the table which appears in the Motion before your Lordships.
§ If your Lordships agree to this Motion, it will—like the Motion on Lords' expenses to which your Lordships have just agreed—provide for automatic annual up-rating. The rates which appear in the table will apply from 1st October this year until 31st March next year. Thereafter, with effect from 1st April each year, the rate will be recalculated in accordance with the RAC's annual table of vehicle running costs, to which I have already referred.
§ I realise that one effect of the proposed new arrangements will be that noble Lords whose cars have an engine capacity of 1300 cc or less will, at any rate initially, be able to claim less than the current flat-rate allowance. But I hope your Lordships will agree that it is only right that the allowance which is payable should reflect, as accurately as possible, the expenses actually incurred. Furthermore, a uniform scale for reimbursement of motoring expenses should surely be applicable to Members of both Houses. I therefore hope that your Lordships will endorse the arrangements which have been adopted in another place and which reflect the findings of an independent inquiry.
§ I have noted with interest the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, which would have the effect of retaining a uniform rate for all cars, of whatever size. It is perhaps only fair to the noble Lord that I should wait to hear what he has to say before responding to those amendments.
§ I have been reprimanded, if that is the right word, for straying out of order during the previous Statement and your Lordships all know who reprimanded me. Having been so reprimanded, I will not do it again. I 409 will not reply to each noble Lord in turn. I will, of course, reply at the end and indeed also after the amendments have been moved. My Lords, I beg to move.
§ Moved, That this House approves the above proposals with respect to the rates of the car mileage allowance available to Members of this House—(Viscount Whitelaw.)
§ Lord Tordoff moved Amendment No. 1 to the above Motion: In paragraph (1)(a), line 2, leave out "2" and inset "1".
§ The noble Lord said: My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Viscount, who, in his usual humorous and relaxed way, has introduced what appears to be an extremely complicated piece of paper in a way which we can all understand. Although I may not succeed to the same extent, I will try to do the same with my amendments, which appear to be equally complicated. I rise to move Amendment No. 1 but, by leave of the House and, I hope, for its convenience, I will speak to Amendments Nos. 1 to 6. Amendment No. 2: In paragraph (1)(a), line 2, leave out "in relation to the engine capacity of the vehicle used for the journey". Amendment No. 3: In paragraph (1)(b), line 1, leave out "3" and insert "2". Amendment No. 4: In paragraph (1)(b), line 2, leave out "in relation to that engine capacity". Amendment No. 5: Leave out the Table and insert:
"TABLE
Mileage up to limit Further mileage
25.9p 14.7p"
Amendment No. 6: In paragraph (3), line 2, leave out "2" and insert "1". Noble Lords will see that Amendment No. 5 is the major amendment in this group and that the others are consequential upon it.
§ Before I go any further, I ought to make it plain, standing here as I do at the Liberal Front Bench, that this is not a party matter. It is a matter on which I have the support of a number of my colleagues individually, but it is not being advanced to your Lordships as a party matter and I hope other noble Lords will recognise that it ought to be a matter for freedom of voting as this House understands it.
§ First, may I clear away one or two misunderstandings by saying that this recommendation which is before your Lordships was not the original recommendation from the Top Salaries Review Body, which wished to have a single maximum figure within which noble Lords could claim up to the limit of their actual costs at a level of 39p per mile. The Government have not taken that on board and I am not complaining about that. There is no earthly reason why the Government should on every occasion accept the recommendations of individual review bodies.
§ Nor is it based on Civil Service rates either now or in the future. Indeed, it has been put to me that, if my amendment were to be carried, the rates would be lower than the appropriate Civil Service rates. I find no difficulty with that, because the need for car usage by civil servants is quite different from that of your Lordships' House. We have one purpose for using motor cars and that is to come to this House and to get home. Civil servants have to use them for business in 410 other parts of the country at different times of the day and night, and I believe that what is appropriate to them is not necessarily appropriate to us.
§ Nor do I accept the suggestion by the noble Viscount that, because these rates have been laid down for another place, they are necessarily applicable to us. The payment of car allowances to honourable and right honourable Members in another place is to enable them not only to get here and to get home, but also to move about their constituencies on political business. We do not have constituencies and therefore I suggest that the questions are again different. These are based very properly on figures produced by the RAC. They are not directly attributable to those figures, because the middle bracket is an average across the range for 1,300cc to 2,300cc, but they are broadly based on figures that have been put up by the RAC and therefore, in that sense, I have no quarrel with the figures which are included.
§ What I am questioning is the introduction of the higher band at 39p. As I said, although that is the same figure as the Top Salaries Review Body suggested, they suggested that as a maximum and not as a norm; that is, up to the level of 20,000 miles a year. I believe that in these days it behoves Members of your Lordships' House to set an example in the country. We should be seen to be economical with taxpayers' money. We should be seen to encourage the use of public transport. I would draw your Lordships' attention to the expenses form that most of us fill up, which states on the back in the notes: Lords are reminded that travel by road is considerably more expensive than that by public transport and are therefore urged to use public transport wherever practicable.
§ That is something to which we should all subscribe. Cars are a necessity for some of your Lordships, because of where you live and for other reasons, and it is proper that such noble Lords should he properly recompensed for the costs that are incurred. But the other objection that I have to raising this top band is the fact that we should also be economical in the use of scarce energy resources.
§ We have had some questions today on wave power. Whatever happens to that, there will be a need for many years to come for the use of hydrocarbon fuels for transport, but these, as we know, are not replaceable. Again I believe that we should be setting an example to the country in the economic use of hydrocarbon fuels. It seems to me that the Motion relating to our expenses does not make us appear to do so. Indeed, the introduction of the top band will be seen by the world outside as being the very opposite. It will be seen as encouraging noble Lords to use their cars rather than to use public transport and, moreover, to use big cars. If one were to be cynical about it, it might be suggested that the best thing that one could do in terms of getting value for money from expenses—which I am sure noble Lords are not out to do, but it may be seen like that by the outside world—would be to buy a second-hand 2,500 Rover which is about 10 years old on which the depreciation is down to virtually nothing.
