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__label__wiki	0.856476	0.856476	Experimental Alzheimer’s drug stirs hope after early trials Posted: Jul 25, 2018 / 10:47 PM EDT / Updated: Jul 25, 2018 / 10:48 PM EDT Alzheimer’s is a progressive mental deterioration of the brain that destroys memory and thinking skills until the person is unable to do even the simplest of tasks. (FILE-CNN) After a series of prominent failures, there’s reason to be hopeful in the search for a drug to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Results of an early trial of an experimental drug showed that it improved cognition and reduced clinical signs of Alzheimer’s in the brains of study participants, and experts are “cautiously optimistic” that the results will be duplicated in future clinical trials. The drug, an antibody called BAN2401, not only reduced the formulation of new beta amyloid clusters in the brain, it reduced existing clusters by 70% on average, American biotechnology company Biogen and Japanese drugmaker Eisai announced Wednesday. The buildup of beta amyloid in the brain is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. BAN2401 also provided a 26% to 30% benefit over a placebo in improving cognition in study subjects, researchers said. Details about the immunotherapy were presented at a news conference during the 2018 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Chicago. “These were people with very mild impairments, some confusion, forgetting someone’s name on occasion,” said Dr. Lynn Kramer, the chief clinical and medical officer for Eisai. “That’s the goal: to stop Alzheimer’s disease when it’s in the mildest presentation.” Reaction from experts was mixed. “I would not say shock and awe,” said Dr. Julie Schneider, a professor of pathology at Rush Medical College. “It’s encouraging to see some cognitive effect and slowing of disease progression, but I personally think there is a lot more work to be done.” Maria Carrillo, chief science officer for the nonprofit Alzheimer’s Association, said that a combination of drugs “is the future, and there won’t be a sliver bullet to defeat Alzheimer’s, so being able to delay the progression of the disease for a couple years would be huge.” Dr. Richard Isaacson, who directs the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at NewYork-Presbyterian / Weill Cornell Medical Center, said that the research is “impressive on the surface, but we have to be cautiously optimistic. This data may be encouraging, but it’s not possible to say for sure. I don’t want us to be wrong again,” as with previous trials that have failed. BAN2401 is administered intravenously and was being tested in five dosage strengths in 856 patients with either mild cognitive impairment or early-stage Alzheimer’s in a phase two trial, which assesses a medication’s dosage. Hope that the drug would be a viable treatment had waned in December when participants failed to show significant improvement by the study’s first goal of 12 months. However, Biogen recently said the highest dose of 10 milligrams per kilogram of a patient’s body weight, given biweekly, showed statistically significant success at the study’s 18-month completion. Kramer said Eisai and Biogen had reached out to regulators in the United States, Europe and Japan to discuss results and next steps. The company has said it hoped to obtain accelerated approval. “This was only a phase two trial, and it’s not going to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration until results from the next larger trial are in,” explained Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs at the Alzheimer’s Association. “Accelerated approval just means you go to the front instead of the back of the line.” For patients anxiously waiting for help, Fargo warned that it will be several years before the drug is available, assuming it’s successful in the phase three trial, which will involve a larger group of patients. “You are not going to be able to go to the doctor and get this anytime soon,” Fargo said. Safety and side effects Earlier safety trials showed that BAN2401 was well-tolerated at all levels, including much lower rates of a well-known side effect of anti-amyloid therapy: microbleeding and minor swelling in the brain called amyloid related imaging abnormalities, or ARIA-E. Kramer said that less than 10% of patients in any of the five treatment arms experienced ARIA, which can create headaches, confusion and visual disturbances that resolve once the drug is stopped. “Of the 48 cases of ARIA-E, only five were symptomatic,” Kramer said, “and could only be identified with an MRI. Of those, only a couple showed any outward symptoms.” Patients who carry an ApoE ε4 gene, the major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, are known to be more susceptible to ARIA-E problems. Due to safety concerns, Kramer said, a regulatory agency outside the United States asked the researchers to remove all patients with the gene from the beneficial high-dosage group that received twice-a-month injections. However, they left patients with ApoE ε4 in the placebo arm of the study. According Isaacson, that may have created a major flaw in the research. “ApoE ε4 patients decline quicker,” he said. “So did the study look so good because they put all of the ApoE ε4 people in the placebo arm, or did the study look good because lowering amlyoid improves cognitive function? That’s the confusing part.” Isaacson says clinical doctors who see patients with ARIA-E who are also ApoE ε4-positive would recommend that they remain in a high-dosage group, because the side effects are often manageable. “Regulatory agencies need to get in the same room with researchers and agree on things so these confusing changes don’t happen mid-study,” he said. “In my opinion, there’s no reason to do that.” The amyloid hypothesis BAN2401 is one of many potential drugs using “the amyloid hypothesis,” a belief that getting rid of beta amyloid should improve memory loss and other cognitive changes seen in Alzheimer’s. Various drug manufacturers have targeted beta amyloid by trying to stop its formation, train the immune system to kill it or remove it from the bloodstream and brain. Results to date had been poor. In late 2016, Eli Lilly’s solanezumab failed to surpass placebo benefits in a phase three trial of 2,100 patients. In 2013, Pfizer scrapped another antibody, bapineuzumab, when it didn’t surpass placebo effects in another phase three trial. Experts suggest that the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s among study participants in both trials might have contributed to the failures. Drug giant Merck used a different approach to fight beta amyloid in people with late-stage Alzheimer’s with its BACE inhibitor verubecestat but admitted defeat in early 2017 after an independent study found that it had “virtually no chance” of working. A second attempt to treat earlier stages of Alzehimer’s was also scrapped in February. Johnson & Johnson’s BACE inhibitor atabecestat, designed to slow cognitive decline in people at risk for Alzheimer’s, was also shelved in May when liver enzymes spiked in study participants. One possible reason for the success of BAN2401, Kramer said, is that the trial was among the first to use PET scans to verify that each study participant had definitive signs of beta amyloid in their brains. Older studies ultimately found that a number of patients tested did not actually have the clumps and plaques the drug was targeting, which might help explain failure rates. Biogen’s other amyloid antibody, aducanumab, is also using the PET scan model in its trials. Aducanumab binds to a different type of amyloid protein in the brain than BAN2401. Biogen announced updated results from a 24-month trial on aducanumab on Sunday at the conference. The latest data showed a “beneficial effect” in cognition for patients with pre-Alzheimer’s disease. It also showed a decrease in beta amyloid plaque levels in a subgroup of ApoE ε4 gene carriers, the major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. However, full results on the study aren’t expected for another year or two. The results of both of these studies are intriguing, the Alzheimer’s Association said. “This is the second trial to show reduction in amyloid and some improvement in cognition,” Carrillo said. “The amyloid hypothesis remains an important therapeutic target to pursue in Alzheimer’s disease.” The last Alzheimer’s drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration was in December 2014, and it was a combination of two existing drugs. Before that, a new medicine for Alzheimer’s hadn’t entered the market since 2003. Of the five drugs approved by the FDA to treat Alzheimer’s, none slows its progression. Read more, here. More Health Stories by Michael Erman/Reuters and Nexstar Media Wire / Jan 5, 2021 NEW YORK (Reuters) — Drugmakers including Abbvie Inc and Bristol Myers Squibb raised U.S. list prices on more than 500 drugs to kick off 2021, according to an analysis by health care research firm 46brooklyn. The hikes come as drugmakers are reeling from effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reduced doctor visits and demand for some drugs. They are also fighting new drug price-cutting rules from the Trump administration, which would reduce the industry's profitability. New US dietary guidelines: No candy or cake for kids under 2 by Nexstar Media Wire and The Associated Press / Dec 29, 2020 (NEXSTAR/AP)-- Parents now have an extra reason to say no to candy, cake and ice cream for young children. The first U.S. government dietary guidelines for infants and toddlers, released Tuesday, recommend feeding only breast milk for at least six months and no added sugar for children under age 2. “It’s never too early to start,” said Barbara Schneeman, a nutritionist at University of California, Davis. “You have to make every bite count in those early years.”	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3248
__label__wiki	0.828866	0.828866	Muslim Rape Gang Activity So Vast, Cops Need 100 More Officers – Investigation Has Cost $14 Million Robert Spencer February 26, 2018 Yet children’s services were just rated “good” in Rotherham, despite the fact that as recently as November, Muslim rape gang survivors said that the gangs were still abusing girls in Rotherham. “Eighty percent of the suspects are said to be Pakistani and 90 percent of the victims are white girls.” With perhaps one or two outlier exceptions, the other twenty percent of the suspects are Muslims of other nationalities, and the other 10 percent of the victims are non-Muslim girls of other races. This rape gang activity has happened because of Islamic teaching regarding Infidel women, but no one in British officialdom has the courage to face that fact. “Rotherham child abuse scandal is so big that police need another 100 officers to work on investigation which has already cost £10million,” by Bridie Pearson-Jones, Mailonline, February 25, 2018: The biggest investigation into child sexual exploitation needs 100 more officers to tackle the ‘unprecedented scale of abuse’ in Rotherham. More than 1,500 potential victims and 110 suspects have been identified by the National Crime Agency, and figures are expected to rise further. Paul Williamson, the senior investigating officer on Operation Stovewood, told the Guardian his team so far had only been able to contact 17 percent of the of the 1,510 possible victims due to a shortage of specially trained detectives. Mr Williamson also said the investigation needed to be as big as Operation Resolve, the investigation into the Hillsborough disaster, as it was comparable in terms of complexity and scale. ‘It’s a really specialist area, engaging and interviewing vulnerable victims’ he said. ‘A lot of our victims were children when they were abused but they’re now adults and have associated problems as a result of that abuse, including suicidal tendencies, mental health issues, drug and alcohol addiction. ‘It’s really complex. The progress will necessarily be influenced by the number of officers we’ve got on the team and we can see that.’ He added he was conscious of demands that are placed across law enforcement in the UK but that he needed 200-250 is officers to complete the task, he currently has 144 officers on Operation Stovewood. The NCA is conducting a huge investigation in the South Yorkshire town following the revelations in the 2014 Jay Report that children were groomed and abused there. Professor’s Alexis Jay’s report sparked national soul-searching when it revealed that the large scale exploitation undertaken by gangs of men had been effectively ignored by police and other agencies for more than a decade. Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer Previous Father Of Daughter Killed In Parkland Slams The MSM For Talking About Guns, Not Safety Next Is the (Tea) Party Over? Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel's Guide to Iran. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3250
__label__wiki	0.89111	0.89111	Fayette County News Complete FCN PDF A lot of ‘new’ in place for new school year Post author:Fayette News Post category:News / Schools / Top Stories Special to Fayette Newspapers As students and parents get ready to start a new school year on August 5, some will be greeted by new principals, and everyone will notice additional safety measures in place at their schools. New Principals Former Sara Harp Minter Elementary School principal Erin Angelo is the new principal at Braelinn Elementary School. She replaces Jennifer Couch who resigned at the end of the 2018-2019 school year. Angelo began her teaching career in Fayette County and has worked for the Fayette County Public School System for over 24 years. She was an elementary school teacher for 13 years before being promoted to assistant principal at Oak Grove Elementary School in 2008. Angelo became principal at Sara Harp Minter Elementary in 2012. Replacing Angelo as principal at Sara Harp Minter Elementary School is John Gibbas, who is new to the community having moved from Aurora, Illinois. He has over 13 years of experience as a school administrator at the elementary and county office level. Before being hired as the principal at Sara Harp Minter, he served six years as principal of Westmore Elementary School in Villa Park School District 45 in Lombard, Illinois. Former Sandy Creek High School assistant principal and registrar Kathy Smith is the new principal at Rising Starr Middle School, replacing Nancy Blair who retired at the end of the 2018-2019 school year. Smith has worked for the school system for over 25 years, starting as a teacher at J.C. Booth Middle School. She taught at both Booth and Bennett’s Mill Middle schools before being promoted at an assistant principal at Bennett’s Mill Middle in 2009 where she worked until transferring to Sandy Creek High in 2014. Another former Sandy Creek High School assistant principal, Richard Smith, is the interim principal of Sandy Creek High following the resignation of principal Robert Hunter in June. Smith has served as an assistant principal at Sandy Creek High for the last 13 years. He has over 22 years of experience as an educator, having taught high school social studies at Forest Park High and Starr’s Mill High schools until his promotion to assistant principal at Sandy Creek High in 2006. Additional Layers of Safety Although statistics show that most schools will never experience a shooting (Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2017, National Center for Education Statics), highly publicized attacks like those in Parkland, Florida and others around the nation causes concern among students, parents, and staff. Safe and encouraging learning and working spaces are key for academic success for students and the educators who teach them. That is why Fayette County Public Schools is starting the 2019-2020 school year with added security measures to help prevent ill-intended situations from happening in its schools. Entrances to all schools will now have security vestibules. Some schools already had them when they were built or remodeled, but those that did not have been retrofitted for them. The schools being retrofitted include all five middle schools, Whitewater High School, Starr’s Mill High School, Sandy Creek High School, North Fayette Elementary School, Huddleston Elementary School, and Fayetteville Elementary School. Vestibules are secured spaces with two or more sets of doors and an office sign-in area. Once a guest has been vetted by the outside intercom and camera system, the front doors to the school will be unlocked, allowing the guest to enter the vestibule. Once inside, guests will go through a second security check before being allowed access into the school. In addition to providing added security of knowing who is visiting Fayette’s schools, the vestibules also serve as a single point of entrance for students who are late, or are coming from an appointment, enabling administrators to keep track of student attendance. Another layer of security for all schools this year is the installation of a visitor management system. Once guests are allowed entrance in to the vestibule, they will sign-in using a self-service kiosk. The kiosk will scan their driver’s licenses and conduct a quick background check. The system will print name badges for guests to wear while in the school, and will allow administrators to quickly see who is in the building at any time. The school system will use state safety grant funds to pay for the initial installation of the visitor management system and licensing software. Annual software license renewals will be funded through school budgets at a cost of less than $500 per school. Bus Stop Safety Giving parents peace of mind at school bus stops has been a top concern for the school system’s transportation department. This year the transportation department will launch the new My Stop App, available for IOS and Android devices, which will eliminate the guessing game of when the school bus will show up. The app will actually give parents the ability to look in real time to determine the location of their child’s bus, allowing them to know exactly when their children are picked up in the mornings and dropped off in the afternoons. The app is available for free download at the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. To learn more about the app and instructions on how to use it, visit www.fcboe.org/mystop. School Entrance Change A major improvement will be in place at Oak Grove Elementary School this school year for students, staff, and the community. The safety of students, staff, and all who visit a public school is a top priority for the Fayette County Public School System. The school system also works hard to be a good neighbor in the communities where its schools are located. Two years ago, due to traffic concerns with student drop off at Oak Grove Elementary, the school system flipped the school bus loop so that buses would enter and exit from Crosstown Road instead of Log House Road. Now, in order to separate the bus loop from the front of the school, and to increase safety for both students and visitors entering and exiting the school, the entrance to Oak Grove has been flipped from Crosstown Road to Log House Road. The parking lot has been reconfigured to make it parallel to Log House Road, now the front entrance of the school. High school student charged in shooting death of neighbor’s dog Residential input sought on Cobblestone zoning 16-year old dies in traffic fatality Copyright 2020 The Fayette County News. All Rights Reserved.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3252
__label__wiki	0.526702	0.526702	Directed by: Tom Harper Written by: Jack Thorne Cast: Sophie Okonedo, Antony Sher, Ben Chaplin UK release: 7 August 2015 In a nondescript Commons meeting room, civil servants play out the 'war book': a set of protocols designed to test the government's response to a nuclear attack. Thorne's remarkable script deserves comparisons to 12 Angry Men in its slow-burning tension, and there's not a weak link in the impressive ensemble cast. Powerful, provocative and essential. Provocative and essential nuclear war-themed drama from Tom Harper Locked away in a nondescript room in the House of Commons, a small group of aides play out the 'war book' – protocol designed to test out the government response to a nuclear attack. Written in the 1950s, the exercise is put through its paces every few… Ben Chaplin	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3253
__label__wiki	0.696703	0.696703	Review: American Psycho Directed by: Mary Harron Written by: Mary Harron & Guinevere Turner Starring: Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas, Samantha Mathis, Matt Ross Rating: [4.5/5] The male ego holds many characteristics, but strength is certainly not one of them. When it can easily be shattered it appears that those with marginalized identities feel the wrath that comes with it. Whether one believes everything to be an illusion or an indictment on society, American Psycho certainly succeeds in its satirical look at the world of ultimate superficiality. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) knows his beautification routine down to the letter. He knows what he enjoys: expensive clothes, furniture, and even business cards. Bateman attempts to present that he lives the perfect life, but his true character soon gets revealed, which includes the murder of several innocent people in his quest to actually feel something in the end. Films like American Psycho do such a great job of satirizing the lifestyle of someone like Bateman that it falls into the trap of being misunderstood. In that respect, it joins a film like Fight Club where the obvious satirization may not make sense to those unwilling to comprehend what they see on screen. By knowing who directed it and the true essence of the tale, the film expertly breaks down what it looks like to be a psychopath and just how someone like Bateman can blend into society even with his heinous actions. Mary Harron co-wrote and directed the film and brilliantly pieced together what existed in the book and brought it to the screen. A story like this needed something special and Harron provided that with the incredible dynamism of her directing style. Even with all of the horrifying actions of Bateman, she uses the camera as an ally in all of his terrible deeds. With all of his actions, the camera stays behind or beside Bateman almost like we’re accomplices in this entire mess. Harron presents what makes this man attractive to people and how he could get away with everything he does. American Psycho provides Christian Bale with the opportunity to shine and he definitely went for it. From getting physically fit for the role to exhibiting the terrifying behaviour that would make Bateman so appealing and alarming all at once. Each monologue that Bale delivers in the role has the same steely and scholarly approach. It comes together in such a monotonous way because the character demands that type of reaction. It makes it all the more unsettling. The topics he decides to speak on should conjure some emotion and passion, but it represents a mask to Bateman. Something he needs to enjoy in order to continually display the opulence that would give him respect amongst his peers. Bale does such a tremendous job and it helped his ascent into the incredible work he would continue to do in the new century. Everything happening in the story can be analyzed because it’s filled with as many details as Bateman’s skincare routine. But one of the more frightening aspects of Bateman’s killing comes from who decides to kill and why. For the most part, the individuals he kills in the film belong in identity groups that he does not respect. Whether it be the homeless man on the street, the prostitutes, and even attempting to murder his secretary. It displays his way of thinking and who he finds disposable in the world. He kills those folks when he gets frustrated by those he sees are on his level. It begins with being shown up in the presentation of business cards, where he kills the homeless man and his dog. It then starts to conclude with trying to feed a cat to an ATM and the murder spree that results from it. Bateman takes out his rage on the most marginalized around him and this selection of victims certainly has its purpose in the story. The way one sees the ending of the film will dictate ultimately how they feel about it overall. Depending on who you talk to it can be seen as a definite conclusion or something left to interpretation. I happen to love the ambiguity that exists with it because it leaves us just as confused as Bateman seems to be by what transpires. It really puts the icing on the devilish cake that Harron puts together for the audience. I won’t go into my ideas of how it all comes together in order to avoid spoilers, but it certainly lands with a cherry on top. Patrick Batemen has been turned into a meme but still stands out as a defining character in cinema. Whether it be his monologues or dance sequences as he prepares for his next kill, American Psycho tells a thrilling story about the weakness of the male ego and how everyone else loses in the end when someone with all of the privileges in the world decides to blow off some steam. Previous PostPrevious Review: American Pie Presents: Beta House Next PostNext Review: American Wedding	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3254
__label__cc	0.732113	0.267887	29th Jul '13 The day starts spectacularly beautiful with clear blue skies and bright sunshine. John decides to take the train north across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and walk back to the city to experience the bridge up close and personal. We are planning to do the Bridge Climb hopefully this week but more on that to come. I choose to have a quiet day today because we had such a busy Saturday night with our friends Brian, Lynne, and Peter. Brian and Lynne were the Sydney-siders we met in Cairns when we were diving. The weather turns cool and overcast quite quickly in the late afternoon with a strong wind picking up. John’s View from a Bridge Bridges fascinate me – and this bridge in particular. It is only the 3rd longest of its type, but it is probably the largest in terms of weight-bearing capacity. It carries two train tracks, eight lanes of traffic and pedestrian walkways. The engineers who designed it didn’t go with a suspension bridge because they wanted the bridge to be able to carry more weight than possible with a suspension bridge. It was built by constructing the two sides of the arch separately. To keep them from collapsing before completion, they were each anchored by massive steel ropes. When the two halves were completed, the two sides were, by design, about 1 metre apart, and the huge steel lines were slowly relaxed, over a period of 8 days, until they connected. The entire weight of the bridge rests on four massive hinges – these allow the bridge to rock back and forward as it expands and contracts – it apparently can lengthen by over 100 millimetres on a hot day. Although the height of the bridge allowed all ships to pass under it for many years, today’s huge cruise ships cannot get through. They now berth at Circular Quay, so their arrivals and departures are tightly scheduled, as only one can be accommodated at a time. Greg’s View from a Balcony We are eating Thai in Newtown this evening with Eric and Graham, who have adopted us while we have been here. Eric has traveled extensively in Bali, and we will be picking his brain for the next leg of our journey (which starts in just two weeks!) We cab it over to Graham’s renovation war zone apartment for a drink on his balcony. And what a balcony! He has the most spectacular, unobstructed view of the Anzac and Harbour bridges with the entire city laid out before him. We savour the view and then head into Newtown after a brief tour of some of the surrounding neighbourhoods (again many million dollar Victorian Terraces) and have a wonderful unhurried meal at Thai Riffic. People are already starting to talk about the end of summer. Boo Hoo! AnzacAustraliaCircular QuaryNewtownSydneySydney Harbour BridgeThaitravelVictorian Terraces Enroute: St. Fréchoux to Paris. Image format post FSTravel NEWS: 04:07:2016 Arriving in Quebec’s Picturesque Bas-Saint-Laurent Intense Body Surfing at Bondi Beach, Australia	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3259
__label__wiki	0.567694	0.567694	Find Me A Cure Herbs Glossary Ailments and remedies Tag: Aedes aegypti Ailmemts & Remedies Zica Virus Post author By Mukul 1 Comment on Zica Virus Zika virus is a member of the virus family Flaviviridae and the genus Flavivirus, transmitted by daytime-active Aedes mosquitoes, such as A. aegypti and A. albopictus, the same type of mosquito that spreads dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said Aedes mosquitoes are found in all countries in the Americas except Canada and continental Chile, and the virus will likely reach all countries and territories of the region where Aedes mosquitoes are found. The infection, known as Zika fever, often causes no or only mild symptoms. Since the 1950s it has been known to occur within a narrow equatorial belt from Africa to Asia. In 2014, the virus spread eastward across the Pacific Ocean to French Polynesia, then to Easter Island and in 2015 to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, where the Zika outbreak has reached pandemic levels. Click & see : zika virus – News Images The Zika virus is found in tropical locales with large mosquito populations. Outbreaks of Zika virus disease have been recorded in Africa, the Americas, Southern Asia and the Western Pacific. The virus was first identified in Uganda in 1947 in rhesus monkeys and was first identified in people in 1952 in Uganda and Tanzania, according to the World Health Organization. The vertebrate hosts of the virus were primarily monkeys in a so-called enzootic mosquito-monkey-mosquito cycle, with only occasional transmission to humans. Before the current pandemic began in 2007, Zika virus “rarely caused recognized ‘spillover’ infections in humans, even in highly enzootic areas”. Infrequently, other arboviruses have become established as a human disease though, and spread in a mosquito–human–mosquito cycle, like the yellow fever virus and the dengue fever virus (both flaviruses), and the chikungunya virus (a togavirus) Can Zika be transmitted through sexual contact? Two cases of possible person-to-person sexual transmission has been described, but the PAHO said more evidence is needed to confirm whether sexual contact is a means of Zika transmission. It is unknown whether women can transmit Zika virus to their sexual partners. As of February 2016, the CDC recommends that men “who reside in or have traveled to an area of active Zika virus transmission who have a pregnant partner should abstain from sexual activity or consistently and correctly use condoms during sex (i.e., vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, or fellatio) for the duration of the pregnancy.” Men who reside in or have traveled to an area of active Zika virus transmission and their non-pregnant sex partners “might consider” abstinence or condom use. The CDC did not specify how long these practices should be followed with non-pregnant partners because the “incidence and duration of shedding in the male genitourinary tract is limited to one case report” and that “testing of men for the purpose of assessing risk for sexual transmission is not recommended. The PAHO also said Zika can be transmitted through blood, but this is an infrequent transmission mechanism. There is no evidence the virus can be transmitted to babies through breast milk. CDC issued new recommendations to those who have traveled to Zika-prone areas: Use condoms during sex or don’t have sex. – Click & See Zika virus is related to dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, and West Nile viruses. The illness it causes is similar to a mild form of dengue fever, is treated by rest, and cannot yet be prevented by drugs or vaccines. There is a possible link between Zika fever and microcephaly in newborn babies by mother-to-child transmission, as well as a stronger one with neurologic conditions in infected adults, including cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome. People who get Zika virus disease typically have a mild fever, skin rash, conjunctivitis, muscle and joint pain and fatigue that can last for two to seven days. But as many as 80 percent of people infected never develop symptoms. The symptoms are similar to those of dengue or chikungunya, which are transmitted by the same type of mosquito. The PAHO said there is no evidence that Zika can cause death, but some cases have been reported with more serious complications in patients with pre-existing medical conditions. The virus has been linked to microcephaly, a condition in newborns marked by abnormally small heads and brains that have not developed properly. It also has been associated with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks part of the nervous system. Scientists are studying whether there is a causal link between Zika and these two disorders. There is no defenite treatment developed yet.Patients are adviced to take rest. Doctors sometimes prescribe few nominal medicines to get little relieve from extenal symptoms. Prevention: Defense against mosquitoes is defense against Zika. The CDC recommends long clothing and insect repellent. If you develop symptoms, go see a doctor. Vaccine development: Effective vaccines exist for several flaviviruses. Vaccines for yellow fever virus, Japanese encephalitis, and tick-borne encephalitis were introduced in the 1930s, while the vaccine for dengue fever only became available for use in the mid-2010s. Work has begun towards developing a vaccine for Zika virus, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The researchers at the Vaccine Research Center have extensive experience from working with vaccines for other viruses such as West Nile virus, chikungunya virus, and dengue fever. Nikos Vasilakis of the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases predicted that it may take two years to develop a vaccine, but 10 to 12 years may be needed before an effective Zika virus vaccine is approved by regulators for public use. Indian company Bharat Biotech is working on two approaches to a vaccine: “recombinant”, involving genetic engineering, and “inactivated”, where the virus is incapable of reproducing itself but can still trigger an immune response. On 3 February 2016, the company claimed animal trials of the inactivated version would commence in two weeks. Since April 2015, a large, ongoing outbreak of Zika virus that began in Brazil has spread to much of South and Central America and the Caribbean. In January 2016, the CDC issued a level 2 travel alert for people traveling to regions and certain countries where Zika virus transmission is ongoing. The agency also suggested that women thinking about becoming pregnant should consult with their physicians before traveling. Governments or health agencies of the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, and the European Union soon issued similar travel warnings. In Colombia, Minister of Health and Social Protection Alejandro Gaviria Uribe recommended to avoid pregnancy for eight months, while the countries of Ecuador, El Salvador, and Jamaica have issued similar warnings. Plans were announced by the authorities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to try to prevent the spread of the Zika virus during the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in that city. According to the CDC, Brazilian health authorities reported more than 3,500 microcephaly cases between October 2015 and January 2016. Some of the affected infants have had a severe type of microcephaly and some have died. The full spectrum of outcomes that might be associated with infection during pregnancy and the factors that might increase risk to the fetus are not yet fully understood. More studies are planned to learn more about the risks of Zika virus infection during pregnancy. In the worst affected region of Brazil, approximately 1 percent of newborns are suspected of being microcephalic. Click & see : 2007 Yap Islands Zika virus outbreak Disclaimer: This information is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical advise or help. It is always best to consult with a Physician about serious health concerns. This information is in no way intended to diagnose or prescribe remedies.This is purely for educational purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zika_virus http://www.whio.com/news/news/national/what-zika-virus-and-isnt/nqKzc/ http://news.yahoo.com/factbox-why-zika-virus-causing-alarm-233408770.html;_ylt=AwrXnCHbw7ZWumkA6oHQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTByNDZ0aWFxBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwM2BHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg– UVM Vaccine Testing Center to Play Role in Zika Virus Vaccine; Experts Answer Questions (uvm.edu) Zika Virus ‘Spreading Explosively’ in Americas (ecowatch.com) Why can’t we just kill all mosquitoes? (kspr.com) Zika Virus Health Information Resources (mulford.utoledo.edu) NC State Expert on Zika Virus Available (news.ncsu.edu) Zika virus an ‘international health emergency’ (betterblokes.org.nz) Zika Virus: 5 Things To Know, Plus Pest Control In Offices (facilityexecutive.com) UVM Vaccine Testing Center to play role in zika virus vaccine development (vtdigger.org) Metro Health confirms 1st Zika Virus case in Bexar County (kfoxtv.com) Florida Governor Rick Scott Declares Zika Virus A Health Emergency (news.brevardtimes.com) Tags Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, Brazil, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chikungunya, National Institutes of Health, Pan American Health Organization, West Nile virus, World Health Organization, Zika virus Stop Dengue in its Tracks No Comments on Stop Dengue in its Tracks [amazon_link asins=’B00A51A3E2,B01MT7D0P5,B003AW1OM8,B004W6GC28,B004W6F1VG,B001UDUR9U,B004KU2DVU,B00BDSRB6Y,B00R8JDGUC’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’finmeacur-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’3cc5500a-99df-11e7-8df4-97be780e82a8′] Dengue fever is caused by the Aedes egypti mosquito. Culex and Anophelesmosquitoes (which cause diseases like malaria and filaria) are nocturnal — that is, they emerge and bite at night. They can be effectively kept at bay by using mosquito nets while sleeping at night. Aedes egypti, however, is a daytime urban insect. It cannot live above 1,220m or fly more than a hundred metres. It is easily identifiable — its body is striped like that of a tiger. It lives in houses and breeds in stagnant water. This could be in flower vases, old tyres, upturned bottle caps, and even water that collects on leaves and plants. CLICK & SEE Eradication of their breeding grounds is, therefore, a Herculean task, which cannot be achieved by the government alone. Citizens need to do their bit, awaken their civic sense and keep their neighbourhood garbage free. At home, flower vases, water cooler trays, and all sorts of open containers — including broken mugs and bottle caps — should be emptied. The government often uses frogs or sprays of insecticides to reduce the population of Aedes egypti in populated areas. The sprays need to be used every eight to 10 days to interrupt the cycle of virus transmission. Also, people must leave their doors and windows open so that the insecticide can penetrate indoors, into the nooks and crannies where the mosquitoes rest. We often close all openings to prevent the “harmful chemicals” from entering inside. This negates the effects of spraying. Once an infected mosquito bites, there is an asymptomatic incubation period of five to six days. After this, dengue sets in abruptly with headache and high fever. There is pain behind the eyes and on moving the eyes. Severe body ache makes it difficult for the person to move, giving dengue the nickname “back breaking” fever. There may be rashes on the skin and inside the mouth. There may also be bleeding into the conjunctiva of the eyes, making them appear blood shot. After three or four days, the temperature returns to normal. But this is only a temporary respite; the fever returns a few days later with all the previous symptoms but in a milder form. Dengue is, therefore, also called “saddle back” fever. Unfortunately, there is no specific treatment for dengue. There is no vaccination (as yet) to prevent infection or specific antiviral medication to combat the condition. Affected persons have to ride out the disease with supportive treatment, hoping for the best. Treatment is symptomatic with paracetamol for lowering the fever and fluids for hydration. Aspirin and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents like brufen must be avoided. Blood transfusions may have to be given if there is bleeding and shock. The first attack of dengue usually takes a few weeks to completely recover from. Overall, the disease has a five per cent mortality. It is especially dangerous in children. The dangerous form, called dengue haemorrhagic fever, which is accompanied by shock and bleeding, occurs with subsequent infections with the virus, especially if they are of a different “serotype”. Humans are infective during the first three days when the virus is multiplying in the blood. During this period, it’s important they lie inside a mosquito net all day and night. This is to prevent them from infecting other members of the household. The diagnosis is made by excluding other causes of fever. Blood tests may show a low white cell count and platelets. There are, however, some confirmatory tests, like complement fixation, Elisa and an increasing number of antibodies. Dengue is a self-limited disease. The severity of the symptoms depends on the serotype of the virus, immunological status of the host and, to some extent, genetics. Herbal products — such as fresh leaves and extracts of neem and tulasi — are being investigated for their anti viral and immune boosting properties. The results are not conclusive. Claims and counterclaims about the efficacy of herbal products are difficult to evaluate. Double blind control studies have not yet been done to prove or disprove their efficacy. One can prevent mosquito bites to a certain extent by wearing long-sleeved clothing, sleeping inside a mosquito net, and using mosquito meshes for windows and doors. Water should not be allowed to stagnate in containers in and around residential areas. Adding a handful of rock salt or pouring kerosene into stagnant water prevents mosquitoes from breeding. Remember, no vaccine or specific treatment exists — the only way to escape dengue is to prevent being stung by these pesky insects. Source: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India) Kolkata Book Fair 2014 Welsh widow ‘gassed’ by burglars in India who stole £26,000 in money and jewellery DIY HAL 9000 Costume Cosplaying as HAL 9000 Airtel donates to UTH mothers’ shelter Commercial net manufacturers Understanding and caring for dengue fever in kids! British widow at her holiday home in Goa ‘knocked out by thieves using chemicals before they stole £25,000 in cash and jewellery’ More than Ebola, other tropical diseases pose growing threat to US. More Than Ebola, Other Tropical Diseases Pose Growing Threat to U.S. Tags 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Anopheles, British National Party, Cavelossim, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chagas disease, Conditions and Diseases, Dengue fever, Fever, Health, India, Infectious Diseases, Mosquito, Mosquito net, Viral Herbs & Plants No Comments on Curare [amazon_link asins=’B001VGQI6M,1613777469,6070119177,B072BMV6FW,B01DLRE0ZO,B07519X94Q,B0741RCQT7,B01GKK4L2G,B074KP8GTS’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’finmeacur-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’b0e251fb-8d33-11e7-8ff0-9ba61879f615′] Botanical Name: Chondrodendron tomentosum Family:Menispermaceae Genus: Chondrodendron Species: Tomentosum Parts Used: Leaf, Root Synonyms: Pereira Brava. Cissampelos Pareira. Velvet Leaf. Ice Vine. Parts Used: Dried root, bark, bruised leaves. Common Names: Curare, Grieswurzel, Pareira Brava, Pareira, Vigne Sauvage, pareira, uva-da-serra, uva-do-mato, ampihuasca blanca, antinupa, antinoopa, comida de venados, curari, ourari, woorari, worali, velvet leaf Habitat: Curare is native to West Indies, Spanish Main Brazil, Peru. It grows in Amazon Basin of South America.(In El Salvador and other parts of Central America) This deciduous plant will flower in a container just prior to leafing out. The flowers are attractive red “spikes”. Zone 9+ The bright red seeds contain a number of poisonous alkaloids that have a curare-like action. CLICK TO SEE THE PICTURES Curare grows as a large liana, or vine, found in the canopy of the South American rainforest. The vine may get as thick as 4 inches in diameter at its base. It has large alternate, heart-shaped leaves which may be 4-8 inches long and almost as wide, with a 2-6 inches long petiole. The leaves are smooth on top with a hairy white bottom, and deeply indented veins radiating from the leaf base. Clusters of small (1/16-1/8 inches), greenish-white flowers are made up of separate male and female flowers. The fleshy fruits are oval, narrow at the base, and approximately 1-2 mm long. Edible Uses: The fruit of this vine is edible with a bitter-sweet taste. Some Indians of South America crush and cook the roots and stems, and add other plants and venomous animals, mixing it until it becomes a light syrup. They call this mixture “ampi”, or “curaré”, which they use on the tip of their arrows and darts to hunt wild game. Crude curare is a dark brown or black mass with a sticky to hard consistency and an aromatic, tarry odor. The name comes from Indian word meaning “poison.” Curare, in large doses, paralyses the motor nerve-endings in striped muscle, and death occurs from respiratory failure. Curare is very bitter, and is actually a common name for various dart poisons originating from South America. The young flowers and new growth are added to soups and other food preparations as a soporific vegetables. Curare has differing effects depending upon dosage, whether it is injected into muscle tissue, or ingested. Curare is used internally in tribal medicine for edema, fever, kidney stones and testicular inflammation. It is also known to relax muscles into a state of inactivity. Under appropriate medical care and attention, curare is also used to relieve spastic paralysis, to treat some mental disorders, and to induce muscle relaxation for setting fractures. Curare is now used extensively in modern medicine. It is only toxic if it enters the bloodstream. Curare is not for sale to the general public. As with many Amazonian tribal plant history and legend, curare is prepared by old women. In some traditions, the witch doctor has a monopoly of the business, but generally, wise old men get together to brew a batch. Extra curare was usually carried by tribal members in a gourd or calabash, and stored with weapons. Medicinal Uses: The active ingredient in “curaré”, D-tubocurarine, is used in medicine. Brazilians consider the root a diuretic, and use it internally in small quantities for madness and dropsy, and externally for bruises. It is also used for edema, fever, and kidney stones. Curare is an alkaloid, and acts as a neuromuscular blocking agent to produce paralysis in muscles. It first affects the muscles of the toes, ears, and eyes, then those of the neck, arms and legs, and finally, those involved in breathing. In fatal doses, death is caused by respiratory paralysis. Curare must get into the blood system for it to work. It doesn’t hurt to eat something killed by a poisoned curare arrow, for instance. The therapeutical employment of curare has been suggested in certain severe and obstinate spasmodic affections, as in epilepsy, chorea, hydrophobia, and, more particularly, in tetanus. It is used by subcutaneous injections of its filtered aqueous solution, thus: Add curare 1 grain, to distilled water 24 minims; dissolve, let the solution stand 48 hours, and filter; of this, from 2 minims (1/12 grain) to 6 minims (1/4 grain) may be used at one injection, carefully repeating the injections until relaxation of the muscles has been effected. Curarine, dissolved in water, with a few drops of sulphuric acid added, to facilitate its solution, is to be used in still smaller doses—from the 1/240 to the 1/120 part of a grain. It is doubtful whether this agent will ever come into general use as a medicinal remedy; at least, not so long as other medicines are known in which greater confidence can be placed. The diversity of action, attributable, in some instances, to its difference of composition, in others to its inertness, or to its highly active qualities, render it an uncertain, as well as an unsafe, remedy. It is used in modern medicine primarily as an auxiliary in general anesthesia, frequently with cyclopropane, especially in abdominal surgery. Upon injection, curare acts as a neuromuscular blocking agent to produce flaccidity in striated (striped) muscle (it competes with acetylcholine at the nerve ending, preventing nerve impulses from activating skeletal, or voluntary, muscles). It first affects the muscles of the toes, ears, and eyes, then those of the neck and limbs, and, finally, those involved in respiration. In fatal doses, death is caused by respiratory paralysis. Practitioners commonly rely on velvet leaf as an excellent natural remedy for menstrual difficulties, including cramping and pain, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), excessive bleeding, and fibroid tumors. Its ability to curb excessive menstrual bleeding very quickly can be quite remarkable. It is often employed in overall female balancing formulas, in kidney formulas (for its diuretic and smooth-muscle relaxant effects), and, in combination with other plants, in heart tonics and hypertension remedies. It is also considered effective against malaria, fever, hepatic ailments, gastric ulcers, diabetes, anemia, high cholesterol, cerebral tonic, fever, typhoid, stomach ulcers, pain killer, chronic inflammation of the urinary passages, good diuretic, etc. In North American herbal medicine, velvet leaf is used for many of the same conditions as in South America as well as for inflammation of the testicles and minor kidney problems. Pereira root also acts as an antiseptic to the bladder and is therefore employed for the relief of chronic inflammation of the urinary passages. It is also a good diuretic. The decoction of the stems and roots mixed with wild bee honey is used to treat sterile women. Root decoction used for post-menstrual hemorrhages, the alcoholic maceration, for rheumatism. Macerated leaves, bark and root, mixed with rum, are used by as aphrodisiac. Root decoction used as a cardio tonic, anti-anemic, anti-malarial. One tribe use a leaf decoction for fever and another use the decoction of the bark and stem as a dental analgesic. Some Ecuadorian tribes use the leaf decoction for conjunctivitis and snakebite. Others use the root tea for difficult delivery and nervous or weak children with colic. Also used in homeopathy, in the form of a mother tincture. Abutua is a very useful herb for women’s affections. Its antispasmodic action makes it influential in treating cramps, painful menstruation and pre and post-natal pain. Brazilian Indian women have for centuries valued its analgesic powers, and the satchels of almost all midwives contain the root of this plant. Helpful for menstrual cramps and difficult menstruation, pre- and post-natal pain Aids poor digestion, drowsiness after meals and constipation. Disclaimer:The information presented herein is intended for educational purposes only. Individual results may vary, and before using any supplements, it is always advisable to consult with your own health care provider. http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/curare.htm http://ezinearticles.com/?Rainforest-Plants—Curare&id=1030007 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/146779/curare http://www.henriettesherbal.com/eclectic/kings/curare.html http://www.herbnet.com/Herb%20Uses_UZ.htm Cruel, deliberate, and unusually vicious. It’s us. The Pharmacology And Toxicology Of Execution By Lethal Injection Will Big Oil Kill More in the Amazon? Medicinal Plants from the Forest Curar Animal Therapeutics receives £265,000 cash injection Incredible Healing Plants from Around the World Delphinium staphisagria Poisons and Panaceas: Plants Tell History of Healing Research In Motion: iPhone 5 Goes On Sale While BlackBerry Network Goes Out Of Service Tags Aedes aegypti, Amazon Basin, Amazon Rainforest, Andes, Brazil, Caribbean, Central America, Curare, El Salvador, Health, Ice cream, Indian cuisine, IOS, Kidney stone, Medicine, Muscle, Poison, South America, United States No Comments on Yellow Fever Yellow fever (also called yellow jack, black vomit or sometimes American Plague) is an acute viral disease. It is an important cause of hemorrhagic illness in many African and South American countries despite existence of an effective vaccine. The yellow refers to the jaundice symptoms that affect some patients.It is a viral infection transmitted by mosquitoes. Yellow fever is a viral hemorrhagic fever caused by the yellow fever virus. The yellow fever virus is a single-stranded enveloped virus that belongs to the flavivirus group. The disease can result in mild symptoms or severe illness and death (mortality rate 5-70%). Yellow fever derives its name from the yellowing of the skin and whites of the eyes (jaundice) that occur in some people infected with the virus. Jaundice is caused by the presence of bile pigment (bilirubin) in the bloodstream and results from damage to liver cells (hepatocytes) during severe infection.