§ It may be that people need cars for purposes other than merely to come to this House and go home again. If that is so, it is the choice of noble Lords. It seems to me that the variable cost they then pay should be 411 attributable to them. We should expect noble Lords to be able to come to this House in reasonable comfort at a reasonable speed so that they can properly carry out their duties, but I do not believe that we should be seen to be encouraging more than that.
§ The right honourable Leader in another place indicated the other day in a debate on the same subject that we were to be seen as in a goldfish bowl and that the world outside would monitor what we do. I should like to draw your Lordships' attention to a letter which appears in today's copy of The Times, which says: I am dismayed by the new scale of mileage allowances, detailed on page 2 of last Saturday's Times, which MPs have voted themselves. This system encourages rather than penalises the use of large capacity cars and I would suggest that this is a bad example and a retrograde step at a time when fuel conservation is supposed to be practised by the rest of the population".
§ The world outside is watching us, and I believe that we must be seen to be acting responsibly. No doubt we do act responsibly and no doubt we shall act responsibly, but we have to be seen to act responsibly. I believe that the Government's proposals will be seen as the opposite. It is on that simple proposition that I beg to move Amendment No. 1, having spoken to the other amendments, of which Amendment No. 5 is the kernel.
Lord Morris
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, speaks, as I do, with the comfort of comparative youth. He has not considered the vitally important point that there are many Members of your Lordships' House who are considerably older than are we who need the safety and comfort of larger capacity cars. I totally reject the case which he has just put forward.
§ Lord Jenkins of Putney
My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, not only for the reasons he has so cogently put forward but also because on one occasion when a noble Baroness ran into my Ford Escort the cost was comparatively small, whereas on another occasion when I ran into a noble Lord's Rolls Bentley the cost was very large. Therefore I suggest that noble Lords should be discouraged from using Rolls Bentleys and encouraged to use Ford Escorts. For this reason, I find myself in full support of the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff.
§ Lord Mulley
My Lords, I, too, support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff. I join with him in thanking the noble Viscount the Leader of the House for putting his case so clearly but I reject his initial thesis that we have got to follow what has happened in another place. The noble Viscount and I were in the other place together for many years. I believe he will agree that the need for a car is greater in the rural rather than the urban constituency. Members of Parliament cover large distances in their cars. They have to go round their constituencies, carry people to the polls, and so on. Their need for cars is probably greater than that of Members of this House.
I am not particularly attached to a particular sum of money, but I believe that it would be better to stick to a uniform sum. We should not have a mileage allowance of up to 20,000 miles at 39p for anybody's car, because that amounts to £7,800 a year. That is a 412 great deal of money to convey any noble Lord from wherever he lives to this place during the limited period of time that the House sits. I believe, therefore, that the second as well as the first part of the noble Lord's amendment is important and that if the amendment were carried as a whole there would inevitably be a reduction in the total cost, without any undue hardship. I have heard no complaints about the existing arrangements. For many years the other place has had a uniform arrangement and for many years before that there was no car allowance at all, but that is an entirely different matter.
Secondly, it is difficult to know where to draw the line. There is no such thing as a British 1300cc car. The whole of the British Leyland range is 1275cc, the Ford range is 1296cc and the Vauxhall range 1297cc.
§ Lord Mottistone
My Lords, if I may correct the noble Lord, I have a British Leyland Maestro which is 1300cc.
My Lords, the noble Lord will find that that is just printed on the car. If he looks at the official registration and the official statistics published by the motoring organisations, the noble Lord will find that his actual engine capacity is 1275cc. The Vauxhall range is 1297cc. If one wishes to buy a certain foreign car—I shall not mention its name, in case the noble Lord might be tempted to buy it—one can buy it with an engine capacity of 1301cc. Therefore, with an increase in capacity of one-third of 1 per cent—0.03—you can get almost a 50 per cent. increase in your allowance, which does not seem to me to make very much sense.
Furthermore, in assessing the cost of motoring one has to bear in mind not merely the cost of fuel, which is what we have been talking about, since that is related to engine capacity, but the cost of other motoring expenses. Tax and parking costs are uniform, whatever the make of car. The biggest cost of motoring—insurance and depreciation—is not necessarily related to engine capacity but to a whole range of other matters. Very expensive cars can have a relatively low engine capacity.
I strongly urge noble Lords to take into account the point made so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, in moving his amendment: that we should not be seen to be encouraging the use of large cars, thus attracting a greater mileage allowance. I am sure that the noble Viscount will also endorse the plea of the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, that as this is a House of Lords matter we should have a free vote.
§ Lord Peyton of Yeovil
My Lords, there are three points which I should very much like to make as the member who had the rather difficult job of presiding over this small committee. First, I should like to make it clear that the committee were not invited to consider, nor did they apply themselves to, the question of what allowances should be paid to Members of your Lordships' House. They were appointed to consider the allowances which should properly be paid to Members of Parliament. They found the task exceedingly difficult and complicated to fit every kind of constituency, every kind of Member, old and young, regardless of their physical strength and 413 whether or not they have young families. It was not at all easy. They did their best and attempted to produce something which was simple and convenient and did not involve a huge amount of administrative work. They also attempted—and this is the last point I want to make—to keep their report reasonably short. I must say that we were all astonished when the Government, in publishing that report, followed that example.
I did comment to my right honourable friend the Leader of the House that it was strange to publish a report which began with the word "we" and then not to identify who "we" were. In his answer to me he pointed out that the names of the members of the committee had been omitted in the interests of brevity!
§ Lord Somers
My Lords, I do not want to oppose the amendment but I should like to make one point. The noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, quoted a passage from the instructions which said that noble Lords are urged to use public transport whenever possible. That would give rise to many difficulties. If one lives some way from a railway station, one has to make arrangements either to park or to garage one's car while one is in London, and that is not always easy. It is expensive, and it may be next door to impossible. When one gets here, of course, one has to get a taxi to the House, and taxis are getting more and more expensive every year. Therefore, I do not know that I would say that the difference in cost is all that great. However, I thought I would make that one point.
§ Lord Monson
My Lords, I wholeheartedly support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff. Apart from the incidental and mildly selfish feelings which some of your Lordships may share, that there are already far too many large cars clogging up the forecourt so that those of us with cars of a more normal size often find it impossible to park, there is a far more important consideration—the British taxpayer.
The most expensive first-class return rail fare between London and Edinburgh is £104. At the mileage rate proposed for cars with engines in excess of 2.3 litres capacity, the corresponding car mileage expenses would be no less than £305.76—almost three times as much. The respective amounts for Liverpool are £60 and £150.93; for Lincoln, £41 and £105.69; for Norwich, £34.50 and £89.70; and for Cardiff, where for some reason the differential is at its narrowest, £47 and £ 113.10. This is taking the most expensive first-class rail fares as examples. When a first-class weekend return is bought—which is more often than not possible for your Lordships —the differential is even greater: over four times in all cases and over five times in the case of Edinburgh, where the weekend return rail fare is £61 in comparison with just under £306.
§ Lord Ross of Marnock
My Lords, would the noble Lord give way? As I look around this House I see that there are a few old-age pensioners. For them it is even cheaper by rail; it is half the price.
My Lords, I am very grateful for that extremely useful support. I support these amendments, but I do not think that they go far enough. The mileage figure for the first few thousand miles includes not only running costs (which is 414 reasonable enough) but standing costs: the cost of the road fund licence, the insurance, and that part of the depreciation attributable to the age of the car rather than to the mileage covered. It is quite possible that the majority of honourable Members in another place do have to buy a second car for their constituency work, especially if they represent geographically large constituencies in Scotland, the Borders, Wales, the West country, Northern Ireland and so on, where they need a car in order to keep in contact with their widely scattered constituents. But these considerations do not apply to noble Lords, as has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff. There must be relatively few noble Lords who buy a car for the sole purpose of journeys to and from this House. That being so, is it really right that standing costs (as opposed to running costs) should be included in our mileage allowance at all?
Finally, may I point out that my brother happens to be a county councillor, and the mileage allowance to which he is entitled is 19.1p for a car of any size. This mileage allowance, I understand, applies to county councillors as well as to magistrates. Why should Members of this House be able to claim twice the mileage allowance of county councillors and magistrates? I look forward to hearing what the noble Viscount has to say on this matter.
§ Lord Hatch of Lusby
My Lords, while supporting the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, may I first make one reservation about the implications of his speech. I think it would be a pity if it were to go out from this House to the public that noble Lords simply use their cars to get from their homes to this Palace. Indeed, I am sure that many noble Lords would agree with me that their cars are frequently used to visit educational establishments and industrial establishments, to meet immigrants, and to meet various lobbies. One can also mention the number of metropolitan councils which, over the last few weeks, have asked us to go to meet them. Of course, our travel does not compare with that of a Member of Parliament in his constituency, but there is a substantial amount of travelling involved in the proper exercise of our duties in this House and the collection of material for the formation of views to be expressed here.
With that reservation I should also couple the fact that, although we are urged to use public transport rather than cars, a great deal of the public transport in this country has simply been removed. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Monson, would agree with me that in the area from which we come, not only are there no trains running in many districts but the train lines have been pulled up and the stations have been sold, so there is no chance of them being renewed. In many rural areas in this country today it is only with the use of a car that you can be mobile at all. However, I fully agree with the main points put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, particularly on the conservation issue and bearing in mind the latter years of this decade, when North Sea oil will be running out.
But there is one further issue. The noble Lord pointed out—and I agree with him completely—that this is not a party political matter; but it is a philosophical matter. Is it not obvious that the proposals which have been put forward by the Government are based 415 on the concept that those who have most capital shall be given the largest allowances and that those who have least capital shall have their allowances reduced? Is this not a philosophical issue, and is it one which this House wishes to support? I am sure that there are many noble Lords on all sides of the House who do not believe that this philosophy should go forward and have the assent of this House. I believe that this greatly strengthens the case of the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, whose amendments I fully support.
§ Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede
My Lords, I shall be brief because I know that your Lordships have much other business to transact today. As the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, said in moving his amendment, this is not a party matter. With that we entirely agree, and I have no doubt that if the noble Lord presses his amendment to a Division noble Lords will vote as they see fit on a free vote without the imposition of any Whips.
Having said that, we have a good deal of sympathy with the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, and with the particular reasons he put forward, which have been repeated by many noble Lords. There is the question of the conservation of energy and resources; the question of public expenditure; the question of how the introduction of the high mileage allowance for large cars will be seen by the public. These are questions which will all weigh with your Lordships in deciding whether or not to support the amendment.
As has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Peyton, the report was prepared for Members of the House of Commons who use their cars in a way that is rather different from that in which we use our cars, and there is no reason why we need necessarily follow the decisions taken in another place. We shall all be interested to hear the reply from the Leader of the House.
§ Viscount Whitelaw
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for all the points they have made. First, I believe it would be right to confirm that I have discussed our position on this side of the House with my noble friend the Chief Whip, and we will of course follow exactly the same procedure as the other parties and have a totally free vote. Therefore, anything that I say is not in any way meant to persuade my noble friends to support me if they feel otherwise. I should like to make that absolutely clear.
I will turn now to some of the points which have been made. My noble friend Lord Morris raised the point about the comfort of the elderly in a large car. Obviously that is a point which will weigh with your Lordships. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkins, did not seem to give a particularly good reason against large cars. After all, he did have an option, which he did not appear to exercise: that is, not to run into any cars at all, large or small. But as he has been in the habit of doing so, perhaps it became a better reason.
The noble Lord, Lord Mulley, raised the point about a free vote and also commented that there was no particular reason why we should follow another place. The same point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede. They commented that Members of another place use their cars differently, for 416 different purposes, and for constituency work, in a way that we do not. My noble friend Lord Peyton, who speaks with all the authority of the author of the scheme—even if, for reasons I did not appreciate, he was not given prime authorship when it was published— pointed out that he had been asked to look at the case for allowances for Members of another place and not for Peers.
The noble Lord, Lord Somers, referred to the difficulty of parking cars and the expense involved. The noble Lord, Lord Monson, said that we should be particularly careful of the taxpayers' interests. Of course, he must be right in that regard, and I fully accept the point he made. The noble Lord, Lord Hatch, seemed to introduce some political concepts into his statement which had not occurred to me. But as the noble Lord will realise, I am very much a nonpolitical animal. Nevertheless, he made it clear that he supports the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff.