…click & see The yellow fever virus infects mainly monkeys and humans: monkeys are the animal reservoir. Infection is transmitted from human to human, monkey to monkey, monkey to human, and human to monkey by daytime-biting mosquitos. Several species of Aedes and Haemoagogus mosquitos can serve as vectors, transmitting the virus during a blood meal. Three types of transmission cycles exist for yellow fever: sylvatic (jungle), intermediate and urban. Although all three transmission cycles occur in Africa, only sylvatic and urban transmission cycles occur in South America. ……………………………...click for picture Sylvatic yellow fever (monkey to human) * Occurs in monkeys infected by wild mosquitos in tropical rainforests * Infected monkeys pass the virus to mosquitos during feeding * Infected wild mosquitos bite humans entering the rainforest (accidental infection) Intermediate yellow fever (monkey to human; human to monkey) * Small-scale epidemics that occur in humid or semi-humid grasslands of Africa * Separate villages experience simultaneous infections transmitted by semi-domestic mosquitos that infect both monkey and human hosts * Most common type of outbreak in Africa Urban yellow fever (human to human) * Large epidemics occurring when the virus is introduced into high human population areas by migrants * Domestic mosquitos of one species (Aedes aegypti) transmit the virus from person to person * Monkeys are not involved in transmission * Outbreaks spread from one source to cover a wide area Yellow fever has been a source of several devastating epidemics. Yellow fever epidemics broke out in the 1700s in Italy, France, Spain, and England. 300,000 people are believed to have died from yellow fever in Spain during the 19th century. French soldiers were attacked by yellow fever during the 1802 Haitian Revolution; more than half of the army perished from the disease. Outbreaks followed by thousands of deaths occurred periodically in other Western Hemisphere locations until research, which included human volunteers (some of whom died), led to an understanding of the method of transmission to humans (primarily by mosquitos) and development of a vaccine and other preventive efforts in the early 20th century. Despite the costly and sacrificial breakthrough research by Cuban physician Carlos Finlay, American physician Walter Reed, and many others over 100 years ago, unvaccinated populations in many developing nations in Africa and Central and South America continue to be at risk. As of 2001, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that yellow fever causes 200,000 illnesses and 30,000 deaths every year in unvaccinated populations. Causes :- Yellow fever is caused by a small virus that is spread by the bite of mosquitoes. This disease is common in South America and in sub-Saharan Africa. ……………You may click to see pictures of mosquitoes causing yellow fever.…. Anyone can get yellow fever, but the elderly have a higher risk of severe infection. If a person is bitten by an infected mosquito, symptoms usually develop 3 – 6 days later. Yellow fever has three stages: 1.Early stage: Headache, muscle aches, fever, loss of appetite, vomiting, and jaundice are common. After approximately 3 – 4 days, often symptoms go away briefly (remission). 2.Period of remission: After 3 – 4 days, fever and other symptoms go away. Most people will recover at this stage, but others may move onto the third, most dangerous stage (intoxication stage) within 24 hours. 3.Period of intoxication: Multi-organ dysfunction occurs. This includes liver and kidney failure, bleeding disorders/hemorrhage, and brain dysfunction including delirium, seizures, coma, shock, and death. Symptoms :- Arrhythmias, heart dysfunction Bleeding (may progress to hemorrhage) Coma Decreased urination Delirium Fever Headache Jaundice Muscle aches (myalgia) Red eyes, face, tongue Seizures Vomiting Vomiting blood Although viral replication begins in cells at the site of the mosquito bite, symptoms of infection are not usually noted for a period of three to six days when the acute phase of infection presents. Acute yellow fever infection is characterized by high fever, muscle pain, backache, headache, shivers, loss of appetite, nausea and/or vomiting. Most people infected improve after three to four days. However, within 24 hours of the disappearance of symptoms, up to 15% of those infected enter a toxic phase during which fever resumes, and the yellow fever virus quickly spreads to the kidneys, lymph nodes, spleen, bone marrow and liver. Liver invasion of one of the last stages to occur: as the liver is increasingly damaged, patients develop jaundice as bilirubin is released from damaged liver cells, experience abdominal pain and vomiting, and develop coagulopathies (inability of the blood to clot) characterized by bleeding from the mouth, nose, eyes and stomach, and presence of blood in vomit and stool. Up to 50% of people who enter the toxic phase die within two weeks of infection. Diagnosis:- Yellow fever may be difficult to diagnose, especially during the early stages, and may be confused with malaria, typhoid, other hemorrhagic fevers (dengue, Rift Valley, Venezuelan, Bolivian, Argentine, Lassa, Crimean-Congo, Marburg and Ebola), rickettsial infection, leptospirosis, viral hepatitis, other causes of liver failure and toxic hepatitis (e.g. carbon-tetrachloride poisoning). A person with advanced yellow fever may show signs of liver failure, renal failure, and shock. If you have symptoms of yellow fever, tell your doctor if you have traveled to areas where the disease is known to thrive. Blood tests can confirm the diagnosis. Treatment :- There is no specific treatment for yellow fever. Treatment for symptoms can include: Blood products for severe bleeding Dialysis for kidney failure Fluids through a vein (intravenous fluids) The treatment for yellow fever is supportive: control of fever, fluids to treat dehydration, and intensive support related to organ damage. The World Health Organization estimates 200,000 cases of yellow fever per year with approximately 30,000 deaths. CLICK TO READ ..>: Early sign of yellow fever could lead to new treatment Prognosis: :- Yellow fever ranges in severity. Severe infections with internal bleeding and fever (hemorrhagic fever) are deadly in up to half of cases. Historical reports have claimed a mortality rate of between 1 in 17 (5.8%) and 1 in 3 (33%). CDC has claimed that case-fatality rates from severe disease range from 15% to more than 50%. The WHO factsheet on yellow fever, updated in 2001, states that 15% of patients enter a “toxic phase” and that half of that number die within ten to fourteen days, with the other half recovering Possible Complications :- Death Disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) Kidney failure Liver failure Parotitis Secondary bacterial infections Shock Prevention :- If you will be traveling to an area where yellow fever is common: Sleep in screened housing Use mosquito repellents Wear clothing that fully covers your body There is an effective vaccine against yellow fever. Ask your doctor at least 10 – 14 days before traveling if you should be vaccinated against yellow fever. In 1937, Max Theiler, working at the Rockefeller Foundation, developed a safe and highly efficacious vaccine for yellow fever that gives a ten-year or more immunity from the virus. The vaccine consists of a live, but attenuated, virus called 17D. The 17D vaccine has been used commercially since the 1950s. The mechanisms of attenuation and immunogenicity for the 17D strain are not known. However, this vaccine is very safe, with few adverse reactions having been reported and millions of doses administered, and highly effective with over 90% of vaccinees developing a measurable immune response after the first dose. click to see the picture Although the vaccine is considered safe, there are risks involved. The majority of adverse reactions to the 17D vaccine result from allergic reaction to the eggs in which the vaccine is grown. Persons with a known egg allergy should discuss this with their physician prior to vaccination. In addition, there is a small risk of neurologic disease and encephalitis, particularly in individuals with compromised immune systems and very young children. The 17D vaccine is contraindicated in infants, pregnant women, and anyone with a diminished immune capacity, including those taking immunosuppressant drugs. According to the travel clinic at the University of Utah Hospital, the vaccine presents an increased risk of adverse reaction in adults aged 60 and older, with the risk increasing again after age 65, and again after age 70. The reaction is capable of producing multiple organ failure and should be evaluated carefully by a qualified health professional before being administered to the elderly. Finally, there is a very small risk of more severe yellow fever-like disease associated with the vaccine. This reaction occurs in 1~3 vaccinees per million doses administered. This reaction, called YEL-AVD, causes a fairly severe disease closely resembling yellow fever caused by virulent strains of the virus. The risk factor/s for YEL-AVD are not known, although it has been suggested that it may be genetic. The 2`-5` oligoadenylate synthetase (OAS) component of the innate immune response has been shown to be particularly important in protection from Flavivirus infection. In at least one case of YEL-AVD, the patient was found to have an allelic mutation in a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the OAS gene. People most at risk of contracting the virus should be vaccinated. Woodcutters working in tropical areas should be particularly targeted for vaccination. Insecticides, protective clothing, and screening of houses are helpful, but not always sufficient for mosquito control; people should always use an insecticide spray while in certain areas. In affected areas, mosquito control methods have proven effective in decreasing the number of cases. Recent studies have noted the increase in the number of areas affected by a number of mosquito-borne viral infections and have called for further research and funding for vaccines Current research:- In the hamster model of yellow fever, early administration of the antiviral ribavirin is an effective early treatment of many pathological features of the disease. Ribavirin treatment during the first five days after virus infection improved survival rates, reduced tissue damage in target organs (liver and spleen), prevented hepatocellular steatosis, and normalized alanine aminotransferase (a liver damage marker) levels. The results of this study suggest that ribavirin may be effective in the early treatment of yellow fever, and that its mechanism of action in reducing liver pathology in yellow fever virus infection may be similar to that observed with ribavirin in the treatment of hepatitis C, a virus related to yellow fever. Because ribavirin had failed to improve survival in a virulent primate (rhesus) model of yellow fever infection, it had been previously discounted as a possible therapy. In 2007, the World Community Grid launched a project whereby computer modelling of the yellow fever virus (and related viruses), thousands of small molecules are screened for their potential anti-viral properties in fighting yellow fever. This is the first project to utilize computer simulations in seeking out medicines to directly attack the virus once a person is infected. This is a distributed process project similar to SETI@Home where the general public downloads the World Community Grid agent and the program (along with thousands of other users) screens thousands of molecules while their computer would be otherwise idle. If the user needs to use the computer the program sleeps. There are several different projects running, including a similar one screening for anti-AIDS drugs. The project covering yellow fever is called “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together.” The software and information about the project can be found at: World Community Grid web site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever http://microbiology.suite101.com/article.cfm/yellow_fever What is the Treatment for Yellow Fever China intensifies quarantine to block yellow fever Sudan: Yellow fever casualty reported in Central Darfur camp Yellow fever outbreak kills 164 in Sudan’s Darfur: WHO Yellow fever outbreak kills 164 in Sudan’s Darfur Darfur yellow fever worst in decades: WHO Yellow fever outbreak in Sudan’s Darfur kills at least 164 Sudan Begins Emergency Vaccinations to Fight Yellow Fever Outbreak WHO: Sudan yellow fever outbreak worst in decades Tags Aedes aegypti, Africa, California, Carlos Finlay, Conditions and Diseases, Dengue fever, Disease, Health, Latin America, Lusaka, Mosquito, Outbreak, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Riverside, South Africa, South America, sub-Saharan Africa, United States, University of California, Virus, World Health Organization, Yellow fever, Zambia 2 Comments on Dengue Fever Dengue fever is a disease caused by a family of viruses that are transmitted by mosquitoes. It is an acute illness of sudden onset that usually follows a benign course with headache, fever, exhaustion, severe joint and muscle pain, swollen glands (lymphadenopathy), and rash. The presence (the “dengue triad”) of fever, rash, and headache (and other pains) is particularly characteristic of dengue. Dengue (pronounced DENG-gay) strikes people with low levels of immunity. Because it is caused by one of four serotypes of virus, it is possible to get dengue fever multiple times. However, an attack of dengue produces immunity for a lifetime to that particular serotype to which the patient was exposed. Dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) are acute febrile diseases, found in the tropics and Africa, and caused by four closely related virus serotypes of the genus Flavivirus, family Flaviviridae. The geographical spread is similar to malaria, but unlike malaria, dengue is often found in urban areas of tropical nations, including Puerto Rico,Singapore,Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, India and Brazil. Each serotype is sufficiently different that there is no cross-protection and epidemics caused by multiple serotypes (hyperendemicity) can occur. Dengue is transmitted to humans by the Aedes aegypti (rarely Aedes albopictus) mosquito, which feeds during the day. How is dengue contracted? The virus is contracted from the bite of a striped Aedes aegypti mosquito that has previously bitten an infected person. The mosquito flourishes during rainy seasons but can breed in water-filled flower pots, plastic bags, and cans year-round. Click to see the pictures..>…..(1)..…..(2) Aedes aegypti mosquito One mosquito bite can inflict the disease. The virus is not contagious and cannot be spread directly from person to person. There must be a person-to-mosquito-to-another-person pathway. Signs & symptoms: Dengue starts with chills, headache, pain upon moving the eyes, and low backache. Painful aching in the legs and joints occurs during the first hours of illness. The temperature rises quickly as high as 104° F (40° C), with relative low heart rate (bradycardia) and low blood pressure (hypotension). The eyes become reddened. A flushing or pale pink rash comes over the face and then disappears. The glands (lymph nodes) in the neck and groin are often swollen. Click to see the pictures.>.…..(1)……….(2)...…………………… This infectious disease is manifested by a sudden onset of fever, with severe headache, muscle and joint pains (myalgias and arthralgias—severe pain gives it the name break-bone fever or bonecrusher disease) and rashes. The dengue rash is characteristically bright red petechiae and usually appears first on the lower limbs and the chest; in some patients, it spreads to cover most of the body. There may also be gastritis with some combination of associated abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting or diarrhea. * fever; * bladder problems; * constant headaches; * severe dizziness; and, * loss of appetite. * uncontrollable laughing, * extreme constipation Some cases develop much milder symptoms which can, when no rash is present, be misdiagnosed as influenza or other viral infection. Thus travelers from tropical areas may inadvertently pass on dengue in their home countries, having not been properly diagnosed at the height of their illness. Patients with dengue can pass on the infection only through mosquitoes or blood products and only while they are still febrile. The classic dengue fever lasts about six to seven days, with a smaller peak of fever at the trailing end of the disease (the so-called “biphasic pattern”). Clinically, the platelet count will drop until the patient’s temperature is normal. Cases of DHF also show higher fever, haemorrhagic phenomena, thrombocytopenia, and haemoconcentration. A small proportion of cases lead to dengue shock syndrome (DSS) which has a high mortality rate. The diagnosis of dengue is usually made clinically. The classic picture is high fever with no localising source of infection, a petechial rash with thrombocytopenia and relative leukopenia. The WHO definition of dengue haemorrhagic fever has been in use since 1975; all four criteria must be fulfilled: 1. Fever, bladder problem, constant headaches, severe dizziness and loss of appetite. 2. Hemorrhagic tendency (positive tourniquet test, spontaneous bruising, bleeding from mucosa, gingiva, injection sites, etc.; vomiting blood, or bloody diarrhea) 3. Thrombocytopenia (<100,000 platelets per mm³ or estimated as less than 3 platelets per high power field) 4. Evidence of plasma leakage (hematocrit more than 20% higher than expected, or drop in haematocrit of 20% or more from baseline following IV fluid, pleural effusion, ascites, hypoproteinemia) Dengue shock syndrome is defined as dengue hemorrhagic fever plus: * Weak rapid pulse, * Narrow pulse pressure (less than 20 mm Hg) or, * Cold, clammy skin and restlessness. Serology and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) studies are available to confirm the diagnosis of dengue if clinically indicated. Because dengue is caused by a virus, there is no specific medicine or antibiotic to treat it. For typical dengue, the treatment is purely concerned with relief of the symptoms (symptomatic). The mainstay of treatment is supportive therapy. Increased oral fluid intake is recommended to prevent dehydration. Supplementation with intravenous fluids may be necessary to prevent dehydration and significant concentration of the blood if the patient is unable to maintain oral intake. A platelet transfusion is indicated in rare cases if the platelet level drops significantly (below 20,000) or if there is significant bleeding. The presence of melena may indicate internal gastrointestinal bleeding requiring platelet and/or red blood cell transfusion. Aspirin and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs should be avoided as these drugs may worsen the bleeding tendency associated with some of these infections. Patients may receive paracetamol preparations to deal with these symptoms if dengue is suspected. You may click to see:->Herbal Cure for Dengue Dengue Fever Cure using Tawa Tawa aka Gatas Gatas weed Papaya Juice Can Cure Dengue Dengue Cure Protocol Dengue Cure discovered in Ayurveda ……(1)....(2) Click to see Homeopathic Medication for Dengue fever Emerging treatments Emerging evidence suggests that mycophenolic acid and ribavirin inhibit dengue replication. Initial experiments showed a fivefold increase in defective viral RNA production by cells treated with each drug. In vivo studies, however, have not yet been done. There is no commercially available vaccine for the dengue flavivirus. However, one of the many ongoing vaccine development programs is the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative which was set up in 2003 with the aim of accelerating the development and introduction of dengue vaccine(s) that are affordable and accessible to poor children in endemic countries. Thai researchers are testing a dengue fever vaccine on 3,000–5,000 human volunteers after having successfully conducted tests on animals and a small group of human volunteers. A number of other vaccine candidates are entering phase I or II testing. A field technician looking for larvae in standing water containers during the 1965 Aedes aegypti eradication program in Miami, Florida. In the 1960s, a major effort was made to eradicate the principal urban vector mosquito of dengue and yellow fever viruses, Aedes aegypti, from southeast United States. Courtesy: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Image Library Primary prevention of dengue mainly resides in mosquito control. There are two primary methods: larval control and adult mosquito control. In urban areas, Aedes mosquitos breed on water collections in artificial containers such as plastic cups, used tires, broken bottles, flower pots, etc. Continued and sustained artificial container reduction or periodic draining of artificial containers is the most effective way of reducing the larva and thereby the aedes mosquito load in the community. For reducing the adult mosquito load, fogging with insecticide is somewhat effective. Prevention of mosquito bites is another way of preventing disease. This can be achieved either by personal protection or by using mosquito nets. In 1998, scientists from the Queensland Institute of Research in Australia and Vietnam’s Ministry of Health introduced a scheme that encouraged children to place a water bug, the crustacean Mesocyclops, in water tanks and discarded containers where the Aedes aegypti mosquito was known to thrive. This method is viewed as being more cost-effective and more environmentally friendly than pesticides, though not as effective, and requires the ongoing participation of the community. Personal prevention consists of the use of mosquito nets, repellents containing NNDB or DEET, covering exposed skin, use of DEET-impregnated bednets, and avoiding endemic areas. Dengue is caused by the bites of the tiger striped Aedes aegypti mosquito, which, unfortunately, is a daytime mosquito. It hides in dark corners in houses and breeds in clean water in flowerpots and even bottle caps. Also, there is no immunisation as yet against dengue. One could make sure there is no stagnant water in his or her house. The house should be “mosquito proofed” with mesh covered windows and doors. Wear protective clothing and apply mosquito repellent ointment or liquid on the clothes. The vapourising mosquito repellents will drive away the mosquitoes, but the smoke is toxic to humans also. Potential antiviral approaches In cell culture experiments and mice Morpholino antisense oligos have shown specific activity against Dengue virus. The yellow fever vaccine (YF-17D) is a related Flavivirus,[clarify] thus the chimeric replacement of yellow fever vaccine with dengue has been often suggested[clarify] but no full scale studies have been conducted to date. In 2006, a group of Argentine scientists discovered the molecular replication mechanism of the virus, which could be attacked by disruption of the polymerase’s work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever http://www.medicinenet.com/dengue_fever/article.htm#1whatis Breakthrough in hunt for dengue treatment [via Zemanta] Post-cyclone ‘race’ to avoid disease disaster [via Zemanta] Brazil army aids Rio dengue fight [via Zemanta] Tropical dengue fever may threaten U.S. [via Zemanta] Dengue fever threatens continental US Stay on guard for dengue fever, travellers warned Dengue Fever on the Rise in Mexico Outbreak of dengue hits Brazil Tags Aedes, Aedes aegypti, Africa, Dengue fever, DengueFever, Fever, Infectious disease, Mosquito, Philippines, Platelet, Puerto Rico, United States Acupunture (7) Advice against Health Hazards (14) Ailmemts & Remedies (831) All-about-tooth-and-tooth-therapy (9) Animal Hide, Shell & Others (9) Anti Drug Movement (25) Ayurvedic (22) Biotherapy (5) Chemicals & Minerals (7) Diagnonistic Test (71) Dry Fruit (14) Environmental Pollution (18) Fruits & Vegetables (251) Health Alert (81) Health Problems & Solutions (61) Health Quaries (42) Healthy Tips (347) Herbal Beauty & Body Care (10) Herbal Care (11) Herbs & Plants (3,148) Herbs & Plants (Spices) (176) Human Organ Transplantation (7) News on Health & Science (1,425) Our body extricts (5) Pediatric (105) Phytotherapy (1) POLUTION CONTROL (2) Positive thinking (360) Pregnancy & Child birth (8) Raikey (1) Remedy of Common Incidences (3) Scientific Studies (1) Snake Bites (1) Suppliments our body needs (47) Tasty dishes (1) Therapetic treatment (35) Therapies (18) WHY CORNER (43) © 2021 Find Me A Cure	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3262
__label__cc	0.577453	0.422547	Black Troops from Dallas, Off to the Great War Recruits in Dallas (click for much larger image) Above is a photo from the National Archives, described only as “Negro recruits having a turkey dinner just before leaving for a training camp. Dallas, Texas.” At the bottom right is the seal of Dallas photographer John J. Johnson who had worked for The Dallas Morning News as a photographer before World War I but was apparently working in a commissioned or freelance capacity here. I’m not sure where it was taken or when. It might have been at the end of October, 1917 when black draftees left Dallas for Camp Travis. (Click articles for larger images.) Dallas Morning News, Oct. 18, 1917 Or it might have been in the summer of 1918 when much larger contingents of black men left for training camp: more than 500 men left from Dallas and more than 200 from Fort Worth at the end of July. The photo below appeared in The Dallas Morning News under the headline “Scene at Union Station Last Night, When 500 Negroes Left for Camp.” (This photo was taken by John J. Johnson, the same photographer who took the photo at the top of this post.) Photo and caption from the DMN, July 31, 1918 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 31, 1918 There was a sizable number of black soldiers at Camp Bowie in Fort Worth, and many of the reports from Fort Worth on the training of the “negro troops” are hard to read. I don’t think of myself as naive, but the blatant racism that was absolutely everywhere in the mainstream press at the time is stunning. Even when attempting to be complimentary, you see things like this: If you imagine that the fact that these recruits are negroes made any difference to the white soldiers in camp you are mistaken, for the white soldiers cheered and threw up their hats as truck after truck of negroes passed by, and the darkies shouted back lustily. […] “I’se glad I got heah at last,” said a big negro as he lined up for classification. “I won’t have to pick no mo’ cotton, no sah; all I’se have to do is to parade in a nice new uniform an’ get three meals an’ a nice new gun….” (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 25, 1918) I’m sure the white soldiers were happy to see fellow recruits showing up, but the journalists — in story after story — treated the “negroes” (they were rarely called “men”) as bumbling caricatures, inevitably quoted in dialect. The United States armed forces were not integrated until 1948, and black troops were segregated from white troops, both in camp and on the battlefield (when they were allowed to fight — they were largely kept in service positions such as stevedores). On this Memorial Day, I share a report from Ralph W. Tyler, a black journalist who had reported throughout the war from the front lines, on the casualties of African-American soldiers who died during World War I in the service of the U.S. Army: Dallas Express, Jan. 11, 1919 Top photo by John J. Johnson, from the National Archives is titled “Negro recuits [sic] having a turkey dinner just before leaving for a training camp, Dallas, Texas”; it can be accessed here. (If anyone has additional info on the details of this photo, I’d love to know.) “92nd Has Comparatively Small Casualty List” is an excerpt from Ralph W. Tyler’s article “General Order Commends Colored Officers” which appeared in The Dallas Express, Jan. 11, 1919. The full article can be read here. For more info on the history of black American soldiers, see the Wikipedia entry here; for info on the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, see here. Also, check out the blurb for the book Unjustly Dishonored: An African-American Division in World War I by Robert H. Ferrell, here. I’ve put a few articles on African-American soldiers in WWI (including those cited above) in a PDF. A few of the articles appeared in the major Dallas and Fort Worth newspapers, and a couple appeared in The Dallas Express, the city’s newspaper published for a black readership (including a rousing article by N. W. Harllee on the parade and celebration thrown by the city to honor the returning black troops — WELL worth reading). Also included are a couple of unbelievable articles from the national press (including a lengthy one by a noted Stars and Bars reporter titled “Negro Soldiers Stationed at French Ports Sing and Dance While Unloading Ships”). The PDF can be accessed here (with articles in varying degrees of legibility). The stirring and exhortative article “Dallas Gives Soldiers Befitting Celebration” by N. W. Harllee is in the PDF just mentioned, but it can also be found in a scan of The Dallas Express, here. UPDATE: Every scan of this article is hard to read, so I’ve tweaked the contrast to make it easier to read. You’ll have to magnify this sucker to read it, but it’s in a PDF here. Filed Under: 1910s, African-American Dallas, Photographs, Vault, WWI 5 Comments to “Black Troops from Dallas, Off to the Great War” pak152 says: great find. as for the photographers. The News and the Herald used contract photographers up until the late 1950s. Thanks. It took me a while to find info on him, but he was kind of a pioneer in processing blueprints here in town. Johnson was partnered with Frank Rogers prior to WW1. Rogers went on to become a commercial photographer from 1920s til the later 50s(?) Oh my gosh (yes, “oh my gosh”!) — they’re the guys who took those viaduct photos! yup, i’ll have to dig up my research on Rogers and other Dallas photographers to share with you	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3263
__label__cc	0.6097	0.3903	Ribbon Cutting For Affordable Housing Downtown By Jesse La Tour on February 7, 2019 • ( Leave a comment ) On February 7th, Mayor Jesus Silva and other local leaders participated in a ribbon cutting ceremony for the brand new Citrea Apartments on East Santa Fe Ave. which provides 54 apartments for low-income families in Downtown Fullerton. OC Supervisor Doug Chaffee (left), Mayor Jesus Silva (right), Councilmember Ahmad Zahra, and project leaders cut the ribbon at Citrea. The project is a partnership between the City of Fullerton, Related California (an affordable housing developer), and the Foundation for Affordable Housing. Social services are provided by LifeSteps and include adult educational courses such as financial literacy, health and wellness, skill-building, and computer training classes. “I am very honored to be part of this,” said Mayor Jesus Silva, “when you see what it does for families to have their own place, a quality place with services, it really starts a shift for them to move up the economic ladder.” The new Citrea Apartments has 55 affordable units. Beth Southorn is the president of LifeSteps, which provides on-site social services for residents of Citrea. She says that social services, in conjunction with affordable housing, helps to prevent and end homelessness. “At LifeSteps, we catch people before they fall,” said Southorn, “Over 85 percent of the time, we’ve been able to prevent housing instability.” Daniela Cervantes San Elias is a Fullerton native, a single mother of two children, and a full time student and employee at Fullerton College. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment at Citrea. Before moving in, she was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Fullerton in an area that was unsafe for her children, and the rent became too expensive. After moving into her parents’ house, she noticed that Citrea was opening, and she applied. “When I was told that I was approved, that was the biggest blessing of my life. I fell to my knees with happiness because I never thought I’d have this opportunity. It’s a very safe location, very convenient for me,” said Daniela, who is getting ready to transfer to Cal State Fullerton to continue her higher education. “I’m very thankful for this opportunity,” she said, “I don’t worry about what tomorrow holds because I am able to provide for both my kids.” Daniela Cervantes San Elias lives at Citrea with her two children. Tom Willard, Founder and President of the Foundation for Affordable Housing, said, “There’s going to be 150 or so people who move in here, but over the life of this project there will literally be thousands of people who will call this facility their home…this property will be a launch pad for many families who are trying to get through the financial labyrinth of living in America.” William Witte, the CEO of Related California, the developer of the property, pointed out that, “The good news is there are 55 families like Daniela’s living here. The not as good news is there are 1,300 plus who applied to live here. So, we all have to do a lot more.” The center courtyard contains a playground for children. Citrea is the first affordable community to be developed in the new Fullerton Transportation Center Specific Plan and located in close proximity to schools, a community center, the Fullerton Public Library, a public park, and within walking distance of the Fullerton Train Station and a regional bus transportation hub. Citrea is located on the site of the former Pacific Citrus Products bottling plant which manufactured the company’s most famous product, Hawaiian Punch, in the mid-20th century. That history is represented in a new mural on the site designed by local artist Mike Tauber and facing thousands of Metrolink and Amtrak passengers each day. Local artist Mike Tauber created murals which reflect the site’s history as the former Hawaiian Punch factory. The Nicolas Jr. High Concert Band provided live music for the celebratory event. Citrea is located at 336 E. Santa Fe Avenue. Campaign Sign Stealer Paulette Chaffee To Be Sentenced Photos of FUHSD Student Exhibit at the Muckenthaler	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3266
__label__wiki	0.8662	0.8662	Table-top war-gaming comes to life with Total War: Warhammer Darren Price Darren Price returns to the world of Warhammer, nearly thirty years since playing the now legendary table-top role-playing game with Total War: Warhammer. When I first played the real-time strategy game, Shogun: Total War, way back in 2000, it reminded me of the childhood table-top battles I used to play using tiny metal Citadel Miniatures. The table-top game was the original Warhammer and its expansion, Forces of Fantasy. It’s is thus, quite ironic that I return to the rich fantasy world of Games Workshop’s seminal table-top role-playing-game with Creative Assembly’s Total War: Warhammer. For over fifteen years the Total War series has allowed players to control armies throughout history in epic battles from Feudal Japan to the plains of the New World. Total War: Warhammer is the revered series’ first foray into a fictional world. For me, one of the big draws of the Total War games is the series’ historical foundation. Playing out campaigns based on real events and partaking in battles with accurately modelled units makes the Total War games serious and ‘proper’ strategy simulations. So you can understand that, despite my reverence for the Warhammer games, I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of a Total War game with a fantasy spin. After playing the game, my concerns were very soon allayed. By untethering themselves from realism and historical accuracy, Creative Assembly have been able to craft what is perhaps their ultimate version of their Total War games. As with the other games in the Total War series, Warhammer works on two levels, campaign and battles. The campaign game is the best way to experience all the Total War Warhammer has to offer. Alternatively, players can opt to go straight into battle with one of the game’s set Quest Battles, create their own custom battles or select a multiplayer battle. For a campaign game, players choose their faction, from the straight-laced Empire, Dwarfs, the orcs and goblins of the Greenskins or the Vampire Counts. Each faction has it’s on play-style and campaign story. The regional campaign map allows players to strategize and administer their controlled regions. You can check your settlements, building construction, tech trees and unit recruitment. As with previous Total War games, an advisor introduces player to the game’s mechanics. And it is worth taking the time to become acquainted with the game because, as accessible as it is, Total War: Warhammer is a complex game to master. The campaign map shows the position of units and objective that need to be undertaken. Managing unit cost is an important part of the game, ensuring that you armies are strong enough within sending you into bankruptcy. Enemies are more diverse than ever, with warg-riding orcs, dragons and other beasties joining ranks of dwarves and rival human factions as you fight to dominate the campaign map. It’s not all about war. You can form alliances, create trade routes and succeed using diplomacy rather than the sword. Player can spend quite a long time peacefully building their populations and researching technology. But know that in Warhammer, war is never far away. It is when your units on the campaign map confront enemy units that the turn-based strategy of the game switches to the real-time action of the battlefield. Battles are fought on a landscape with players in charge of individual units on the battlefield. For the first time, and befitting the fantasy setting, you can also play on subterranean maps. Seeing hundreds and hundreds of fantasy units on the battlefield warmed by heart, as this was exactly how I’d imagined my table-top Warhammer battles looking like. With Pegasus-riding mounted units, dragons, giants and spell-casters on the field, the battles in Warhammer are unlike any of the those in past Total War games. Having lords and heroes with their own enchanted armour, weapons and abilities adds even more depth to the already deep Total War battlefield gameplay. The fantasy flying units, change both your defensive and attacking tactics, as do the huge monsters that enter the fray. The spectacle of the battlefield is made all the more breath-taking by the game’s stunning graphics. Zooming into the battlefield action you can watch as individual warriors go head-to-head. It is exactly like a game of Warhammer brought to life. In recent years the Total War series has been a bit hit and miss performance-wise, being a die-hard NVidia-equipped player. Many games in the series, most notably Napoleon: Total War, gave me no end of grief on release. It was only with subsequent patches and driver updates that Napoleon actual became a playable game. Alas, Total War: Warhammer, whilst not having any game-breaking performance issues for my GTX 1080 system, is suffering from more than the odd graphical glitch. These will, no doubt be sorted out in due course. But right now, the game does not like V-Sync enabled with an NVidia card. Total War: Warhammer, as a non-historic, fantasy strategy game exceeded my expectations. Not only have the developers manages to bring the world of Warhammer (and those painted Citadel Miniatures from my childhood) to life, but they have also managed to make the best Total War game to date. I do, however, draw the line at a futuristic sci-fi based Total War game- don’t do it. Take heed Creative Assembly! Verdict: 9/10 Gaming Warhammer Total War PC	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3267
__label__cc	0.739048	0.260952	Call Us \| 203-389-0001 Legal Video Legal Video Services Day in the Life Video Production Video Depositions Electronic Trial Support Litigation Support Videos Settlement & Mediation Programs Synchronized Video Depositions Attorney Video Marketing Litigation in the Software Age Sales & Marketing Video Fundraising & Non-Profit Video Contact Geomatrix Productions Geo Happenings Viewing posts from: October 2019 How Habitat gets 8 out of 10 to Say Yes. by Geomatrix Productions in Corporate Video Hartford Area Habitat for Humanity has what every non-profit dreams about having. A recruiting and fund-raising “super-tool.” It is a two-and-a-half-minute video that captures the energy and illustrates the morale building that permeates throughout every Habitat home-build. They use it to help recruit for the organization’s Build-A-Thon, an annual event for corporate sponsors to come out and get all of the home projects built and enclosed before bad weather arrives. The organization has been able to use the video throughout several platforms, including social media, newsletters, e-blasts, their web site, and at presentations. Karraine Moody, Hartford Area Habitat for Humanity’s Chief Executive Officer, makes sure she shows it at every presentation she gives. “We have many stake holders who help us create homeownership and the video captured that. Folks walk away fully informed and they know exactly what our mission is, and what a corporation’s role is within Build-A-Thon. The video confirms that what we are building isn’t substandard – it confirms that it is hands-on – and people come away saying, ‘OK, I get it now. It’s a great opportunity for my team. We are going to leave tired, but we are also going to leave fulfilled.’” Moody says at the end of the day, 8 out of 10 potential sponsors now say yes to the commitment. “Once we present the video, it’s done. All the questions have been answered and everyone loves it. At that point it’s ‘OK, what dates are available and what does the sponsorship look like?” Habitat for Humanity’s believes everyone deserves the right to live in a decent, affordable home. The Habitat mission is to help families and individuals in need live in dignity and safety by constructing, rehabilitating and preserving homes they can call their own. The non-profit organization simply can’t fulfill that mission without the help of volunteers and corporate sponsors. To ensure that potential sponsors who are approached say “yes,” Habitat decided they needed a video to “seal the deal.” They chose Geomatrix Productions to produce it. “It was the first time for us to make this investment. It was really about how we could market Habitat beyond the base we currently have to introduce our affiliate and explain our mission to a wide range of new potential sponsors and volunteers. It also gave us the opportunity to spotlight some of our long standing sponsors and generate individual video clips for those sponsors to share the work they had done. To have real life testimonials and be able to give back to our long term sponsors was the biggest gift.” Moody says the organization looked at a few production companies, and because of Geomatrix’s open attitude to being on a construction site and the ease that was presented at their first meeting, they said “This is the firm for us.” According to Moody, Geomatrix did not disappoint. “We had a great experience. All of our questions were answered. While shooting video on the work site, we felt we had input by being able to see the clips and have the opportunity to make changes on the spot. To have that opportunity was amazing, especially because it was our first time doing a video. You want to have a partner who is going to be receptive, and who allows us to be at the table consistently throughout the process. I give Geomatrix a 10 in terms of customer service, follow through, input and feedback.” Geomatrix producer Patrick Volk says capturing the energy of the build on video was infectious. “The energy on the construction site pulled us into the project even more, and I think it shows on the finished product. We truly enjoyed collaborating with all the staff at Habitat and are thrilled they are happy with the outcome.” Moody plans to work with the Geomatrix team on other videos in the near future. “We’re coming back. What I love about the Geomatrix team is that everyone is engaged and everyone is bringing their A game to the table. To be on-site with professionals who are looking to give you their best product and who make sure you are content with the outcome – that’s priceless.” Building the Future: How A Video is Helping a Small Town Grow With a rich tradition and a vision for the future, the Fairfield County, Connecticut town of Monroe is on the move. So when the members of its Economic Development Commission wanted to share the town’s appeal and economic advantages with the world, part of their plan was to have a video produced. Hands down, they chose Geomatrix Productions to take the wheel on their journey. The EDC’s goals were to ignite commercial development in their business and industry zone and attract skilled workers and families, thus increasing the tax base to continue to provide the town with a stable economy. Monroe First Selectman Kenneth Kellogg: “We wanted to have a robust marketing plan and I view this video as a key component of the bigger picture. For families and businesses deciding where to locate, this video tells our story. It showcases what we as a town have to offer and how we are changing with the times while retaining our town’s charm and character.” In a collaborative effort, Geomatrix’s team wrote and produced a three minute video that captures the real essence of the town, from its history and heritage to its population, award winning schools, quality of life, neighborhoods, architecture and the arts. It highlights Monroe’s strong retail and corporate base and proximity to highways, large cities and the beautiful Connecticut coastline. And it concludes by referring to steps the town has created to make a move there easier for businesses – a new era in economic development. The pace of the video combined with a welcoming voiceover and uplifting music evokes confidence and opportunity, as it encourages viewers to “stop and spend a day or two” to discover the town’s wealth of benefits for themselves. The video is on the town’s web site, and has been shared with prospects on an ad hoc basis. It has been shared with the State Department of Economic and Community Development, and distributed on flash drives to commercial brokers. “I’ve yet to hear anything but positive feedback on it,” said Kellogg. “It has helped us in more ways than we probably even know”. Kellogg shared the process of working with the professionals at Geomatrix: “When we went to that first review of the script, I said to myself, ‘Wow, they covered all the main points that were important to me and that we wanted to make sure were covered.’ We had a few ideas to maybe refine things a little, but they really did a great job in making sure that the message we were trying to get across was there, and it was all done within a limited amount of time. Additionally, they did so in a way that flowed really well. I was very impressed in their ability to get that script done as well as they did.” As for the video itself, Kellogg said Geomatrix was right on target: “It was important to get across the type of community we are. We have a farming history and a desire to not lose that New England charm and character but at the same time we understand that we need to grow our commercial and industrial base. The things like our parks and education system and farmers’ market – the things that show how engaged people are in the community and the fact that we have a lot of opportunity here with undeveloped land were key, along with the fact that we recognize responsible growth. The folks at Geomatrix hit it on the mark. It was an extremely positive experience. All of our interactions with them were excellent and professional and they listened and they delivered.” You can build the future of your town or city with a video as well. Contact the professionals at Geomatrix to talk about how we can help. Like what you see? Want to know more? Ask us anything here—or better yet, give us a call! (203) 389-0001 Legal Video (home) Legal Video Blog Posts Corporate Video Production Services Educational Video Production Fundraising & Non-Profit Video Production Sales & Marketing Video Production Training Video Production 270 Amity Rd #222 Woodbridge, CT 06525 Phone: (203) 389-0001 Responsive Website Design by Rebel Interactive Group Geometric Productions 270 Amity Rd #222 Woodbridge, CT 06525	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3271
__label__cc	0.609845	0.390155	Traditional Health Beliefs: Theories of Illness Traditionally, illness was thought to be the result of an imbalance in the three anchors of the lokahi triangle (physical, mental/emotional and spiritual). Traditionally, illness was thought to be the result of an imbalance in the three anchors of the lokahi triangle (physical, mental/emotional and spiritual). Healing traditions addressed all three and healing occurred in a very holistic way. Many Pacific cultures share these or similar beliefs. For example, in Palau, illness could occur from “ancestral-wrongness to the spirit” (Wong et al., 2004). Effect of Historical Experiences on Health Care/Status Cultural historical trauma is the psychological, physical, social and cultural aftermath of the colonialism many indigenous people have experienced. Many health disparities suffered by Native Hawaiians today are thought to have their origins in what is referred to as “cultural historical trauma” (Blaisdell, 1996). Cultural historical trauma is the psychological, physical, social and cultural aftermath of the colonialism many indigenous people have experienced. This includes the loss of social structures, lands and ways of life, as well as the effects of racism and discrimination. The term also refers to the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding that seems to be carried forth into successive generations and affects all aspects of health. This “cultural wounding” can result in communal feelings of disruption and a sense of collective helplessness, which can in turn impact one’s “sense of self” and health seeking behaviors. Studies in Hawaii and other islands have suggested that a return to traditional diets could help lower serum cholesterol, blood sugar levels and other obesity related conditions. Specifically, Native Hawaiians have the highest incidence of morbidity and mortality and the highest age-adjusted mortality of any ethnic group in Hawai’i (Anderson et al., 2006). As an example of how westernization has affected the lifestyle of many Native Hawaiians, consider how the traditional diet, which was low in fat and high in complex carbohydrates, has changed to a typically western diet, high in fat and low in complex carbohydrates (Blaisdell, 1993, 1996). Currently, the prevalence of obesity in Native Hawaiians is 69.3% (Anderson et al., 2006). Studies in Hawaii and other islands have suggested that a return to traditional diets, focused on staples such as taro, breadfruit, and sweet potato, could help lower serum cholesterol, blood sugar levels and other obesity related conditions. Micronesia offers another insight into the effects of dietary change. Instead of fishing and agriculture, many Micronesians have come to rely on the canned meat, shortening, and salty, canned fish that is readily available as a result of Micronesia’s past “trust” relationship with the US. Consequently, rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes are all increasing (National Institutes of Health & National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), 2000).	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3272
__label__wiki	0.50066	0.50066	Gist Junction – News around the world Do Five Finger Death Punch Take an Anti-Mask Stance with “Living the Dream” Video? [Updated] October 16, 2020Entertainment, Politics Five Finger Death Punch have released a music video for the single “Living the Dream” that is rife with political symbolism. One aspect of the video appears to take an anti-mask stance, although there’s some ambiguity in the band’s intentions. In the video, civilians who wear masks are given a button that says “Compliant” emblazoned with a hammer and sickle (a longtime communist symbol). A sinister female leader who gives out the masks doesn’t have to wear one, as her button reads “Exempt”. There are also zombies hoarding toilet paper and Pulp Fiction-like gimps who are walked on a chain by the “Exempt” leader. The American flag is seen in the video with the stars replaced by the hammer and sickle, as well. When a masked ice cream truck worker is spotted with an actual American flag, Mrs. “Exempt” loses it and unleashes her gimps, who cinematically destroy the ice cream truck. The video then cuts to a television news item on “The Great Awakening”, and climaxes with a number of unmasked patriotic Americans, the members of Five Finger Death Punch included, being mowed down with gunfire. In the end, it turns out it’s all just the premonition of one of the Founding Fathers, who wakes from the dream right as he’s about to sign the U.S. Constitution. Is it all a big right-wing metaphor? Outspoken Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Zoltan Bathory released a statement that doesn’t overtly say that the video is anti-mask, but his political opinion is thinly veiled: “America is a beautiful idea that draws immigrants like myself from all over the world to the promised land of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This idea is now under siege and certain events are starting to remind me of the things many of us came here to escape… It’s not a ‘left against right’ problem but an evolutionary problem. The growing pains of a civilization that without the necessary spiritual enlightenment, arrived a bit early to a level of technology where everyone is connected. The good news is that now everyone has a voice. The bad news is that now everyone has a voice. So we are living in the manipulators’ paradise, where liars and hypocrites run unscathed, the news are just opinions, politics are a blood sport, and facts are determined by consensus instead of the truth. We as artists, however, have a unique opportunity to portray and ridicule the absurd to prevent it from becoming reality.” The song “Living the Dream” is from FFDP’s most recent album, F8, which came out in February of this year. Earlier this week, Five Finger Death Punch officially parted ways with longtime guitarist Jason Hook, who has been replaced by British guitarist Andy James. Hook had to leave the band’s February tour early due to complications from a recent gallbladder surgery, and has now made his departure permanent. “As far the reason I’m leaving… well, there really isn’t just one,” Hook said in a press release. “I’ve been in bands my entire life and I feel like I’ve done all the good that I can here. It’s time to pass the baton and move on to new challenges.” Update: Guitarist Zoltan Bathory has issued a lengthy statement denying that there is an anti-mask message in the “Living the Dream” video: “As much as some news sites used ‘anti-mask’ as a clickbait title (And I must applaud the capitalist in them or I myself would be a hypocrite) Let’s make this crystal clear: In a fictional story, Amongst shopping cart zombies, Tide Pod eating fat superheroes and all the other metaphors, why would anyone think the mask scene isn’t one. The scene in question is not about the masks… it’s NOT an Anti-Mask message… in fact you can go to FiveFingerDeathPunch.com right now and buy some cool ones. If I must explain this: The whole video is in the frame work of fiction, a dystopian nightmare of one of the founding fathers – right before he signs the constitution. Just as I prefaced it: ‘We as artists, have a unique opportunity to portray and ridicule the absurd to prevent it from becoming reality.’ The mask segments are about hypocrisy on the highest level. When the rules are made for you but those who made them are exempt. Pretty much the standard in all dictatorships and totalitarian regimes (I had the displeasure of growing up in one) hence the reference. I often say, ask us!!! The immigrants… the Cubans, the Venezuelans, the North Koreans, anyone from the former Soviet block… Talk to us and we will tell you …. WE were lucky, because we had a place to escape to. We are fortunate that we could come here…. but If America is gone, where will you go? We immigrants also remember how our freedom slipped away, how our rights were ripped from us, how we were kept under the thumb and in fear of our own governments. So maybe, just maybe… we have valuable experience we can tell you about, we can forewarn you of the things we have seen before. So We the people must do everything in our power to stay free as a society. We must prevent the rise of tyranny in all shapes and forms, we must resist the would be dictators and the totalitarian ideals. This is what the founding fathers worried about and tried to prevent by creating the constitution. Believe it. America is a miracle, and I LOVE this country… and I will never shut up about it. Anyway – not anti mask – and If you reduced this entire video to that scene and missed the metaphor behind it … Well… the good news is – It is STILL America so you have the right to have and even print your own opinion.” Watch the “Living the Dream” below and draw your own conclusions. Editor’s Note: Stay safe by picking up one of our custom face masks. A portion of the proceeds will benefit MusiCares’ COVID-19 Artist Relief fund supporting independent musicians. Entertainment News, Hard Rock, Heavy Consequence, Heavy Metal, Heavy Music News, Music, Music Videos, New Music Videos, Politics Protest Reporters Bring Their Own Security 3 months ago Israel, Bahrain Sign Deal Establishing Formal Ties 3 months ago HR McMaster: China ‘Most Crucial Challenge’ to US 3 months ago Eva Mendes Talks Raising Her Kids With Ryan Gosling and Hints at Her “Ambition” to Act Again 3 months ago Surfer Bethany Hamilton Is Pregnant, Expecting Baby No. 3 3 months ago Celebrities2,418 Entertainment7,624 Headlines1,477 Science & Technology1,524 Sport6,641 © 2021 Gist Junction - News around the world	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3277
__label__wiki	0.78457	0.78457	The Bi- and Tri-Pyramidal Structural Hulls have been hydrostatically pressure tested and proven by the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was commissioned to test and study the ability of these prototypes to withstand external pressure in their sophisticated Ocean Simulation Laboratory. SwRI is world renowned as one of the top applied research and development organizations in the United States and has considerable resources including over two million square feet of test facilities, laboratories, workshops and offices. The institute is composed of eleven technical divisions that offer a wide range of expertise and services to various industries and governmental groups. Global’s Mosquito Hawk I was the first to be tested by Southwest Research Institute in the Ocean Simulation Laboratory. The Mosquito Hawk I represents the first prototype of the Tri-Pyramidal Structural Hull and is constructed entirely of 3/4 inch thick, poplar wood plank that is simply laminated and glued together without any nuts, bolts, or screws of any kind. Before being placed in the pressure vessel for the test, the SwRI engineers measured and weighed the Mosquito Hawk I for data points to calculate the theoretical depth in water at which the structure would fail. They determined that the structure would fail at or before 98 feet of depth as represented by 42 psig in the pressure vessel. Kenneth W. Welch Jr., Global Oceanic Designs’ Chief Inventor, contended that the Mosquito Hawk I would reach at least 387 feet of depth represented by 167 psig. The stark contrast between these predictions put Mr. Welch’s universal ratio methodology that created the structures to the test. Only exceeding 387 feet would be considered a success. Finally, the testing on the Mosquito Hawk I commenced. The structure was inserted into the pressure vessel, and the Ocean Simulation Laboratory staff steadily injected more water to increase pressure and simulate depth. All eyes focused on the external digital readout of the pressure being withstood by the first Tri-Pyramidal Structural Hull. The sophisticated monitoring equipment detected no sounds or changes in the structure as the gauge showed a hydrostatic pressure equivalent to 250 feet of depth in fresh water. The SwRI engineers hypothesized that the hull suffered a pinhole breach early in the dive that allowed water to fill the hull without it ever registering as a failure of the structure. The group determined that the best course of action would be to remove Mosquito Hawk I to examine it. When removed from the tank, no water drained to indicate the location of a breach. In fact, the hull weighed exactly what it had before the test. Everyone present excitedly agreed to resume the testing after recalibration and verification of the accuracy of the instrumentation being used. After successfully completing a simulated underwater dive of more than 250% of the experts’ hypothesis, Mosquito Hawk I was already on its second simulated dive. The process was repeated, and the hull showed no signs of weakness as the pressure passed the 250 foot depth simulation again. In fact, the pressure in the tank reached 167 psig which corresponds to Mr. Welch’s prediction of the Mosquito Hawk I withstanding the pressure of 387 feet of depth in fresh water. Many of the SwRI participants were still skeptical, so the tank was depressurized to inspect the hull and recalibrate instruments. Again, the hull showed absolutely no sign of damage. Now that the Structure had reached Mr. Welch’s targeted depth nearly 300% beyond SwRI’s theoretical maximum, the Mosquito Hawk I would be taken to crush depth on the third dive to determine an actual maximum external pressure for the Hull. Soon the simulated depth of 387 feet was reached for a second time that afternoon in a third dive that converted many of the skeptics into believers. The ever-increasing hydrostatic pressure eventually overcame the Structure at 172 psig for a simulated depth of 398 feet of fresh water, and the Mosquito Hawk I became the deepest-diving wooden submersible in history. At this point, Mr. Welch knew that he had discovered a scientific phenomenon. The wooden Tri-Pyramidal Structural Hull exceeded the experts’ theoretical maximum depth by 300 feet and confirmed that his vision of a universal ratio mathematical system was worthy of further research and funding. Mr. Welch and his team returned to Southwest Research Institute to test a second version of its Tri-Pyramidal Structural Hull. The Crystal Quest I is a “double-long” Tri-Pyramidal Hull constructed entirely of one-inch-thick, clear acrylic. Like the Mosquito Hawk, its components were simply laminated and glued together rather than the use of any nuts, bolts, or screws. Crystal Quest I was equipped with batteries, lights, a camera, and a full robotics package that could be controlled via infrared commands. In fact, it functioned as an operational Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). In addition to these components, Global was excited to test the structure’s ability to withstand hydro-static pressure in the “double-long” configurations of the Tri-Pyramidal Hull. The testing process was performed in the same manner as the verification of the Mosquito Hawk I, and Crystal Quest I performed beautifully. Again, the SwRI engineers predicted a simulated depth of 486 feet as Mr. Welch insisted on 1,765 feet. The structure was overwhelmed by the hydro-static pressure at 1,803 feet. The second successful test exactly confirmed the universal ratio math for a second time. The theoretical maximum depth that Crystal Quest I would be able to withstand was calculated using the same methodology and hypothesized to be exactly half of that of the singular unit. Also, the test confirmed the ability to use components within the structure which will prove invaluable to underwater industry. When it was time to return to Southwest Research Institute’s Ocean Simulation Laboratory with a third prototype for testing, Crystal Quest II was met with anticipation. The ability to build a Bi-Pyramidal Structural Hull out of multiple different materials was next to be observed. The Hull has an interior skeleton of one-half-inch thick steel that is encased by 1 ½-inch-thick acrylic plate. The internal steel components were welded together, and the acrylic plating was secured using lamination to continue to avoid the cost and complications of nuts, bolts, and screws. The completed Crystal Quest II underwent hydrostatic pressure testing at Southwest Research Institute in the same manner as the previous Structural Models. After exceeding the experts’ calculations by over 300% again, the structure failed at 1,641 psig which represents 3,750 feet of depth in freshwater, and Crystal Quest II is recorded as the deepest-diving, non-spherical submersible in history. The series of tests performed by the Ocean Simulation Laboratory at Southwest Research Institute on the Bi-Pyramidal and Tri-Pyramidal Hulls verifies their ability to withstand external pressure as well as the universal ratio methodology used to create them. The Structures not only exceeded all conventional expectations, but also have proven to have calculable, repeatable performance characteristics. The knowledge gained through these experiments and verification has paved the way for further designs that are now available to the world for successful development under our oceans, on and above our lakes and rivers and in outer space.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3279
__label__cc	0.58122	0.41878	CIS 3050 - Systems Programming Resources to Help with Problem-Solving Handout: Search Modifiers Cheat Sheet Springer Link Journals and Ebooks Provides access to scientific articles, protocols and reference works. Full-text collection of all ACM publications, including journals, conference proceedings, technical magazines, newsletters, books, and the ACM Guide to Computing Literature. Engineering Village Contains over 20 million indexed and full-text journal articles, conference proceedings, trade publications, patents, and government reports relating to all aspects of Engineering. Dates of Coverage: 1898 - Current, Updated Daily Journals, conference proceedings and standards produced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Focus on electronics and computer science. A scientific literature database that focuses on literature in computer and information science. Includes algorithms, metadata, services, techniques, and software. Subject Matter Timeframe: Evolving Dates of Coverage: 20th Century - Current Open Access repository of more than a million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. Date of Coverage: 1991 - Current Article abstracts for the mathematical sciences literature. URL: https://guides.lib.uoguelph.ca/CIS3050 Subjects: CIS - Computing & Information Science	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3282
__label__wiki	0.918301	0.918301	Dubai Parks and Resorts Says To List On Dubai Bourse On Dec 10 The firm sold 40 per cent of its shares at Dhs1 per share to individual investors and institutions. Dubai Parks and Resorts expects to list on the Dubai Financial Market on December 10 following the completion of its Dhs2.5 billion ($680.7 million) initial public offer, the company said on Wednesday. The firm, part of Meraas Holding which is owned by Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, sold 40 per cent of its shares at Dhs1 per share. Of this, 40 per cent was sold to individual investors and 60 per cent to institutions. The tranche open to retail investors was multiple times covered, the company said in Wednesday’s statement. It reported on Friday the institutional portion of the offering had also been well oversubscribed. Dubai Parks and Resorts is developing an entertainment area in the emirate that will include theme parks and other attractions. Mary Sophia December 3, 2014	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3283
__label__cc	0.738384	0.261616	Children's apparel retailer Founded in 1969 and publicly listed since 1997. Operated over 1,000 stores in North America plus 90 international stores. Children's Place Inc USA website facebook twitter Children's Place Inc 9/100 in Fashion Transparency Index The 2020 Fashion Transparency Index reviewed 250 of the world's largest fashion brands and retailers and ranked them according to how much they disclose about their social and environmental policies, practices and impacts. Brands owned by this company scored 9%, signifying it has little to no information about their supply chain practices or policies available to the public. The average score was 23% and the highest score was 73%. Source: Fashion Revolution (2020) CEO Pay Ratio of 1,262:1 In 2020, twenty CEOs furloughed (temporarily laid off) a majority of their workforces due to COVID-19 while having made more than 1,000 times their median employee's compensation in 2019. Altogether, the total compensation of these twenty CEOs could have supported more than 30,000 jobs at their companies' median employee level of compensation. In 2019 this company's CEO was paid US$12,208,109, while the median employee pay was US$9,671, giving a CEO Pay Ratio of 1,262:1. Transparency Pledge The Apparel and Footwear Supply Chain Transparency Pledge (Transparency Pledge) helps demonstrate apparel and footwear companies' commitment towards greater transparency in their manufacturing supply chain. Transparency of a company's manufacturing supply chain better enables a company to collaborate with civil society in identifying, assessing, and avoiding actual or potential adverse human rights impacts. This is a critical step that strengthens a company's human rights due diligence. This company is not aligned with the Transparency Pledge and has made no commitment to publish supplier factory information. Source: Clean Clothes Campaign (2019) Better Cotton Initiative member This company is a member of the Better Cotton Initiative, a voluntary program which encourages the adoption of better management practices in cotton cultivation to achieve measurable reductions in key environmental impacts, while improving social and economic benefits for cotton farmers, small and large, worldwide. Source: Better Cotton Initiative (2019) Corporate responsibility claims This company has corporate responsibility claims on its website under the heading responsible sourcing and philanthropic programs. Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety member This company is a member of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a legally binding, five-year commitment to improve safety in Bangladeshi ready-made garment factories. The Alliance aims to improve worker safety in the Bangladesh garment industry by upgrading factories, educating workers and management, empowering workers, and building institutions that can enforce and maintain safe working conditions throughout Bangladesh. However it lacks an important enforcement mechanism included in the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, and unlike the Accord, the Alliance has not received the endorsement of the ILO. Source: Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (2020) SB 657 disclosure statement The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010 (SB 657) requires companies operating in California to disclose their efforts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from their direct supply chains. Follow the link to see this company's disclosure statement. Source: company website (20120) Subsidiaries Gymboree Corporation Childrens clothing retail Acquired by Bain Capital in 2010 and filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and again in 2019. The Children's Place acquired the company after its second bankruptcy. Address Secaucus, Jersey, USA Website www.childrensplace.com Gymboree Childrenswear Gymboree Babywear	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3288
__label__cc	0.711306	0.288694	Update on Franz Ferdinand and Harry Potter October 19, 2004 at 7:53 PM ET Geri HPANA (via BBC) harry potter and the goblet of fire, Franz Ferdinand We reported earlier this week that Franz Ferdinand had been approached to write songs and act in the next Harry Potter movie. Now BBC Radio has more information directly from their guitarist Nick McCarthy: "We were going to collaborate with Jarvis, Jarvis Cocker. He's written three songs already and he wants us to write another one with him, so hopefully we'll have the time and energy! No, we do have the energy, I'm sure. It's such an exciting thing to do, it's incredible. They've asked us to be in the film. Something about the four weird sisters or ugly sisters, (it's actually the Weird Sisters) playing bagpipes or something, I don't know." If we receive confirmation about their participation in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire we will be sure to let everyone know. Thanks to AdW for the tip.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3289
__label__cc	0.642907	0.357093	1301 Deleware Avenue SW Tour navigation: Tour Info \| Next River Park was designed by Charles Goodman and constructed in 1962. The gated community includes nine-story apartment buildings and unusual barrel-roofed apartments. The distinctive use of aluminum for ornament and the townhouses' roofs was the product of a partnership with Reynolds Metals. The company sponsored the project with the hope that it would result in aluminum becoming the era’s preferred roofing material. While not listed on the DC Inventory of Historic Sites, the building is historically significant in numerous ways. It is associated with master architect Charles Goodman, whose own Alexandria Home and designs in Virginia Heights are designated. Its barrel roofs and use of aluminum made a distinctive contribution to mid century modernism in Washington. River Park was also part of Southwest's sweeping urban renewal-era plan that replaced row houses with apartments, and displaced the neighborhood's most African-American residents. Led by the federal government, this redevelopment became a blueprint for similar projects across the country. At the same time, the apartments also became one of the city's first racially integrated apartment complexes. River Park's mixed legacy leaves us with an architecturally unique development and an entry into discussions of race and history in Washington. Untitled: Taken by Jacqueline Drayer “River Park ,” DC Historic Sites, accessed January 16, 2021, https://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/776. Mid-Century Modernism in Southwest	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3290
__label__wiki	0.67007	0.67007	Employee Attempts To Hide Behind Release To Quash Another Employee’s Allegations of Sexual Harassment Non-disclosure agreements have made headlines in recent months due to their use to cover up allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace. Over the summer, a bill was introduced in the United States that aimed to prevent employees from using non-disclosure agreements in instances of sexual harassment. A recent case before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice saw the court ruling on whether an employer could rely on a release to prevent a former employee from suing another former employee for sexual harassment. The employee worked as a manager of a store owned by the employer from April to August 2011. Another employee (the “Director”) was also employed before and after this period of time. Upon leaving the job, the employee received $10,000 after signing a Memorandum of Settlement and a Release, which had a paragraph reading, “This release of claims shall include any claims against anyone or any organization in any way associated with The Salvation Army which arise out of or which are in any way related to or connected with my employment or the ending of my employment.” The Director was fired on June 4, 2015 after the employer received a written sexual harassment complaint from another person. An independent investigation uncovered eight complaints by current and former employees. This is in addition to the complaint brought forward by the employee. On August 16, 2016, the employee commenced an action by statement of claim, seeking damages for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional harm, and breach of fiduciary duty by the Director. Her allegations included sexual harassment by the Director both at work and outside of work. An application for summary judgment The Director sought summary judgment dismissing the claim on the following grounds: The employee executed a full and final release; The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal has exclusive jurisdiction; and The evidence does not support the claims. In regards to the first grounds, the court did not dispute that in certain circumstances, employees and employers could enforce a contractual benefit. However in this case, the court asked whether the release was intended to cover all possible matters, and whether it was based on employment. After reviewing the release, the court found that the use of the words “arise out of…my employment” define the scope of the release. As a result, it can’t be used to prevent the disclosure of events that took place outside of the workplace. In its decision the court wrote, “I conclude the Release cannot be considered all inclusive, including the claims herein, as the scope was the employment relationship. While many of the alleged events occurred at the place of employment and, perhaps, because of the employment, sexual harassment, intimidation and other improper conduct are not connected to employment. They are clearly separate matters. “The Salvation Army, quite properly, acknowledges that sexual misconduct does not arise from the employment relationship. Here, the settlement was negotiated by the Human Resources manager. Cases involving sexual misconduct are handled by the Director of Employee Relations. The settlement pertains to severance only. As the alleged conduct falls outside of the employment relationship, specific language to such claims would need to be added to the Release to bar the present claim” Regarding the question of jurisdiction, the court held that the claim involves more than sexual harassment, including the intentional infliction of emotional harm, which is a common law claim. Finally, the court addressed the Director’s argument that the evidence does not support the claims. The court found the employee had indeed provided a detailed account of multiple events, adding that a trial should still take place regardless as victims of sexual misconduct and harassment often do not report such events. A trial would be necessary to allow the evidence to be presented. The employment law team at HMC Lawyers has over 130 years of cumulative litigation experience and offer insightful legal advice to employers and employees about matters relating all areas of employment law. Our Employment Team helps employers and employees address challenging workplace disputes with a minimum disruption to relationships wherever possible. We strive to resolve matters through mediation and other formal methods of alternative dispute resolution to minimize costs, but where necessary, are tireless trial advocates on behalf of our clients. To make an appointment with one of our Employment Team members, call 1-800-480-3534 or contact us online. We represent employers and employees in Calgary, throughout Alberta, and across Western Canada. Husband Says Lack Of Sex Should Lead To Annulment of Marriage January 14, 2021 Defendant Learns That Once Noted In Default, It Can Be Hard To Change Course January 7, 2021 Is Retroactive Child Support Possible When Father Didn’t Know Child Was Born? December 31, 2020 Insurer Claims Speeding Defendant Was Racing And Therefore Not Insured December 23, 2020 Child Support Challenged When 18-Year-Old Makes Money In High School Program December 17, 2020 Abuse of Process Access and Custody Employment Standards Code Frivolous or Vexatious Claims Insurance Policy Coverage Judge Shopping Non-Compete Clauses Occupier's Liability Occupiers' Liability Workplace Policies	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3294
__label__cc	0.596701	0.403299	Robert Rauschenberg Foundation v. Grutman Robert Rauschenberg Foundation v. Grutman, --- So.2d --- (Fla. 2d DCA 2016) In this decision, the Court considered which methodology to apply when calculating trustee fees. The beneficiary of the trust, a charitable foundation, argued that the trustee fees should be calculated using the lodestar method set forth in Florida Patient's Compensation Fund v. Rowe, 472 So.2d 1145. The trustees argued that their fees should be calculated based on the factors set forth in West Coast Hospital Ass'n v. Florida National Bank of Jacksonville, 100 So.2d 807 (Fla. 1958). The Court reviewed the history of the two methods and ultimately determined that the West Coast factors should be used to calculate trustee fees, not the lodestar method described in Lowe. As a review, the West Coast factors include: the amount of capital and income received and disbursed by the trustee; the wages or salary customarily granted to agents or servants for performing like work in the community; the success or failure of the administration of the trustee; any unusual skill or experience which the trustee in question may have brought to his work; the fidelity or disloyalty displayed by the trustee; the amount of risk and responsibility assumed; the time consumed in carrying out the trust; the custom in the community as to allowances to trustees by settlors or courts and as to charges exacted by trust companies and banks; the character of the work done in the course of administration, whether routine or involving skill and judgment; any estimate which the trustee has given of the value of his own services; payments made by the cestuis to the trustees and intended to be applied toward compensation. Thirty years after the West Coast decision, the Rowe decision adopted the lodestar method for determining reasonable attorney fees. The lodestar method calculates fees by multiplying the number of hours reasonably expended by a reasonable hourly rate. To determine the reasonable number of hours or the reasonable hourly rate, the court considers factors similar to the West Coast factors. Following the Rowe decision, the Court held that the use of the word "reasonable" in the fee statute was consistent with the lodestar method for attorneys and personal representatives in In re Estate of Platt, 586 So.2d 328 (Fla. 1991). Another fifteen years went by, and the Florida legislature enacted F.S. 736.0708(1) which provides for trustee's fees that are "reasonable under the circumstances." The Court considered the legislative history of the statute, and determined that the legislative history showed an intent to apply the West Coast factors, and that there was no legislative intent to apply the lodestar method. The Court upheld the trial court's calculation of fees using the West Coast factors and found that the court's findings regarding those factors and the reasonable fee amount were supported by the evidence presented at trial. F.S. 736.0708 lodestar reasonable fees Rowe trustee's fees West Coast Hospital Blackburn v. Boulis Dowdy v. Dowdy In re Guardianship of Hawley	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3295
__label__wiki	0.601054	0.601054	Doktor Kaboom - Wheel of Science Schorr Family Firehouse Stage 48 Willow Street, Johnson City, NY 13790 sat13apr11:00 am3:00 pmDoktor Kaboom - Wheel of ScienceSchorr Family Firehouse Stage, 48 Willow Street, Johnson City, NY 13790 DOKTOR KABOOM and the Wheel of Science DOKTOR KABOOM Doktor Kaboom! and the Wheel of Science Saturday, April 13 at 11 AM & 2 PM $10 Adult; $8 Senior/Student/Child Doktor Kaboom is returning to the Schorr Family Firehouse Stage. But he’s having trouble picking his favorite science demonstrations, so he’s bringing them all! Unfortunately, there are way too many to do them all in one show. The solution: The Wheel of Science! Doktor Kaboom has built a great big spinning wheel and labeled it with everything from optical illusions to chemical reactions to a homemade hovercraft, and more! At least a dozen fantastic demonstrations are ready to go, and wherever the wheel stops, that’s what’s next! So, step right up, and let’s spin that wheel! April 13 at 11:00 a.m. April 13 at 2:00 p.m. Saturday, April 13, 2019 at 11:00 a.m. & 2:00 p.m.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3299
__label__wiki	0.974511	0.974511	Home » News » Once indispensable to powerful pols, FERC commissioner navigates power politics Once indispensable to powerful pols, FERC commissioner navigates power politics Source: Hannah Northey, E&E reporter • Posted: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 Democratic FERC Commissioner John Norris may have a long resume of successful campaigning in Iowa, but these days he’s digging into energy policy. Photo courtesy of FERC. John Norris spent more than three decades running high-profile political campaigns in his home state of Iowa — and once ran for Congress himself. But these days, as a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, he’s more interested in the wonky world of transmission and pipeline policy than maneuvering tricky political battlefields. Norris, who once managed campaigns for John Kerry, Sen. Tom Harkin and Jesse Jackson, said he doesn’t miss the political world where he once thrived, lamenting an influx of third-party spending on campaigns. “It’s so polluted today with money, influence and politics, part of me wants to gather up the energy to take it on again, but part of me says, ‘OK, you’re making a difference where you’re at right now,'” said Norris, who made his own failed bid for the House in 2002. “And frankly, more of a difference … at FERC than I ever would have made as a member of Congress if I had been elected in 2002.” Norris, 54, once served as chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party and is a highly sought-after campaign organizer. He and his wife, Jackie — the former chief of staff for Michelle Obama — have even been dubbed Iowa’s premier power couple. But when Norris had the chance to come to Washington, D.C., he aimed directly for FERC, a powerful, independent Washington-based agency that oversees the electric grid and national pipeline infrastructure as well as hydroelectric projects. President Obama nominated Norris to serve on the commission in 2009, and Norris was recently reconfirmed to a second term ending June 2017. Despite Norris’ lengthy list of political endeavors, he’s quick to point out that complex energy policy decisions at FERC don’t leave a lot of room for politics. “I think there’s the reality check at FERC and in regulatory policy, where you have economic regulation, you have a public policy ideology among the commissioners, but you also have physics involved,” he said. Norris is most keenly focused on FERC’s landmark new rule, Order 1000, and ensuring the grid can evolve to meet the country’s energy demand. He’s also crunching the numbers to see how the system can meet Obama’s goal of reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions 83 percent by 2050. Emissions will need to drop from 2,100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2011 to 405 million metric tons in 2050, ruling out any use of coal or gas for baseload electricity generation, he said. Under that scenario, all the gas will be needed to provide backup generation for renewable resources. “I’m trying to put a more specific face on those numbers than 83 percent by 2050, because that’s the only way you can begin to plan a system to get there,” Norris said. “All we’re doing, in my mind, with Order 1000 is telling folks, ‘You can do this more efficiently if you talk to your neighbor,’ because we can’t think like islands anymore.” Even so, Norris concedes he hasn’t completely shut the door on his former life of politics in Iowa. “There’s no part of me that says, ‘I’m never doing that again,'” Norris said. Homegrown political chops Norris grew up on his family’s farm in Montgomery County, Iowa, near the town of Red Oak, where he helped his parents raise hogs and grow corn and soybeans. His brother now lives and works on the farm, and Norris’ two sisters still live in Iowa, one a doctor and the other a nurse. “I was one of those guys who got up before the sun was, and checked trap lines and then fed hogs, went to school, came home and worked in the fields until it was dark.” When he was 14, Norris began going door to door to campaign for Harkin, who was then running for a House seat, and gained the political chops that would one day make him a valuable commodity back home and in Washington, D.C. Norris said he pushed for Harkin, who was then the Democratic nominee making his first run in a Republican district, while knowing that “nine out of 10 households, if they knew a Democrat was on their porch with a piece of literature, would have turned their dogs loose.” In 1974, Harkin was elected to Congress from Iowa’s 5th District, beating out the incumbent Republican congressman, William Scherle. Norris would continue working for Harkin in junior high and high school and eventually campaigned for Harkin. Harkin ran for the U.S. Senate in 1984. After serving a decade in the House, Harkin moved to the Senate in 1984 and, after being re-elected in 2008, became the first Iowa Democrat to win a fifth term in the chamber. Harkin came to politics with a background from the 1960s in Iowa that “took campaign organization to the next level at that time,” Norris said. Harkin was successful because he used volunteers to communicate a strong message, identify voters and separate out persuadable voters to “build the decks” in voter turnout, Norris said. “Just a methodical progress towards winning numbers. People with good campaign organization skills can make great businesspeople — it’s planning, strategy and implementation.” In 1981, Norris earned an undergraduate degree from Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. He went on to serve as the director of the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition during the farm crisis, a disaster fueled by low crop prices and farm incomes that triggered widespread bankruptcies and a recession for the state’s farming communities. Thousands of farmers in Iowa went under after prices began to tank and banks were lending money hand over fist, Norris said. “It was devastating, everything from farm suicides to the huge protests or demonstrations on the state Capitol with all the white crosses for farms that had been lost,” Norris said. “It was just a devastating time for many families.” Before heading off to the University of Iowa’s law school — where he would earn an degree in 1995 — Norris took a slight detour. After running his first presidential campaign for the Rev. Jesse Jackson — who lost the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis — Norris visited friends in Greenfield, Iowa, who mentioned that a restaurant in a three-story, 1920s brick building downtown, known as “The Old Hotel,” was up for sale. Norris and a friend invested $5,000 each and geared up for the grand opening by persuading all the local newspapers and radio stations within a 30-mile radius to run stories about it. “We bought it on a song and started it with hardly any money. We put our campaign experience together, years of working on campaigns, and kind of did some creative marketing or free publicity in the area,” Norris recalled. “My dream or vision was to make enough money to develop the upper two floors, half bed and breakfast but also a conference center for people in Des Moines.” Although Norris left the business after four years, he recently stopped by the “Old Hotel” last Christmas. The current owner received a grant from the state, and the restaurant and attached hotel are now fully refurbished. “When I left the restaurant and went to law school, I thought I was on vacation,” he said, laughing. ‘No regrets’ When asked which campaign was the most difficult, Norris doesn’t hesitate: “My own.” In 2002, Norris decided to run for Iowa’s 4th District House seat when he was living in Ames — and national Democrats considered him a top-notch recruit. The expansive, rural Republican-leaning district consists of 27 counties and is located in the central portion of the state. Norris said he was prepared financially to run and knew what to expect, having “had enough experience in campaigns to know what I was getting into.” But Republican incumbent Tom Latham, a former farmer and well-known fiscal conservative, would prove to be a tough opponent. Latham won 55 percent of the vote to Norris’ 45 percent. Norris acknowledged it was a bad year for Democrats. The election, held on the heels of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, saw the GOP solidify its majority in the House and gain control of the Senate. “I walked away with no regrets and actually not discouraged about running for office or politics, although anyone who runs for office will tell you the fundraising part of it is just both dehumanizing and counterproductive to democracy and good policy,” Norris said. “But it was a good experience.” Looking back, Norris said he ran a good campaign but probably should have listened a bit less to his team of consultants and followed his instincts more. “The Washington, D.C., consultant crowd kind of does ‘group think’ and cookie-cutter messages … and sometimes misses the local attitude and feel,” Norris said. Norris would take his star power two years later to help run then-Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) presidential campaign during the Iowa caucuses. Norris helped the eventual Democratic nominee to a come-from-behind caucus victory — and helped burnish his own reputation. Kerry won 38 percent of the vote, beating out then-North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (Mo.). One watcher of Iowa politics said Norris was a “tremendous campaign” director who engineered an astounding and unexpected victory for Kerry. David Redlawsk, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University, who was working on Edwards’ campaign at the time, said Norris was seen as a key “get” at that point — an activist and key “influencer” at a senior level, and a critical player for Kerry. David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and a former political reporter for the Des Moines Register, said he first met Norris when he was working on Kerry’s campaign, and described him as a “good, progressive Democrat” who was easy to work with and extremely organized. “He really did think there was a path for Kerry to win at the time, when nobody else did,” Yepsen said. “John was just very methodical in helping Kerry win those caucuses. I didn’t write Kerry off, and I’m glad I didn’t.” Eye toward energy Norris’ future in energy policy only began to take shape in 1998 — and by accident. That year, Norris was tapped to serve as chief of staff for then-Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D). Norris said he hit it off with Vilsack and helped the governor assemble a legislative and policy team. Norris was serving as chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party at the time. Norris realized right before inauguration day that no one had been assigned to cover energy policy on a coalition of business and industry groups and utilities that were meeting regularly at the time to promote the restructuring of Iowa’s retail electricity market. “The governor and I … realized we better get in the middle of this discussion if we wanted to have any impact on what may come to the Legislature or our desks someday, either as a proposal or legislation,” Norris said. “I looked around and said, ‘Who here has some energy policy background?’ and no one raised their hand.” Norris recalled diving in, “fast and furiously reading every night” to learn the complex language of energy regulation. “Of course, my first meeting was like, ‘Who is this guy; we’ve never seen him before; what does he know about energy policy?'” Norris said, laughing. Norris eventually chaired the group and helped the committee craft legislation that passed in 2001 allowing utilities to seek certain rates — and financial stability — before building new projects. “I really redirected the ship, steered them away from restructuring and going to a deregulated market by honing on what their real objectives were — a long-term supply of energy for Iowa,” Norris said. But when Vilsack wanted to appoint Norris to the state’s utility commission in 2001, Norris had a change of heart. Norris was walking from the public utility commission’s offices back to the Capitol when he decided he needed to see Vilsack’s press secretary. “I needed to let him know, you know what, I was going to run for Congress instead,” Norris said. After Obama won in 2008, Norris and his wife — who ran Obama’s Iowa campaign — discussed whether they might want to try to work for the administration. Jackie Norris had visions of working at the Corporation for National and Community Service, while Norris had his sights set directly on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They were still uncertain whether landing those jobs would make them want move to Washington, D.C., with their three young sons. But then the president-elect and future first lady called and asked Jackie to serve as Michelle Obama’s chief of staff. That made the decision easy, Norris said. When FERC was looking for a chairman in 2009, Norris decided to throw his hat into the ring, knowing that then-Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) was backing Suedeen Kelly, while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was backing Jon Wellinghoff, who was then the acting chairman and wound up getting the job. “If they didn’t want to navigate that fight, then whoever was the Democratic commissioner had to at least be someone they would consider for chair, and I better let them know I could do it,” Norris said. Norris felt he was qualified from his years of legal and political experience, having served as chairman of the Iowa Utilities Board and president of the Organization of MISO States. In December 2009, Norris was nominated to the only open slot on the commission. Wellinghoff had been appointed chairman earlier that year. Once again, he didn’t hesitate. “When the president asks you to do something … you don’t say no,” Norris said.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3300
__label__wiki	0.697345	0.697345	Assistant/Associate Professor The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Employment Type: Permanent Faculty Vacancy ID: FAC0003083 Position Summary/Description: The Department of Epidemiology, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is recruiting for multiple full-time tenure-track positions at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor. We are seeking outstanding individuals engaged in epidemiology research, including, but not limited to, pharmacoepidemiology, real world evidence, outcomes/health services research, or epidemiologic methods with research in substantive areas such as, but not limited to, cancer, infectious diseases, endocrinology (diabetes), or women's health. Research portfolios may include a range of topics, from molecular to social determinants of disease. As a member of the Department of Epidemiology at UNC, the new faculty members would be expected to develop an independently funded research portfolio in epidemiology. They would be expected to advise students and contribute to teaching epidemiology courses. The Department of Epidemiology (http://www.sph.unc.edu/epid/) is internationally recognized as a leader in epidemiologic research and training. For the fiscal year 2019, the Department of Epidemiology was ranked first in award amounts across the university's 222 units with $64M in sponsored funding. In addition to the UNC Gillings School of Public Health, departmental faculty research programs benefit from multiple interdisciplinary centers, programs, and databases at UNC, including the Center for Pharmacoepidemiology (CPE), the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC), the Center for AIDS Research, the Causal Inference Research Group (CIRG), the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS), the Sheps Center for Health Services Research, and the Carolina Population Center (CPC). Collaborations are also encouraged with other Research Triangle institutions such as the Research Triangle Institute (RTI), Duke University, and NC State University. Candidates for the rank of Associate Professor must have a strong record of scholarship with experience as a principal investigator or collaborator on epidemiology research studies, and experience in graduate student advising and teaching. Candidates for the rank of Assistant Professor must demonstrate the potential to become independent investigators and teachers. AA/EEO Statement: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or status as a protected veteran. About The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carolina rates among the nation’s great institutions of higher education, set on an historic and beautiful campus that celebrates all four seasons. Carolina’s students, faculty and staff come here from around the world, bringing varied cultural, racial and ethnic heritages that help make UNC-Chapel Hill a thriving intellectual center. We’re repeatedly ranked the nation’s best value in higher education for students seeking to earn a college degree – the University has garnered the top spot each time since the ranking’s launch in 1998.Whether you’ve just started your career, are new to academia or are a seasoned professional with assorted campus experiences to draw on, we hope you will find a great place at Carolina. Connections working at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3301
__label__cc	0.634714	0.365286	Become a full-time Primary Care physician and work with a comprehensive, multidisciplinary team in New York City to aid an at-risk patient population. In this role, you will join NYC Health + Hospitals in their mission to serve low-income and vulnerable New Yorkers who are recovering from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. These Centers of Excellence will address the disparate outcomes communities of color experience and will be supported through New York City's NYC Care program, providing access to healthcare for all New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status or income. Be a part of healthcare history and serve others in need within Queens, New York. New York City retirement benefits Generous PTO, including 11 paid holidays Access to multiple physician specialties on-site Guaranteed salary and generous incentives Monday to Friday schedule, some weekends as needed To address the needs of COVID-19 survivors in New York City, NYC Health + Hospitals is opening three COVID Centers of Excellence in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens - in the communities of color that have been hardest hit by the disease. These new Gotham Health facilities provide comprehensive outpatient primary care services that support COVID-19 recovery. They will offer pulmonary care, radiologic and diagnostic services, behavioral health care, medication access and dedicated rooms to safely isolate and test patients. Queens, the easternmost and largest of New York City's five boroughs, is home to two of the world's busiest airports: JFK International and LaGuardia. Sports lovers enjoy watching the New York Mets play or catching the world's best tennis players in action during the US Open. Foodies love the authentic cuisine, from Greek delights to Korean barbecue to French fare. Contemporary art museum MoMA PS1 and the Socrates Sculpture Park are found in Queens - one place where you can truly discover the world.