I have to say that we have not yet discussed the amendment concerning mileage rates, which obviously we shall come to, but I must agree that these amendments would save the taxpayers' money. Although I am advocating another course, it would be quite wrong of me not to admit that, on balance, the amendments would do that. People with large cars would lose a considerable amount, and people with small cars would gain. On balance, I think there would be a saving of the taxpayers' money.
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Viscount for giving way. Can he say anything in reply to my point about magistrates and county councillors, who receive only 19.1 pence per mile for a car of more than 2.3 litres compared with the 39 pence proposed by the Government?
My Lords, it was simply that the arrangements put forward for Members in another place and which we were seeking to copy here, were based on proposals made by my noble friend Lord Peyton and his committee. There are inevitably many different comparisons which can be made, and the noble Lord very properly makes yet another one.
Clearly, many of your Lordships feel that it is right not to appear to be using larger cars at this time, and to support smaller cars. That is a very proper approach; but I must say something on a rather broader front. In seeking to do my best for your Lordships and this House as far as various arrangements are concerned, it would be wrong if I did not say that it does help, from time to time, to work with another place. In some cases, it does help to follow their practices. To break away from those practices is perfectly reasonable if that is what your Lordships decide, but that does have disadvantages as well as, perhaps, an advantage on this occasion.
In my position as Leader of this House, and with the many different negotiations I have to make, it would be quite wrong of me not to register that point. But having done so I return to the point that this is entirely a matter for your Lordships personally to decide. I have made the points that I felt it right to make as Leader of the House, but I leave it entirely to your Lordships to decide what you wish.
§ Lord Tordoff
My Lords, with typical generosity the Leader of the House has mentioned that on the other side of the House as well as on this side there is to be a free vote. I welcome that most generous statement. I will deal first with the final point he made about breaking away from the practices of the Commons. I accept that the noble Viscount works hard on our behalf to ensure that we have a fair crack of the whip. But it does not seem to me that in changing on this occasion we would be doing anything other than that which was rational on the arguments which have been deployed. I am sure that can be explained to Members of another place. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Peyton, in that respect, because we should make it quite clear that anything we do is no reflection on what may have been done in another place. If we were to do something different, it is because our circumstances, in respect of this particular issue, are quite different.
I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Somers, about parking. Of course, we are not trying to force everyone to use public transport. We are trying to encourage people to use public transport; but it is recognised that we in this House are of different ages and of different vitalities. This bears on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Morris. The worst accusation that has been made against me today is that I am too young. That applies only in this House: outside, my children take a very different view.
We recognise that there are many people coming to your Lordships' House who need to have adequate private transport. I do not believe that in passing this amendment we would seriously restrict the people who need that kind of transport. It is on that basis, and encouraged by the support I have received from all sides of the House, that I press my amendment.
On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 1) shall be agreed to?
§ Their Lordships divided: Contents, 128; Not-Contents, 64.
Airedale, L. Dean of Beswick, L.
Aldenham, L. De Freyne, L.
Alexander of Tunis, E. Diamond, L.
Amherst, E. Donaldson of Kingsbridge, L.
Ampthill, L. Elliot of Harwood, B.
Annan, L. Elystan-Morgan, L.
Attlee, E. Ezra, L.
Avebury, L. Falkland, V.
Aylestone, L. Foot, L.
Banks, L. Gallacher, L.
Beaumont of Whitley, L. Gladwyn, L.
[Teller.] Gosford, E.
Beswick, L. Graham of Edmonton, L.
Birk, B. Greenway, L.
Blanch, L. Grimond, L.
Blease, L. Grimthorpe, L.
Boston of Faversham, L. Haig, E.
Bottomley, L. Hall, V.
Buckmaster, V. Hampton, L.
Carmichael of Kelvingrove, L. Hanworth, V.
Cathcart, E. Hatch of Lusby, L.
Collison, L. Hayter, L.
Craigavon, V. Henley, L.
Dacre of Glanton, L. Hooson, L.
Darcy (de Knayth), B. Howie of Troon, L.
Hughes, L. Peyton of Yeovil, L.
Hunter of Newington, L. Phillips, B.
Hylton-Foster, B. Ponsonby of Shulbrede, L.
Ilchester, E. Rankeillour, L.
Ingleby, V. Rea, L.
Inglewood, L. Renton, L.
Irving of Dartford, L. Renwick, L.
Jacobson, L. Romney, E.
Jacques, L. Ross of Marnock, L.
Jenkins of Putney, L. Rugby, L.
Jessel, L. Ryder of Warsaw, B.
Kilmarnock, L. Sainsbury, L.
Kintore, E. St. Davids, V.
Lawrence, L. Saltoun, Ly.
Leatherland, L. Seear, B.
Listowel, E. Seebohm, L.
Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe, B. Serota, B.
Lloyd of Hampstead, L. Somers, L.
Longford, E. Spens, L.
Lothian, M. Stamp, L.
McCarthy, L. Stedman, B.
McNair, L. Stewart of Alvechurch, B.
Mais, L. Stewart of Fulham, L.
Marsh, L. Stoddart of Swindon, L.
Maude of Stratford-upon- Stone, L.
Avon, L. Strabolgi, L.
Mayhew, L. Strathspey, L.
Milford, L. Strauss, L.
Milverton, L. Swinfen, L.
Molson, L. Taylor of Blackburn, L.
Monson, L. Teviot, L.
Mowbray and Stourton, L. Tordoff, L. [Teller.]
Moyne, L. Tranmire, L.
Mulley, L. Underhill, L.
Newall, L. Walston, L.
Nicol, B. Wells-Pestell, L.
Norfolk, D. Whaddon, L.
O'Brien of Lothbury, L. White, B.
Oram, L. Willis, L.
Pender, L. Winterbottom, L.
NOT-CONTENTS
Alport, L. Lane-Fox, B.
Avon, E. Lauderdale, E.
Bauer, L. Long, V.