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3302
__label__cc	0.571802	0.428198	Home > Biological and Medical Informatics "The application of computational techniques to biological problems is incredibly exciting. We can look at the world at so many levels and ask hard questions about how things work or why a process happens. It is a testament to scientific advancement and collaboration that I feel lucky to build from." — Elena Caceres, PhD student, Biological and Medical Informatics Biological and Medical Informatics The Biological and Medical Informatics program equips PhD students with the skills and knowledge in applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, physics, chemistry, and biology needed to study biological composition, structure, function, and evolution at the molecular, cellular, and systems levels. Students are involved with gathering, storing, analyzing, predicting, and disseminating complex information. The field is essential, for without quantitative analysis of the massive and growing amounts of biological data generated by various systems, biology and -omics data cannot be interpreted or exploited. UCSF researchers pioneered many bioinformatics areas including data visualization, systems biology, protein structure prediction, and drug design. With faculty interests that include genetics, genomics, evolution, protein structure, systems biology, host-pathogen interactions, drug design, and cellular biology, students have a wide range of areas to explore and integrate. Members of the Bioinformatics faculty include members of the National Academy of Sciences, Howard Hughes Investigators, Searle Scholars, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) New Innovator Awardees. Over 40 faculty members teach and mentor students in the BMI program. Faculty members are affiliated with the departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Biophysics, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Microbiology and Immunology, Medicine, Neurology, and Surgery; as well as the Gladstone Institute and Institute for Human Genetics. sub-disciplines The BMI program is a member of the Quantitative Biosciences Consortium (QBC), and a founding member of the Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology (iPQB) at UCSF. bioinformatics and computational biology complex biological systems The BMI program office is located at the Mission Bay campus. Visit the program website for more information. The BMI program is offered by the UCSF Graduate Division, administered by the UCSF School of Pharmacy, and delivered by faculty members in the UCSF schools of pharmacy and medicine. < more programs Julia Molla Ryan Hernandez, PhD BMI.UCSF.EDU See program statistics.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3304
__label__wiki	0.818549	0.818549	Spandex Headband Collection Thin Elastic Headband Collection Terry Towelling Headband Collection Wide Cotton Headband Collection Nike Headbands and Hairbands Hair Elastic Head Tie Headbands About Grand Headbands Headband News Custom Made Headbands Sponsorship Initative HEADBAND CHAMPIONS; ELAINE THOMPSON Dec 04, 2020 by Ed Band comments 0 For most of the superstar athletes in the world, their greatness was evident from an early age, their potential was a herald, but not for Elaine Thompson-Herah. A two-time Olympic champion with a love for flower headbands. Born in Manchester Parish, Jamaica, into a deeply religious family with no real history or affinity with sports, Thompson was not a stand-out athlete in any discipline. However, as a child growing up, Thompson has described her earliest contact with sprinting, citing her love for cartoons and a handy trick to not forget what errand she was running. Raised by her grandmother, she always had to run errands for her to the nearest shop or market, and sprinting meant reaching the shops before she could forget the item to buy, and to make it back home quickly in time to catch her favourite cartoons. One with a little rebellious spirit (like the rest and best of us), Thompson would partake in the Jamaican High School Championships, an event where the potential of stars such as Usain Bolt, Shelly-Anne Fraser-Pryce, and Yohann Blake, shone for all of Jamaica to see. Finishing fourth in the 100m at the championship, Thompson would be left out of her track and field team two years later, before being found by long time coach and eventual friend, Stephen Francis. Under Francis’ tough love and discipline, Thompson would break out internationally in 2015, with a scintillating performance at the IAAF World Championships in Beijing. Pushing favourite and eventual winner, Dafne Schippers to the brink, Thompson would run 21.66, a personal best for her at 200m. Though the Jamaican team would win gold at the 4x100m relay, Thompson would set her sights on individual greatness. 2016 would cement her superstardom and place in history as she claimed gold in both the 100m and 200m at the Rio Olympics, making her the only woman alongside the legendary Florence Joyner Griffith, to capture gold in both events in the same Olympics. She is currently ranked third and second respectively, in the women’s 100m and 200m world rankings. She shares the Jamaican national sprint record at 10.70, alongside the incredible Shelly-Anne Fraser-Pryce. At the launch of her own Nike collection back in 2017, Elaine Thompson talked about her love for headbands and what pivotal role the accessory plays in her career. Professional sports is a world where confidence and energy separate the best from the rest of the pack, and for Thompson, her confidence is deeply rooted in her style and three main accessories; her sneakers, spikes, and headband. She revealed that she personally picks out these three items, as they are part of her boost and confidence for every race. The now 28-year old’s headband of choice is flower headbands. Injuries have kept her from performing at the level the world witnessed in Rio, but Thompson is returning to her best as the Olympics close in, and has already shown some remarkable performances in 2020, running a season-best 10.73s in July. Declaring her desire and motivation to retain her Olympic titles, Thompson is now an underdog, a position she is comfortable with and welcomes with relish and a flower headband. There are no comments for this article. Be the first one to leave a message! Grand Headbands specialises in sport headbands that are as stylish as they are functional. Our headbands are hand-made and machine-made, using high quality materials. FAQs Contact Copyright © 2021 Grand Headbands . Powered by Shopify	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3305
__label__wiki	0.817847	0.817847	Front Matter The Beginning of the U.S Franklin's Return Troubles After the War The Constitution The First President Washington's Troubles A Wonderful Invention Death of Washington The U.S. Buys Land War With African Pirates Death of Somers The First Steamboat The Gerrymander The War of 1812 "Don't Give Up the Ship" The Star-Spangled Banner Clinton's "Big Ditch" More Land Bought Jackson Stories Jackson's Presidency New Inventions Whitman's Ride The Mormons The First Telegraph The Mexican War The Slavery Quarrel Daniel Webster's Youth Webster's Speeches Early Times in California Discovery of El Dorado Rush to California The Underground Railroad The First World's Fair John Brown's Raid Lincoln's Youth The First Shot The Call to Arms The President's Decision Admiral Farragut The Monitor and Merrimac The Penninsular Campaign Barbara Frietchie Lincoln's Vow The Battle of Gettysburg The Taking of Vicksburg Riots, Raids, and Battles The Burning of Atlanta The March to the Sea Sheridan's Ride The Doings of the Fleet Lee's Surrender Decoration Day Lincoln Stories Lincoln's Rebukes A President's Son A Noble Southerner Hard Times in the South The Atlantic Cable Best Way to Settle Quarrels Our One Hundredth Birthday Gold for Greenbacks A Clever Engineer Death of Garfield The Celebration at Yorktown The Great Statue A Terrible Flood Lynch Law The Great White City The Explosion of the Maine The Battle of Manila Hobson's Brave Deed Surrender of Santiago The Hawaiian Islands The Annexation of Hawaii The Philippine War Assassination of McKinley The Panama Canal Roosevelt's Administration Two Presidents German Views The World War Since the World War Story of the Great Republic - Helene Guerber The First President The new Constitution having been accepted by enough states, the Continental Congress decided that its rule should end, and the new Constitution go into force, on the 4th of March, 1789. Having arranged for the beginning of the new government, the Continental Congress, after ruling our country nearly fifteen years, ceased to exist. As had been decided, the electors chosen by each state met in February, to vote for our first President. Each man wrote Washington's name at the top of his ballot, and thus the "Father of his Country "was chosen first President of the United States of America. Now, it had been settled in the Constitution that the man who received the next largest number of votes should be Vice President. But while all were agreed that Washington was the best man in the country, and voted for him, the second name was not the same on every paper. Still, when the votes were sent to Congress and counted, it was found that John Adams had received more than any one else, and he became our first Vice President. As soon as the election was over, the news was carried by a horseman to Mount Vernon, where Washington was busy farming. Although several attempts had been made to reward him for his services, he had steadily refused all pay. When the state of Virginia wished to honor its greatest citizen, it made him a present of some bonds. But, true to his principles, Washington would not accept any reward. Still, finding it would hurt the Virginians' feelings if he entirely refused their gift, he suggested that the money be used to found the university which now bears his name and that of Robert E. Lee, the great Southern general. Washington had hoped he would never have to leave his beautiful home again, but when he heard that he was elected President, he quickly and unselfishly prepared to go and serve his country in a new way. All along the road to New York he was welcomed by bell-ringing, speeches, receptions, etc., the people all trying to show their love and respect for the man who had brought them safely AT TRENTON. through the Revolutionary War. When he came to Trenton Bridge, where he had once won a great victory, thirteen young girls, all dressed in white, strewed flowers under his horse's feet. Over his head were great green arches, bearing mottoes, one of which said that Washington had watched over the mothers, and would therefore take good care of the daughters. Here, too, a band played music written in Washington's honor, and called the "President's March." As there were no ferries in those days such as we have now, Washington was rowed across to New York in a barge, which was manned by thirteen sailors in fine new red, white, and blue uniforms. Owing to the slow means of travel, Congress had assembled on the 6th of April, instead of on the 4th of March, as had first been planned; and Washington's inauguration did not take place till the 3oth of April. For this solemn ceremony, Washington was clad in garments every thread of which had been grown and made in America. To give all the people a chance to see him, Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall, New York, on the very spot where his statue now stands, on Wall Street. FEDERAL HALL, NEW YORK Laying his hand upon a Bible, which has been carefully preserved, he then publicly took this oath: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." As you see, this is a very solemn promise, and it was no easy task that Washington had thus undertaken. The Congress was all new, President and Vice President were new, and there was no one there to tell them what they were to do. The United States was then, it is true, only a third-rate country (of no more importance than Belgium or Denmark is now), but the men at the head of the government had to behave in such a way that every one would learn to respect it.. Besides, as there were then no other republics in the world which could serve as models, except Switzerland, it was hard for them to know just how a republic should act. WASHINTON'S COACH Nevertheless, Washington proved calm, firm, and just, as ever, and order was soon brought out of chaos. Washington, who was addressed as "Mr. President," chose Jefferson, Hamilton, Knox, and Randolph to help him govern, and they formed what is now called the Cabinet. He also selected judges, making John Jay the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and sent ministers to the principal countries in Europe. To make sure that the people, who had been accustomed to the pomp of royal governors, should not fail in respect for their new government, Washington, who was always very dignified, generally rode out in a carriage drawn by six horses, and escorted by powdered and liveried servants. He also gave stately dinner parties and balls, which latter he generally opened himself by dancing a minuet. Besides that, he held receptions, to which every one could come. He did this because all men have equal rights in a republic, and, being the representative of the poor as well as of the rich, he said both had the same right to visit him. Congress was very busy for several years, for the money affairs of the United States were in a bad condition. Some of the members said that our country would never be able to pay all the money it owed. But it was finally decided that not only the debts of the Continental Congress should be paid, but also the state war debts. This was a large sum, amounting to about seventy-five million dollars; but Congress promised to pay it, saying it would be as dishonest for a country to refuse to pay every penny owed, as for a private person to do so. Congress also put a tariff upon goods brought from abroad; arranged, in obedience to the Constitution, that a census should be taken every ten years; and decided that the United States should have a national bank, and a mint to coin the money, used in the country. A BALL IN WASHINGTON'S TIME Hamilton had a great deal to do with arranging money matters; and he suggested that instead of using the English money table, we should adopt the dollar as the unit of money.. This unit was then divided into hundredth parts, or cents, coins which were first used by our government in 1793. In fact, Hamilton's ideas proved so good that the great orator Webster once said in speaking of him: "He touched the dead corpse of public credit, and it sprang upon its feet."	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3308
__label__cc	0.683111	0.316889	Tag: Manchester The Corn Exchange, Manchester September 22, 2019 hilaryshistorypages My photograph of the Corn and Produce Exchange, founded in Manchester in 1837, altered in 1897 and rebuilt in 1903. I worked here in the early 1980s when it was a slightly more hidden gem, hidden behind a triangular office block (Royal Insurance?) and opposite the white-tiled Manchester Arndale Centre. It is greatly changed now and looks across a public space to a new Metrolink stop; the interior is also greatly changed, it was very dark and tired when I worked there, a preponderance of brown wood and green tiles, now it is home to many restaurants and cafe bars. All of which made it difficult to choose my best picture from the last few years; this picture needed quite a lot of editing to remove tables and chairs, unsightly electricity cables and boxes and the legal signage for wheelchair users, etc., (so it’s good to know that these things are in place), and to make it more as I remembered it, but I also liked the way the sun caught the writing around the door and highlights the cleaned-up ‘heraldry’ above. I think it shows the entrance to the building in a good light. (Edited with Affinity Photo) Tagged Corn Exchange, Manchester The Daily Express Building, Manchester Daily Express Building, Manchester We called it the Daily Express Building (it’s just the Express Building on the photo) and we used to pass it late at night (as Great Ancoats Street in Manchester was then on the direct route from Wrexham to Leeds, no M56 or M62) and we were on our way, in our Morris Traveller, to visit mum’s cousin in Leeds. Every time we went past the building mum and dad would point it out because, in those days and late at night, the building was lit up like Blackpool Illuminations and the printing presses were running, much of them visible through those wonderful glass walls-of-windows. It really was a sight to behold. Photo taken 4th Sept 2019 with some cropping and editing to remove traffic and huge advertising signs. Tagged Daily Express, Express, Great Ancoats Street, Manchester, newspaper, printing Anglo Scots Research The Anglo Scottish Family History Society is part of the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society at http://www.mlfhs.org.uk. The ‘Anglo-Scots’ was formed by members of the MLFHS who also have ancestors across the border and they typically hold a meeting once a month at the Manchester Central Library. Members of the MLFHS, however, have access to the Society’s forum, an excellent place to ask for help with Manchester and Scottish research. Tagged Anglo Scots, Anglo-Scots, ASFHS, Manchester, MLFHS, Scotland	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3309
__label__cc	0.736284	0.263716	Professor Paul Henman Paul Henman is Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Futures and Professor for Digital Sociology and Social Policy in the School of Social Science, University of Queensland. For more than 20 years, Paul has examined the nexus between digital technologies, government policy and public administration. With degrees in computer science and social science, and previous employment in government, his research is academically innovative with real world impact. Paul’s publications include Governing Electronically (Palgrave 2010) and Performing the State (Routledge 2018). As Principal Investigator of an ARC-funded project on Government webportals as new government institutions, he is using innovative digital methods to understand and evaluate government online. Paul is also Chief Investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society (2020-27).	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3313
__label__wiki	0.729731	0.729731	Human Capital and Global Working Group Hillel Rapoport hillel.rapoport@psemail.eu Paris School of Economics Network Member Hillel Rapoport is Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a research fellow at IZA, CESifo, Harvard Center for International Development, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, CEPII and EUI's Migration Policy Center. A member of Bar-Ilan University’s Economic Department until 2013, he also held visiting positions at Stanford University (in 2001-03) and at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (in 2009-11). Since 2008 he is the scientific coordinator of the “Migration and Development” annual conferences jointly organized by the World Bank and the French Development Agency. His research focuses on the growth and developmental impact of migration and on the economics of immigration, diversity, and refugees’ relocation and resettlement. Rapoport is the editor of two books (“Brain gain or brain drain: the international competition to attract talent”, Oxford University Press 2012, and “The economics of immigration and social diversity”, Elsevier, 2006) and has published research articles in general economics journals such as Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and in field journals such as Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Public Economics, World Development or International Migration Review. Inequality: Measurement, Interpretation, and Policy (MIP) The Changing Structure of Immigration to the OECD: What Welfare Effects on Member Countries? HCEO hceo@uchicago.edu HCEO is run by the Center for the Economics of Human Development and is funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3314
__label__wiki	0.688822	0.688822	Faustus: That Damned Woman 22nd Jan 2020 - 4th Apr 2020 Join our mailing list to receive regular updates from Headlong. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme People, Places and Things The Absence of War The Nether Language Close Sarah Grochala \| Oct. 14, 2013 Gavin Spokes, Christopher Patrick Nolan, Hara Yannas, Mark Arends, Tim Dutton, Stephen Fewell, Mandi Symonds and Matthew Spencer in 1984. Photo: Tristram Kenton. Language is more than simply words. It shapes the way we think. In the appendix to 1984, Orwell tells us that Newspeak is a language deliberately designed to limit the range of people’s thoughts and to make certain ideas unthinkable. It can be argued, however, that all languages, like Newspeak, limit the range of ideas that it is possible for people to understand. Words represent ideas. For example, the word ‘tree’ represents the idea of a ‘tree’ – the large woody leafy plant that you find might lining the streets of a city, in gardens, in parks, in the countryside or in forests. When I talk to you about a tree, we both have the same basic image of what I mean in our heads, even if the tree in my head is an pine tree and the tree in yours is a chestnut tree. The trees we imagine might be slightly different but we both understand the basic idea that is being communicated. We like to think of language as something natural and innate. You could argue that the word for the idea of a ‘tree’ is ‘tree’ because there is something innately tree-like about the sound of the word. The essence of the idea of a ‘tree’ is contained in the word ‘tree’ and that is why this particular word is associated with this particular idea. If this was true then the word for the idea of a ‘tree’ in every language would surely be the same or at least very similar in sound. However, the word for the idea of a ‘tree’ in different languages is very different. For example, in French the idea of a ‘tree’ is represented by the word ‘arbre’ whilst in German it is represented by the word ‘baum’. These two words for the idea of a ‘tree’ do not sound similar in any way. There is no innate relationship between the word and the idea that it represents. Instead, the word ‘tree’ represents the idea of a ‘tree’ because the group of people who speak the English language have agreed that this is so. If language is built out of words which represent ideas, then it makes sense that the range of words within a language reflects the ideas that are present in the culture of the group of people who speak it. Different languages present different understandings of the way that the world works. The French linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, argues that an Inuit would not understand what an English person meant when they used the word ‘snow’ because for the Inuit there is no one thing that is ‘snow’. Instead, for Inuit people, there are many different ideas of ‘snow’ because it snows a lot and in lots of different ways. Each Inuit idea of ‘snow’ would have its own features which defined it from other types of snow and there would be a different word to represent each different kind of ‘snow’. The Inuit language, Saussure argues, has lots of different words for snow because this reflects the way that Inuit people experience their world. In contrast, the English language has a large number of words for different types of water, while Welsh language has the most single words to describe different types of rain, which would suggest that the both the English and the Welsh understanding of the world is a very watery one. If the words of a language reflect the way in which the people who speak that language understand the world, then it is also possible that our understanding of the world is shaped by the language that we speak. Words not only reflect the way that we understand the world but they define it as well. Is it possible to think an idea if there are no words in the language that you speak to represent it? If you spoke a language, such as Newspeak, that had no words to describe the idea of ‘freedom’ would you be able to even think about the idea of being ‘free’? Would you have any understanding of what ‘freedom’ was? Or would the thought be completely unthinkable? Orwell argues that in Newspeak, where there is no word to describe the idea of ‘freedom’, it would be as impossible for a person understand the idea of ‘freedom’ as it would for a person who had never heard of chess to understand that the words ‘queen’ or ‘rook’ could represent chess pieces. Orwell’s Newspeak is an extreme example of the ways in which a language could be used to limit the range of people’s thoughts. However, the languages that we speak everyday do shape both the way that we think about the world and what it is possible for us to think in subtle ways. Orwell and 1984 Descartes Demon Headlong Theatre 17 Risborough St London SE1 0HG Copyright Headlong 2018 info@headlong.co.uk Reg no. 65478136589 Charity no. 267965 Privacy Terms Digital	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3315
__label__cc	0.655414	0.344586	WE ARE HEALDSBURG FOREVER Why a locally focused community foundation & endowment? Acting as a central point of funding, we capture the collective generosity in our community, and make all of our local nonprofits stronger with efficient use of donor funds while helping build their capacity. Founded in 2003 to serve the greater Healdsburg area—including Geyserville, Alexander Valley, Dry Creek Valley, and parts of Russian River Valley – Healdsburg Forever has granted over $1.4 million to local nonprofit organizations since its inception. Now with an endowment of $1.7 Million, we continue to distribute annually to dozens of grantees. Here’s the inspiring story of our early years by founding community members. In 2003 a group of community minded residents was committed to ensuring there would be a lasting resource devoted to supporting quality of life in the Healdsburg and Geyserville communities… a local community endowment. As explained by one of the founders, “We chose an endowment process for these funds to be distributed because we wanted a permanent and secure source of money that would always be available for whatever the needs of Healdsburg in Geyserville were in the future. Nonprofits come and go, the needs of the community change over time. We wanted a source of revenue that was available for whatever was most important for the community at any given time.” The initial organizers gathered a group of people who together spent six months to a year creating the Healdsburg Area Fund (later renamed Healdsburg Forever). Established as an affiliate of Community Foundation of Sonoma County, Healdsburg Forever benefits from the foundation’s fiscal oversight and back office expertise, while a local board and grants committee is knowledgeable about, and connected to, the specific needs of our local communities. Thanks to an anonymous donor, Healdsburg Forever was offered a $500,000 matching challenge grant over the first three years to build up initial endowment funds. Anyone who made a contribution before May 15, 2004 was included in the Founder’s Circle. In 2004, Healdsburg Forever distributed $20,000 to local nonprofits serving Healdsburg and Geyserville. Grants awarded grew to $100,000 in 2014, $190,000 in 2019, and totaled $1.3 million throughout the period from 2004 to 2019. During this same period, the Healdsburg Forever Endowment grew to reach $1.6 million. On its 10-year anniversary, Healdsburg Forever launched its “Leave Your Mark” campaign, generating several million dollars in future legacy giving. Healdsburg Forever formed a Grants Committee consisting of local residents knowledgeable about local nonprofits and local needs. Their expertise and a well- designed annual review process allow Healdsburg Forever to identify the most important needs of our communities each year. The grants process along with the model of a sustainable community endowment have proven invaluable in helping our community weather the ups and downs of the economy and be in tune with evolving local needs. During the 2009-2010 recession, Healdsburg Forever’s grants were designed to help nonprofits keep the doors open. In the ensuing years, Healdsburg Forever’s strategic grant-making helped incubate nascent nonprofits such as Farm to Pantry as well as support a variety of critical programs across 60 diverse nonprofits serving our communities. As a result of recent wildfires impacting our communities Healdsburg Forever again pivoted to allow 2019 grants awarded to be used for general operations providing nonprofits needed flexibility to withstand these crises. Healdsburg and Geyserville are built around our greatest treasures: the beauty of the environment, agriculture and those who farm the land, wine, food and hospitality, our cultural heritage and diversity. COVID-19 and wildfires have hit our communities hard. With grapes left unharvested and restaurants, hotels, wineries and shops sitting empty, people who live and work here are struggling to afford food and housing, are juggling childcare shortages and home-based learning, and are facing a health crisis unlike anything we have seen before. Healdsburg Forever provided two rounds of emergency grants totaling $142,000 to eight organizations providing essential safety net services to the most vulnerable in Healdsburg and Geyserville. However, the demand for services continues to grow exponentially. In just 6 weeks our community, stepped up to the challenge, maximized the generous $150,000 matching grant from the Community Foundation Sonoma County, and enabled us to exceed our $300,000 goal. At year-end, the “Healdsburg Forever Community Impact Fund” rang in $360,000. Your generous donations will be deployed quickly to help the most vulnerable in our Healdsburg/Geyserville communities. Our vision is to ensure that the Healdsburg-Geyserville area is a sustainable, inclusive community in which all individuals have equal opportunity to thrive. By utilizing our local expertise and extensive community involvement, we identify and fund priority needs of nonprofits serving Healdsburg and Geyserville to nurture and sustain a diverse, thriving and more equitable community. We accomplish this through careful oversight of our endowment and generous donor philanthropy. A LOCALLY FOCUSED COMMUNITY FOUNDATION & ENDOWMENT Sustainability has been a key goal since the inception of Healdsburg Forever and what better way to achieve this than establish a Healdsburg area endowment? Having our endowment invested with the Community Foundation Sonoma County (CFSC) combines the best of fiduciary strength and entrepreneurial agility. Through CFSC we can access systems and an experienced team of a recognized nonprofit leaders, while our all-volunteer board of local residents has on-the-ground knowledge of the unique challenges of our local communities. Acting as a central point of funding, Healdsburg Forever captures the collective generosity in our community, and makes all of our local nonprofits stronger through efficient use of donor funds supporting both critical programs as well as operational capacity. CAROL BEATTIE Some text about Carol here. BARBARA LANIN Some text about Barbara here. CLAIRE BURDETT Some text about Claire here. DAVE RING Some text about Dave here. AN INVESTMENT FOR GOOD IN OUR COMMUNITY GIVE WITH CONFIDENCE We are a volunteer board, with no paid staff, allowing your philanthropic dollars to go directly to grantees. LEVERAGE OUR EXPERTISE Our rigorous application and funding processes ensure grants go to worthy organizations quickly. Our experienced grants team knows both local community needs and the network of local nonprofits. We assemble a portfolio of grants for maximum impact. WE SUPPORT CRITICAL AND EMERGING NEEDS In this time of multiple crises, we are providing essential safety net services which help individuals and families stay healthy, housed, fed and engaged in learning. AN ENDOWMENT IS FOREVER The very definition of sustainability. Interest distribution provides a stable stream of funds for grant making to local nonprofits. HOW HEALDSBURG FOREVER IS MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN OUR COMMUNITY	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3316
__label__wiki	0.897241	0.897241	Health Ministry to form 'Working Group' with private players Health Minister JP Nadda said the Working Group is aimed at collaborating with the private sector to use their expertise for achieving country's health goals. कश्मीर में मिशन 44 हासिल करेंगे नड्डा New Delhi: Health Minister JP Nadda on Thursday announced forming of a 'Working Group' by the ministry with private sector players to develop alternate health care models under public-private partnership in a time bound manner. Addressing 12th India Health Summit, Nadda said the Working Group is aimed at collaborating with the private sector to use their expertise for achieving country's health goals. "We get wonderful ideas from the companies. We have been interacting with each other. But the problem is we discuss and disperse. There is no concrete approach on how we would go about it. "Therefore, I declare to form a Working Group with the ministry and the private leaders to come up with alternate and rare PPP models in a time bound manner," he said. He said the Working Group will break the barriers to help government collaborate with private sector. "Many new ideas come but they need to be examined. And this is only possible if we hold intense discussions on issues, understanding about them and see how successful models can come up," the minister said. Nadda said government needs special support from private health leaders in areas like infrastructure, alternative finance arrangements, skills and insurance issues. "We really need to discuss these areas and decide how we will go forward. As you are the leaders in the health industry and catering to 70 per cent of the health care, you have a major role to play and your support will be useful. IT and accessibility are the areas where we can go forward among others," he said. He said stakeholders are important for key interventions to improve the health care system as the government faces several challenges. "We work under certain challenges. We can view, address and share the problems but stakeholders are the persons who know where and how the interventions are required to make the health care facilities better," he said. Nadda said government has identified 184 high burden districts which need special attention in term of health care services. "Government has mapped out 184 districts which are high focus districts which need great attention. If we are able to address the issues of these regions, we will improve the health parameters of the country," the minister said. Speaking about various challenges faced by the government in health care system, Nadda said variation between health facilities in rural and urban areas, inequity in public and private health facilities and financial problems are some of the major issues. "There is a great variation of health services in rural and urban area. There has been more concentration on urban areas while the rural are unattended. So we are trying to focus on that. Then there is inequity between public and private health services. Though 70 per cent of the needs catered by private sector, we face difficulty in regulating them," he said. Nadda also expressed concern about the lack of health infrastructure in eastern part of the country. "North and Eastern parts of the country need special attention as they still lack important health facilities. Whereas southern and western parts are doing good as they have better infrastructure and educational institutes," he said. health infrastructure Health Care System	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3317
__label__wiki	0.937721	0.937721	Schankman’s St. Louis: Young Guy, Old Tunes-St. Louis’s Arcadia Dance Orchestra By Paul Schankman T.J. Müller is 27 years old, but his favorite music comes from an era almost 100 years old. Müller has been fascinated by the boozy sounds of jazz music from the 1920s ever since he was a boy growing up in England. “I can remember my mom singing the tune ‘Babyface’ to me,” Müller said. As a kid he began playing music when he was five, and by the age of eight had already decided he wanted to be a professional musician. His father, a vicar with a penchant for jazz, bought him a used trumpet for £2.00. Later, he would gain experience as a member of his family’s band. But it was at the age of 20 that he got his big break. Pokey LaFarge and his St. Louis-based band was touring the U.K while Müller was in college. Müller connected with him and when he heard LaFarge was looking for a trumpet player, Müller got the job, touring with the band for three years. That connection to St. Louis inspired his interest in music and musicians from the Gateway City. “There is something about the underdog which is always interesting, and I think St. Louis has always been an underdog in terms of the narrative of music history,” Müller said. Müller moved to St. Louis, eventually starting his own band called “The Gaslight Squares,” an obvious nod to the city’s musical past. Then, two years ago, he decided to try something even more musically ambitious. “I felt it would be incredibly fun to try and put together a group that could, as authentically as possible, recreate (the music of the 1920s) having an 11-piece orchestra playing regularly in St. Louis, playing the exact same sort of music and repertoire you could expect to hear in St. Louis if you were to travel back in time.” Müller called his new group “The Arcadia Dance Orchestra,” named for the long-gone Arcadia Ballroom that once stood in Midtown St. Louis. At the orchestra’s performances, Müller frequently talks about the history of music in St. Louis during the 1920s as part of his patter between songs. “There is something about the music in the 1920s. I feel like we were moving out of the old world and into the new, so everything is exciting and challenging and urgent,” Müller said. Though Müller had very little formal music training, he met, and has been mentored by local jazz legend Bill Mason, still playing his coronet at age 90. Müller found an old book about how to arrange music from the 1920s, and he uses it to create the charts the Arcadia Dance Orchestra plays. He also transcribes music from old recordings and has built a few instruments of his own to make the arrangements sound more authentic to the period. “I am trying to make that music more and more specific to St. Louis. I am trying add tunes which I have strong evidence that St. Louis bands were regularly performing and playing and furthermore trying to find tunes composed by St. Louisans,” Müller said. The Arcadia Dance Orchestra plays concerts six to eight concerts at year. It has also recently added a monthly rehearsal open to the public for a small cover charge at The Focal Point in Maplewood, at which members of the audience can dance. “It just has to be gradual,” Müller added. “I’ll see how far I can push it before I fly to close to the sun.” Pokey LaFarge, Just a Plain Ole Midwestern Boy The St. Louis Cabaret Project Sponsors Monthly Open Mic Night ArtsDance It’s Not a Square Dance: It’s a Contra Dance!	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3319
__label__wiki	0.924938	0.924938	The Bellefonte Central Railroad (reporting mark BFC) was a shortline connecting Bellefonte and State College, Pennsylvania. Constructed in the late 19th century to haul local iron ore to furnaces in the Bellefonte region, it later hauled freight traffic to Penn State and lime for steelmaking from local quarries. The line to State College was abandoned in 1974, and most of the remaining railroad in 1984, but a small portion is still used by the Nittany and Bald Eagle Railroad. Claims to Fame Mike Bezilla notes several "claims to fame" belonging to the railroad: Had a governor as its president? Pennsylvania Governor James A. Beaver of Bellefonte served as first president of the Buffalo Run, Bellefonte, and Bald Eagle Railroad, later reorganized as the Bellefonte Central. Carried the President of the United States? President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, and their party rode to the Penn State campus over BFC rails aboard their private car, the Ferdinand Magellan on May 9, 1953. Had an employee who was the first to receive benefits under the Railroad Retirement Act? In 1935, retired BFC car repair foreman William Billett received Railroad Retirement Board Check No. 1. Originated more lime and stone than any other shortline in the nation? It originated approximately 14 million tons of quarry products during its corporate lifetime, including 383,737 tons in the peak year of 1925 and 381,183 tons in the second-highest year of 1955. Had a locomotive that was designated the “All American Short-line Diesel”? Trains magazine bestowed that singular honor on BFC SW1200 No. 5624 in 1987. [The initial content of this page was taken verbatim from Wikipedia. There is no intent to claim authorship of the work. It is desired to annotate this work herein.] The railroad was originally incorporated on September 21, 1882, as the Bellefonte and Buffalo Run Railroad. The purpose of this line was to connect Bellefonte with Pennsylvania State College, and to tap the iron ore deposits along Buffalo Run. This would replace the inefficient wagons used to haul ore to the iron furnaces at Bellefonte. The local iron and agricultural interests who chartered the road contracted out construction to Frank McLaughlin, a Philadelphia businessman, in exchange for a majority of the stock; he turned construction over to his business associates, the Collins brothers. Experienced contractors, they were working at the time on the Beech Creek Railroad, and began grading the Bellefonte & Buffalo Run in March 1883. However, the Bellefonte & Buffalo Run was graded to minimal standards of engineering, with little earthmoving and many curves. In the meantime, McLaughlin and others chartered the Nittany Valley and Southern Railroad in January 1883. This line was proposed to run from Bellefonte to Mill Hall, providing a connection with the Beech Creek Railroad. (The Bellefonte & Buffalo Run's only connection in Bellefonte was the Pennsylvania Railroad.) However, capital was not forthcoming, and construction of the Bellefonte & Buffalo Run ended with the completion of the grading from Bellefonte to Struble in June 1883. This grade followed Buffalo Run from Bellefonte to Waddle, where a horseshoe curve carried it across and out of the valley and it climbed eastward to the summit at Alto. From there it descended to the iron ore pits at Struble. The Bellefonte & Buffalo Run and Nittany Valley & Southern were merged on March 16, 1885, to form the Buffalo Run, Bellefonte and Bald Eagle Railroad, under the presidency of James A. Beaver. The new company began to lay rail on the grade in April 1886, and began shipping ore from Lambourn Bank (near Waddle) to the McCoy & Linn furnace in Bellefonte in January 1887. The Collins brothers also invested in local ore banks, including those at Red Bank. This was reached by a branch from Mattern Junction, on the horseshoe curve near Waddle. To smelt the ore, they began building Bellefonte Furnace near the new railroad's enginehouse in Coleville, on the outskirts of Bellefonte. The furnace was put in blast on February 1, 1888, but the local supplies of ore proved insufficient to sustain it and it was shut down in February 1891. Part of the Red Bank Branch would be abandoned in 1894. The loss of traffic from Bellefonte Furnace hurt the railroad, which was sold at foreclosure on December 1, 1891. It was reorganized on May 9, 1892, as the Bellefonte Central Railroad. The new railroad was organized under the presidency of Robert Frazer, a precocious civil engineer formerly employed by the Lehigh Valley Coal Company. Frazer's first goal was to reduce dependence on ore traffic by extending the railroad from a wye at Struble to State College. The branch would carry passenger traffic, less-than-carload freight, and coal for the college power plant. Because of the railroad's slender financial reserves, the Oreland Branch was removed and its rails used for the State College extension. The first train ran over the new branch on April 2, 1892. The original station was located at College Avenue and Frazier Street and built in the Queen Anne style. The building of the extension also increased passenger service, with three trips per day (except Sunday) each way from Bellefonte to State College, and two per day each way from Waddle to Red Bank. The Bellefonte Central also promoted passenger traffic by building an amusement park on the former Benjamin Hunter farm, which it called Hunter's Park, and by investing in the University Inn, which provided hotel accommodations for visitors to Penn State and had its own stop on the railroad. However, the railroad discontinued passenger service on the Red Bank Branch in 1894. Many of the miners had left the area when ore banks shut down after Bellefonte Furnace went out of blast, and few riders remained for the Waddle–Red Bank trains. Since the shutdown of Bellefonte Furnace, President Frazer had been trying to reach a rate agreement with John Reilly of the furnace company. They came to terms in July 1892, and Reilly began making arrangements to restart ore mining and put the furnace back in blast. It resumed ironmaking in March 1893, and the Bellefonte Central acquired additional ore cars to serve the traffic. At the end of April, Tom Shoemaker resigned as superintendent to tend to his expanding duties supervising Bellefonte Furnace and ore mining at Graysdale. He was replaced by Francis H. Thomas, a long-time Reading employee. Unfortunately, the new furnace traffic would prove ephemeral. The Panic of 1893 forced Bellefonte Furnace to shut down again in July, after only four months of operation. While the railroad was still shipping ore to the McCoy and Linn Iron Works, Shoemaker could find few other customers for Graysdale ore and its importance to the railroad again declined. Despite the poor economic times, the railroad's management remained confident. On May 10, 1894, the directors approved the extension of the main line from Struble to Pine Grove Mills. Such an extension had been contemplated as long ago as 1884, during the BRB&BE era. While Pine Grove Mills would originate some traffic through farming and logging, the extension was primarily contemplated as part of a larger route. By extending south from Pine Grove Mills to Huntingdon, the line could connect with the Huntingdon and Broad Top Mountain Railroad, an independent railroad serving the Broad Top coal region. By linking to the Central Railroad of Pennsylvania at Bellefonte (built in 1893 over the contemplated Nittany Valley & Southern route), the Bellefonte Central could form part of a coal route tapping the Broad Top field on behalf of the New York Central. However, the route faced a formidable obstacle in the crossing of Tussey Mountain. Such a line would require switchbacks or a long summit tunnel. The Pennsylvania Railroad already occupied the only usable gap at Spruce Creek and would not look favorably on its new competitor for the Broad Top traffic. However, the economy remained slow, and the railroad found it difficult to obtain land at favorable prices.[19] After a little grading, the project stalled until 1896, when the railroad lifted the rail from the derelict Red Bank Branch west of Graysdale and used it to lay track on the extension. Service on the extension opened to Bloomsdorf in September 1896 and to Pine Grove Mills in December. Despite a $75,000 subscription offered by the town of Stone Valley (now submerged under Lake Perez) to complete the extension to Huntingdon, the expense of further extension would clearly have outstripped the railroad's finances. The Bellefonte Central undertook no further construction towards Huntingdon. Despite the loss of ore traffic, the Bellefonte Central had managed to keep its financial house in good order during the 1890s. Penn State University had begun to represent an important source of freight and passenger traffic, although the railroad frequently clashed with the school over unpaid bills. In 1896, Professor John Price Jackson obtained permission from the railroad to run trolley wire over its tracks from State College to Struble. An old Philadelphia Traction Company trolley was operated by electrical engineering students over the line until 1905. Ore traffic did see a resurgence, as the re-opened Bellefonte Furnace went from sporadic operation during the 1890s to a more sustained level in 1899 and 1900. To supply additional iron ore, the owners of the furnace bought the ore pits around Scotia from the Carnegie interests, who were switching to Mesabi Range ore. The Bellefonte Central relaid almost a mile of the abandoned Red Bank Branch from Graysdale to the mines of Mattern Bank and built a new line from Graysdale to Scotia to reach the Scotia mines, previously served by the Fairbrook Branch of the PRR. However, the railroad lost some of the furnace traffic in 1899 to the Central RR of PA. This railroad was owned by the same interests as Bellefonte Furnace, and in that year, it built a long trestle over the PRR to reach the furnace directly and connect with the Bellefonte Central. The furnace first switched its source of lime to a quarry along the Central RR of PA, instead of the Bellefonte Central, and in 1903, a new interchange between the Central RR of PA and the PRR allowed the furnace to shift inbound coke and outbound iron traffic to the Central as well. Furthermore, the Mesabi ores were beginning to replace local ore, even in Bellefonte. Search for new traffic Bellefonte Furnace closed on December 21, 1910, and Nittany Furnace in 1911. Their last contribution to the railroad's prosperity was the huge heaps of slag accumulated at the furnace sites: this was shipped over the Bellefonte Central to the PRR for use in construction projects. While the loss of furnace traffic would ultimately prove fatal to the Central RR of PA, the Bellefonte Central had found new sources of revenue. The McNitt-Huyett Lumber Company opened a mill at Waddle in 1909 and built an extensive network of 36 inch gauge track into the Scotia area, dual-gauging the Scotia branch and making use of the abandoned rights-of-way from the area's iron-mining heyday. The local timber was soon exhausted, and the branches to Mattern Bank and Scotia were abandoned in 1915. However, McNitt-Huyett built further extensions, and continued to haul logs to the Waddle mill until about 1919. Furthermore, high calcium limestone deposits in Bald Eagle Mountain, on the north side of the Buffalo Run valley, were now being exploited, much of their production going to steel mills in Pittsburgh. These quarries, eventually consolidated under the management of the Chemical Lime Company, would replace the iron furnaces as the principal generators of traffic on the Bellefonte Central. With dreams of expansion towards Huntingdon long gone, the branch to Pine Grove Mills was removed in 1919. However, a new opportunity to lengthen the railroad would arrive. In 1927, the PRR applied to abandon its little-used Fairbrook Branch. The Bellefonte Central, with the blessing of the Interstate Commerce Commission, bought the line from Fairbrook to Stover, and obtained trackage rights from Stover into Tyrone. A new line was built from Struble to Fairbrook (more direct than the roundabout and now abandoned route via Scotia), and service to Tyrone began in 1930. The object of the purchase was to send freight directly to the PRR main line at Tyrone, bypassing the circuitous route via Bellefonte. Furthermore, Professor Ernest L. Nixon (uncle of Richard Nixon) owned a large potato farm near Fairbrook and planned to turn the area into a major potato-growing region. Other traffic would include lumber, clay, and furnace slag. However, the resentful PRR refused to supply cars at Tyrone, and gave the same rate for interchange at Tyrone as at Bellefonte. With no rate differential to offset the costs of the longer run to Tyrone, it was uneconomical for the Bellefonte Central to interchange there. The stockholders brought in new management in the wake of this debacle, in 1933, and operations were suspended on the branch. Depression, World War II and decline Litigation over interchange at Tyrone continued until 1938, ending with a decision unfavorable to the Bellefonte Central. The railroad promptly filed to abandon the line from State College to Stover, but approval was not granted until May 1941. The rails were removed by that November. Frustrated in its expansion attempt, the Bellefonte Central was sustained throughout the Great Depression by the shipment of construction material to State College. Penn State extensively expanded its campus in the late 1920s and 1930s, in part to keep up with increased enrollment during the Depression, and many supplies traveled over the railroad. A new station was built on North Atherton Street in State College in 1930, and the line was cut back to the power plant. (The Hammond Building now occupies the old right-of-way to the original station.) Shipments from the lime quarries fell as the steel industry collapsed, and Chemical Lime went into bankruptcy in 1935. However, the company continued operating during the bankruptcy, and was prompted to modernize its operations, building a new rail-served lime plant at "Chemical" and abandoning quarrying for deep-shaft mining. While it was bought out by National Gypsum Company at the end of 1940, the modernization (paid for by a Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan) would keep the lime operation competitive for decades, and make it the largest shipper on the Bellefonte Central. The outbreak of World War II and the ensuing industrial demand further increased lime traffic. The war also brought about a brief resurgence in the Bellefonte Central's original source of revenue, iron ore. The Scotia Mining Company was formed at the beginning of the war to resume mining in Scotia, and built a new ore washer in 1942. The ore was initially trucked to Waddle for shipment, but after it was determined to be insufficiently pure, the company obtained Reconstruction Finance Corp. money for further improvements. A new 3 mile spur was built from the main line at Lagarde (Alto) to a new beneficiation plant at Scotia. However, only 35 carloads of ore were shipped before the Surrender of Japan, and the resulting fall in iron ore prices made mining uneconomical once again. While regular passenger service ended in 1946, post-war traffic remained strong, again largely on the basis of Penn State construction. The Bellefonte Central also carried construction materials for the building of local homes, as enrollment at Penn State increased under the GI Bill. Although the advent of trucking was steadily eating into the less-than-carload freight business, the railroad still handled bulk deliveries of food to Penn State and shipments of machinery, automobiles, and paper. While the delivery of coal to local homes ended in 1947, the railroad continued to haul about 470 cars per year of coal to supply the Penn State power plant. In 1953, the Bellefonte Central bought an EMD SW9, its first diesel locomotive, and retired its steam locomotive in 1956, after buying an EMD SW1200. However, the best years of the railroad were now behind it: it recorded its highest operating income in 1955. In 1959, Penn State switched to trucks for coal shipments to its power plant, and scheduled service to State College ended. The collapse in traffic further accelerated in the 1960s, with the general decline of the Northeastern railroads. As the Pennsylvania Railroad (Penn Central after 1968) deteriorated, rail shipments suffered increasingly long delays, for which the Bellefonte Central could not compensate. The era also saw the last passenger service over the railroad, a PRR special from Pittsburgh for the University of Pittsburgh–Penn State football game in 1964. After years of attempting to generate new traffic in State College, the Bellefonte Central finally gave up on the southern end of its line in 1974. The last train left State College on July 22, 1974, and 13 miles (21 km) of rail were pulled up from State College to Chemical in 1976. From now on, National Gypsum would be the railroad's only customer. Last years and abandonment New management came to both the lime plant and the railroad in 1976. The plant was bought by Domtar, while the Bellefonte Central was sold to Kyle Railways. Prospects still appeared reasonable for the railroad, as the plant at Chemical (bought by Domtar in 1976) had an extensive customer base. Most of the lime produced there went to steel mills in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. Ground lime was also shipped to glass manufacturers, and to chemical and paper companies. However, the Pennsylvania steel industry soon began to falter under the pressure of foreign competition and its own inefficiencies. As the steel industry fell, the lime market also collapsed, and Domtar shut down the plant at Chemical on July 1, 1982. The Bellefonte Central shut down the same day. The Chemical plant was sold in April 1983 to Confer Trucking, a local firm, which operated it at reduced capacity and had no need for rail service. Accordingly, the Bellefonte Central filed for abandonment in 1984. The 4.1 miles from Chemical to Coleville were removed in spring 1985. However, the last mile of track from Bellefonte to Coleville was bought by the SEDA-COG Joint Rail Authority, in order to make use of the enginehouse at Coleville. This track is now part of the Nittany and Bald Eagle Railroad, and the old Bellefonte Central enginehouse is now used for their locomotives. About a mile of the right-of-way on the grounds of The Arboretum at Penn State has been converted to a rail trail, which was opened on May 22, 2006. Locomotive Roster Rolling Stock Roster Bellefonte 0.00 Connection with Pennsylvania Railroad Coleville 0.85 Enginehouse and shops; site of Bellefonte Furnace Morris 2.31 Stevens 3.19 Chemical 3.54 Site of Chemical Lime/National Gypsum/Domtar plant Whitmer Linns Hunter's Park 5.40 Amusement park built by the railroad Fillmore 6.72 Briarly 8.50 Waddle 10.33 Mattern Junction connection with Red Bank (later Scotia) Branch Lagarde 13.34 or Alto; connection with branch to Scotia Mining Company Krumrine 16.10 Struble 17.47 connection with Pine Grove Mills and Fairbrook Branches State College 18.30 station now a bus terminal Red Bank and Scotia Branches Mattern Junction connection with main line Graysdale junction Scotia Branch Mattern Stormstown Station at some distance from the town Red Bank site of ore mining Scotia Branch Scotia site of ore mining Pine Grove Mills Branch Struble 0.0 connection with main line Bloomsdorf Pine Grove Mills 3.5 station now Ferguson Township Elementary School Fairbrook Branch Fairbrook 5.4 remainder of branch ex-PRR Musser 7.1 Pennsylvania Furnace 8.9 Hostler 10.6 Marengo 12.4 Furnace Road 14.1 Dungarvin 15.8 Warriors Mark 18.2 Pennington 20.6 Eyer 21.6 Stover 23.6 Connection with Pennsylvania Railroad Scotia Branch (wartime) Lagarde 0.0 connection with main line Scotia Mining Co. Plant 3.0 Bezilla, Michael; Rudnicki, Jack (2007). Rails to Penn State: The Story of the Bellefonte Central. Stackpole Books. ISBN 978-0-8117-0231-7. Michael Bezilla, "Proxy for the New York Central: The Central Railroad of Pennsylvania," Milepost, Vol. 24 (October 2006): 14-19. Michael Bezilla, "Battle for Coal," Railroad History, No. 194 (Spring-Summer 2006): 58-67. Michael Bezilla, “The PRR’s Lewisburg & Tyrone Railroad: When Two Halves Didn’t Make a Whole,” Milepost, Vol. 22 (April 2004): 10-19; expanded and reprinted in The Keystone, Vol. 39 (Spring 2006): 18-40. Jack Rudnicki and Michael Bezilla, “Freight Traffic on the Bellefonte Central Railroad,” National Railway Bulletin, Vol. 66 (2001): 4-33. Michael Bezilla, “Philadelphia & Reading in the Nittany Valley,” The Bee Line, Vol. 23 (2001): 19-23. Susan Lewis, “Shortline to State College,” Town & Gown, May 1984: 10-22; June 1984: 60-76. Paul Simpson, “The Bellefonte Central Railroad,” Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 117 (October 1967): 7-17. Woodrow W. Bierly, “Bellefonte Central Railroad,” Model Builder, Vol. 12 (October 1948): 6-10. Russell B. Nesbitt, “A History of the Bellefonte Central Railroad,” Penn State Engineer, Vol. 10 (May 1929): 5-36.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3323
__label__wiki	0.587138	0.587138	HOME > Japan SPOTLIGHT > Article Interview with Dr. Linda Yueh, an economist at Oxford University and the London Business School, and author of The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today Learning from the Author of The Great Economists – Linda Yueh By Japan SPOTLIGHT Her latest book, The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today, was one of The Times's Best Business Books of 2018. It discusses what the ideas of history's greatest economists would tell us about the most important economic issues of our time. Prof. Yueh kindly responded to our questions by e-mail as below. (Responses received on Sept. 4, 2019) JS: There is a general consensus today that we are in a geopolitical recession, meaning that the economy itself is emerging from the continued negative impact of the financial crisis in 2008 but that geopolitical risks such as the US-China technology war are beginning to negatively affect the world economy. Do you share this view? Yueh: We are in a global cyclical slowdown as economic growth likely peaked in advanced economies last year. This past decade was unusual for major economies because there was a slow recovery from the worst systemic banking crisis since the 1930s. At this part of the cycle, downside risks such as US-China trade tensions are particularly worrisome. I examine the 1930s in my book, The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today, and there are certainly lessons to be learned from that period to avoid making similar mistakes today. JS: Some may regard the decline in the importance of economics as a result of the increasing impact of politics on the economy, since political movements are now key to any economic consequences. But do you think this must be wrong? Yueh: Economics, throughout history, has provided the analytical tools and the empirical evidence that can help inform public policy. The objectives of those policies are set by politicians and the implementation of those policies by civil servants and other policymakers. These are all affected by the political environment; notably, the political will of the people as well as political feasibility are important in taking any policy decision. The Great Economist Alfred Marshall that I write about re-named the subject over a century ago to make this distinction between economics and politics clear – he changed the former from "Political Economy" to be called "Economics" to try and remove politics from economic analysis. He considered calling it "Social Economics" at one point because the subject is ultimately about how people interact. Given the vast technological changes in the 21st century economy today, we need economic analysis just as those who came before us did when they tried to understand the vast changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. JS: Rising populism is considered a principal culprit for the geopolitical crisis, such as the US-China high-tech war or anti-globalization sentiment. Increasing income gaps likely caused by globalization must certainly be one reason for such populism. Political scientists, however, may argue somewhat differently. There may be people in the lower middle-class without a high educational background who feel less secure or frustrated by increasing immigration. They may feel left behind and ignored by politicians. Elderly people may also feel lonely and insecure in an aging society. How do you think these people's social concerns can be allayed by economics? Yueh: There have been periods in history when consensus around economic policies broke down and there was also a backlash against globalization. The challenge for economic policy is to address those concerns by ensuring that globalization, technological change, and the whole economic system are working to the betterment of everyone in society. For instance, it has been understood since at least the times of the father of international trade, the Great Economist David Ricardo, that trade produces "losers" when the economy specializes in some sectors and less so in others. The distributional impact of trade can be partly addressed through fairer trade rules but also through domestic policy to reduce disparities in incomes and circumstances. Economic analysis has a role to play in both sets of policies. JS: Which do you think would have more impact upon income inequality, globalization or the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Yueh: It's very difficult to disentangle these effects, which economists refer to as skill-biased technical change. In other words, technology and globalization interact and have throughout history. For some aspects of wages and employment particularly in blue collar jobs, the evidence is that automation is more important than globalization. Income inequality is in any case a complex topic that goes beyond these factors, which I write about in my book in the chapter titled "Is Inequality Inevitable?" JS: Globalization itself can have great benefits for the world economy and enhance people's living standards. But many people think the distribution of benefits has not been done fairly or equally. What do you think would be most effective in convincing people of the benefits of globalization? Yueh: Only by showing that the economic system will make trade fairer through creating a level playing field – and for trade policies to take into account the distributional impact on the society as a whole; plus also using domestic policy to help out those who lose. These are the ways in which support for globalization could begin to be re-gained. JS: How do you think the Great Economists would suggest achieving more equal distribution of the benefits of globalization? Yueh: Many of the Great Economists in my book would likely focus on achieving genuine equality of opportunity through policies that improved people's prospects. The redistributive policies which help people afterwards are necessary but insufficient, so it is time to debate new approaches. One would be to consider pre-distributive policies. That would try to ensure that people had the skills to adapt to a changing economy through education and training. It would be a way of trying to ensure there was equality of opportunity. A specific measure that would support pre-distribution could be government-led investment, along with private funding, in infrastructure that takes advantage of today's low interest rates. Those projects could employ those who have lost their mid-skilled jobs due to automation and globalization and improve their skills through working on more technologically advanced infrastructure projects which often involve digital aspects. That's one example that I discuss in my book as to how pre-distribution policies could work. JS: In order to achieve more income equality, do you think more government interventions must be allowed, as they would be necessary to correct the bad outcomes of market mechanisms? Yueh: The answer is yes in a market economy, but the level of income inequality is a function of political choice. So, it's up to governments to fashion policies that reduce inequality which is how policymakers addressed the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. The Great Economists like Alfred Marshall at the time offered economics as a tool for policymakers to determine the distributional impact of their policies and showed that lower inequality did not hamper economic growth. As the United States is now in the Second Gilded Age, it's time to have those discussions once again. JS: Education and social welfare policies are more important than ever, as both could help achieve more equality in a technology-driven economy and aging society. Do you think economic policies in the future will be more socioeconomic? Yueh: Education is important in pre-distributive policies while welfare policies are central to redistributive policies, so both have been important historically and certainly will be for the future, where aging will likely worsen income inequality whilst at the same putting more pressure on social welfare systems. JS: With all the developed nations suffering from tremendous government debt and low interest rates, Keynesian policies may not work well. What policy do you think would contribute most to stimulating economic growth? Yueh: In my chapter on John Maynard Keynes, I ask the question whether governments should invest. And if so, in what? And what would be the effect on government debt and economic growth? The answers center on the second question: what is the government investing in? If it is in human capital and essential infrastructure, including digital, that would be capital spending and not current spending. Such investment could be assessed separately in terms of the budget deficit. Throughout history, it's evident that only by investing in people and capacity can societies raise their standards of living and boost their growth rates. Yet investment is low at present and many countries are concerned about a slow-growth future. This complicated issue is addressed as well in the final chapter of my book. JS: Overall, what do you think about the capitalist economy's future in the light of what the Great Economists have achieved so far? For example, after seeing the possible negative consequences of some anti-globalization policies, would people recognize again the merits of globalization, and thus the crisis of capitalism would be over? Yueh: In my book, I examine over two and a half centuries of economic history. There have been historic periods when capitalism was in crisis and people supported communist and socialist regimes en masse. The battle of ideas that ensued helped transform the capitalist system of Adam Smith's day in the 18th century, which I write about in the first chapter of my book, to the welfare state capitalism of the 20th century that is prevalent in advanced economies today. By changing the economic system to suit the conditions of the present day and arguing for how to do so, that's how societies have come through times previously. The current breakdown in consensus around the economic system poses an opportunity for another battle of ideas to ensure that the system is reformed and made suitable for the needs of a 21st century society. And this is a debate that we will all need to engage in. Otherwise a new consensus won't be achieved. The Great Economists that I write about were all actively involved in the policy debates of their day. Many did so by writing accessible books, so I hope that my book will do its small part in contributing to a discussion of these critical issues for all of our futures. (Japanese translation of The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today available at: https://www.hayakawa-online.co.jp/shop/shopdetail.html?brandcode=000000014178&search=%A5%EA%A5%F3%A5%C0%A1%A1%A5%E6%A1%BC&sort=) Japan SPOTLIGHT November/December 2019 Issue (Published on November 10, 2019) Formatted by Naoyuki Haraoka, editor-in-chief of Japan SPOTLIGHT & executive managing director of the Japan Economic Foundation (JEF) LOST & FOUND COWBOY – Uplifting Cross-C... 2) LOST & FOUND COWBOY – Uplifting Cross-C...1) Interview with Dr. Gary Hamel, Co-author of t...em? How Will the Art Market & the Rich Respond to...ong Roundtable with Prof. Fukunari Kimura, Dr. Ke...is Has Populism Peaked? Interview with Dr. Paul Sheard, Senior Fello...ons Haiku Attunement & the "Aha" Moment The Debate on Taxing Digital Services, Where ...ash Companies Have a Crucial Role to Play in Nati...ity	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3324
__label__cc	0.605246	0.394754	← North Korea used Berlin embassy to acquire nuclear tech, says German spy chief Ex-spy chief claims Palestinian officials worked with CIA to wiretap opponents → Swiss trying to change image as Europe’s spy hub, say officials February 6, 2018 by Ian Allen Leave a comment Officials in Switzerland say new laws enacted in recent months will help them change their country’s image as one of Europe’s most active spy venues. For decades, the small alpine country has been a destination of choice for intelligence officers from all over the world, who use it as a place to meet assets from third countries. For example, a case officer from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) will travel to Switzerland to meet her Algerian agent. She will exchange money and documents with him before she returns to Britain and he to Algeria, presumably after depositing his earnings into a Swiss bank account. There are multiple reasons that explain Switzerland’s preferred status as a meeting place for spies and their handlers. The country is suitably located in the center of Europe and is a member of the European Union’s Schengen Treaty, which means that a passport is not required to enter it when arriving there from European Union member-states. Additionally, the country features an efficient transportation and telecommunication infrastructure, and its stable political system offers predictability and security, despite the limited size and strength of its law enforcement and security agencies. Perhaps most important of all, the Swiss have learned not to ask questions of visitors, many of whom flock to the country to entrust their cash to its privacy-conscious banking sector. But, according to the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS), foreign spies and their handlers should find another venue to meet in secret. Speaking to the Sunday edition of Switzerland’s NZZ newspaper, FIS spokeswoman Isabelle Graber said she and her colleagues were aware that their country is a venue for meetings between intelligence operatives from third countries. Such meetings have “continued to rise in the last few years” and include “everyone from security agency employees to freelancers”, as “the market in trading secrets has exploded”, she said. That trend, added Graber, has led to a corresponding rise in meetings aimed at exchanging information for money. Many such meetings take place throughout Switzerland, she noted, and are “in violation of Swiss sovereignty and can lead to operations against the interests of the nation”. In the past, said Graber, FIS was unable to prevent such activities on Swiss soil, due to pro-privacy legislation, which meant that the agency’s ability to combat foreign espionage in Switzerland was “far more limited than in other countries”. However, said the intelligence agency spokeswoman, the law recently changed to permit FIS to break into homes and hotels, hack into computers, wiretap phones, and implement surveillance on individuals believed to be spies or intelligence officers of foreign countries. Armed with the new legislation, the FIS is now “working hard to clear up third-country meetings [and] to prevent these from happening or at least disrupt them”, said Graber. Several times this year alone, FIS had forward information about “third-country meetings” to judicial authorities in Switzerland, she said. ► Author: Ian Allen \| Date: 06 February 2018 \| Permalink Filed under A specialized intelligence website written by experts, since 2008 Tagged with espionage, FIS (Switzerland), intelligence legislation, Isabelle Graber, News, Switzerland	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3327
__label__wiki	0.852596	0.852596	Home Social Media How to Tell if Someone Has Watched Your Stuff on Facebook By Aaron Charles Whether you're concerned about cyber-stalkers or you just want to know what kind of people are taking a closer look at your Facebook content, there are ways to know who's seen your stuff on Facebook -- but not completely. Much depends on what "stuff" you want to monitor and whether you're thinking in terms of your Facebook profile or a Facebook page. And yes, there is a difference. Oftentimes people will confuse a Facebook profile with a Facebook page -- two distinctly different platforms that vary in terms of what you can know about who's seen or done what. A Facebook profile is for personal use, and is what you create when you first join Facebook. Once you've created a Facebook profile, then you can choose to make a Facebook page, which is designed especially for businesses, brands, organizations and artists to advertise themselves. For Facebook pages, Facebook provides a tool called "Page Insights" that will show you who's viewed posts you've made on your page, regardless of whether they "like" or click on them. This differs from Facebook personal profiles. Facebook doesn't allow you to know who has merely visited your profile and viewed its content, such as photos or videos, as of June 2013. Rather, another Facebook user must interact in some way, which could be by liking a post or commenting on it. Read Receipts However, Facebook now offers "read receipts" for personal profiles that are a part of a Facebook group, or that use the Facebook Messenger desktop or mobile app. Whenever someone sends a message to you or multiple people within a group or over Messenger, an indicator at the bottom of the message shows the number of people who've read the message, even indicating each reader by name. But Facebook does warn that just because a message is marked as read by specific users, there's no guarantee that they have read the message carefully -- or even at all, for that matter. Facebook's read receipts feature has inspired many people to complain about it since its release, partly because there's no way to disable it. Complaints also include the awkward faux pas that occurs when someone, unaware of the read receipts feature, goes on to tell the message sender that she's only just read a message -- belatedly -- while the read receipts indicator declares otherwise. Social embarrassment aside, others say that it's a violation of privacy and could exacerbate cases of stalking or cyber-bullying. Facebook: About Page Insights Facebook: Common Myths About Facebook Facebook: Group Basics Digital Trends: Read Receipts Are Letting Everyone Know I'm A Horrible Person Tech Glimpse: Stop Facebook Messenger on iOS From Sending ‘Seen’ Receipts Change.org: FaceBook, Inc.: Allow The Disabling Of "Read Receipts" For Messaging Aaron Charles began writing about "pragmatic art" in 2006 for an online arts journal based in Minneapolis, Minn. After working for telecom giant Comcast and traveling to Oregon, he's written business and technology articles for both online and print publications, including Salon.com and "The Portland Upside."	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3331
__label__wiki	0.780021	0.780021	Vice President’s Plane to Iowa Stopped on Tarmac by Positive COVID Test Photo: GettyImages Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Des Moines at 12:09 p.m., about an hour later than expected after one of his staffer's tested positive for COVID-19, according to Bloomberg. The person who tested positive was apparently not on the flight that eventually left Joint Base Andrews, but some people on-board the flight did deplane. CNN reports a source told them "there was concern about other people on the plane having been in contact with the positive individual." There has been no comment from the Vice President's Office. Just yesterday, TIME reported that one of President Donald Trump's personal valets had tested positive for COVID-19 earlier in the week. While he's in Des Moines today, Vice President Pence will be talking to faith leaders about spiritual and religious gatherings in the state and how they can be done responsibly. He's also scheduled for a food supply roundtable discussion during his visit to Iowa's capital city. Iowa's News Now reports Vice President Pence was last in Iowa in January. He was in the state before the Iowa caucuses and spoke in both Des Moines and Council Bluffs. As the Vice President visits the state, the Iowa Department of Public Health confirmed 397 new confirmed cases of the virus, bringing the total to 11,457. There were also 12 more deaths in the state on Thursday. The total of people killed by COVID-19 in Iowa now stands at 243. Retail + Service Deals For Eastern Iowa Essential Workers Filed Under: Coronavirus, Des Moines, nl, staffer, Vice President	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3336
__label__wiki	0.845523	0.845523	The Gothic Garage Johnny Ironsights About Johnny Johnny Ironsights is an Americana and Alt-Country artist whose music channels the hard-living spirit and dark strangeness of the American underbelly. The Phoenix, Arizona singer-songwriter crafts a dynamic tone that incorporates country, goth and punk sensibilities into a unique and driving sound. The drenched stereo reverb and pitch-shifting vibrato emanating from Ironsights’ Magnatone amp and Fender Jazzmaster guitar help create his signature sound. Born and raised in California, his new album draws on the uniquely American flavors of the Golden State—downtown Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and the Redwood forest—where both the land and its inhabitants are at once dangerous, broken and yet, strangely noble. Ironsights’ self-produced album “Murder Mountain” was written and recorded at his home studio in Phoenix during the pandemic and shortly after the death of his father to cancer. The songs are deeply personal as he laments about loss, reflects on his childhood, his first love and heartbreaks, while always staying positive for brighter times ahead. “I’ve seen America from so many different kinds of folks and my own biracial background, and I think that bleeds through into my music...I’m thankful for that.” As a solo artist and band member, Ironsights has performed throughout the USA, Canada, Europe and South Asia. In 2014, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and moved to India for nine months, where he performed music for US State Department officials. Johnny Ironsights’ new album Murder Mountain was mastered by three-time Grammy winning engineer Gavin Lurssen (O Brother Where Art Thou?, Lucinda Williams, Game of Thrones). The album includes notable pedal steel guitarist Tommy Detamore (Dallas Wayne, Jim Lauderdale, The Texas Tornados, Doug Sahm). Publicity: Pati deVries, Devious Planet, patidevries@deviousplanet.com Radio: David Avery - Powderfinger Promo - 1 (800) 356-1155, david@powderfingerpromo.com Booking: booking@johnnyironsights.com Instagram: @johnnyironsights Facebook: www.facebook.com/johnnyironsights Twitter: @johnnyironsight	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3339
__label__cc	0.580334	0.419666	About SOMI What does SOMI stand for? Foundation for Market Information Research (refer to as "SOMI" or the "foundation") is a non-profit organization set up to identify and influence issues of social importance. We focus on the functioning of markets in the areas of privacy, elderly policies, housing and care. Is SOMI a mass claim foundation? SOMI is indeed a foundation for claiming mass damage, but it is not all we do. In our view, legal proceedings are the means to change relationships between individuals and, therefore a mean, not an end. In the first place, it is about collecting and disseminating knowledge and about changing structures that were not sufficient. We also include informing policy and opinion makers and designing public and information campaigns. How will SOMI act? SOMI was established as a discussion partner for not only the individual(s) who was involved in the event(s), which has caused many disadvantages, but also as a discussion partner for the government and other parties; SOMI will also act as the voice for consumer groups in the media. In addition to sharing knowledge, we also want to focus in the coming years on promoting the interests of those affected by the negative effects of markets that are insufficiently transparent or efficient, including by taking collective or individual actions, and claiming (damage) compensation for the benefit of its affiliated or registered stakeholders. What is the 2019 Claim Code? The Claim Code 2019 (the "Claim Code") is a form of self-regulation drawn up by the Claim Code Committee, after extensive consultation among a large group of stakeholders. The Claim Code is not legally binding, but the Claim Code does have a preventive and warning effect. The purpose of the Claim Code is to record the generally accepted views in the Netherlands regarding the good governance for claim foundations. The Claim Code aims to create a framework for good and transparent governance of the interest groups by giving principles and elaborating them. Part of the principles is that the collective representation of interests takes place on a non-profit basis of the organization or directly/indirectly associated (legal) actors and that the representation of interests takes place independently and avoids conflicts of interest. Does the foundation meet the conditions of the claim code? The most recent version of the claim code entered into force on March 4, 2019 and applies from that date to interest groups within the meaning of Art. 3: 305a BW that was established from that date. SOMI was established on May 31, 2016 and largely complies with the principles of the claim code. However, SOMI also deviates from this in a number of areas, which is permitted. In accordance with the 'comply or explain' principle of the Claim Code, we have indicated how we deviate and why on these points in our accountability document. The accountability document also applies as regulations as referred to in Article 16 paragraph 1 of the articles in association to SOMI. Does SOMI have sufficient knowledge and skills to represent the public interests and conduct any procedures? The Claim Code requires that the board of a foundation consists of at least three people. For the time being, the board of SOMI consists of two persons (one of whom is a lawyer), so that the foundation retains the option of appointing one or more additional director(s), more specifically attuned to the specific actions and activities of the foundation. We are still looking for a lawyer for the Supervisory Board who will assess the contributions of the public and think about their fees. We work with a team of experts, including external experts, consultants, service providers and organizations that have successfully represented the interests of stakeholders. When conducting negotiations and/or proceedings. Where can I find the statutes? Click here for the statutes (in Dutch) How does SOMI differ from De Consumentenbond and the Vereniging Eigen Huis, for example? SOMI is a theme-driven think tank, without permanent supporters. Do you have an idea or proposal for a new action that is worthwhile? Let us know! Then we think along with you about the possibilities. How can I reach SOMI? By email and by telephone at the office hours. Sign up and participate What is crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is a form of social action, in which the target group (the "crowd") helps themselves by supporting a legal action. Not only with money, but primarily by supplying knowledge, insight and information. Our main sources are your attention and commitment. I would like to remain anonymous, is that possible? Yes, we appreciate you wanting to stay informed about our promotions. It is also possible to log in anonymously or with an alias. You will be kept informed of the promotion, but we will not be able to represent your interests. How is it possible that SOMI can represent my interests at a relatively low cost? SOMI can make this possible by acting on behalf of a large number of stakeholders. Your contribution is important in this action. I have a relevant article or relevant documentation that I would like to send You can send your document to info@somi.nl What happens to my personal data? Your data will be stored in the database of the Foundation for Market Information Research. The personal data that the participants provide or the data that were processed by the foundation, such as addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, are stored in files that are owned by the foundation. This data will only be used by the foundation in accordance with its privacy policy as published on the website. By registering, participants acknowledge and agree to this policy. If we want to approach you about other promotions or other services of our foundation or associated (legal) services, we always ask you for separate permission in advance. Under no circumstances will your data end up with other organizations (or persons affiliated with), unless you have given your explicit written consent (electronically). About the action Why this action? The collection of information for a claim by a group of persons is a form of social involvement. Preparing and conducting legal proceedings is an active way of improving society and important organizations and systems in it. Why this action now? If this action has been organized a few years earlier, the ongoing bank bailouts would have diverted attention from the subject of this action. In addition, some of the behaviors are a bit outdated now. As a result, stakeholders are less likely to rely on the sensitivity of important information only for the purpose of keeping it confidential. If we process this action a few years later, there is a chance that the next banking crisis will again divert attention. That is the reason why we started this action now because the situation with the national bank has been calm recently. What is the purpose of this action? The aim of this action is to make banks' earnings model more transparent and verifiable, including the cooperation with governments that are part of it, and what effects these companies have on the daily life of Dutch people. As the activities of the investigated companies and the persons involved are in conflict with the law, this investigation will provide the basis for legal proceedings for compensation of this damage for the homeowners concerned. How can I participate and support the action in terms of content? A number of components to which you can contribute are included under 'Contributions' on SOMI.nl. We, therefore, call on you - for example, if you have more information or conclusions or findings - to might be useful to our research. All contributions are processed confidentially from the start and were handled by the consultants of the foundation who are bound by confidentiality. The expenses that you have incurred for this information can be reimbursed by SOMI at a certain rate (depending, among other things, on the information value and/or specialism involved). Timeline: when you have a good item for our timeline, which links persons and events (actions and statements), you can mail them to us. WOB: for its ongoing actions, SOMI is looking for questions that can be put to various agencies whose answers take us further in the dissemination of knowledge or advocacy in our actions. We ask for your input to ask the right questions. If you have a question(s) in this matter, you can email it to us, with the attached documents related to it. Claim documents: if you have instructions that can contribute to our files, or that we can request or supplement from third parties, you can email us. Hearing of witnesses: if you have an indication about the knowledge of certain persons, objectively and preferably documented, you can email us. The final results of the actions are published on this site. SOMI also publishes an overview of the most active and the most valuable contributions. Please indicate when you want to remain anonymous, when you want to contribute under an alias or when you have incurred expenses for intensive study because of your contribution. How will I be kept informed of the progress? We will send you news about your personal situation or contribution by e-mail or we will display it in your private section on my.somi.nl. It is your responsibility to notify us promptly of changes to that address and, where applicable, to keep the information we send you about your content and contributions confidential. When a newsletter is published we will email you a link to it. All other information is published through our sites. Why crowdsourcing? This research area covers many years of information from a number of different banks and a large number of financial products, with many different characteristics. Which makes the work labor-intensive. Most importantly, we believe that there is a pattern of (behavioral) coordination between banks or their directors/supervisors. To fully uncover this pattern, we appeal to the public and you as a participant to make a substantive contribution to data collection and knowledge expansion. The procedures and discussions about this subject can then prompt the action faster, at a lower cost. In addition, we hope to further expand the group of people who can claim damages. Why not claim damages immediately? SOMI's focus is on informing and improving market forces. A focus on compensation then distracts and does not immediately improve all consumers as a whole. Compensation for damages must be a derived result of successful advocacy and the discovery of what happened and who played a role in it, along with structural market improvement. Why, in addition to advocacy, also a collective settlement? If an affected party wants to receive compensation, this can be done through a settlement or through the court to get a decision on the case. In many cases, the financial interest is too small to go to court individually, because of the associated costs. A collective settlement is often the only practical way for this large group of affected parties to obtain compensation for at least part of their damage. The Collective Settlement of Mass Claims Act ("WCAM") makes it possible for affected parties to litigate as a collective about compensation or to reach a settlement. From the point of view of efficiency and manageability, collective settlement of the damage may be the best way. This avoids the costs and efforts associated with conducting a large number of civil proceedings, always with identical questions to be answered. How are fees distributed in the event of a collective settlement? In general, it can be said that in the context of a possible collective settlement, an amount paid by the perpetrator(s) will be distributed among all individual stakeholders and the foundation. To that end, a certain allocation key will be included in the settlement agreement. In accordance with this distribution key, an amount will eventually be awarded to each individual interested party to compensate for the damage they have suffered. The distribution key is partly determined by the type of damage event and the nature of the damage. In the case of the global distribution key, the interested party is required to provide less evidence than in the case of the distribution key, which is tailored to the individual circumstances of the case.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3344
__label__cc	0.560698	0.439302	Jazz on a Summer's Day The run of this film has ended. Thank you for your support of Flicks Theatre. Directed by Bert Stern English Closed Captions Filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and directed by world-renowned photographer Bert Stern, Jazz on a Summer's Day features intimate performances by an all-star line-up of musical legends including Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O'Day, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, and closes with a beautiful rendition of The Lord's Prayer by Mahalia Jackson at midnight to usher in Sunday morning. The film has been beautifully and extensively restored in 4K from the best surviving vault elements by IndieCollect. "Gorgeous. Probably the best feature-length jazz concert movie ever made." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader “Filmed with a rare artistry, a rare attention to making images of music that are themselves musical.” - Richard Brody, The New Yorker “An exquisite historical document. The film is where the American concert documentary genre begins.” - Philip Eil, VICE “There is not a moment that, freeze framed, would not be an absolutely stunning still picture.” - Judith Christ	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3345
__label__cc	0.705406	0.294594	Phoebe Fox Posted on July 10, 2014 by K.J. KJ~~Tell us a little bit about yourself. Phoebe~~ I grew up in Georgia, moved to New York City to pursue an acting career, “retired” from showbiz to Florida to work as a journalist, and seven years ago moved to Austin, Texas, with my husband and our terribly spoiled dogs, where I plan to stay for a while. I’ve worked as a film producer/director, a theater critic, a health columnist, a game-show host, a casting assistant for Broadway shows, an intern for Paramount Pictures, and the voice of the heroine in a video game. Kind of a fun and eclectic background to draw on when you’re a writer. KJ~~What are you working on right now? Phoebe~~ At the moment I’m putting the final touches on the Breakup Doctor sequel—Bedside Manners, out in March of 2015—and then doing a final edit on a manuscript currently called Falling Together (soon to be retitled, thanks to one of my favorite writers, Marisa de los Santos, who used that working title for her last book). That one’s a bit of a departure from the Breakup Doctor series—a deeper story about a woman who leaves her seemingly happy marriage and literally starts a new life from scratch in an unfamiliar, washed-up beach town after a tragedy she cannot overcome. It’s about forgiveness, really—of the ones we love who hurt us, whether they mean to or not (and often so much more deeply because we love them), and even more important, forgiveness of ourselves for doing the things we once imagined were unthinkable. KJ~~Of the books/stories you have written, which one would you like to tell us about? Phoebe~~ The first in my Breakup series—cleverly titled The Breakup Doctor—is about a therapist who, when she loses her practice, reinvents herself as a relationship columnist and counselor, on call to help you shape up after a breakup. But when her own relationship falls apart, she finds herself spectacularly breaking every one of her own rules. It’s a fun, funny read, but I hope also says something real about how we handle the tough parts of love—not just in our romantic relationships, but with friends and family too. And how to forgive yourself when you fall short of your own expectations. Which seems to be a theme in my writing. There are a variety of buy links on my publisher’s page KJ~~What was the hardest part about getting this book/story from the first ideas to publication? Phoebe~~ A couple of years ago my agent, the tireless Courtney Miller-Callihan at Sanford J. Greenburger, submitted Breakup Doctor all over, and we got some of the nicest, most positive rejection letters you’ve ever seen—but not a single offer. I figured the story was just a no-go, so I put it away and worked on two other manuscripts I’ve since completed. After that I revisited Breakup Doctor and still liked it and thought it had a story to tell, so I did a heavy rewrite of it and told Courtney that I was going to self-publish, and she said, “Give me one more crack at it first.” (Every author wants a Courtney Miller-Callihan in her corner.) And so she shopped it around one more time, and this time we found the perfect home for it—Henery Press, an intimate house that has impressed me at every turn with their enthusiasm for the book and for me, as well as their industry knowledge and fast growth as a company. In a way I think this is how it had to happen—Breakup Doctor is a much better book than it was the first go-around; I needed time to “season” the story. And Henery is the exact right publisher for it, and I found them at the exact right time (when they branched out form their usual comedic mysteries to include my genre, chick lit). It makes me think of the story of Breakup Doctor itself—something really, really good came out of what at the time felt like nothing but rejection and heartbreak. KJ~~Where did you get your inspiration for this book? Phoebe~~ Breakup Doctor started years ago as an almost entirely different book, generally based around a woman who bought a fixer-upper house to flip it in the hot Florida market, just before the mortgage crisis hit. At the time I was living in Fort Myers, Florida—the epicenter of the mortgage collapse, nicknamed “Foreclosure Myers” in the press. And yes, I had just bought a house. In the process of writing it, however, I supported several friends through tough breakups (and vice versa), as well as writing a recurring series for my paper about happily married couples and what made them work. I spent loads of time observing, researching, and talking about relationships—why they succeeded, why they failed, and how to handle the latter when it happened—and the book started to take on a new path, though I still wasn’t quite finding its spine. And then I met the man who is now my husband, and we hit it off fast and hard, followed very quickly by what I like to call “the Great Disappearance” (and my husband likes to call “a figment of my imagination”). After a month of steady contact—dates, phone calls, e-mails, a full-court press—he told me he was going away for a week’s vacation, and I stopped hearing from him. Completely. I immediately decided he was there with another woman, and that all the great connection I’d thought we’d had was in my own head. I beat myself up mercilessly—how could I have misjudged everything so thoroughly? And in his absence the book finally found its heart: Why can love make us a little crazy, even when we think we have it all together? Oh—and it turns out my husband was at a weeklong yoga retreat. Where they discouraged computer and cell phone use.  KJ~~What books or authors have influenced you the most and why? Phoebe~~ He’s Just Not That Into You, by Liz Tuccillo and Greg Behrendt, literally changed my dating life, and is probably a good large part of the reason I’m happily married today. It was a big inspiration for Breakup Doctor as well. For craft books, Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing is like a master class in writing fiction, and Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write is the greatest treatise on and exhortation to creativity that I know of. In the fiction field, I have to say that my childhood reads were among the most influential—they’re simple stories, but books like Harriet the Spy and Encyclopedia Brown and the Judy Blume books and Why Me? and Lisa Bright and Dark gave me an appreciation for storytelling that’s probably a huge part of the reason I love to do it today. KJ~~What does a typical writing day look like for you? Phoebe~~ Like a lot of writers, I still work a full-time job, although I’ve had the luxury for the last twenty-plus years of working from home. So generally I get up, walk the dogs, and then write for a couple of hours in the morning, and then work my “regular job” for the rest of the day. Lately I write weekends too, though I didn’t used to—since the first Breakup Doc came out, I learned that getting the word out about your book is also a full-time job. So I’m still working to find the balance between my writing career and my other career, book promotion, and family. I keep assuring my neglected husband and family and dogs and friends that that balance is coming soon…. KJ~~What are your favorite books that you have read simply for pleasure? Phoebe~~ I’m a big fan of authors like Hester Browne, Lolly Winston, Emily Giffin, Jennifer Weiner, Liz Tuccillo, Marisa de los Santos, Sarah Pekkanen, and Sarah Bird, more or less in my genre. But I also read a lot of nonfiction—I love history, sociological subjects, and biographies (especially if A. Scott Berg wrote them)—some self-help (like any writer worth her salt who focuses on relationships), and recently have been reading more mystery. And Jenny Lawson and the Oatmeal make me snicker like a twelve-year-old boy. KJ~~Do you have strategies for getting past those days that are hard to write? Phoebe~~ Usually avoidance and denial, and then more coffee and gritted teeth—the mental equivalent of a cattle prod. My husband and I just saw Eddie Izzard, one of my favorite comedians, and in a Q&A after the show he was asked about what led to his success. I loved his answer: “Determination.” He said that someone once asked him, when he began pursuing acting, why he wanted to be a so-so actor when he was such a brilliant comedian. And his answer was, “Once I was just a so-so comedian.” That struck me so viscerally—the idea that being successful is much less about some kind of innate talent, and more about determination, persistence—just doing and doing and doing that thing you love until you become good at it. That’s what I remind myself of on the days writing feels like a slog. KJ~~If you took a two-week vacation in any book or story, where would you go and who would you be? Phoebe~~ I think I would like to visit the worlds of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. I grew up reading these stories, and they were the magic portal for me to my imagination. All things were possible—frogs could talk, a mermaid could trade her tail for legs, a childless couple could wish a minuscule son into existence. Good triumphed over evil, virtue was rewarded, and true love conquered all. They were magnificent and magical and occasionally terrifying, and they opened worlds to me beyond the one I knew. This entry was posted in Author Interviews and tagged interviews with authors, Phoebe Fox, The Break Up Doctor, writer's block, writing by K.J.. Bookmark the permalink.