Beloff, L. Macleod of Borve, B.
Belstead, L. Margadale, L.
Bessborough, E. Masham of Ilton, B.
Boothby, L. Merrivale, L.
Boyd-Carpenter, L. Morris, L. [Teller.]
Broxbourne, L. Northchurch, B.
Bruce of Donington, L. Onslow, E.
Caithness, E. Orkney, E.
Cameron of Lochbroom, L. Quinton, L.
Campbell of Croy, L. Sandys, L.
Cockfield, L. Savile, L.
Cork and Orrery, E. Selkirk, E.
Cox, B. Sempill, Ly.
Cullen of Ashbourne, L. Skelmersdale, L.
Daventry, V. Strathcarron, L.
Denham, L. Sudeley, L.
Denning, L. Swinton, E.
Eccles, V. Teynham, L.
Elton, L. Thomas of Swynnerton, L.
Erroll of Hale, L. Tonypandy, V.
Faithfull, B. Torphichen, L.
Gardner of Parkes, B. Trefgarne, L.
Glanusk, L. [Teller.] Trumpington, B.
Hailsham of Saint Vaux of Harrowden, L.
Marylebone, L. Vivian, L.
Halsbury, E. Westbury, L.
Home of the Hirsel, L. Whitelaw, V.
Killearn, L. Wise, L.
Kinnaird, L. Young, B.
Kinnoull, E.
§ Resolved in the affirmative, and amendment agreed to accordingly.
§ The Lord Chancellor (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone)
My Lords, I think I understood the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, to say that Amendments Nos. 2 to 6 would be moved en bloc.
moved Amendments Nos. 2 to 6: [Printed earlier: col. 409.]
On Question, amendments agreed to.
moved Amendment No. 7: In paragraph (3), line 3, leave out "10,000" and insert "5,000". The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall be brief. I seek to move Amendment No. 7 and at the same time speak to Amendment No. 8. Amendment No. 8: In paragraph (3), line 4, leave out "20,000" and insert "10,000". What I am doing here is questioning the Government on this limit of 20,000 miles for the cutoff point. It seems extremely high, as someone has already said in the earlier debate. The amount of contribution to the depreciation charges that are obtained at 20,000 miles a year is very high in relation to the total cost of the car. I should have thought that a lower figure, again, was more appropriate for your Lordships' House because of many of the suggestions that were made in the earlier debate. It is essentially a probing amendment. I should be grateful if the Government could indicate whether they will at some stage consider reducing the level. It seems to me to be excessive in relation to your Lordships' needs. I beg to move.
My Lords, clearly your Lordships' decision on the other amendments raises questions for this one as well. At this stage I should like to suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, that the arrangements that have been made so far as mileage is concerned are slightly important from the point of view of trying to make reasonable recompense for the actual costs involved. The arrangement affects that. For that reason, I should prefer to leave the matter as it stands, naturally having accepted what has been done on the other amendments. If having done that I have a chance to look into the matter against the background of the other decisions, I am perfectly prepared to do so.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Viscount. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendment No. 8 not moved.]
On Question, Whether the Motion, as amended, shall be agreed to?
§ Lord Ferrier
My Lords, may I point out that there is no provision in the regulations for hire cars? There are a number of Peers who by virtue of living a great distance from an airfield, and/or age, and/or infirmity, are compelled to hire a car. Perhaps my noble friend could apply his mind to making a provision whereby the cost of hire cars in such circumstances can be defrayed.
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Ferrier has asked about the arrangements for Peers who are unable to drive their own cars and have to hire a car. Perhaps I may remind him that in July last year the House agreed that Members of this House who are disabled should be able to recover additional expenses for attendance at this House incurred by them on account of their disablement. These additional expenses in hiring a car can therefore, subject to the discretion of the Leave of Absence and Lords' Expenses Committee, be met under the existing rules. I believe that they are now, and they certainly will be in the future.
Lady Saltoun
My Lords, it is not just a question of those who are disabled having to hire a car. To give an example, I live 45 miles from Aberdeen airport, where there is only parking in the open. I can drive my car there, and, if it is not required at home, leave it there during the week between April and October. But in that part of the world I cannot possibly do so between October and April, because when I came back it would be frozen up. Therefore in the winter months I am obliged to take a taxi. I should very much like to know what the rules and regulations are.
§ The Earl of Kintore
My Lords, we can be paid for the trip there and back once a week, if one has only one car and no transport whatever otherwise than that. That applies if one has to take the car and your wife has no car to use until you return. That problem has been recognised. and there is this provision once a week. That would be fine if we could limit our trips to attend the House to only once a week. but that is not the case. I live a long way from an airport, and the second time that one makes the trip one has to pay for it oneself. I do not think that that is very logical, nor awfully just.
My Lords, in answer to the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, and my noble friend, of course this matter can he looked into again by the Leave of Absence and Lords' Expenses Committee, and I will undertake that it should be. I believe that the matter has been looked at before and did not find favour on that occasion, but that does not mean that it cannot be looked at again, and that will certainly be done.
Motion, as amended, agreed to.
Back to Lords Expenses
Forward to British Railways (No. 2) Bill
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Archive for the ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ Tag
15 Oscar Bait Flops starring the last 15 Oscar Best Actress Winners Leave a comment
Take a good look at that Best Actress Oscar, Cate!
An actor’s career won’t ever be complete if he/she hasn’t had that one film perceived as his/her Oscar vehicle only for the movie to not live up to its expectations and its Oscar chances ultimately ending up in a crash and burn in situation. Today, we’d be revisiting the last 15 Oscar Best Actress winners, and while all of them have ended up with Oscar statues in their mantles already (some even more than one, coughMerylcough), these are some films that were perceived to be the one.
2000: Julia Roberts
Then America’s Sweetheart Julia Roberts was unstoppable that year sweeping all televised precursors leading to the Academy Awards for her sassy superstar performances as the title role in Erin Brockovich, and while she obviously “loved it up there” in the podium, her post-Oscar career has mostly focused on doing favored works for her director friends (such as Steven Soderbergh and Ryan Murphy) or actor friends (such as Tom Hanks). However, in 2007, she starred alongside Hanks and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson‘s War as Texas socialite Joanne Herring donned with a big blonde wig and her signature wide grin. While she picked up a Golden Globe nomination for this, her real Oscar comeback came seven years after in August Osage County.