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3347
__label__wiki	0.6967	0.6967	How Can We Know What to Believe about Joseph Smith’s Personal Character? The Prophet Joseph Smith, by Alvin Gittins via lds.org “And there was not any man who could do a miracle in the name of Jesus save he were cleansed every whit from his iniquity.” In his first interview with the angel Moroni, Joseph Smith was told that his “name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people” (Joseph Smith—History 1:33). Joseph, who was only 17 years old at the time, must surely have been startled by such a revelation.1 What about his life would simultaneously evoke such devotion and derision? Moreover, how can honest seekers of the truth know what to really believe about his personal character in the face of these competing perspectives? Through the efforts of The Joseph Smith Papers project, numerous historical documents pertaining to the prophet’s life and ministry have recently been made available to the general public.2 Now, more than ever before, Joseph Smith’s life is on full display before the world. In his own statements, Joseph acknowledged that he was not a perfect man. In response to allegations of misconduct, he confessed that as a youth he “fell into many foolish errors … [and] diverse temptations.”3 However, he clarified that these were not “great or malignant sins”4 but rather that he had “a light, and too often, vain mind, exhibiting a foolish and trifling conversation.”5 On one occasion, Joseph explained, “Although I do wrong, I do not the wrongs that I am charged with doing.”6 The Sacred Grove by Jody Livingston Joseph’s Christian piety and moral character can be demonstrated through a number of personal documents. In an 1832 letter to his wife Emma, Joseph reported that “the Lord assisting me, I have visited a grove … almost every day … to give vent to all the feelings of my heart in meditation and prayer.”7 Writing from a hotel room in New York City several months later, Joseph mentioned that rather than sightseeing, he preferred “reading and praying and holding communion with the Holy Spirit.”8 After surveying these and other personal documents, historian Richard Anderson explained, “The early Joseph is above all the Joseph of faith, of great humility, and of constant prayer.”9 Reports from those who knew Joseph Smith intimately help confirm the evidence of his moral uprightness from his private documents. For instance, Joseph’s brother William remembered how their family responded after Joseph told them about his visit from the angel Moroni. The whole family were melted to tears, and believed all he said. Knowing that he was very young, that he had not enjoyed the advantages of a common education; and knowing too, his whole character and disposition, they were convinced that he was totally incapable of arising before his aged parents, his brothers and sisters, and so solemnly giving utterance to anything but the truth. All of us, therefore, believed him.10 The Angel Moroni Appears to Joseph Smith by Tom Lovell. Image via lds.org Anderson explained, “Two parents, five brothers, and three sisters of the Prophet Joseph Smith were living at the time of the coming of Moroni, and each became a devout believer in the reality of the revelations. They comprise a virtual jury qualified to evaluate the consistency of Joseph's early story and his personal believability in telling it. Without dissent, these eleven gave total acceptance.”11 Dozens of other testimonials come from those who witnessed the prophet’s integrity and goodness throughout the remainder of his life.12 Another mark of Joseph Smith’s sincere and noble character was his willingness to suffer persecution and even death for his beliefs and for those he loved. In a British newspaper, a non-LDS columnist remarked in 1851 that Joseph Smith lived for fourteen years amid vindictive enemies, who never missed an opportunity to vilify, to harass, and to destroy him; and he died at last an untimely and miserable death, involving in his fate a brother to whom he was tenderly attached. If anything can tend to encourage the supposition that Joseph Smith was a sincere enthusiast … it is the notability that unless supported by such feelings [of sincere belief], he would have renounced the unprofitable and ungrateful task, and sought refuge from persecution and misery in private life and honorable industry.13 Finally, there are revelations from the Lord Himself that confirm Joseph Smith was divinely chosen as a prophet and that he remained the Lord’s servant until the end of his life. In 1841, the Lord stated, “Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you, my servant Joseph Smith, I am well pleased with your offering and acknowledgments, which you have made; for unto this end have I raised you up, that I might show forth my wisdom through the weak things of the earth. Your prayers are acceptable before me.”14 And in 1843, the Lord declared, “I say unto you, my servant Joseph … I seal upon you your exaltation, and prepare a throne for you in the kingdom of my Father, with Abraham your father. Behold, I have seen your sacrifices, and will forgive all your sins.”15 Joseph Smith Seeks Wisdom from the Bible by Dale Kilbourn. Image via lds.org Yet some may wonder, if Joseph Smith was such an honorable man, then why are so many bad things said about him? The answers to this question may likely be as numerous as the prophet’s critics. For some, the reason is that his conduct or revelations contradict their theological, moral, or social convictions. For others, the idea that God could speak in such a direct way with anyone in modern times seems implausible. And a growing number of individuals simply do not believe in God period, and therefore any prophetic claims are seen as either fraudulent or delusional from the outset. Unfortunately, because of such views, many have spread false or misleading information about the prophet, either intentionally or inadvertently. This situation has only perpetuated undeserved criticism.16 Whatever the reasons may be, the mere fact of opposition neither disproves nor confirms Joseph Smith’s legitimacy as a prophet.17 After all, many other prophets and even Jesus Christ Himself were scorned and rejected by multitudes of their people.18 Anticipating future prophets, both true and false, Jesus provided the only sure method of sifting through all of the clashing opinions of men: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. … A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit” (Matthew 7:16, 18).19 With these verses in mind, Elder Neil L. Andersen explained, “Each believer needs a spiritual confirmation of the divine mission and character of the Prophet Joseph Smith. This is true for every generation. Spiritual questions deserve spiritual answers from God.”20 Such a confirmation often comes through sincere study, diligent prayer, and faithful adherence to the revelations—or fruits—of the prophet.21 Elder Andersen further warned, “The negative commentary about the Prophet Joseph Smith will increase as we move toward the Second Coming of the Savior. The half-truths and subtle deceptions will not diminish. There will be family members and friends who will need your help.”22 None of us will ever fully and completely understand another individual in our own time period, much less one who lived two centuries ago. The historical record of Joseph Smith’s life is fragmentary, and there will always be unanswered questions about what, why, how, when and where he did or said something. For this reason, personal revelation from God must be the ultimate deciding factor in discerning his moral character and divine calling. The Book of Mormon teaches that “there was not any man who could do a miracle in the name of Jesus save he were cleansed every whit from his iniquity” (3 Nephi 8:1). The same holds true for Joseph Smith and his prophetic calling.23 As an apostle of the Lord, Elder Andersen testified, “I give you my witness that Jesus is the Christ, our Savior and Redeemer. He chose a holy man, a righteous man, to lead the Restoration of the fulness of His gospel. He chose Joseph Smith.”24 This same spiritual witness is available to any and all who seek it diligently. Neil L. Andersen, “Joseph Smith,” Ensign, November 2014, online at lds.org. Richard Lloyd Anderson, “The Credibility of the Book of Mormon Translators,” in Book of Mormon Authorship: New Light on Ancient Origins, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1982), 213–237. Richard Lloyd Anderson, “The Trustworthiness of Young Joseph Smith,” The Improvement Era 73, no. 10 (1970): 82–89. 1. See Joseph Smith—History 1:23. 2. See “Joseph Smith and His Papers: An Introduction,” online at josephsmithpapers.org. 3. Letter to Oliver Cowdery, December 1834, p. 40, accessed November 18, 2017, online at josephsmithpapers.org. 4. Joseph Smith—History 1:28. 6. History, 1838–1856, volume D-1 [1 August 1842–1 July 1843], p. 2, accessed November 18, 2017, online at josephsmithpapers.org. For evaluations of Joseph Smith’s reputation in New York, see Richard Lloyd Anderson, “Joseph Smith’s New York Reputation Reappraised,” BYU Studies 10, no. 3 (1970): 283–314; Richard Lloyd Anderson, Review of “Joseph Smith's New York Reputation Reexamined,” Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 3, no. 1 (1991): 52–80; Hugh Nibley, Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 11 (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1991), 103–406. 7. Letter to Emma Smith, 6 June 1832, p. 1, accessed November 18, 2017, online at josephsmithpapers.org. Spelling corrected. 8. Letter to Emma Smith, 13 October 1832, p. 3, accessed November 18, 2017, online at josephsmithpapers.org. Spelling corrected. 9. Richard Lloyd Anderson, “The Credibility of the Book of Mormon Translators,” in Book of Mormon Authorship: New Light on Ancient Origins, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1982), 228. See also, Richard Bushman, “The Character of Joseph Smith: Insights from His Holographs,” Ensign, April 1977, online at lds.org. 10. William Smith, William Smith on Mormonism: A True Account of the Origin of the Book of Mormon (Lamoni, IA, Herald Steam Book and Job Office, 1883), 9–10. On another occasion, when William was asked if he thought Joseph could have been lying to his family, he responded, “No. We all had the most implicit confidence in what he said. He was a truthful boy. Father and mother believed him. Why should not the children? I suppose if he had told crooked stories about other things, we might have doubted his word about the plates, but Joseph was a truthful boy. That father and mother believed his report and suffered persecution for that belief shows that he was truthful. No sir, we never doubted his word for one minute.” J. W. Peterson, “William B. Smith’s Last Statement,” Zion's Ensign 5, no. 3 (1894): 6; as cited in Richard Lloyd Anderson, “The Trustworthiness of Young Joseph Smith,” The Improvement Era 73, no. 10 (1970): 89. 11. Richard Lloyd Anderson, “The Trustworthiness of Young Joseph Smith,” The Improvement Era 73, no. 10 (1970): 82. For more on Joseph Smith’s family life, see Richard Lloyd Anderson, “Joseph Smith’s Home Environment,” Ensign, July 1971, online at lds.org; Richard Lloyd Anderson, “The Early Preparation of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” Ensign, December 2005, online at lds.org. 12. For a sampling of such statements, see “Character of Joseph Smith: Gentleness and Meekness and Love Unfeigned,” September 11, 2013, online at josephsmith.net. For a more comprehensive survey, see Mark McConkie, ed., Remembering Joseph Smith: Personal Recollections of Those Who Knew the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2003). 13. “The Mormons” The Morning Chronicle, June 1851, as cited in George Q. Cannon, The Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet (Salt Lake City, UT: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1888), 336. Emphasis added. 14. Doctrine and Covenants 124:1–2. 15. Doctrine and Covenants 132:48–50. 16. For the inconsistency of many of the claims made against Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, see Daniel C. Peterson, “Editor’s Introduction: ‘In the Hope That Something Will Stick’: Changing Explanations for the Book of Mormon,” FARMS Review 16, no. 2 (2004): xi–xxxv. 17. See Hugh Nibley, The World and the Prophets, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 3 (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1987), 9–16. 18. See Matthew 13:57; Mark 6:4; Helaman 13:25–26. For a comparison of the lives of Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ, see Richard Lloyd Anderson, “Probing the Lives of Christ and Joseph Smith,” FARMS Review 21, no. 2 (2009): 1–29. 19. See also, Moroni 7:14–16. 20. Neil L. Andersen, “Joseph Smith,” Ensign, November 2014, online at lds.org. 21. For the importance of testing a prophet’s words by acting upon them, see John 7:17: “Jesus answered them, and said, My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” 22. Andersen, “Joseph Smith,” online at lds.org. 23. For instance, unless Joseph was humble and prayerful, the seer stone would not work during the translation of the Book of Mormon. See John W. Welch, “The Miraculous Timing of the Translation of the Book of Mormon,” in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations 1820–1844, 2nd edition, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and BYU Press, 2017), 173–174, doc. 96. As another evidence of the need for moral conduct, Joseph’s gift to translate was completely withdrawn for a time because he and Martin Harris did not listen to the counsel of the Lord. See William J. Critchlow III, “Manuscript, Lost 166 Pages,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols., ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1992), 2:854–855. Why Did Moroni Conclude with So Many Exhortations?	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3348
__label__cc	0.650794	0.349206	Could there be life around Jupiter? by Medhi Ben Slama in Physics Jupiter and Ganymede. By NASA hubble The search for liquid water on Jupiter’s moons could reveal a habitat suitable for life. Space physicist Mehdi Ben Slama guides us through that search. narrated by Vidish Athavale music by Dexter Britain /media/could_there_be_life_around_Jupiter.mp3 /media/Episodes_images/episode_id-47e8afff-69e3-43eb-818f-675e5301ec1e/TI_ganymede.jpg Medhi Ben Slama Mehdi is a space physicist at Imperial College London whose research focuses on the search for water on Jupiter’s moons, particularly Ganymede. When his head is not up above my butts, he enjoys exploring underground cave systems. Also, he is Tunisian — and yes, Tunisia is a real country. From the point of view of the universe, our everyday concerns, goals, failures and achievements are uneventful occurrences. Until fairly recently, at the beginning of the 20th century, we thought that the Milky Way galaxy made up everything that there is, the entire universe. We thought that its 100+ billion stars — of which the Sun is but one — exhausted the number of stars that there are in space. It turns out that today we know the Milky Way is but one of over 100 billion galaxies that populate the universe. This vastness is overwhelming, overwhelming to the point of frightening us. This fear is understandable, however. The universe is so great that the rise of a civilization like ours might not be a one-off event, but an event that occurs all the time. The emergence and persistence of life, including intelligent life, may be no rarity. The universe may be rippling with life. But if that’s the case, where does this alien life hide? Maybe much closer than we would expect. Living creatures, as we know them, require water to survive, so our best shot at finding them involves first determining which environments possess water in large quantities. In the last few years, our best shot at finding water hasn’t been with other Solar System planets, not even Mars, but with Solar System moons, with the most recent space missions taking place around Jupiter and Saturn. And this is where things get interesting: Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter’s moons, is almost entirely made up of water ice. This fact raises a question: if there is ice all around the surface and down to almost 600 km under it, could that ice melt into liquid water? We know that the further underground we go, the warmer it gets. Hence, there could be a certain depth where it gets hot enough for water to exist in its liquid form. The problem then becomes: how can you detect liquid water that’s covered by a large layer of ice? The answer is electricity. Our oceans are excellent conductors of electrical currents. (This is why swimming during a storm is a really bad idea — you might be electrocuted!) On Earth, electrical currents on the water surface produce oscillations in the magnetic field that spread upwards and can be picked up by instruments on orbiting satellites. If a satellite picks up these signals, we can suspect that there is an ocean below it, potentially harbouring life. But there are no storms on these moons. And even if there were, the lightning couldn’t reach the water several kilometres below. So if there are oceans below the ice on Ganymede, how can we tell that they’re there? The mechanism involved is very common, and is something used in everyday life. The process, called magnetic induction, allows us to convert motion into electricity, or electricity into motion. Take your electric toy car, for example: open it and you will find a chunk of copper wires surrounded by a ring of magnets. When the magnets rotate around the copper wires, electricity is created in them. So, a fact to remember: if something conductive wiggles near a magnet, you get a magnetic field. So, if there are oceans under the ice on Ganymede, they could act as a conductive wire that carries electrical currents. So what could play the role of a magnet? Well, Jupiter has the largest magnetic field of any planet in the Solar System. On top of that, we have motion due to the orbit of the moons around Jupiter. So, we have the perfect recipe for electricity: a wire (which could be the oceans), a magnet (which would be Jupiter), and movement (which is the orbit). We know that there is a magnet and movement. So, if a magnetic field is detected on Ganymede, there must be oceans conducting the electricity! This is why we think that oceans exist underneath the large layer of ice on Ganymede: in the 1990s, the instruments aboard a satellite picked up a very large magnetic field. This large magnetic field could only have been created by the existence of such oceans. There is still a lot we don’t know about the oceans though. Our last mission measuring this magnetic field ended in 1995. But in approximately 2030 a new space mission by the European Space Agency will seek to observe Ganymede in detail. It will hopefully confirm the existence of these oceans, providing us with evidence for a potential habitat for alien life in our very own Solar System! Something similar: How to photograph an atom and save the world by Oscar Williams How can the behaviour of a single atom provide insights into our energy demands? How do we know that atoms actually exist? And what on Earth do the acronyms XPS, STM and UHV stand for? If you find yourself wondering ... Something different: Walking through Dickensian London by John Mullan In this podcast, Dickens expert John Mullan takes us on a journey through this great writer's mind, touching on his relationship to London, dreams, Bedlam, ... Copyright © Know it Wall team@knowitwall.com (hidden) static URL for 'switching_audioplayers.js'	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3349
__label__wiki	0.69111	0.69111	New Test from Quest Diagnostics Helps Physicians Choose HIV Antiretroviral Therapy in Patients with History of Drug Resistance Faster reporting aids physicians in identifying HIV mutations that can inhibit effectiveness of newest class of antiretroviral therapy MADISON, N.J., June 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (NYSE: DGX), the world's leading provider of diagnostic testing, information and services, today announced the availability of a new laboratory developed test designed to help physicians determine whether a patient with a history of HIV drug resistance will respond to the latest class of HIV antiretroviral therapies. The HIV-1 Coreceptor Tropism Test, which reports results in approximately half the time of the nearest competing test, provides physicians with timely information so they may more quickly determine or change therapy based on how the HIV virus infects cells in the individual patient. "Diagnostic testing is at the center of personalized medicine, providing genetic insights necessary to understand which medicines are most likely to produce a favorable health outcome for the individual patient," said Jon R. Cohen, M.D., senior vice president and chief medical officer, Quest Diagnostics. "Our new HIV tropism test will advance personalized medicine for HIV by helping physicians identify suitable patients for a particular therapy and ensure those who are not suitable do not lose precious treatment time potentially better spent on a different drug." HIV coreceptor tropism refers to the preference of strains of HIV to bind to, activate and infect cells, promoting disease progression, based on the type of coreceptor on the cell's surface. The newest class of antiretroviral drugs, called entry inhibitors, targets the tropism process involving one or both coreceptors, CCR5 or CXCR4, of CD4 cells, which help the immune system fight infection. HIV-1 viral particles that use the CCR5 coreceptor to infect the cell are called R5-tropic, those using CXCR4 are called X4-tropic, and those using both are called dual-tropic. X4- and dual-tropic viruses typically emerge after years of infection and are found in up to half of patients with a history of drug resistance or those with advanced disease. Guidelines from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommend tropism testing prior to the start of a CCR5 inhibitor, such as maraviroc (Selzentry TM). Three out of four people taking HIV drugs experience treatment failure linked to drug resistance. "CCR5 antagonist entry inhibitors have given physicians new options for treating thousands of patients with HIV who have shown resistance to earlier HIV therapies. Yet, they are only suitable for about half of these patients due to different ways the virus tries to infect cells," said Jay G. Wohlgemuth, M.D., vice president of Science and Innovation, Quest Diagnostics. "With our new tropism test, we expect to report results within seven days of receiving a patient specimen, compared to the leading commercial HIV tropism test, which requires two weeks of processing time once a sample is received. Considering that tropism status can change in as little as a few weeks in patients with a history of HIV drug resistance, faster results potentially translate into earlier initiation of efficacious therapy." At the XVIII International HIV Drug Resistance Workshop in Fort Meyers, Florida, Quest Diagnostics scientists yesterday presented results of a three-way study using samples from patients with histories of drug resistance that found that the Quest Diagnostics HIV-1 Coreceptor Tropism laboratory developed test demonstrated 74 percent agreement with Trofile(TM), the leading phenotypic tropism test available from Monogram Biosciences, and 74 percent agreement with SensiTrop(TM) II, a genotypic tropism test previously available from Pathway Diagnostics. The SensiTrop(TM) II test, which is no longer commercially available, was 73 percent in agreement with Trofile(TM) . The Quest Diagnostics investigators concluded that the concordance between the two independently developed genotypic tropism tests was comparable to the concordance of each assay with the Trofile, and that the proportion of X4 viruses detected did not vary significantly by assay type. Quest Diagnostics had offered a prior version of the SensiTrop test through a license with Pathway Diagnostics before acquiring the company during the fourth quarter 2008. The company's new HIV-1 Coreceptor test employs a novel molecular-based technology developed by Quest Diagnostics scientists. The Quest Diagnostics HIV laboratory testing services menu is the most comprehensive in the diagnostic industry. In addition to HIV tropism testing, the company's test services range from HIV diagnostic testing to monitoring HIV viral load, determining a viral genotype, and testing for the HLA-B*5701 genetic marker as an aid in predicting a hypersensitivity reaction to abacavir (Ziagen(R)), an antiretroviral therapy. About HIV and AIDS HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus, is a retrovirus that infects cells of the human immune system, destroying or impairing their function. The two major viruses that cause AIDS are HIV-1 and HIV-2. The most common, HIV-1, is found worldwide, while HIV-2 is primarily confined to West Africa. The most advanced stage of HIV infection is AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. HIV can take up to 15 years to develop into AIDS, a process that antiretroviral drugs can help delay. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 1.2 million people over the age of 15 in the U.S. were infected with HIV in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available. HIV antiretroviral therapy (ART) is designed to suppresses or stop HIV disease progression. Quest Diagnostics is the world's leading provider of diagnostic testing, information and services that patients and doctors need to make better healthcare decisions. The company offers the broadest access to diagnostic testing services through its network of laboratories and patient service centers, and provides interpretive consultation through its extensive medical and scientific staff. Quest Diagnostics is a pioneer in developing innovative diagnostic tests and advanced healthcare information technology solutions that help improve patient care. Additional company information is available at www.QuestDiagnostics.com. The statements in this press release which are not historical facts may be forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date that they are made and which reflect management's current estimates, projections, expectations or beliefs and which involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to be materially different. Risks and uncertainties that may affect the future results of the company include, but are not limited to, adverse results from pending or future government investigations, lawsuits or private actions, the competitive environment, changes in government regulations, changing relationships with customers, payers, suppliers and strategic partners and other factors discussed in "Business" in Part I, Item 1, "Risk Factors" and "Cautionary Factors that May Affect Future Results" in Part I, Item 1A, "Legal Proceedings" in Part I, Item 3, "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Part II, Item 7 and "Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk" in Part II, Item 7A in the company's 2008 Annual Report on Form 10-K and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" and "Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk" in the company's 2009 Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and other items throughout the Form 10-K and the company's 2009 Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. Trofile is a trademark of Monogram Biosciences, Inc. Selzentry is a trademark of Pfizer Inc. ZIAGEN(R) is a registered trademark, used under license by GlaxoSmithKline Inc. Quest, Quest Diagnostics, the associated logo, Nichols Institute and all associated Quest Diagnostics marks are the registered trademarks of Quest Diagnostics. All third party marks -- (R)' and (TM)' -- are the property of their respective owners. (C) 2000-2009 Quest Diagnostics Incorporated. All rights reserved. Laure Park (Investors): 973-520-2900	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3351
__label__wiki	0.817056	0.817056	Home / About / National Council / Robert Berney, PC Holdings Robert Berney, PC Holdings Robert Berney holds a PhD in SME Development and has been involved in owning and managing his own business P.C. Holdings Ltd for 30 years. He has lectured in Universities in France, Finland and Ireland and was a partner in a consultancy practice specialising in SME policy. He was a member of a number of Government advisory committees and is the Irish representative on the EU Enterprise Policy Group in Brussels. A member of ISME since its founding, Robert was Chair in 2004/5.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3353
__label__wiki	0.990017	0.990017	Whitney Houston's death: 'No signs of foul play,' police say Whitney Houston was found unresponsive in a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Saturday afternoon by paramedics who performed CPR for about 20 minutes before declaring the pop star dead. Authorities said they don't have a cause of death. "Nothing obvious at this time," Beverly Hills police Lt. Mark Rosen told reporters at a news conference. "No signs of foul play." The Beverly Hills Fire Department said it was called to the hotel about 3:30 p.m. and Houston was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m. Houston, 48, was in the Los Angeles area for a musical tribute for music executive Clive Davis and had performed earlier this week. PHOTOS: Whitney Houston, 1963-2012 Houston was planning to attend Davis’ annual pre-Grammy party Saturday at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Earlier this week, the 79-year-old Davis perused page after page of guest lists in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he conducts business when he’s in the Los Angeles area. Among those Houston was expected to rub elbows with were Quincy Jones, Tony Bennett, Akon, Cee Lo Green, Miley Cyrus, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Jennifer Hudson, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall. “It’s a great time where everybody can set down their swords, so to speak,” Davis said, seated on an overstuffed divan next to a coffee table cluttered with papers, CDs and videos. “I was grateful that, inviting them to my home, that they would feel comfortable and just keep coming back, and they've kept coming back every year to where it's expanded to be this incredible haven for musicians.” Houston had drug and alcohol problems for years, and in May her spokeswoman said she was going back to rehab. Publicist Kristen Foster told the Associated Press on Saturday that Houston had died but did not provide further details. Houston was kown for such hits as “How Will I Know,” “Saving All My Love for You” and “I Will Always Love You.” She also starred in movies such as “The Bodyguard.” Hotel guests stunned Hotel guest describes scene Whitney Houston dead at 48 No signs of foul play say police Whitney Houston died in hotel room Whitney Houston had large entourage Medics performend CPR for about 20 minutes Whitney Houston spotted displaying erratic behavior Whitney Houston dead at 48; celebrities react on Twitter -- Andrew Blankstein and Randy Lewis Photo: Whitney Houston performing at the closing concert of the 'Mawazine' world music festival in Rabat, Morocco May 24, 208. Credit: Zacarias Garcia / EPA	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3357
__label__wiki	0.531865	0.531865	Jesus: His Life – Eight-Part HISTORY Event Coming Soon! February 22, 2019 by Lisa M. Hendey HISTORY event Jesus: His Life airs beginning March 25. Image courtesy of HISTORY Fittingly, a new television feature on the life of Jesus Christ debuts on Monday, March 25 on HISTORY. While I haven’t screened the full series yet, the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord seems like the perfect day to tune into a program that looks at the life of history’s most important man, the Son of God. Programs like this one are often helpful vehicles to learn about the historical events that surround Jesus’ life. This series offers input and perspectives from a theologically-diverse group of scholars and faith leaders (listed in the press release below). I’m looking forward to watching and sharing my thoughts on the project when it airs. With Lent beginning in early March, the timing for the series as we head into Holy Week and the Easter season is a perfect invitation to dig beyond what we see on the screen and dive more deeply into scripture. Here’s a sneak peek at the trailer: History to premiere eight-part event ‘Jesus: His Life’ on Monday, March 25 Epic retelling of the life of Jesus Christ airs over four weeks leading up to Easter NEW YORK, NY, Jan. 22, 2019 – HISTORY’s eight-part event “Jesus: His Life” explores the story of Jesus Christ through a unique lens: the people in his life who were closest to him. Each of the eight chapters is told from the perspective of different biblical figures, all of whom played a pivotal role in Jesus’ life, including Joseph, John the Baptist, Mary Mother of Jesus, Caiaphas, Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, Mary Magdalene and Peter. Each figure takes a turn guiding viewers through the emotional and epic story of the most famous man in history, through his birth, death and resurrection, all conveyed through a combination of scripted drama and interviews with prominent religious and historical experts. Utilizing some of the world’s most respected Biblical scholars, historians, faith leaders and theologians, the series weaves together the canonical Gospels, historical sources and cultural context to create a complete portrait of Jesus – the man and the Messiah. The series reveals his journey through a complex world of kings, politicians, reformers and soldiers in a turbulent power struggle during a time of revolutionary change. “Jesus: His Life” brings viewers into this dramatic world to reveal the greatest story ever told. The series premieres two episodes back-to-back weekly beginning on Monday, March 25 at 8 p.m. ET/PT, with the finale airing just before Easter. A+E Networks holds exclusive worldwide distribution rights for the series which is produced by Nutopia. “‘Jesus: His Life’ brings together some of the world’s top scholars, historians and faith leaders from diverse ideological and theological perspectives to tell the story of Jesus in a new way,” said Mary Donahue, SVP, Programming and Development for HISTORY. “Viewers will see and experience the life of Jesus as never before, through this powerful and thought-provoking portrait of a man who is one of the most influential people in human history.” The series interviews and consulted with a diverse group of scholars, faith leaders and theologians from across the ideological spectrum to provide a rounded picture of the life and times in which Jesus lived, including: Robert Cargill – Assistant Professor of Judaism, Christianity and Classics, University of Iowa Christena Cleveland – Associate Professor, Duke University Divinity School Bishop Michael Curry – Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church Nicola Denzey Lewis – Professor in the Department of Religion, Claremont Graduate University Joshua DuBois – Author and CEO, Values Partnerships and Head of White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships under President Obama Rabbi Joshua Garroway – Associate Professor of Early Christianity and the Second Commonwealth, Hebrew Union College Mark Goodacre – Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Duke University Nyasha Junior – Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible, Temple University Mark Leuchter – Professor and Director of Jewish Studies, Temple University Kimberly Majeski – Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Christian Ministries, Anderson University Father James Martin, S.J – Jesuit Priest and Author Ryan McAnnally-Linz – Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture Scot McKnight – Professor of New Testament, Northern Seminary Father Jonathan Morris – Catholic Priest Candida Moss – Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham (UK) Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III – Senior Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ Joel Osteen – Senior Pastor of Lakewood Church, New York Times Bestselling Author, and Executive Producer Michael Peppard – Associate Professor in New Testament, Early Christian Studies, Religion and Public Life, Fordham University Reverend Gabriel Salguero – Pastor and President of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition Stephen Schneck – Associate Professor of Politics, Catholic University of America Simon Sebag Montefiore – Historian and Author Reverend Shively Smith – Assistant Professor of New Testament, Boston University School of Theology Pastor Susan Sparks – Preacher, Comedian and Author Miroslav Volf – Founder/Director, Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Professor of Theology, Yale University Divinity School Ben Witherington III – Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary Annette Yoshiko Reed – Associate Professor of Religious Studies, New York University “Jesus: His Life” is produced for HISTORY by Nutopia with Jane Root and Ben Goold serving as executive producers. Eli Lehrer, Mary Donahue and Evan Lerner serve as executive producers for HISTORY. Joel Osteen also serves as Executive Producer. A+E Networks holds exclusive worldwide distribution rights for “Jesus: His Life.” Filed Under: Television Tagged With: History, Jesus, Lent, Television	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3360
__label__wiki	0.76632	0.76632	Adele Is Reportedly Ready to Release New Music After Her Divorce Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images New Adele music might be just around the corner. According to People, the singer is ready to release new songs following her divorce from husband Simon Konecki. In fact, sources say she plans to drop a new album later this year — and it'll be just as personal as 19, 21 and 25. "She is definitely getting ready both mentally and physically to promote new music. It seems it will happen later this year,” the insider explained. "She talks about last year as a very difficult year, and she's said in the past that creating new music is almost like therapy. You can tell that she is ready to share with her fans." Meanwhile, another source described the superstar as "perky as hell" and said "she’s free and spirited and feels like a new person." They also added: “She is so busy, but her life is better-rounded than it was before. She is very fulfilled being an artist. New music is still a big deal for her, and she feels alive and happy.” It seems like Adele is truly living her best life. She's also reportedly spending time with "loyal girlfriends" who just as private as she is when it comes to their personal lives. One person who comes to mind is BFF Jennifer Lawrence, who Adele was previously spotted getting drunk with at a gay bar in New York City in March. As for her ex-husband, sources say she and Konecki are doing a good job at co-parenting their son Angelo. Music Comebacks We're Waiting For Source: Adele Is Reportedly Ready to Release New Music After Her Divorce Filed Under: adele	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3362
__label__wiki	0.777877	0.777877	Justia › US Law › Case Law › Wisconsin Case Law › Wisconsin Supreme Court Decisions › 1966 › Giese v. Karstedt Receive free daily summaries of new opinions from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Subscribe Giese v. Karstedt 30 Wis. 2d 630 (1966) GIESE (Harland), by Guardian ad litem, Plaintiff and Respondent v. KARSTEDT and another, Defendants: IOWA NATIONAL MUTUAL INSURANCE COMPANY, Defendant and Appellant. GIESE (Marvin) and another, Plaintiffs, v. SAME, Defendants: SAME, Defendant and Appellant. Supreme Court of Wisconsin. 633 For the appellant there was a brief by Everson, Whitney, O'Melia, Everson & Brehm of Green Bay, and oral argument by Philip R. Brehm. 634 For the respondent there was a brief by Lehner, Lehner & Behling of Oconto Falls, and oral argument by Howard N. Lehner. WILKIE, J. The issues presented on this appeal are whether the following findings by the trial court are against the great weight and clear preponderance of the evidence:[1] First, that Frederick Karstedt did not furnish his automobile to his father for regular use prior to and on April 2, 1961. Second, that Frederick Karstedt was not a member of his father's household on April 2, 1961. According to the policy terms, appellant Iowa National will succeed on this appeal if either question is answered in the affirmative. Although respondents do not argue this point, it should be noted at the onset that the exclusion clause in the policy is not ambiguous.[2] Therefore, this is not an occasion to invoke the rule of strict construction against the insurance company in regard to the policy provisions. Regular Use. The policy in question excludes coverage in the event that Frederick Karstedt's car was furnished for the regular use of his father, the named insured in the Iowa National insurance policy. Before Frederick left on his service hitch he told his father to "Keep the gas tank filled so moisture wouldn't get in it" and to "occasionally run it on the road." The father also understood these to be his instructions. It cannot be said that a direction to "occasionally run" a 635 car is equivalent to permission to use the car regularly. Nor did Theodore Karstedt carry out his son's wishes in such a way as to regularly use the car. Between February 23 and April 2, 1961, he started the automobile at most once a week and drove it on either one or two occasions. The trial court found that: "The use of the car was very sporadic and definitely restricted."[3] Our conclusion is that the trial court's finding that there was no regular use of Frederick's car by the father must be affirmed. Household. In Raymond v. Century Indemnity Co.,[4] a case not cited in the trial court's opinion, a twenty-two-year-old, who had previously lived with his mother all his life, entered the army. Whether or not there was insurance coverage on the particular facts depended on the underlying question of whether the son was still in his mother's household. It was held that nothing had happened to destroy his status as a member of the household. Although there is authority to the contrary,[5] this appears to be the general rule in most jurisdictions.[6]Raymond 636 was cited in the very recent case of Doern v. Crawford,[7] where this court, after considering it and two other "household" cases,[8] said: "The holdings of these three cases demonstrate that the controlling test of whether persons are members of a household at a particular time is not solely whether they are then residing together under one roof. Living together under one roof is a factor to be considered and must have occurred at some time. When not occurring at the time in question, the absence from the family roof must be of a temporary nature with intent on the part of the absent person to return thereto."[9] "Whether the absence from the household is of long or short duration is immaterial except as it may give rise to an inference of intent to remain away permanently or only temporarily."[10] Aside from the time spent in school and service, Frederick had always lived in Cecil. He had never established a permanent residence elsewhere. While away from Cecil he left unneeded personal belongings in his parents' home. After enlisting in the armed forces, he continued banking in Cecil, used a Cecil address for mailing and automobile-licensing purposes, and had a portion of his pay sent there. True, he apparently voted in the national elections while at school in Milwaukee in 1960. But after that date he returned to Cecil. In short, these and other factors demonstrate, with no inferences to the contrary, under the holding of Raymond and the test promulgated in Doern, that young Karstedt had not *637 completely severed the "household" umbilical cord as of April 2, 1961. The trial court's finding that: ". . . his [Frederick's] voluntary enlistment and entry into the service took him out of the household and he was no longer a member of it." is against the great weight and clear preponderance and is in error. That Frederick should be deemed to remain as a member of his father's household and that coverage should not be extended under the father's insurance policy where he is involved in an accident while driving his son's automobile (not specifically covered by the father's policy) is perfectly consistent with the basic purpose of provisions excluding from coverage liability arising out of the use of other automobiles owned, hired, or regularly used by a member of the insured's household.[11] By the Court.Judgments reversed. [1] Boekek Construction Equipment Corp. v. O'Brien (1966), 29 Wis. (2d) 649, 139 N. W. (2d) 650; Huber Glass Co. v. First Nat. Bank (1965), 29 Wis. (2d) 106, 138 N. W. (2d) 157. [2] Lontkowski v. Ignarski (1959), 6 Wis. (2d) 561, 95 N. W. (2d) 230. [3] Citing Le Mense v. Thiel (1964), 25 Wis. (2d) 364, 130 N. W. (2d) 875. [4] (1953), 264 Wis. 429, 59 N. W. (2d) 459. [5] Shapiro v. Republic Indemnity Co. of America (1959), 52 Cal. (2d) 437, 341 Pac. (2d) 289. [6] Central Manufacturers' Mut. Ins. Co. v. Friedman (1948), 213 Ark. 9, 209 S. W. (2d) 102; Senn v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co. (Ky. 1956), 287 S. W. (2d) 439; Mississippi Benefit Asso. v. Majure (1947), 201 Miss. 183, 29 So. (2d) 501, 229 N. Y. Ins. Co. v. Jahrling (1962), 16 App. Div. (2d) 501, 229 N. Y. Supp. (2d) 707; American Universal Ins. Co. v. Thompson (1963), 62 Wash. (2d) 595, 384 Pac. (2d) 367; Detroit Automobile Inter-Insurance Exchange v. Feys (D. C. Cal. 1962), 205 Fed. Supp. 42; American Service Mut. Ins. Co. v. Pugh (8th Cir. 1959), 271 Fed. (2d) 174. [7] Ante, p. 206, 140 N. W. (2d) 193. [8] National Farmers Union Property & Casualty Co. v. Maca (1965), 26 Wis. (2d) 399, 132 N. W. (2d) 517, and Lontkowski v. Ignarski, supra, footnote 2. [9] Doern v. Crawford, supra, footnote 7, at page 213. [10] Doern v. Crawford, supra, footnote 7, at page 214. [11] As stated by Mr. Justice FAIRCHILD in National Farmers Union Property & Casualty Co. v. Maca, supra, footnote 8, at page 405, the purpose of the "drive-other-car" provisions like the one in the Iowa National policy here "is to avoid coverage of several vehicles owned by members of the same family, who, by their close intimacy, might be expected to use each other's cars without hindrance and with or without permission." of Wisconsin Supreme Court opinions.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3367
__label__wiki	0.7655	0.7655	Anna Rickels joins UT Law to advance expungement efforts A University of Tennessee College of Law alumna has been selected to lead the Legal Clinic’s effort in helping rural East Tennesseans rebuild their lives. Anna Rickels, a 2014 graduate of UT Law, will serve as the College of Law’s reentry fellow working with the ExpungeTN Project that provides legal services to those who struggle to overcome their criminal records. In June the Tennessee Bar Foundation’s Tennessee Legal Initiatives Fund awarded the College of Law a $100,000 grant to help better serve vulnerable and underrepresented populations in East Tennessee. In total, the organization awarded more than $1 million to encourage innovation in civil legal aid. Rickels will primarily work with UT College of Law professors and student attorneys to identify and assist individuals seeking to remove charges from a criminal record. She will organize Saturday Community Courts in rural East Tennessee counties partnering with judges, court clerks, district attorneys, public defenders, churches, and local community groups. She will also help launch ExpungeTN.org, a website that will offer user-friendly resources for individuals statewide. ExpungeTN.org will be designed to make more accessible Tennessee’s laws concerning record expungement, employability, and voting rights restoration. Rickels attended Davidson College in North Carolina where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in religion and is a former program director for Chapel Hill Quest Martial Arts in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She returned to her hometown of Knoxville in 2011 to attend law school and worked in criminal defense law as an associate attorney with Oberman and Rice. Legal Clinic Director Joy Radice, who will oversee Rickels’ efforts, said the project is an important undertaking for the College of Law. “We are thrilled to have someone with Anna’s skill, determination, and talent working with our Legal Clinic to help better serve residents of Tennessee’s rural areas,” Radice said. “Our students, our college, and our community are being well-served by this ExpungeTN, and we look forward to sharing more details as Anna’s efforts continue.” The UT College of Law Legal Clinic is a national leader in clinical education, ranking ninth in U.S. News and World Report’s top legal clinical programs among public universities and 20th among all U.S. law schools.