2001: Halle Berry
After her historic win in 2001, Berry remains to be the only African-American actress who have won the Oscar in a leading performance for Monster’s Ball. However, most of her post-Oscar career has been panned left and right specifically during her turn in Catwoman. While the actress have fared better in television (with her Emmy nominated performance “Their Eyes Were Watching God“), Berry still tried to prove her win was no fluke by starring in different Oscar vehicles such as “Things We Lost in Fire” in 2007. For this list though, nothing is as baity as her attempt for a comeback in 2010’s “Frankie & Alice” where she played a 70s stripper suffering from a dissociative identity disorder. Berry picked up a filler Globe nod for it, but the awards failure performance caused the film to be shelved only to be revived four years later for a theatrical release to the knowledge of… nobody.
2002: Nicole Kidman
Winning on her second consecutive nomination, Nicole Kidman was the biggest movie star on the planet during her win as author Virginia Woolf in Best Picture nominee The Hours. And while everyone thought this would be the start of the Academy’s love affair with the Australian actress, the opposite happened with her starring in low-key indie films (Dogville, Birth), flop mainstream attempts (The Stepford Wives, Bewitched), or Oscar baits that simply didn’t materialize (Nine, Australia). That said, her worst Oscar bait flop happened in 2013 when she played another Best Actress Oscar winner Grace Kelly in “Grace of Monaco.” Issues over cuts and versions between screenwriter Arash Amel, director Olivier Dahan, and distributor Harvey Weinstein all contributed to the tragic fate of this film (which as of this writing, has apparently three different versions). While Grace opened the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, it was panned by critics there losing any chance for a theatrical release. It ended up premiering on TV via Lifetime earlier this year, though that ended up as a blessing in disguise as that decision earned it an nomination for Best Television Movie at the Emmy Awards earlier this month.
2003: Charlize Theron
After her unanimously praised performance of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, Theron easily received another Oscar nod two years after for the movie North Country. That said, Theron stayed low key with her movie choices tackling supporting roles mostly or really, small films. While her comeback in 2011 for Young Adult didn’t fruit to Oscar nom #3, it can’t be considered an Oscar bait flop considering the nature of the film doesn’t seem like the type that will get its actress nominated. However, after the success of Gone Girl last year and its lead actress Rosamund Pike receiving a nomination for it, studio A24 tried to ride on its success by releasing another Gillian Flynn novel turned to movie “Dark Places” starring Theron as the only survivor of a town massacre. Suffice to say, this was released in limited theaters and VOD killing all its chances to get Theron nominated.
2004: Hilary Swank
Only five years after receiving her first Best Actress Oscar, Hilary Swank easily snatched her second after starring as the female boxer Maggie Fitzgerald in the Best Picture Oscar winner of that year “Million Dollar Baby.” That’s why her third bid for an Oscar nomination (exactly ten years after her first and five years after her second), was for playing the great, late Amelia Earhart in Mira Nair’s 2009 take on the life of the prominent figure. Unlike her first two vehicles though, Swank quite received the flak for portraying yet another character leaning on the masculine strengths for another shot at Oscar. So despite Fox Searchlight handling the campaign for this film, not even that is enough to save this critical and commercial flop. Surprisingly enough, her next Oscar bait came in 2014 for “The Homesman“, but again to no avail. Maybe Hilary decided to plot her Oscar vehicles every time a year ends on 9 or 4 no?
2005: Reese Witherspoon
Her Oscar-winning role was that of the late country superstar June Carter Cash in “Walk the Line.” In this 2007 thriller however, Reese joined forces with Oscar winners Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin, as well as Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal. Back in 2007, films dealing with the CIA and terrorism have been as baity as one can expect, so Witherspoon’s role as a pregnant woman involved in some terrorism actions seem like a shoo-in Oscar contender. Add the fact that this was Witherspoon’s foray into straight drama territory and this seemed anything but an Oscar flop. Until it was. Luckily for Reese, she managed to come back in the Oscar race earlier this year for her turn as Cheryl Strayed in Wild.
2006: Helen Mirren
Usually when a woman in her sixties win an Oscar, it’s mostly an indirect lifetime achievement award of some sort. But not for Dame Helen Mirren. Since her win for The Queen in 2006, this has led her to receive more leading roles and she has been the go-to British actress even surpassing Dame Judi Dench and Dame Vanessa Redgrave to name a few. She easily picked up an Oscar nod in 2009 for The Last Station, and we’re certain that she came close in 2012 for Hitchcock after receiving Golden Globe, SAG, and BAFTA nominations for it. Mirren is an easy name check for nominations too, as proven by her Golden Globe nomination (yet again) for The Hundred Foot Journey. However, Woman in Gold was a different story. It’s a great feat that the movie earned four times its budget, but with the topic of a Jewish refugee fighting for a painting of her aunt by the Nazis, this is the type of role that can easily skate its actress to awards talk… only that it won’t happen anymore.
2007: Marion Cotillard
Among all the Oscar flops in this list, The Immigrant is that one film that really doesn’t deserve its placement. It’s a great film and its number of accolades received could certainly prove it. However, after acquiring this film at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Harvey Weinstein certainly did not know how to market or simply, what to do with this film and he ended up throwing it to E-One, the smaller right hand company of The Weinsteins which is an indication that they won’t be pushing this film for any awards consideration. But when Cotillard started to pick up steam for her performance in “Two Days, One Night“, Weinstein made a sudden last minute play of giving Cotillard and its cinematography some push hoping it can get her the nomination. Of course it didn’t, and Marion ended up getting that overdue second nomination for her better performance. Sadly, Marion has yet to be nominated for an English performance, and this could have been it had it been handled properly.
2008: Kate Winslet
For quite a period in the late 2000s, Jason Reitman has been the Academy’s catnip. His films have ended p receiving Oscar nominations for Ellen Page in Juno, and George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick in Up in the Air with Golden Globe nods for Aaron Eckhart in Thank You for Smoking and Charlize Theron in Young Adult. However, all streaks will come to an end, as Reitman’s one began with the Kate WInslet-starrer Labor Day. Based on the novel by Joyce Maynard, Winslet plays another lonely suburban housewife (as if Little Children and Revolutionary Road weren’t enough) who had an encounter with convict Josh Brolin. The movie was met with horrible reviews, but hand it to the Golden Globes for still name checking Kate Winslet giving her a Best Drama Actress nomination for it.
2009: Sandra Bullock
2009 ended up as the start of a career renaissance for Sandra Bullock. Not only did she star in two movies of that year with grosses combined a 600+ million dollars, she ended up with the Best Actress Oscar for her turn as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side. What could have been the pinnacle of an actor’s career only was the beginning for Sandra who followed it up with box office hits like The Heat and Minions or critically backed films like that of Gravity. This year, however, she dons her blonde wig yet again (just like in her Oscar winning performance) to headline David Gordon Green’s “Our Brand is Crisis.” While her awards chances have yet to be determined, you can mostly count her out since the movie received mixed to negative reviews since it premiered at Toronto International Film Festival this year. At least her personal reviews weren’t tragic, but count no Best Actress nomination for her this year.
2010: Natalie Portman
Portman’s road to the Oscar was for her performance as the ballerina in Black Swan, but only a year before that, we saw her closest attempt to follow up her 2004 nomination for “Closer” in Jim Sheridan’s “Brothers“, based on the 2004 Danish film of the same name. As the woman who was left in between the characters of Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire, Portman was given the tough position of acting upon two other contemporaries. Sadly for the film, it has gained little to no traction at all that year, mostly for the U2 song “Winter” and a Golden Globe nod for Tobey Maguire.
2011: Meryl Streep
Yes, even Oscar’s favorite actress takes a break from being Oscar nominated. Grunt all you can as Meryl enjoys her 19 career Oscar nominations and three statues at home (her latest for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady), but every now and then she takes on flop Oscar vehicles such as this one directed by Robert Redford and had her starring with Tom Cruise. Streep plays liberal TV journalist Janine Roth who thinks the government is using her position to be an instrument of their plans. Here’s another film that tried to combined issues of journalism, terrorism, and war ending up with zero awards traction, rotten reviews, and a disappointing box office performance.
2012: Jennifer Lawrence
After starring in Best Picture nominees Silver Linings Playbook (for which she won her Oscar) and American Hustle, it seemed like the pairing of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence is one that seems to have find its footing in the Academy. Their third pairing, however, is from Oscar winning director Susanne Bier from the 2008 novel of the same name. While this costume drama seemed like it would continue the trajectory of both actors getting nominated, too many issues surrounding the film’s release ended up losing all momentum for the movie. It finally was released in the US last March which is enough reason to say that the movie’s intention to get any awards consideration is already killed.
2013: Cate Blanchett
At this stage in her career, Cate Blanchett is already infallible with everything she touches is suddenly critic proof. She has reached that stage in her career already where she has the respect and admiration of her peers and critics alike, as proven by her great comeback in 2013 because of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine for which she won her second Oscar and her first one in Lead. But before any of those happened, she has been starring in one flop bait after the other in the early 2000s, particularly this Ron Howard film in 2003 entitled “The Missing.” It was Howard’s comeback after winning for “A Beautiful Mind” and starred Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones. Good for Blanchett though because the year after, she finally natched her first one for “The Aviator.” And the rest, as they say, is history.
2014: Julianne Moore
Lastly, we have current Best Actress Julianne Moore. Before winning the Oscar this year for Still Alice, Julianne’s last visit to the Oscars as a nominee was still way back in 2002 when she was double nominated for The Hours (losing to Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Far From Heaven (losing to The Hours co-star Nicole Kidman). While we all have probably thought that Julianne would end up being forgotten (as it’s harder to win an Oscar when you’re in your 50s), she proved it otherwise. The journey to 2014 was a long wait though appearing in Oscar contenders where her co-stars got nominated but not her (such as The Kids Are All Right and A Single Man) or low key Oscar flop baits (The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio and Savage Grace). What stood out was the one directed by Fernando Meirelles though. As the opener of the 2008 Cannes Film Fest, Blindness was destined to be a real Oscar contender with its great ensemble, and the reputation of the people involved. After all, it was one of the most prominent best selling novels that time, and this was a challenging role. Alas, the bad reviews killed any of its perceived Oscar chances.
There you have it. What are your favorite Oscar flops? Which Oscar bait ones did you secretly enjoy? Talk to me about it on Twitter: @nikowl
Posted September 30, 2015 by Nicol Latayan in Awards, Films, List, Lists
Tagged with Amelia, best actress, Blindness, Brothers, cate blanchett, Charlie Wilson's War, charlize theron, Dark Places, Frankie and Alice, Grace of Monaco, Halle Berry, helen mirren, hilary swank, jennifer lawrence, julia roberts, julianne moore, kate winslet, labor day, Lions for Lambs, marion cotillard, meryl streep, natalie portman, nicole kidman, oscar, Our Brand is Crisis, reese witherspoon, Rendition, sandra bullock, Serena, the immigrant, The Missing, Woman in Gold
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PM returns home after participating in 14th OIC Summit
The Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani attending the opening session of the 14th Islamic Summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
By QNA
DOHA – HE Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al-Thani returned to Doha today, coming from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after heading the State of Qatar’s delegation to the Extraordinary Gulf Cooperation Council Summit, Extraordinary Arab Summit and Islamic Summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which were held in Makkah Al-Mukarramah.
The Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani participated with Their Majesties; Highnesses and Excellences, leaders and delegation heads of Islamic States, in the opening session of the 14th Islamic Summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which was held yesterday evening at Al-Safa Palace here.
The Session was attended by Their Excellences members of the official delegation accompanying His Excellency.
Earlier in the day, the Prime Minister and Interior Minister met with several Arab leaders at his residence at the Guest Palace.
President Mahmoud Abbas of the sisterly the State of Palestine met with H E the Prime Minister and Interior Minister. At the beginning of the meeting, His Excellency conveyed the greetings of the Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and his good wishes to the Palestinian President and the Palestinian people progress and development.