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3368
__label__cc	0.675371	0.324629	Lifespark Uses Innovative AI Platform To Teach Parenting Skills Kevin Kruse Can a chatbot on your smartphone improve your parenting skills? Heather, the woman with short brown hair that I was chatting with on Facebook messenger, was frustrated. Her son Ethan would put up a fight every night when it was time for bed. A scene every parent knows all too well. Heather was understandably at the end of her rope (“Sounds rough,” I told her, “OMG–thank you, it is rough!” she answered.) But she shared an amazing technique she used to persuade her son to stop playing and to get in his pajamas. The technique involved getting closer to Ethan as he played, laying a hand gently on his back, and staying close until he moved into the bedroom. She seemed relieved that it was working, and even sent a picture of the post-it note she keeps on her fridge to remind her of the three steps. Did I mention Heather is an interactive chatbot? The messenger bot is called ParentSpark and was created by startup LifeSpark. And with chatbot Heather’s help, a parent's life becomes easier with short chats at their convenience. The ParentSpark chatbot offers a more personalized approach to parenting advice than most best-selling books. You can select the frequency from which you hear from ParentSpark, receive assignments, and even request that she checks in with you every few days. Chances are you’ve experienced AI chatbots before if you’ve ever returned an item on Amazon, or dealt with cable companies online, or tried to book a hotel room from their website. You might even be sick of them. But a new trend is starting to emerge; the development of psychological chatbots that provide support, motivation and behavior change. And they have a very lifelike feel. To co-creator of ParentSpark, Rachel Sklar, the human quality is the whole point. “Parenting advice is easy to come by, but hard to remember and apply,” Sklar explains, “At ParentSpark we use relatable, interactive stories to leverage the way adults learn.” Essentially, by sharing stories of her own experiences, Heather becomes less like an algorithm and more like a non-judgmental friend. This makes it easier to remember and trust her advice. When chatting with Heather there are canned responses to choose from (“Yes,” “Sure,” and “Got it,” among many others) and they are surprisingly accommodating. It’s because of this approach that this chatbot is different than most. Many AI chatbots learn from the responses they are given, infinitely collecting external information and stimuli that determine its output. This has, more often than not, resulted in total PR disasters. Heather’s advice is backed by legitimate research, and while she can learn and adapt to the kind of advice you’d like to hear—even remembering multiple contexts—her core competency won’t be compromised by the odd unruly user. With these developments in chatbot technology, it looks as though interactive AI is the wave of the present and the future. The emerging trend of chatbots being utilized for more nuanced topics, like mental health, anxiety management, and parenting, has been steadily gaining in popularity. Apps like Woebot and Wysa, both of which come styled as a therapist-cum-best-friend, have modern approaches to dealing with mental health in a busy world. After all, scheduling time to discuss your problems with a therapist, or even venting to a close friend over a drink, costs both time and money. As Sklar frames it, the world of parenting is equally messy and time-consuming. “Parents don't have time to wade through it all with a critical eye—and even if they did, it's hard to apply what you've learned without support,” she says, “ParentSpark is high-quality, customized content delivered in micro-chunks…And it's there when parents need the support most.” It’s an innovative approach to what might be considered deeply personal subjects. As more companies give AI chatbots expanded abilities, the more likely they are to venture into a more unchartered territory. “We hope chatbots will grow to support people in more abstract ways—to help them create more meaningful lives and feel more connected to the people around them.” Sklar’s point isn’t missed on most millennials, who are more likely than any other generation to engage online in forums or on social media. So what’s on the horizon for AI and chatbots? For LifeSpark and its creators, it’s about more than staying on the cutting edge. “Our mission is to make education and coaching accessible to everyone, despite limited resources in their lives or community.” Sklar’s goal is to create an easy-to-use and easy-to-access source for parents of all socioeconomic backgrounds, and for them to know they are receiving quality information. The fact that the greatest tool to do so happens to be a chatbot with lots of stories and a heart of gold, is almost secondary. “We help people turn great ideas into action so they can make a bigger impact in the world,” Sklar explains. Thousands of industries are waking to the new dawn of chatbots and their limitless possibilities. Who’s to say chatbots won’t one day lead whole remote teams? Or provide prescriptions? Or teach students? So the next time you log on to Slack, or BaseCamp, or Facebook Messenger, remember the person whose advice you’re taking just might be made up of a series of algorithms and numbers. And if they were…would it matter? http://www.kevinkruse.com CEO of LEADx, and NY Times bestselling author, of Great Leaders Have No Rules and Employee Engagement 2.0. Get a FREE trial of the LEADx platform at https://page.leadx.org/demo.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3369
__label__wiki	0.921805	0.921805	History & Founders Strategy & Approach Governance & Financials History & Founders Training Jewish Community Security Capacity Initiative Announcing Impact Cubed MGSDII The Pulse of Jewish Music Virtual Concert Series JCOCO: Jewish Collaborative Coworking This is San Diego Jewry Strategic Focus & Grantmaking Grant Stories North County Jewish Life Jerusalem Renewal San Diego-Israel Connections HIVE Member Directory What The Hive Offers HIVE Membership Application West Coast Jewish Futures Conference West Coast Jewish Futures Conference Sessions The Hive & SDCJC Collaboration Leichtag Commons Coastal Roots Farm Leichtag Advisory Services Philanthropic Consulting Farmer D Consulting Food Systems Consulting Isolation Inspiration: a Virtual Art Show Leichtag News Counting Our Voice: a Community Time Capsule Virtual Galleries and Collaborations Chef Tiffani’s Cooking Corner & Recipes sukkah-build-2 (1) September 19, 2018 /by Connie Lu https://leichtag.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Leichtag-Foundation-Logo2.png 0 0 Connie Lu https://leichtag.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Leichtag-Foundation-Logo2.png Connie Lu2018-09-19 18:15:182018-09-19 18:15:18sukkah-build-2 (1) Thanksgiving Looks Different this Year – Try New Recipes to Add a Twist on the HolidayNovember 24, 2020 - 10:30 am COVID-Safe Holiday Volunteer OpportunitiesNovember 11, 2020 - 2:33 pm Lessons from The COVID-19 Crisis in North County San DiegoOctober 15, 2020 - 1:15 pm Celebrate Women’s Progress on Women’s Equality Day!August 26, 2020 - 1:25 pm Moving from Pain to Joy and Justice – Exploring the Month of Av August 6, 2020 - 9:42 am Be the first to read the latest about Leichtag Foundation's grantmaking and activites! © Copyright 2020 \| Leichtag Foundation \| 441 Saxony Road Encinitas, CA 92024 \| 760-929-1090 \| info@leichtag.org Disabusing Others of Their Assumptions and Preconceptions Black. White. Jewish. Christian. Male. Female. Curly hair. Straight hair. Every day, in every way, people make assumptions about others based on gender, affect, physical attributes, gestures, and accents. Shoshannah and Cedric Hart know a thing or two about this, as they have spent many years listening to what others think they know about them. When the Arizona natives began dating more than 10 years ago-she was about to begin college at Arizona State University, he was finishing up there-they faced a barrage of questions from Cedric’s parents, devout Christians, about Shoshannah’s belief system. “They asked me, ‘How do you celebrate Christmas? Why don’t you believe in Jesus?”‘ recalled Shoshannah, 28, who grew up in a strongly identified Reform Jewish home in Phoenix and attended a local Chabad synagogue, where she observed her Bat Mitzvah. Jump ahead five years to their move to California, where Shoshannah, now a practicing attorney, went to law school, and Cedric, 32, found himself in the hot seat. The couple would be at a synagogue service or another Jewish gathering, and people would question whether Cedric was Jewish, since he is African American. “It is kind of annoying,” Cedric, an elementary school physical education teacher, said, speaking in the present because questions of his Jewish identity still persist. “But I try to brush it off.” Nevertheless, he conceded, the effect is alienating. “It kind of makes me feel pushed out.” What both Harts would like people to know is that Cedric is every bit as Jewish as Shoshannah. He underwent conversion more than two years ago, after several years of serious study. He did so not because his then -fiancee asked him to-in fact, like traditional rabbis, she discouraged him until she was certain he was doing it for himself-but because he wanted to be Jewish like the children they planned to raise together. “There are many Jews of Color” Now the parents of a five-month-old son, Ezra, and three-year residents of San Diego, Shoshannah and Cedric find that living in North County affords them multiple opportunities to express themselves as Jews. Members of Congregation B’nai Tikvah in Carlsbad, they also participate in family programs at Cardiff’s Temple Solel, as well as many activities at The Hive and Coastal Roots Farm, including Great Outdoors Shabbat; Tu B’Av, a Jewish version of Valentine’s Day; and the Sukkot Harvest Festival. They said that they appreciate Leichtag Commons’ ability to attract San Diego Jews of all ages, colors, levels of observance, genders, and sexual orientations. It is also why Shoshannah is drawn to Shalom Baby, a program run by San Diego’s Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, which enables new parents and babies to meet each other. Through the group, she has become friendly with an LGBTQ mom and another participant married to a black man from Israel-a reminder, she said, that “there are Jews of many colors.” Cedric added that he, too, is feeling the warm embrace of the San Diego Jewish community. For him, he said, it’s all about “joining in and talking to each other and learning.” Reflecting the Jewish Values of Mitzvot and Tikkun Olam Local emergency room physician Dr. Chad Valderrama is in awe of his wife, Julie Avanzino, who, he says, remains as graceful as the professional ballet dancer she once was. He particularly marvels how Julie, who danced with major companies in Pittsburgh, Denver, and San Diego, has seamlessly adopted Jewish traditions and practices, though she was not born Jewish. “While creating a Jewish home is important to all of us,” said Chad, who is 36, “Julie takes the lead in organizing” for the holidays, such as Sukkot, Hanukkah, and Passover. “So even though she has not converted, she is just as Jewish as I am.” For her part, Julie, also 36, said that she welcomes being part of the San Diego Jewish community and feels embraced by it. This sense of belonging is important to Julie, the daughter of two chemists, an Italian-American father and Chinese-American mother. “My parents are agnostics/atheists,” said Julie, who grew up with no religious identity in the Silicon Valley. “On the one hand, it is fine. On the other, holidays had no meaning to me.” The couple, parents to infant daughter Olivia, with another baby on the way, said that the Jewish calendar allows them to take pause to reflect on the importance of life, love, and family and to observe the passage of time. “San Diego has allowed us a lot of opportunities to explore who we are.” In very concrete ways, said Chad, the son of a Jewish mother and Spanish father who converted to Judaism, the San Diego Jewish community, of which he is a product, helped shape his Jewish identity. Growing up in La Jolla, Chad, along with his family, attended nearby Congregation Beth Israel. While synagogue life was important, there were Jewish-sponsored activities that opened his eyes to tikkun olam, the idea the Jews have a solemn responsibility to repair the world. In high school, he and other Jewish teens participated in Operation Understanding, traveling by bus to the Deep South to learn more about the ways in which American Jews worked with African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. He also took part in the Aaron Price Fellowship Program, sponsored by Price Philanthropies in San Diego, which enables San Diego public high school students from diverse backgrounds to come together to build friendships and to take part in civic-oriented experiences that promote lifelong commitments to their communities. “San Diego has allowed us a lot of opportunities to explore who we are,” said Chad. While the Avanzino-Valderrama family is not affiliated with a local synagogue—they are shul shopping—they come to The Hive and Coastal Roots Farm for a host of activities. “Olivia loves the chickens,” said Julie. Julie also stays connected locally to families she and Chad met during Honeymoon Israel, a program that brings newly married interfaith and Jewish couples together for meaningful experiences in Israel. With the friends she made on that trip, she continues to engage in mitzvah activities that support those in need. “These are all ways that reflect our values,” Chad said. The San Diego Jewish Community as a Vehicle for Positive Change Unlike her parents, a retired judge and estate planning attorney, and her brother, a civil rights lawyer who worked in the Obama Administration, Jessica Pressman does not use the law to effect the changes she believes are needed in her community. But the 44-year-old San Diego native, a professor of English at San Diego State University, did learn early on to call out injustices when she saw them and to strive to make the world a better place. In San Diego, and, in particular, its Jewish community, Jessica and her husband of 17 years, Brad Lupien, a non-Jewish social-worker-and-teacher-turned-entrepreneur, are trying to teach their two Jewish-raised children, 12-year-old Jonah and 10-year-old Sydney, the lessons of tikkun olam—repairing the world—through example. On the local level, she and another Jewish parent at her children’s school in North County spoke up when administrators planned a major event to take place on Yom Kippur. They were successful in changing the event date. Jessica was less successful, she said, when she tried to organize friends to go with her to a local protest against racism and anti-Semitism after the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. “The response I got was, ‘I am going to focus inward, and keep my energy focused on family and all that is right in our magical little community.’” she recalled. “‘The magical little community’ set me off. Are you kidding me? I grew up here. You have no idea.” Thirty years ago, Jessica said, prejudice was quite overt in San Diego. Swastikas appeared after her brother ran for a student government office at Torrey Pines High School, and she had to explain to friends why the expression “Don’t bagel me,” a modern-day version of “Don’t Jew me,” was offensive. “‘The magical little community’ set me off. Are you kidding me? I grew up here. You have no idea.” Jessica said that the climate is ripe in San Diego, which she says has come a long way since the days of swastikas, for more education and positive change. And she sees The Hive and Coastal Roots Farm as incubators for such progress. When she couldn’t get friends to attend the anti-prejudice protest with her, she contacted Leichtag Foundation, which organized a program on Judaism and race relations. She is also grateful for the opportunities the San Diego Jewish community affords her and her family to educate themselves. Soon after she and Brad, 43, returned from the East Coast, where Jessica was teaching at Yale, they participated in a Jewish Community Foundation-supported Jewish Giving Circle to learn more about tzedakah and Jewish philanthropy. “It was foundational,” she said, “in how to give and to make friends in the Jewish community. “There are a lot of ways in,” Jessica continued, referring to the entry points of Jewish engagement in San Diego, and she and Brad and their kids are relishing the chance to discover and access as many of them as possible. Leading Lives of Multiple Commitments Stacie and Jeff Cook understand commitment. They live it. A Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy, Dr. Jeff Cook, 37, is also an emergency room physician who has cared for injured and sick military soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and, more recently, in Kuwait, where he was deployed last year. Like all military families, he and Stacie, an obstetrician/gynecologist, are accustomed to constant moves when the Navy calls him up: They most recently lived in Yokosuka, Japan, and, before that, Jacksonville, Florida. But now that they have two children, 3-year-old Ari and 1-year-old Olive, they are happy to be settled, at least for the next couple of years, in North County, where they are committed to creating a Jewish home for their children. Their commitment is such that Stacie, 38, who grew up Episcopalian in Upstate New York, drives 20 miles each way through the county’s back roads to transport Ari to Temple Solel’s preschool program in Cardiff-by-the-Sea. Impressed by her interest and involvement in her children’s Jewish education, the synagogue’s preschool administration appointed her co-chair of the PTA. Stacie said that her desire to help her children lead Jewish lives and to support the local Jewish community any way she can is tempered by her own concerns that she might “do something wrong,” be it go against a traditional Jewish practice or misspeak a Jewish prayer. But, she acknowledged, no one in the community has ever corrected her and, in fact, everyone has been unfailingly supportive of her efforts. “I feel very welcomed by the community,” said Stacie, who has taken a leave from medicine to raise the family. “Judaism can center you and give you a community.” Jeff grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in suburban Atlanta, the son of a mother who is active in the Jewish community and a Sephardic father. Over the 15 years in the military, he has worked in earnest to maintain a strong Jewish practice. He attended a Passover Seder in Afghanistan, High Holiday services in Kuwait, and, on occasion, Shabbat services on bases overseas. He and Stacie also were part of a small, tightknit Jewish community of military families in Japan. Here, in North County, with few Jewish families in their immediate area, they often find themselves on weekends en route to military friends’ homes for Shabbat and other holidays. Contrary to the notion that few Jews serve in the military, the “proportion of Jews in the service is probably the same as the population as a whole,” Jeff said, noting that his commanding officer at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego is also Jewish. The local Jewish community, both civilian and military, has been a grounding force for her constantly moving family, said Stacie, who has attended programs at The Hive and Coastal Roots Farm and is considering conversion to Judaism. “You can lose control of your life [because] you’re at the whim of military assignments,” she said. “Judaism can center you and give you a community.” Black, Jewish and Queer. These three identities weave the fabric of who I am, but it took a long time to believe that they could exist together. The idea of “belonging” was foreign to me for much of my life. I was aligned with three communities that historically faced oppression in society, and there was no type of representation I could see for people like me. Questions of my existence as a Black Jew, and the implications that came with being Black and Queer would overwhelm me. Because of this, I watered down my Jewish identity through my teenage years. I could only focus on discovering myself through my other two identities, which was hard enough. When I entered college, I was invited to join Hillel, which piqued my interest in Judaism. I attended all through my college years, finding community in weekly Shabbats, learning about Israel, and expressing my Jewishness more. Slowly but surely, my Jewish expression began to exist on the same plane as my Blackness and Queerness. I could fit them all at the table instead of checking them at the door. I experienced more acceptance of myself, and from other people, and I began to feel more included in all the communities I represented. Still, feeling included didn’t mean that I felt like I belonged. Fast forward to 2019 and I’m at a conference listening to UC Berkeley’s john a. powell speak to us about “belonging” as a result of co-creation. He remarked that “inclusion” implied that one must extend an invitation to their space, thus creating an imbalanced power dynamic. “Belonging” relates to the idea that a space is co-created with others, ensuring that everyone has equal and equitable access because they belong there. My work with the Leichtag Foundation and The Hive has led me on an exploration of “belonging,” not just for myself, but for anyone who, like me, felt that they didn’t belong in any space. This is the reason behind This is San Diego Jewry. I want to show this unique, vibrant community that we all belong here. San Diego has been the space where I’ve truly dived into my Jewishness and discovered what I love about it, and how I want to wield it in my life. Our closeness to nature motivates me to weave in Jewish values of agriculture at home. The values of tzedakah and Tikkun Olam align with and inspire my own views of justice and liberation. The creative ways that we express our Jewishness as a community excite me for how I’ll apply these lessons to wherever I go in the future. I realize now that I belong anywhere that I want to be. I belong where I can help others experience belonging. I belong where I, a Black-and-Jewish-and-Queer person, can create work like this that represents the true expansiveness of our San Diego Jewish expression. And we all belong here because we are the tapestry of this community. Thank you for weaving it with us. Jewish Values in Action Supporting Dignity and Self Worth of Every Person Lee and Toni Leichtag established the Leichtag Foundation in 1991 following the sale of their business. Lee and Toni were lifelong entrepreneurs with a passion for innovation and for supporting talent. They believed that only with big risk comes big reward. Both born to families in poverty, Toni to a single mother, they strongly believed in helping those most in need and most vulnerable in our community. While they supported many causes, their strongest support was for young children and the elderly, two demographics who particularly lack voice in our society. “G-d has been good to us, we want to return the favor.” Lee and Toni were partners in every sense. They were proud parents of Joli Ann Leichtag, of blessed memory, and enjoyed being grandparents. When asked about his most significant accomplishment in life, Lee said, “My marriage to Toni.” This testament of their partnership and their commitment to family and community are the foundation of the legacy the Leichtag Foundation strives to honor. A Lifelong Dream Gives Rise to Al Fresco Judaism Lifelong Baltimoreans, Rabbi George and Alison Wielechowski and their sons, 11-year-old Lennon and 9-year-old Gideon, are more than pursuing the good life in Southern California. Having moved to San Diego more than three years ago, they are fulfilling a lifelong dream. The pretext for their journey west was family: Alison’s sister and mother already lived here. But for George, 42, an entrepreneur as well as a clergyman, the region’s startup climate was as alluring as the physical environment in which to practice his and Alison’s form of Judaism. Most recently, George was the executive director of the San Diego-based Open Dor Project, which encourages and funds the development of new and emerging spiritual models of Jewish life around the country. As gratifying as Open Dor has been, he and Alison, 40, are also enthused by their creation of a havurah friend group of 10 mostly interfaith families that, thanks to San Diego’s famously temperate climes, meets mostly at parks, trails, and beaches for monthly Shabbat and other observances. “For Shavuot, we took a hike mimicking the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai,” said George, who was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. “We talked about the meaning of revelations.” San Diego’s cultural and natural climates give rise to “meaningful opportunities” for Jews to express themselves in a seemingly infinite number of ways. Al fresco Judaism, San Diego style, is thousands of miles from the lives they led in Maryland. George grew up in Section 8 public housing with his Evangelical Christian single mother, a domestic from Guatemala, who, he said, “saved up all her money to buy the smallest house in the nicest neighborhood that she could afford,” which also happened to be the nexus of Jewish life in the northwestern part of Baltimore County. As he spent time with Jewish classmates and friends and their families, he said, he came to love their history, culture, and traditions. He converted to Judaism 16 years ago. Alison was raised in a neighboring part of Baltimore that was also predominantly Jewish. Her father was an executive director of a Conservative synagogue, and she led a fairly traditional Jewish life. Active participation in a Jewish student association at college led to a long career in the Jewish world—as director of Goucher College Hillel and, most recently, as director of development at Krieger Schechter Day school. The Wielechowskis said that San Diego is also giving their sons an appreciation for experiencing Judaism and nature concurrently. As Lennon begins preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, he is toying with the idea of incorporating into his ceremony a serious study of Jewish values and climate change. “Only in San Diego,” one might say. Or, as George said, San Diego’s cultural and natural climates give rise to “meaningful opportunities” for Jews to express themselves in a seemingly infinite number of ways. The time for Jewish leadership to facilitate such is expression is “ripe,” he said. A Midlife Re-Introduction to Judaism Change came rapidly to Debbie Macdonald as she approached the half-century mark in the late 1990s. First, seemingly out of the blue, the younger of her two sons, Josh, announced that he wanted to study for a bar mitzvah. “This was a big surprise,” said Debbie, now a 72-year-old retired nonprofit administrator who, as a child, had attended a Conservative synagogue in San Diego with her family, but had become distanced from organized religion once she went away to college and graduate school. “My husband at the time was not Jewish,” she said. “We did celebrate major Jewish holidays with my extended family, but I was not interested in joining a temple. I tried to ignore Josh’s requests because I did not think he would stick with it. But he continued to ask me to study for his bar mitzvah.” So the Macdonald family joined San Diego’s Temple Emanu-El, which is where Debbie experienced another surprise. “I got to know the rabbi there at the time, and I realized that Judaism could be very different than it had been when I was growing up,” she said. So different, in fact, that Debbie wanted to have an adult bat mitzvah, and she began preparing for it soon after Josh had completed his religious studies. “I realized that Judaism could be very different than it had been when I was growing up.” A couple of years later, Debbie announced another major life change. “I went to see the rabbi, and I told him two things,” she recounted. “First, I told him that I was getting a divorce. The second thing I told him was that I’m gay, and that I’m in love with a woman. He was happy for me and asked, “Is she Jewish?’” That woman, Nancy Kossan, now 67, a retired academic and university administrator, is not Jewish. She was raised in a Protestant denomination. Describing herself now as “a- religious,” she said that she enjoys the social action/social justice aspects of Reform Judaism. Both women, who have been together for 19 years and were married in 2008, have found a welcoming home at Emanu-El. Debbie, who has served on the congregation’s board for many years, was its first lesbian president. She and Nancy attend Shabbat services at least once a month, and have taken a number of classes there over the years, including an introduction to Judaism and Hebrew Bible courses. Both also appreciate the temple’s emphasis on civil and human rights, with Debbie noting that Emanu-El was the first among the half dozen synagogues that now march in San Diego’s LGBTQ Pride parade. While synagogue life takes up a good portion of their lives, Debbie and Nancy, who live in the city’s Pacific Beach neighborhood, have found time for involvement in other Jewish groups, including a havurah. Always interested in child welfare, Debbie has also donated time and resources to Jewish Family Service of San Diego. If you had asked her 30 years ago whether she would be active in a synagogue and engaged in the Jewish community, “I would have said, ‘Not in a million years,’” Debbie reflected. Helping Jewish Students Find Their Own Anwers When Katie Mendelson, who now goes by Chaya Ertel, was a teen, she loved cruising Los Angeles’ Hollywood Boulevard at midnight with friends, seeing what mischief she could whip up. “I was a free spirit,” recalled the 41-year-old mother of five. Chaya is now a partner, with husband Rabbi Eric Ertel, known as Shmuely, in an 11-year old venture called San Diego Jewish Experience, which offers religious, cultural, and educational opportunities to hundreds of local college students, most of whom are at University of California, San Diego. Chaya may no longer be “a free spirit,” but she retains a huge sense of fun … plus a deep understanding of young people’s hunger to achieve meaning in the world. That’s a desire of which she has first-hand knowledge. After high school, Chaya spent a year in Israel as part of a Conservative Jewish post-secondary program. But she quickly fell in with a group of more observant Jews and determined that she wanted to lead an Orthodox life. Alarmed by what they saw as her turn to the religious right, the leaders of Chaya’s program summoned her father to Israel to “deprogram” her. Instead, he gave his blessing. He could see, Chaya said, that Orthodox Judaism had given her the “clarity” that she had sought. Chaya and Shmuely, 42, who grew up in New Jersey to a family that subsequently embraced Orthodox Judaism, met through a matchmaker in Israel, where they continued their studies and Shmuely was ordained. The courtyard of their La Jolla home, on the edge of the UC San Diego campus, is ground zero for the host of Jewish experiences occurring seemingly round the clock: study groups, drop-in rap sessions, challah baking demonstrations, and Shabbat and holiday dinners. Shmuely says that he works with about 250 students annually, some of whom he escorts to Israel on yearly Birthright trips, and Chaya estimates she prepares 10,000 meals each year. “[W]e don’t hand G-d a shopping list of our needs and wants. It is about a relationship.” While the Ertels see the students, most of whom are from interfaith families, as extensions of their own family—Shmuely is impressed by their “perseverance and commitment” to acquire a stronger identity, Chaya with their struggles with faith, even in the face of “life’s painful, messy realities”—they also nurture their own San Diego Jewish experiences. They are members of La Jolla’s Congregation Adat Yeshurun, and their eldest daughter, now in college, was the first Orthodox teen to participate in the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego’s program to teach young people about Jewish philanthropy. Avid runners, Shmuely and Chaya also take part in La Jolla’s annual 5K. But San Diego Jewish Experience is never far from their minds or hearts, because the students’ challenges are their own. Thinking back to a young woman she mentored, Chaya said, “She was young when her mother passed away from cancer, and she came to shul the night of her mother’s yahrtzeit, maybe to doven, maybe just to feel close to G-d. Not sure. But I have to believe as a little girl, she prayed her mother would get well. And the answer was obviously no. And yet there she was, reaching out. She taught me the definition of spiritual maturity and grit–that we don’t hand G-d a shopping list of our needs and wants. It is about a relationship. Sometimes there are tremendous disappointments, and we won’t always know why, but … she was there for the long haul.” A Free Jewish Spirit More than 40 years ago, Ruth Platner did something rare for the times. She divorced her husband of almost 30 years, packed her bags, and moved from Wausau, Wisconsin, a small city in the northern part of the state, to San Diego’s North County, where she embarked on an entirely new life. With her daughters grown and involved in their own families and careers, Ruth, unencumbered, thrived. A painter and sculptor, she devoted her life to her artwork and the enhancement of the local art scene. She taught craft skills to developmentally disabled young adults, helped set up an art school at the Oceanside Museum of Art, and earned a master’s degree in educational technology. “She was pretty gutsy,” said her eldest daughter, Mimi Miller, an acupuncturist who lives in a San Diego beachfront community about 15 miles south of her mother. At 92, Ruth still is. She continues to live in the condominium she has owned for decades and to enjoy a rich life. Though she no longer makes art, she still displays it—most recently, at The Hive’s Farmhouse Gallery, where, this past May, she had a one-woman exhibit of her acrylic paintings. The show coincided with the observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ruth knows something of the Holocaust, too. “We are no longer traditional Jews, [but I feel] a deep connection to the Jewish part of myself.” Born in Hamburg, Germany, Ruth was a young girl when the Nazis rose to power. While family and friends fled the country or were shipped off to concentration and death camps, Ruth, her Jewish mother, and non-Jewish father kept a low profile in an attic apartment that her father had secured for them. They lived there throughout World War II, in constant fear of being discovered and deported. During that time, a number of her immediate family members were killed. After the war, Ruth resumed her studies at the Hamburg Art Institute. “When life hands you mud (in this case, from the bomb crater), make a sculpture,” she recalled in “War and Pieces: Healing Through Life’s Struggles,” her 2015 memoir. She also met and married a fellow Holocaust survivor, Fred Platner, the man she later divorced but with whom she stayed friendly. A pillar in Wausau’s tiny Jewish community, Fred died in 1988. Ruth cared for him at the end of his life. As she developed her own style in the United States, Ruth segued from sculpture to painting, often focusing on Jewish subjects, such as the Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, and members of her family. While becoming active in San Diego’s Jewish Renewal movement and attending services at the North County Elijah Minyan, she also became affiliated with a local Buddhist group. “She will say that she’s a JewBu,” Mimi said, explaining that her mother has incorporated the teachings and practices of both faiths into her life and personal philosophy. The free, open spirit that Ruth has come to embody is reflected in her family members—her three daughters, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild—who include people of color and of various faith traditions. “We are no longer traditional Jews,” said Mimi, who nonetheless feels “a deep connection to the Jewish part of myself. When I participate in the traditions, I appreciate the richness.” Soaking Up the Wonders of Life Eve Rosenberg is, to use the Yiddish she so loves, a shtarke, a strong, sturdy, and resilient soul. At 105, Eve has the distinction of being the oldest resident of the Seacrest Village Retirement Communities in Encinitas. But after 11 years at Seacrest, whose origins date back 75 years to the San Diego Hebrew Home, Eve is also famous among residents and staff for her wit and keen intellect. In short, her community loves her. And she is delighted to return the compliment. “Everything about Seacrest is wonderful,” Eve kvelled, or gushed with the pride of a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of which she is. “It is a piece of paradise. Everything is done with such good taste.” Paradise is not the environment in which Eve spent most of her life. Born in Detroit to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Eve, along with her parents and sister, moved to New York during the height of the Great Depression in the early 1930s to find work. College was out of the question, as there was no money for it, and she took whatever jobs she could find to help support her family. She was fortunate, at one point, she said, to work at the New York Public Library, “because I love books.” Eve was also fortunate, at another job, to meet the man who would become her husband: Murray Rosenberg. “Life pitches you balls, and you have to catch them.” “I was working at a very interesting shop on Fifth Avenue when he walked in,” Eve said, recounting how they met. “He was dashing. He was wearing his uniform [since he was a solder during World War II].” The couple had two sons after the war, the younger of whom, Jonathan, 68, is a longtime San Diego resident. Sadly, Murray, exposed to yellow fever during his military service in the Philippines, died prematurely, leaving Eve a widow for more than four decades. Through many hardships, though, Eve has striven to take a philosophical approach. “Life pitches you balls,” she said, “and you have to catch them.” Eve would have stayed in New York had its harsh winters not exacerbated her longtime battles with bronchitis. At Seacrest, close to Jonathan and his family, she participates in almost every discussion and study activity, relishing the classes with Seacrest’s rabbi. Though she herself is not observant, she said, “I have a neshama, a Jewish soul.” Like many San Diegans, Eve enjoys the great outdoors. “I love walking every day among the interesting trees at Seacrest,” she said. Eve said that she is reminded of something her mother said to her so many decades ago: “In life there are a lot of bridges … Whatever way, you have to cross the bridge.” She concluded, “Crossing the bridge to Seacrest was the one of the best choices I’ve made.” Living in Harmony with a Blending of Culture Though they were both brought up in strongly identified Jewish families, Yaniv and Liron Scherson have, in a very real sense, a mixed marriage. Their union is a blending of cultures—on Yaniv’s side, Ashkenazi and Latin American; on Liron’s, Mizrahi, Sephardic, and Israeli—making their family a diaspora of world Jewry. Cultural differences aside, the North County couple form a united front on two significant issues: passing along strong Jewish identities to their two sons, 7-year-old Noam and 4-year-old Amit, and ensuring the continuation of a vibrant Israel. The son a Chilean Jewish father and Mexican Jewish mother and grandson of Polish and Lithuanian immigrants who fled to Central and South America as the Nazis rose to power, Yaniv, 35, a Berkeley- and Stanford-educated innovator in renewable energy sources, has strong family connections to Israel himself. His parents, also scientists, earned their doctorates from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, and he met Liron, 38, an Israeli native, on a trip to the Jewish state. Liron, a social worker who has worked with at-risk youth and special needs children, grew up in the city of Ramat Gan, the daughter of a father from Casablanca, Morocco, and a mother of Yemeni ancestry. Her parents’ marriage represented a unique and uncommon commingling of the two cultures at that time. The Schersons decided five years ago to move from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Diego’s North County. “I think that the Jewish community here is amazing,” said Liron. Though it is smaller than the Bay Area’s, she said, its size “creates intimacy.” “People are happy and grateful to live here … and they want to make connections [with others]. In fact, noted Yaniv, since they moved to North County, they have met several other Israeli families in their own community and have formed core friendships with all of them. That has allowed them to remain connected to Israel, which they visit yearly. At the same time, the Schersons love the diversity of San Diego’s Jewish community, which, Yaniv noted, includes significant numbers of immigrants from four corners of the world: South Africa and the former Soviet Union, in addition to Mexico and Israel. The Schersons said that the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States—the recent shootings at the Chabad synagogue in Poway and appearance of swastikas in Carmel Valley rattled them deeply—is a sober reminder of the plight their ancestors faced to maintain their religious and cultural identities and of the responsibility they feel in continuing Jewish traditions. Yet they are very grateful to live in a community that is integrated and welcoming and appreciate the opportunity to participate in and contribute to North County San Diego’s Jewish culture. “People are happy and grateful to live here,” Liron said, and “they want to make connections [with others].” Leading Lives of Openness and Inclusion Growing up in suburban Sacramento, the son of a father who became a born-again Christian and an Asian American mother who is half Japanese and half Filipina, Kyle Young, 33, had little contact with the Jewish community. In fact, he said, many of his classmates were Mormon. But Kyle, who has lived in San Diego for nine years, finds himself immersed in the local Jewish community, both professionally and personally. He has been a marketing manager at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla for almost two years, and he has shared his life for more than eight years with a Jewish man, Ben Winnick, 43, an Orange County native who is a database administrator at the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System. The two, who live in the Clairemont neighborhood of San Diego, will be married in March 2021, their 10th anniversary. They met singing together with the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus. Since they became a couple, and particularly since he has worked at the JCC, Kyle has become a fast student of Jewish history, culture, and tradition, though he considers himself religion-less and has no thoughts of adopting a faith-based tradition. For him, it is “all about family, community, and food rather than a relationship with God,” he said. “We go to Ben’s parents for Hanukkah and Passover,” and they occasionally make or go to Shabbat “It’s all about seeing people where they’re at rather than where you want them to be.” Ben, who came to San Diego in 2001, following graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, is a strongly identified LGBTQ Jew. Although his family was heavily involved in a synagogue in his hometown of Anaheim, he is not a member of a local synagogue. Nevertheless, he appreciates his congregational options in San Diego and environs, having spent High Holidays at a number of shuls over the years, including Temple Emanu-El. He also takes pride in the local Jewish community’s visibility at the San Diego Pride Parade, noting that six or seven synagogues regularly march. Kyle echoes Ben’s impressions of a San Diego Jewish community that is warm and embracing of a diverse Jewish community. Speaking of his workplace, he said, “Whether our members and guests are Conservative or Reform or Orthodox, or are part of an interfaith family—as I have found many Jewish people my age are—or in an interfaith relationship, the community center is welcoming, open, and receptive.” Ben and Kyle and their families have all chosen to abide by that open-door policy. They put up a tree for Christmas, and Kyle’s mother crafts gifts for Ben’s family for Hanukkah. “It’s all about seeing people where they’re at rather than where you want them to be,” said Kyle. The Intersectionality of Identities: Queer, Non-Binary, Latinx, and Jewish You would think that as the executive director of San Diego LGBT Pride, Fernando Zweifach López Jr., who uses the pronoun they, has done all the coming out they possibly can. A queer, non-binary individual who has worked for many years on civil rights issues, López also speaks openly and often about their father’s family, Mexican-American migrant workers who tilled the fields of rural California. But after the recent Poway synagogue shooting, in which a gunman killed a worshiper and seriously maimed several others, López, 37, publicly reminded their community about another layer of their identity. In a mass email to SD Pride’s friends and supporters, with the subject line “I Am Jewish,” they wrote about their mother’s parents, Orthodox Jews from Russia and Austria. While their Jewish coming out message—a call for greater tolerance and understanding among all oppressed minorities—was warmly embraced by most, López said, they also received quite a bit of hate mail. “More than ever before,” they added. Rather than despairing about another example of rising anti-Semitism in this country, López remains dogged in their determination to counter bigotry head-on. After all, they said, they’ve been doing exactly that since they were a young child in the Imperial Valley. “Observing Hanukkah keeps me grounded in my heritage and it reminds me of my grandparents’ stories.” “Growing up, I was told, ‘You’re Jewish, you’re an immigrant. You’re going to face anti-Semitism and xenophobia,’” López said, explaining how they developed resilience. López needed to call upon this inner strength when they realized, at an early age, that they were somehow different from most other kids. “The bullying and harassment never stopped,” they said, once their peers saw that López was different, too. Rejected by their family for their sexual orientation, López couch-surfed at friends’ homes for a year or so before moving to San Diego for work and college. They lived in a car for a while, survived several suicide attempts, and met a Jewish man, with whom they had a seven-year relationship. Both became outspoken proponents of marriage equality, and López eventually went to work for one of the largest marriage equality advocacy groups before coming to SD Pride, where, in addition to running the annual Pride parade and festival, they develop a host of harm-reduction and anti-discrimination programs. They also founded an interfaith department that works with sympathetic religious groups locally to advance LGBTQ interests. Many of the faith-based groups are Jewish, which gratifies López immensely. While not an observant Jew, López celebrates Hanukkah, lighting the menorah and saying the prayers. “It keeps me grounded in my heritage,” they said, “and it reminds me of my grandparents’ stories.” López is also heartened by a full rapprochement with their father, “now one of my best friends and dearest advocates,” they said. “It took 20 years,” they continued, “but we are now taking our first vacation together.” Be the first to read the latest about Leichtag Foundation’s grantmaking and activites!	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3370
__label__wiki	0.803651	0.803651	Text by Barbara Isenberg \| Portrait by Rafael Pulido Film Most Read Film Writer and producer Norman Lear has been called a one-man Golden Age of Television, responsible for such hit ’70s shows as All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons and Good Times. Tackling such tough subjects as racial bigotry, homophobia and abortion, Lear and his colleagues enlarged the world of TV’s sitcoms and drew huge audiences. He had three of the top four shows on the air during one season, five of the top nine on another. Now 94, Lear is still developing new television shows and still dedicated to the social activism that has long accompanied his television work. He launched People for the American Way to challenge the mixing of religion and politics and the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center to analyze the impact of entertainment on news and culture. A World War II veteran who flew 52 missions, he later purchased a July 4, 1776, copy of the Declaration of Independence for $8.1 million, then sent it across America with historical exhibits and voting information. BARBARA ISENBERG: When your World War II tour of duty ended in 1945, did you have a career plan? NORMAN LEAR: As a kid of the Depression, with parents who were out to lunch, I needed a role model, and that was my Uncle Jack, who used to flip me a quarter. I wanted to be an uncle who could flip a quarter. He was a press agent, and I’m not sure I knew what a press agent was, but I wanted to be him. When I was overseas, I wrote a one-pager announcing my release from the Air Force and how brilliant I would be as a press agent, and I sent it to Uncle Jack. He sent it out, and I got a job in New York writing amusing things about stars and Broadway shows for newspaper columnists. BI: How did you make the leap from press agent to comedy writer? NL: I moved to California, which is where I met Ed Simmons, who wanted to be a comedy writer, and that turned my attention to comedy writing. One night, our wives were at the movies, and we wrote a parody of The Sheik of Araby. There were a lot of nightclubs around, and we sold it for $40 to the first club we went to. That was what I made in a week trying to be a press agent and selling door to door. We wrote a piece for Danny Thomas that he did at Ciro’s nightclub, and a major agent in the audience called us. Soon we were writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and we did TV specials for people like Jack Benny and Danny Kaye. BI: Did you ever think you’d write for television? NL: No. There was no television when I was thinking about making a living. My mother heard me singing in the shower and thought maybe I could be a cantor, but I was never asked by my parents what I wanted to be. BI: What were some of the shows on TV when you started out? NL: There were The Beverly Hillbillies, The Flying Nun, Petticoat Junction and Father Knows Best. The biggest problems an American family faced in those shows were the boss is coming to dinner and the roast is ruined or mother dented the car and how will the kids help her keep the news from daddy. BI: How did All in the Family come about? You and your producing partner, Bud Yorkin, were working mostly on movies by that time. NL: Bud was making a Pink Panther film in England, saw the U.K. television series Till Death Us Do Part, about a bigoted father and his liberal son, and told me about it. I was getting divorced, I was in great difficulty financially and in live television you owned nothing. I knew I had to do something that had reruns, and I was thinking about that when Bud mentioned Till Death Us Do Part. Within two weeks, I had written 82 pages of notes for a show that became All in the Family. BI: You borrowed a bit from your own family experiences when you were writing All in the Family, didn’t you? NL: Well, my dad did have a floor model Atwater Kent radio, and he controlled the radio dial from a red leather chair next to it much like Archie would control the TV dial later. He used to call me “the laziest white kid he knew.” And when I screamed at him that he was putting down a race of people just to call his son lazy, he would yell back, “That’s not what I’m doing, and you’re also the dumbest white kid.” He would also tell my mom to stifle herself, just like Archie told Edith. BI: When the first episode ran in January 1971, CBS started the show with a disclaimer and hired extra switchboard people to deal with viewer responses. NL: There was no subject we did that was not an everyday event in our family or our extended family or in the house up the street. But people would say to me, “If you have a message, pal, there’s Western Union. You have no right to use television.” I used to say, “That’s not what we’re doing. We’re trying to bring an audience to its knees with laughter.” BI: Are you saying that shows like All in the Family and Maude, with their story lines about racism, attempted rape and other rarely discussed topics, weren’t written to inform and persuade? NL: It was years later when I began to accept that there was a message. I’m a grown man with strong feelings, and of course it’s reflected in my work. But there were messages on TV before, too. Their message was that there were no economic issues, no moral questions, no problems. That is also a message. BI: How do you see America today? NL: I see America the way Dwight Eisenhower warned us it could be in his farewell address, talking about the possibility of a military-industrial complex taking us over. I feel that is exactly what is choking us right now, delivering the fruits of everybody’s labor to the 1 percent. So many people in our country felt hopeless to such a degree that they would throw their weight behind a Donald Trump. BI: Any thoughts about how America came up with two such polarizing presidential candidates in 2016? NL: It was the American people’s way of saying: “This is the kind of leadership you give us? Take this.” And when I say that, I’m not just thinking of politics. I’m thinking of Wells Fargo, the pharmaceutical company Mylan’s EpiPen price increases, the airbags from the Takata Corporation—I’m thinking of leadership across the board. BI: You recently were an executive producer on the Epix TV series America Divided and investigated housing inequality. What surprised you most about what you found out? NL: What surprised me is that I could learn what I learned and still sleep well after learning it. I don’t know how to explain caring as much as I think I care and doing as much as I think I do and realizing now and again how little it is. Then again, every little bit matters. BI: Your popular 1975 show, One Day at a Time, reimagined with a Cuban-American family, is set to air early next year on Netflix. What is the status of your proposed TV show, Guess Who Died, set in a retirement community? NL: We’ve had more interest lately, and my guess is that it will happen. The fact is that older people are the fastest-growing demographic with the most expendable income. And we watch a lot of television. BI: It’s your demographic, of course. Do you feel 94 years old? NL: I am the peer of whoever I’m talking to. If I am talking to a 15-year-old, that’s who I am. If I’m talking to a 50-year-old, that’s who I am. I see too many 75-year-olds who seem much older than I feel. I’m aware I’m an older person, and I wish my back didn’t hurt and my legs didn’t weigh 1,000 pounds. But I go to bed at night and can’t wait for the first taste of coffee in the morning. BI: What do you think accounts for you not feeling your age? NL: I think it’s living in the moment and being aware that whatever I’m doing, I’ve spent all my life getting there to do it. Like this interview. It is an indisputable fact that this interview took me 94 years, some weeks and some days to get to. And for you and everyone who reads it, it took every split second of your lives. So is the moment important or not? How can anyone deny the importance of any moment that took all of your life to get to? Desmond Tutu shares his motivations, inspirations and his idea of true happiness. GILES DULEY BY ANGELINA JOLIE Angelina Jolie interviews photographer Giles Duley about his striking photography which focuses on refugees. The renown conductor speaks on how he’s seen and experienced music to be a catalyst for learning, integration, & social change.