For his part, the Palestinian President entrusted His Excellency to convey his greetings to H H the Amir and the Qatari people further development and progress. The two sides also reviewed fraternal relations.
The President of the Republic of Tunisia Beji Caid Essebsi met with H E the Prime Minister and Interior Minister. At the beginning of the meeting, His Excellency conveyed greetings of the Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and good wishes to the President and to the Tunisian people development and prosperity.
For his part, the Tunisian President entrusted His Excellency to convey his greetings to H H the Amir and the Qatari people further development and progress. The two sides also reviewed fraternal relations between the two brotherly countries.
H E the Prime Minister also met at Al Diyafa Palace with H H Sayyid Shihab bin Tariq Al Said, the Adviser to H M Sultan Qaboos bin Said of the Sultanate of Oman. At the beginning of the meeting, His Excellency conveyed the greetings of the Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and his good wishes to H M Sultan Qaboos bin Said and to the people of Oman continued progress and prosperity.
H H Sayyid Shihab bin Tariq Al Said conveyed the greetings of H M Sultan Qaboos bin Said to H H the Amir and to the Qatari people further prosperity and development. The meeting reviewed the close fraternal relations between the two countries.
His Excellency met with the Prime Minister of the sisterly People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, Noureddine Badawi and with the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Turkey, Mevlut Cavusoglu.
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US service member killed in action in Afghanistan
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President Ilham Aliyev received credentials of incoming ambassador of Republic of Korea VIDEO
Baku, December 5, AZERTAC
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has received credentials of the newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Korea Kim Tong-op.
The ambassador reviewed a guard of honor.
Kim Tong-op presented his credentials to President Ilham Aliyev.
President Ilham Aliyev then spoke with the ambassador.
The head of state hailed very good relations between the two countries, stressing the necessity of expanding economic cooperation and increasing trade turnover through joint efforts. President Ilham Aliyev recalled his state visit to the Republic of Korea, saying this visit contributed to the expansion of the bilateral cooperation. The head of state noted successful activities of a number of Korean companies in Azerbaijan in industrial, transport management, urban planning, architecture and other fields, pointing out favourable opportunities for cooperation in areas such as agriculture, ecology, education, and vocational training. President Ilham Aliyev highlighted Azerbaijan`s modern transport and transit potential regarding cargo transportation on East-West route, adding that the Republic of Korea can also benefit from these opportunities.
The newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Korea Kim Tong-op extended President Moon Jae-in`s greetings to the Azerbaijani President. He said he is pleased to be appointed as an ambassador to Azerbaijan. Kim Tong-op said he will spare no efforts to increase the friendly relations and economic and trade cooperation between the two countries.
President Ilham Aliyev thanked for Moon Jae-in`s greetings, and asked the ambassador to extend his greetings to the President of the Republic of Korea.
AZERTAG.AZ :President Ilham Aliyev received credentials of incoming ambassador of Republic of Korea VIDEO
President Ilham Aliyev inaugurated new education block of Police Academy of Ministry of Internal Affairs VIDEO
President Ilham Aliyev inaugurated new administrative building of Binagadi District Court VIDEO
President Ilham Aliyev received credentials of incoming Afghan ambassador VIDEO
President Ilham Aliyev received credentials of incoming Austrian ambassador VIDEO
President Ilham Aliyev received delegation led by Chief of General Staff of Russian Armed Forces VIDEO
President Ilham Aliyev received delegation led by NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe VIDEO
First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva met with MEDEF President VIDEO
10 killed, 24 injured in road accident in S. Pakistan
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® M.A.P. International Theatre Festival starts in Baku with support of Bakcell
Bakcell, the First Mobile Operator and the Fastest Mobile Internet Provider of Azerbaijan is pleased to announce the start of the second M.A.P. International Theatre Festival organized by YARAT Contemporary Art Space at various major venues across Baku in the period from November 6–11.
Being a platform for communication, education, exchange of knowledge and experience, M.A.P. Festival - an acronym for music, art and performance - combines different forms of theatre to introduce the audience to wide range of contemporary theatrical forms. This year the festival will feature 16 performances by well-known and prestigious theatre companies from Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Iran, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Russia and the United Kingdom. On the first day of the festival, right after the official opening ceremony to be held at Baku Congress Center, the theater fans will be able to enjoy a programme that includes a multi-disciplinary show Aria by the Italian collective NoGravity Theatre. Combining choreography, singing and costume, the performance includes musical compositions from Monteverdi, Vivaldi and Pergolesi. Merging together a number of artistic genres, dancers, musicians and singers, all equally play a central role in this performance.
The M.A.P. Festival is a significant contribution to the development of art in Azerbaijan and an acknowledgment of Azerbaijani art in the world. This is a unique opportunity for people engaged in music, art and performance to demonstrate their works together with international professionals.
Bakcell has been the main sponsor of M.A.P Festival from the first year. Being a national telecoms operator, Bakcell is committed to supporting projects that contribute to the development of music and arts in Azerbaijan.
Bakcell offers a wide range of products and Services to users of modern mobile communications Services. The company provides its customers with the best-in-class 4G mobile internet.
The 4G services of Bakcell are already available in Baku and Absheron peninsula, as well as central parts of more than 40 regions of Azerbaijan.
With more than 7000 base stations, Bakcell network covers 99% of the population and 93% of the land area of the country (except for the occupied territories). In 2017, Bakcell network has been recognized as the “Best in Test” in Azerbaijan by P3 Communications, being one of the most trusted independent authorities in mobile benchmarking. Bakcell has been recognized as the Fastest Mobile Network in Azerbaijan. This award, presented by world-famous “Ookla” company, recognizes Bakcell’s commitment to delivering fastest speeds to customers all across Azerbaijan.
For more information about Bakcell products and services, please visit www.bakcell.com or call 555. For press releases please see www.bakcell.com/az/news (or www.bakcell.com/en/news for press releases in English).
If you are not a Bakcell subscriber, but wish to find out about Bakcell and its products and services, please call 012 498 89 89.
AZERTAG.AZ : ® M.A.P. International Theatre Festival starts in Baku with support of Bakcell
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