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3371
__label__wiki	0.969665	0.969665	Hillary Super TEXT BY LESLEY MCKENZIE PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAFAEL PULIDO Fashion As the president of Anthropologie Group Apparel and Accessories, Hillary Super finds the most satisfaction helping women feel their best. “To hear our customer talk about the role our clothes play in her life and the joy they bring to her, it just makes me want to raise the bar in every way,” says Super. It’s also one of the reasons why she stepped into the role last year. “I feel like I can represent her,” says Super. “I have been her over the years. I feel extremely connected to the mission of what we do.” Retail has been a prominent part of Super’s life ever since she was old enough to work. Raised in Arcadia, California, as the eldest of two sisters, Super landed her first job at age 14 selling clothing at the mall. “I loved the mall experience. I was definitely an early adopter in terms of fashion trends,” says Super, who was both artsy and academic (“but strongly preferred the artsy,” she says). After her dreams of attending art school were sidelined by her father, who insisted that she first obtain a liberal-arts degree, Super opted to pursue a bachelor’s in women’s studies at the University of Southern California, while working at The Gap to fund her fashion addiction along the way. Super planned to go into academia after graduation, until a friend’s father, who happened to be the CEO of the now-shuttered department-store chain Mervyn’s, stated the obvious: Super’s real passions lay in retail and fashion. “I didn’t even know what that career path was, or what it would look like,” says Super. “He basically introduced me to that and brought me into the training program there.” In 1996, while working as a planner for Mervyn’s in the Bay Area, Super crossed paths with Kathy Bronstein, then CEO of Wet Seal, who took a chance and hired Super as a buyer. Super credits Bronstein with not only teaching her everything about buying in retail and how to develop product but also for instilling in her an intense level of standards and discipline. “I think of her as being one of the most influential people in my career,” says Super. Super went on to forge her own formidable path, working for Gap, Inc., in San Francisco as a senior merchandiser and later as a divisional merchandise manager for the company’s Old Navy brand—with stints in New York at Ann Taylor and New York and Company in between. In 2013, Super landed what she had always imagined to be her dream job of running a company with Guess North America in Los Angeles, only to depart the following year. For the first time in 20 years, Super took time off to relax, and also to re-examine her career priorities. “It was the job I thought I had always wanted, but actually, it was just what I was supposed to want. It didn’t make me happy at all.” After a summer of traveling, sailing and reflecting, Super was pointed in the direction of Maris Collective, a small Santa Monica-based startup that brings retail to five-star resorts. For the next two years, Super learned everything she could about running a nontraditional retail business. “It really showed me that retail is not dead, because if you have a unique offering and you have a personal connection and experience, it will drive people to your store,” says Super, who applies that mindset to her current job, where “it’s all about delivering joy.” One of the big things Super hears repeatedly through customer feedback at Anthropologie is how the brand makes them feel. “The fact that women don’t feel better about themselves in general is something that’s on my mind,” says Super. “Women tend to defer and apologize, and not speak the truth or make a direct statement because of the way they fear they’re going to be perceived—something I think just has to stop.” Super remembers the first time she felt the glass ceiling, when she began working at a senior level in retail. “I remember the men in the room talking over the women and basically disregarding what they were saying in a way that was so blatant, I sat back in the room and thought, ‘Oh, this is what it feels like.’ ” Her advice to other women: “Help each other,” she says. “There’s no reason for us to be competing against each other, because there’s room for all of us. The place that each of us is meant to be, we’ll find it.” Inspired by “the Kathy Bronsteins of the world,” Super, who now splits her time between Philadelphia and Palm Springs, where she and her San Francisco-based partner have a home, is committed to being a role model for women in retail. “I was very lucky that my father and an early mentor [Kathy] both had the unwavering belief that I could do anything, and that really helped to form my own self-perceptions,” she says. To that end, Super also acts as a coach and connects female entrepreneurs to resources through LDR Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in women. “We all have those moments where we need someone to make a call for us, make the intro, recommend us, redirect us, give us some pointed feedback, and it takes purpose. It’s easy to forget or get busy, and we as women have to act with purpose and commit to helping each other along and to encouraging each other, instilling belief in one another. We can do it.” AMY WILLIAMS “I love working as part of a collaborative team” says our CEO, whose enthusiasm for denim is still going strong. “I get to do what I love, and employ a team of wonderful people in our studio. It’s like a dream come true.” KIRSTEN GREEN “As opposed to talking about all the bad behavior and the ways in which women have been held back over time, we said, let’s get together to build community amongst ourselves and shine a light.”	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3372
__label__wiki	0.843068	0.843068	A&S Magazine » Fall 2019 » Real Life, Magnified Real Life, Magnified Rachel Masilamani creates graphic novels about women’s issues. Frame by frame, a woman sands down her windowsills, turning layers of lead paint into so much dust. She worries about the effects the dust might have on her cats, whooshing them away. Yet, when the woman takes her own mask off, she has a sneezing fit. The warnings about lead paint under each drawn panel add to the tension: Is she doing enough to care for herself? Should she even be doing this job? But the subject of the cartoon isn’t home improvement safety. The elaborate narrative and austerely drawn images explore the pain of miscarriages, as well as the tangle of emotions and worries women might have about pregnancy, motherhood, and their bodies. The story is one chapter in Nonpartum, a graphic novel-in-progress by Rachel Masilamani ’99, an artist who has fashioned a love of drawing and narrative into a running commentary on modern life. Her cartoons, which have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mutha Magazine, and a collection for the writers’ group PEN, are a universe away from the escapism of comic book superheroes or the hysteria of dystopian sci-fi stories. Her comics deal in real life, magnified. Rachel Masilamani at work. Masilamani craftily braids the personal with the political, writing and drawing about bringing new life into the world, dealing with the health care system, or living amid the brooding and scary national mood. “My goal is not to entertain,” says Masilamani, 42. “I want to start a conversation, to develop points for thought so people can recognize parts of themselves. It’s a fundamental joy to recognize yourself in a piece of art.” She began developing her skills while studying anthropology and art history at the Krieger School. A class in comic art with Hopkins instructor Tom Chalkley, an inveterate cartoonist, reawakened a childhood love of storytelling and making pictures. Some courses at the nearby Maryland Institute College of Art helped shape her vision as well. “I learned that visual art is more than a mechanical or aesthetic thing,” she says. “It’s an intellectual exercise too.” At Hopkins, her rangy intellect was already in full bloom. As an anthropology major, she investigated several types of signifiers, including why the uniform of the British skinhead (leather bomber jacket, black boots) was perceived as a threat, especially given that other, less menacing groups wore similar clothes. As an art history minor, she explored the unique portrait perspective that the German couple Bernd and Hilla Becher employed in their photographs of industrial buildings. “Hopkins was a really great environment for an independent thinker,” she says. “School really didn’t do too much for me until I got there. I had the luxury, once I figured out what I was into, of really going after it.” A four-year work-study job in the university’s book preservation office gave her an interest in how books are constructed and how people will use them. “Now, as I put my own books together, I think about how people will hold them, how they’ll be looked at,” she says. Masilamani’s combination of drawing and storytelling has developed into something all its own, says one of her mentors. Her late adoption of the form helped her become an original. “Rachel’s so unusual in that she didn’t grow up reading comics—she didn’t really pay attention to them till she was 18,” says Chalkley. The unique ways Masilamani employs variances in the white space between frames can serve as punctuation or additional comment, he adds. What’s more, she supplements dialogue balloons with captions, allowing her to add meta commentary or new trains of thought to her work. The lead paint story in Nonpartum includes a side story involving a boy’s attempt to swim the length of a river. His mother follows along in a canoe, monitoring his progress and how he’s feeling. He sinks at the end, the mother helpless to do anything about it—a metaphor for Masilamani’s own gestation experience. “I’m trying to put things out there that we usually don’t talk about,” Masilamani says. “I’ve had miscarriages, which are incredibly common, but it’s rare to have a conversation with someone about them. I’m hoping stories like this open up that window so we can have those conversations.” Explore Related Topics: alumni Alumni Kudos: Spring 2019 A Path to Public Service The Prescription for Community Health	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3373
__label__cc	0.619027	0.380973	The Extinction of the Human Race and The Dot Com Bust 2.0 This morning I read two stories in the the Wall Street Journal and the The New York Times that were about Silicon Valley Unicorn companies losing 100 Billion USD and how the world’s richest countries will not meet many of their emission targets or as in the case of the United States will actually emit more climate change accelerating gases. How can we utilize all of this excess capital Venture Capitalists have to spend while also doing good for the environment? From the NYT article. Credit to Drew Angerer/Getty Images Somini Sengupta on November 26th 2019 published an article in the The New York Times about how a recent UN report has found that the world is heading to climate catastrophes. The United States and China will not meet their emission targets and are even undoing progress made towards trying to meet those goals. The pledge to reduce emissions is important to protect people who live in areas that are already being influenced by climate change as reported here, here, and here. If you read any of these articles and are a climate denier you will probably just get more angry the more you read, but the fact is things are changing for the world. Daytime flooding that used to last only a few days in the Florida Keys and Miami now occur frequently. Category 5 Hurricanes are more frequent. Venice floods last longer and are higher. Towns in Louisiana will eventually get swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico. People who have lived for generations in some areas will no longer be able to maintain their way of life. Instead of trying to slow or reverse climate change things seem to be accelerating. Indeed, scientists who once predicted that climate change would not be felt for 8000 years in the 1950s adjusted to centuries in the 1960s through the 1980s and from the 1990s to today we are talking a timeline of 5–50 years as discussed by eugene linden here. As a scientist I see these trends being reported on and discussed and the first thing I do is I look for how the data trends and I want to extrapolate things further out. To me, the effects of climate change are being felt now. I lived in NYC during Hurricane Sandy and walked through lower Manhattan after the flooding subsided. I had conference calls with coworkers who were working from home for weeks in Houston after Hurricane Harvey and I knew people who lost houses and cars to that Hurricane. We will see trillions of dollars in damage due to climate change in the coming years. We have billions and billions in capital sitting with Venture Capitalists now that could be put to work on companies and products that will help us reverse climate change. Billions of dollars of Venture Capital will be invested into an ecosystem that has been called a Ponzi Ballon by Chamath Palihapitiya. Is funding co-working spaces with cold brew coffee on-tap, being able to rent Scooters on-demand a good idea? I would take the position that it is not due to hundreds of billions of dollars being lost recently. Heather Somerville just wrote in the Wall Street Journal about how Silicon Valley Adjusts to New Reality as 100 Billion Evaporates. These companies have created value for millions of people in the short term both in the form of jobs and lower cost services and theoretically will eventually return investor’s capital. But if the whole city of Miami has to move because climate change will make southern Florida uninhabitable then it all seems like all the smartest people in the room were playing video games while the world burns down around them. Chamath Palihapitiya’s purpose of starting Social Capital was noble, he wanted to start a fund that enabled entrepreneurs to grow meaningful companies that can solve meaningful problems. He wanted to invest in companies that were going to provide more than just a return on his investment. We do not need more capital going to photo sharing apps, food delivery apps, or things that generally make it easier for me to be a bum. We need 10 more Social Capitals to tackle problems that will have a meaningful impact on easing our transition into a world that is in constant flux or have a meaningful impact on reducing our society’s dependence on producing climate changing gases. There are the obvious problems already trying to be solved. Electric Transportation. Telsa, Rivian, and the big car companies are making electric vehicles. The majority of oil refinement is to make some sort of C8 fuel that can power an internal combustion engine with the end result being CO2 and things or people moved to other places. This will reduce the need for Catalytic Cracking of refined oil and will reduce overall global emissions if they can get to scale fast enough. Cleaner Energy Generation and Storage. This problem is also already being tackled by companies like GE Power with their massive wind turbines, Tesla’s Solar Business, and solid state battery technology from A123 systems and their competitors. If we could all drive electric cars that are powered from wind turbines and solar cells that would fix all our problems right? Maybe. Why do we even need electric transportation? We drive and need to move to get to our jobs and often our jobs are not close to where we work. For some it’s because they work in factories and factories are not near residential areas and for the people who do not work in manufacturing it is usually because it is too expensive to live close to where we work. There are two problems I outlined there: 1) Can you have factories in close proximity to residential areas? 2) Can you reduce the cost of housing so that people don’t have to live far away from where they work? The first point brings into the concept that factories are inherently dirty, but they do not have to be. If we could have our means of production closer to our residential areas without having any issues of pollution this could really change how we look at manufacturing. To have our products made in a different country while maybe the lowest cost option due to differentials in labor it is definitely not environmentally feasible to be shipping solar panels from China to the United States. The second point brings to the forefront the idea of lower cost housing — ideally housing that is more efficient than existing stock and close to where many people work. Not needing a commute in the first place is the easiest way to reduce emissions from driving an internal combustion car or producing an electric vehicle. There are some obvious problems about existing residents not wanting to be crowded by a large influx of “poorer” people or people being displaced by “gentrifiers” who will take over their community. I would challenge the people who are resistant to how neighborhoods change with new housing to think about where they want people to go in the event of a major climate event that causes a significant amount of climate refugees. What if for example New Orleans no longer becomes habitable? Where will those United States citizens go? The construction of population dense buildings that utilize principles from the Passive House could not only create low energy housing for a large number of people, but ideally it should be done with lower costs. I outline a myriad of problems in the previous paragraph, but when I think about solutions it goes down to having a dialogue with existing communities, reducing costs of building energy efficient housing, and figuring out where the safest places to build for the future. Reducing the costs of planning, construction, and more advanced materials are part of the equation, but getting local, state, and federal governments aligned is equally important. If Venture Capitalists could fund companies that are looking to solve these problems I would be more hopeful towards our future. On the flip side, entrepreneurs looking to secure funding for their ideas and products on how to solve some of these problems think about good business fundamentals, why your company will succeed now, and how you can give your investors an advantage over the competition. Making money and giving a return to your investors is the best way to insure that other companies like yours will succeed. Securing your intellectual property and getting government regulations to enable your product over existing technology would ensure a definite advantage. Hopefully the wealthy people who just got a big tax break from Donald Trump can put that money to work like all the pundits on CNBC say will happen. The Decider: Christmas Trees Mariana Zapata in Asparagus Magazine Low-carbon transformation faces headwinds in the United States and Canada Michael Barnard in The Future is Electric The Last Straw Kia Mooney Use of Cloud Seeding Technology to Mitigate Loss of Life and Property Due to Floods in Kerala Lt Col C Preveen, FIE The Startup Combating Climate Change One Rug at a Time Lauren Hargrave The Loss of Summer in Australia Melissa-Jane Nguyen The World Needs You Christina Meier Ph.D in Age of Awareness Planting trees is vital, but it won’t stop climate change. We must reduce fossil fuel use. Rupesh Paudyal in TalkPlant	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3374
__label__wiki	0.958288	0.958288	News & Politics » Neighborhood News When the regular Democratic organization picks on an independent candidate, even a small mistake is priceless ammunition. by Ben Joravsky Soon after Jason Farbman filed his Green Party candidacy for state representative from the 14th District, the regulars in Rogers Park did what they usually do to independents who dare to challenge their machine. They brought in the lawyers and took Farbman to court, hoping to have him bounced from the ballot for violating some technicality. To their surprise, and the delight of his backers, Farbman isn't just fighting back--he's exposing an embarrassing election-law blunder on the part of his Democratic opponents. "What Jason's done is awesome," says Dan Johnson Weinberger, a north-side Green Party activist. "The regulars must have thought Jason would fold. But Jason's got guts--he's taking it to the machine." This might look like a fight Farbman can't possibly win. His opponent in the November election, incumbent state representative Harry Osterman, is the son of one of Mayor Daley's closest north-side allies, the late 48th Ward alderman Kathy Osterman. North-side Democratic committeemen appointed Harry Osterman state representative in January 2000, when Carol Ronen vacated the office to become a state senator. A few months later Osterman beat Claude Walker in the Democratic primary--after getting endorsements from Daley, house speaker Michael Madigan, and virtually every other Democratic Party bigwig. Since then he's positioned himself as a loyal functionary in the Madigan-Daley machine. In contrast, Farbman is a 24-year-old cage-rattling populist who says what he wants no matter whom he might offend, being either too naive to know better or too independent to care. Born and raised near Danbury, Connecticut, he dropped out of Bard College in 1998 ("I was frustrated regurgitating what the teachers were saying to us"), sang in a punk rock band, and made his living as a waiter at an Olive Garden restaurant. He moved to Chicago in November 2000. "Why not?" he says. "My sister came out here to go to the Art Institute, and it only took me a few minutes of walking around to feel comfortable here." He settled in Rogers Park, found a job at a restaurant in Evanston, and decided to get involved in Green Party politics: "I went to their Web site and found this little notice that said, 'Want to be a candidate? Want to run?'" He sent an E-mail to the site and soon found himself talking with Weinberger, who encouraged him to challenge Osterman. "Harry's a machine politician in a neighborhood that's not really a machine neighborhood," says Farbman. "Mayor Daley put him in office because of his family connections. He hasn't really done anything. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but having him represent Rogers Park is a big waste. In Rogers Park we should have a representative with progressive points of view as opposed to the usual watered-down, mainstream crap." By April, Farbman, backed by the local Greens, had decided to run. That's when he began learning the basics of Chicago politics. "The first thing I learned is that since the Democrats and Republicans write the election-law rules, it's very difficult for an independent to even get on the ballot," he says. "A Democrat or Republican needs only 300 signatures to get on the ballot to run for state rep. An independent needs 1,500 signatures. Why? I guess they'd tell you it's to make sure that we're legitimate candidates--whatever that means. Realistically, it's a rule they created to maintain their power." On April 8 Farbman and his campaign manager, John Garone, started gathering signatures. "We were lackluster at first, but we got better," he says. "In a way, the regulars did us a favor. You have to collect 1,500 signatures? OK, that sucks. But that means we have to talk to thousands of voters--and that only makes us stronger." On June 21 he submitted 2,380 signatures to the Board of Elections. On July 1 a woman named Kara Allen, represented by attorney Michael Kasper, filed an objection to his nominating petition. "I'd never heard of Kara Allen, but she's not the key person in this case," says Farbman. "Kasper's key. He's very up-front about his Democratic connections." According to Allen's challenge, Farbman's nomination papers "contain petition sheets with the names of persons who are not registered voters, or who are not registered voters at the addresses shown opposite their respective names," as well as "the names of persons who did not sign the papers in their own proper persons" and "the names of persons for whom the addresses stated are not in the 14th Representative District." Allen asked that these signatures be thrown out, along with all of the signatures gathered by Garone, on the grounds that he "purports to reside" at one address but "publically lists his residence address and is registered to vote" at another, making his "affidavit on those sheets...false and those sheets...invalid in their entirety." Allen also asked that Farbman be removed from the ballot, because he'd gathered "less than 1,500 validly collected signatures." This isn't the first time the Democrats have challenged signatures supporting independent candidates. It's one of those time-honored political coming-of-age rites most independents must endure--along with getting their campaign posters destroyed and their canvassers taunted. Weinberger had undergone the rite in the summer of 2000, when he battled Democrats--again represented by Kasper--who were trying to bounce Ralph Nader, the Green Party's presidential candidate, from the Illinois ballot. "In Nader's case we needed 25,000 signatures to make the state ballot," Weinberger recalls. "We turned in about 39,000. The Democrats challenged 19,000, so that meant we had to save 5,000 signatures. It was brutal--sort of hand-to-hand combat. We compared the signatures on our petitions to the signatures on registration cards. They had all these party people doing their dirty work. After a while we got to know them. They let us know it wasn't personal. They were just doing what they had to do to get a job with the county or the city or whatever." The Greens prevailed, and Nader stayed on the ballot. But Farbman's case may be trickier, because he openly admits that some of his petition signers probably live outside the district. "I'm not saying we have 2,300 ironclad signatures--remember, we were new and got off to a bad start," he says. "I'm sure there are some bad signatures there--just as I'm sure there are some bad signatures on Osterman's petitions. But 800 bad signatures? Enough to knock me off? No way." He denies that his campaign forged any signatures, as Allen alleges. As for Garone's address, it's an innocent oversight. "Garone used to live on California," he says, "but now he lives on Carmen. When he signed his affidavit on the bottom of his signature sheet he had already moved. He just hadn't updated his voter's registration. All we need is to bring in a utility bill showing that he lived on Carmen when he got those signatures. So give me a break." Yet Farbman concedes that Allen's suit has already succeeded on one level--it has forced him to spend time and money fighting it. "As an act of harassment, it's worked," he says. "Here I am, reading through mountains of legal paper and going down to the Board of Elections and spending all this time answering their silly charges. I can't afford a lawyer, so I have to do my own legal research and write my legal documents and argue my own case." On Sunday, July 14, he found himself at his desk composing a motion, due the next day, asking the Board of Elections to dismiss Allen's complaint. "I had done all this legal research, and I was going to write that the case should be dismissed because Allen has asked the board to overreach its authority," he says. "But as I got ready to write, something seemed strange. In her objector's petition [Allen] says she lives at 5431 N. Lakeview. And I kept thinking, Lakeview, Lakeview--where the hell is Lakeview? Suddenly right there it dawned on me--there is no Lakeview. Not in my district anyway. There's a Lakewood up here. But Lakeview--where her petition says she lives--is south of my district, by Fullerton and Diversey. You have to understand the situation. It's 11 at night and I'm flying high on Pepsi. I want to jump up and down and scream hallelujah, because this is everything I can hope for. They have all these lawyers, all these supposed experts who supposedly know the election law inside and out--all these people who are endlessly trying to screw me and all the other independents on bizarre election-law stuff that only a nerd would understand. And they got it wrong! I still can't believe it. Can you imagine all the thousands and thousands of signatures they've tossed out over the years for having the wrong address? Can you imagine all the independent campaigns they ruined with this tactic? The enormity of it all hit me there and then. If [Allen] doesn't live where she says she lives, you gotta throw out her objection. Hey, if it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander." Legally, someone filing an objection to a nominating petition has to live in the district in question, so the next day Farbman filed his motion seeking to dismiss Allen's case on the grounds that "there is no such objector as Kara Allen registered to vote at 5431 N. Lakeview in the 14th Representative District, nor is there a street, avenue, or road by the name of Lakeview in that Representative District." Faberman's Green Party allies can't help laughing at the irony. "I wish I could have seen the look on Mike Kasper's face when he read Jason's petition," says Weinberger. "I wish I could have been there when he realized they got the address wrong. They must have a hundred experts and lawyers with nothing better to do than use the intricacies of election law as a tool against independents--and they wrote the wrong address. It's priceless." Kasper, who says he is indeed the gen-eral counsel for the state Democratic Party and a former Madigan staffer, says Allen doesn't want to talk to reporters, and he won't comment on the issue of her residency. "I don't get into the specifics of a case," he says. He does say that "she's a voter in the district" who has "every legal right to file an objection. The law provides that in order to run you must submit petitions signed by a certain number of voters. This is a legitimate law. Why should Mr. Osterman, if that's whom Ms. Allen supports, be required to spend money in a campaign against a candidate who's not qualified?" On July 19 Kasper filed a response to Farbman's motion, arguing that Allen lives on Lakewood and not Lakeview. He wrote that Farbman's "attack on [Allen's] standing is presumably based upon the typographical error contained on Page 1 of the Objector's Petition, which identifies [Allen's] street as 'Lakeview' rather than 'Lakewood.'" Osterman has distanced himself from Allen's objections. "She's a family friend," he says, but adds that he had nothing to do with her case against Farbman. "She probably told me about it, but I didn't ask a lot of questions--that's her business," he says. "Do I support her efforts? Put it this way--I think the Democratic Party should have the ability to look at the petitions of other candidates." Farbman predicts the petition challenge will backfire. "I think I will stay on the ballot, because I know I have enough good signatures," he says. "I think this is overkill by the Democrats. These tactics turn off the very people they're supposed to be recruiting. They think they're being so smart, when really they're being dumb." As we went to press Farbman called and screamed, "We won!" After he calmed down he explained that at a Tuesday afternoon Board of Elections hearing Kasper announced that Allen was withdrawing her objection. To be continued. Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jon Randolph. Jason Frederick Is Madigan's Democratic opponent a Rauner plant? 5 Jason Gonzales says no, but we follow the money. by Ben Joravsky \| Mar 9, 2016 John J. Kim/sun-times The first step to toppling a mayor: Getting on the ballot 40 Mayor Rahm’s challengers will need to collect way more than 12,500 signatures to qualify. by Ben Joravsky \| Nov 12, 2014	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3375
__label__wiki	0.685347	0.685347	News & Politics » Letters Truth or Cleverness by Ed Zotti To the editors: With all respect to my friend Jim Krohe, I take exception to some of his remarks about Michigan Avenue [September 27]. 1. Krohe writes, "had [Eliel] Saarinen and [Frank Lloyd] Wright been allowed to build on the avenue, it might today deserve to be called 'the Magnificent Mile.'" There are several problems with this. First, it buys into the tiresome view, commonly aired by younger architects trying to make an impression at parties, that Michigan Avenue is a failure. I have spent a lot of time walking around American and Canadian cities; if Michigan Avenue is a failure, we have no successes. Second, it ignores a key fact. I gather the building Krohe wishes Saarinen had been allowed to build is the one entered in the Chicago Tribune design competition of 1922. The essential features of this building were incorporated into the 333 N. Michigan Avenue building; cf Chicago, 1910-29, Condit, pp. 118-19. Third, Krohe assumes a great street is the result of an accumulation of great architecture. This is seldom the case. It has been said that Paris is a beautiful city full of mediocre buildings. That's not precisely true of Michigan Avenue, which has a few masterpieces. But most of the buildings are unexceptional. What gives the street its character is not outstanding architecture but the design of the street itself, the relationship of the buildings to it (including the skillful design of the storefronts), the high quality of materials, and the diversity of uses. Finally, readers should know that Frank Lloyd Wright's Michigan Avenue skyscraper design was a highly idiosyncratic work. While it's unfortunate it wasn't built somewhere in Chicago, it's no great tragedy it didn't go up on Michigan Avenue. 2. Krohe writes, "Piles like Chicago Place are just as ersatz as their predecessors but they lack the latters' modesty. New York has the Trumps as a symbol of money's victory over style; Chicago has North Michigan Avenue." This is off the wall. Does Krohe somehow have the idea that earlier buildings like Tribune Tower are modest? Had someone said that to Colonel McCormick, the eccentric Tribune publisher who built the "Symphony in Stone," it would have broken his heart. Modesty is also not the first term that comes to mind when one thinks of the Wrigley Building, which has been illuminated by a blinding array of spotlights for virtually its entire existence. The buildings of the 1920s were as pretentious as their owners and architects could make them. Chicago Place cannot legitimately be described as "just as ersatz" as its predecessors, if by ersatz one means to suggest a cheesy pastiche of design ideas from earlier periods. Many of the architectural features of the buildings of the 20s were directly copied from buildings of the Renaissance. Chicago Place to my knowledge has no direct historical precedents. It displays historical influences, but that could be said of any building except for a few by the first modernists. Krohe's low opinion of Chicago Place is hard to fathom. It is a handsome building by any reasonable standard and certainly an improvement over 900 N. Michigan and Water Tower Place, at least in terms of its relation to the street. The use of false windows on the facades of the retail pedestal (given the reality that mall merchants do not want genuine windows) seems preferable to the blank expanse of masonry evident at Water Tower Place and only thinly disguised at 900 N. Michigan. In any case the building is not just another piece of schlock architecture. Krohe quotes historian John Stamper's claim that North Michigan Avenue is in danger of becoming "an urban wasteland of unprecedented proportions" and calls it "a little hysterical." Indeed. You want an urban wasteland, visit Lawndale. Michigan Avenue, whatever its defects, is among the world's most attractive commercial streets, has not become markedly less so in the 26 years I have been acquainted with it (quite the contrary), and does not seem in imminent peril now. Jim is a good fellow and a fine writer. But all of us in this business are tempted to say things that are cleverer than they are true. Ed Zotti W. Vernon Park	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3376
__label__wiki	0.742119	0.742119	497 F. 2d 516 - Securities and Exchange Commission v. Continental Commodities Corporation 497 F2d 516 Securities and Exchange Commission v. Continental Commodities Corporation Fed. Sec. L. Rep. P 94,724 SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION, Plaintiff-Appellant, CONTINENTAL COMMODITIES CORPORATION et al., Defendants-Appellees. United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit. Wayne M. Whitaker, Robert F. Watson, S.E.C., Ft. Worth, Tex., Thomas Taylor, Richard E. Nathan, Gen. Counsel, S.E.C., Washington, D.C., for plaintiff-appellant. Sam N. Vilches, Jr., Fletcher Yarbrough, Martin Frost, Temporary Receivers, Dallas, Tex., for defendants-appellees. Before RIVES, GEWIN and RONEY, Circuit Judges. GEWIN, Circuit Judge: This appeal is taken from a district court order denying a preliminary injunction sought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Continental Commodities Corporation (Continental Commodities), Charles Long, and Continental Commodities Trading Company.1 The complaint filed by the SEC sought to enjoin Continental Commodities from committing alleged violations of various registration provisions of the Securities Act of 1933, 15 U.S.C. 77e(a), 77e(c), and 77q(a) (1970),2 and of the anti-fraud provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 15 U.S.C. 78j(b) (1970) and Rule 10b-5 thereunder, 17 CFR 240.10b-5 (1973),3 and petitioned for the appointment of a receiver of all assets and property belonging to or in its possession. The district court deemed jurisdiction of the subject matter to be lacking, reasoning that none of the transactions engaged in by Continental Commodities involved a security within the meaning of the two aforementioned Acts. In view of our disagreement with this conslusion, we reverse and remand for consideration by the district court of the propriety of granting the relief requested by the SEC.4 * According to the verified complaint, Continental Commodities, a Texas corporation incorporated in November of 1972, Charles Long, its President, and Continental Commodities Trading Company, a partnership formed in California by Long in mid-January 1973, offered to sell and sold to public investors interests denominated options on commodities futures contracts.5 Headquartered at a Los Angeles office in which all options were written, the trading enterprise was a member firm of the West Coast Commodity Exchange and hence subject to rulings of the California Commissioner of Corporations. On February 22, 1973, the Commissioner issued notice that the West Coast Commodities Exchange had classified all commodity options as securities and suspended trading in these options pending their registration as such. Compliance with this ruling dictated that Continental Commodities and Continental Commodities Trading Company cancel each option that they had underwritten and take steps to mollify their disappointed customers. Since from its inception until February 22, 1973, the Dallas office had attracted approximately 80 customers with 40 open accounts and the Los Angeles office had attracted approximately 40 customers with 20 open accounts, the appeasement efforts required of Continental Commodities were substantial. The failure of these efforts left disgruntled customers whose affidavits appear in the abbreviated record. The complaint filed by the SEC asserted that jurisdiction could be grounded upon one of two bases. The first base was the trading enterprise itself, the second, promissory notes issued as partial reimbursement to customers who held open accounts with Continental Commodities at the time trading was suspended. The trading enterprise extended the opportunity to invest in commodities futures contracts. Continental Commodities undertook to recommend certain commodities futures contracts to its customers. An interested customer would first be issued an option, guaranteeing him the right to purchase the contract at a stated price, with the option to remain open for a specified period of time. Continental Commodities neither owned the underlying futures contract nor escrowed any protion of the customer payments for the purpose of acquiring such contracts. In addition, Continental Commodities undertook to advise a customer of the most opportune moment either to sell or to exercise the option. Finally, it also offered investment counseling as to the most propitious time to sell a specific futures contract. The complaint alleged that several fraudulent acts were committed in connection with the discretionary trading accounts and particular options on futures contracts. Among these were that Continental Commodities misrepresented the lucrativeness of trading in commodities futures and the amount of reserve it had on deposit in bank to cover for the money invested in such futures, and in specific instances of counseling as to when to exercise options, that it misrepresented the then current market price of the underlying commodity futures contract.6 The second potential base for finding subject matter jurisdiction was that, upon receiving notification that trading on options was suspended, Continental Commodities issued promissory notes to some of its customers as partial reimbursement. Although the record is somewhat obscure as to the precise number of recipients and the maturity date of the notes, it would appear that the notes were ostensibly non-interest bearing, with a maturity date of less than 9 months, and were issued to more than a nominal number of customers. The complaint, as amplified by verified affidavits before the district court, alleges that the notes represented 40% Of the amount of money owed to a customer, and that before issuing them, Continental Commodities exacted a promise of forbearance from legal action if payments were made as promised. Charles Long is alleged to have informed customers that the SEC had frozen his accounts, valued at $3,000,000 and thereby precluded him from paying off the debts owed by Continental Commodities, and to have indicated that the SEC would permit the company to remain in business if it would return 60% Of the investors' original investments immediately and give promissory notes for the balance. Moreover, the record contains a letter written by Charles Long to a customer expressing Long's hope that Continental Commodities would square its accounts, register its options, and resume trading again. This letter tends to belie Long's testimony that there was 'no way' Continental Commodities could stay in business, and is buttressed by an affidavit submitted by an SEC attorney to the effect that Long had issued the notes in order to leave himself with enough cash to sue the West Coast Commodities Exchange and possibly register options should it become necessary. Having recounted the facts which spawned this litigation and which were before the district court in its ruling on the SEC's motion for a preliminary injunction, it is critical to take cognizance of the procedural labyrinth traversed by the parties below and on appeal. As we noted earlier, the complaint filed by the SEC posited two theoretical bases for subject matter jurisdiction-- that both the scheme for trading on discretionary accounts and the notes issued were securities. The latter argument was somewhat ill-framed, and hence in its April 9, 1973 order denying the motion for a preliminary injunction, the district court merely addressed and rejected the SEC's contention that the scheme of trading on discretionary accounts amounted to an investment contract. Subsequently, the SEC sought a rehearing due to the failure of the court to consider the contention that the notes were securities within the definitions of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The district court disposed of this motion on May 3, 1973, ruling that the notes issued by Continental Commodities were not subject to the abuses sought to be curbed by the Acts and hence did not fall within their ambit. On appeal, the SEC seeks to preserve only its contention that the notes were securities. In its brief, the SEC informs us that assuming a favorable ruling on appeal, it will move for a permanent injunction and may then resurrect the investment contract theory.7 We are, however, reluctant to condone the use of tactical legerdemain when such is designed to bridle an appellate court in its resolution of a case. The issue of whether trading on discretionary accounts amounts to an investment contract was vigorously contested below and was addressed at some length by the district court. Its disposition rested essentially on its perception of the legal contours of the definition of investment contract, and one of the prerequisites subsumed within it-- the requirement of a common enterprise. Thus, while not impervious to the hazards of deciding a case on a basis not contested on appeal, we think that this case is particularly appropriate for such an approach.8 Accordingly, we address both the investment contract and note issues. As we noted earlier, the district court rejected the SEC's contention that the trading in discretionary commodities accounts engaged in by Continental Commodities fell within the ambit of the term security,9 as defined by the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The definitional sections of the two Acts, which are substantially identical, Tcherepnin v. Knight, 389 U.S. 332, 335-336, 88 S.Ct. 548, 552-553, 19 L.Ed.2d 564, 569 (1967), stipulate that the term security includes an investment contract. See 15 U.S.C. 77b(1) and 15 U.S.C. 78c(a)(10). The district court correctly concluded that SEC v. W. J. Howey Co., 328 U.S. 293, 298-299, 66 S.Ct. 1100, 1102-1103, 90 L.Ed. 1244, 1249 (1946) expresses the controlling standard for determining whether an investment contract exists. There, the Court stated that: 'An investment contract for purposes of the Securities Act means a contract, transaction or scheme whereby a person invests his money in a common enterprise and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party . . ..' As was noted in SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, Inc., 497 F.2d 473, p. 477 (5th Cir. 1974) (No. 73-2339), this test subsumes within it three elements: first the existence of an investment of money; second, that the scheme functions as a common enterprise; and third, that profits of the enterprise are derived solely from the efforts of others. It was the asserted absence of the second element that prompted the district court to hold that an investment contract did not exist.10 Following the Seventh Circuit's reasoning in Milnarik v. M-S Commodities, 457 F.2d 274 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 409 U.S. 887, 93 S.Ct. 113, 34 L.Ed.2d 144 (1972), and that contained in Wasnowic v. Chicago Bd. of Trade, 352 F.Supp. 1066 (M.D.Pa.1972), aff'd without opinion, 491 F.2d 752 (3d Cir.), cert. denied, U.S. , 94 S.Ct. 2407, 40 L.Ed.2d 773 (1974),11 the district court deemed the requisite commonality absent for two reasons: first, because each individual invested in different options, the accounts of individual investors were unrelated; and second, there was no understanding or expectation that investors would share in a common fund comprised of the returns on their investments. These reasons constituted the very impediments to a finding of commonality in Milnarik. There, as here, M-S Commodities held numerous discretionary accounts for trading in commodities futures. In holding that no investment contract was presented the Seventh Circuit stated: 'Although the complaint does allege that Nelson entered into similar discretionary arrangements with other customers, the success or failure of those other contracts had no direct impact on the profitability of plaintiff's contract. Nelson's (an agent of M-S Commodities) various customers were represented by a common agent, but they were not joint participants in the same investment enterprise.' 457 F.2d at 276-277. Were this view compatible with pronouncements of the Supreme Court and this Circuit, then the district court's reasoning would be compelling. However, we cannot accept the Milnarik view. In SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, Inc., supra, this court decried a litmus application of the Howey test and expressed its preference for a resilient standard which would comport with the uniformly acclaimed remedial purposes of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. While primarily concerned with explicating the contours of the 'solely from the efforts of others' element, we had occasion to consider the parameters of the common enterprise element as well. There, we endorsed the Ninth Circuit's formulation that "(a) common enterprise is one in which the fortunes of the investor are interwoven with and dependent upon the efforts and success of those seeking the investment or of third parties',' SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, Inc., supra at 478, quoting SEC v. Glen W. Turner Enterprises, 474 F.2d 476, 482 n. 7 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 821, 94 S.Ct. 117, 38 L.Ed.2d 53 (1973), and remonstrated that 'the critical factor is not the similitude or coincidence of investor input, but rather the uniformity of impact of the promoter's efforts.' SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, Inc., supra at 478. Accordingly, although in the Koscot scheme of multi-level distributorships, wherein each investor's profit materialized only when the prospects he attracted to Opportunity Meetings and GoTours enlisted as distributors or sub-distributors with Koscot, this court nevertheless deemed the requisite commonality to be present: 'The fact that an investor's return is independent of that of other investors in the scheme is not decisive. Rather, the requisite commonality is evidenced by the fact that the fortunes of all investors are inextricably tied to the efficacy of the Koscot prospects and consummating a sale.' SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, Inc., supra at 479. This language expressly rejects the proposition that the pro-rata sharing of profits is critical to a finding of commonality, accord, Blackwell v. Bentsen, 203 F.2d 690, 691-692 (5th Cir. 1953), cert. dismissed, 347 U.S. 925, 74 S.Ct. 528, 98 L.Ed. 1078 (1954); SEC v. Glen W. Turner, Inc., supra at 482; Marshall v. Lamson Bros. & Co., 368 F.Supp. 486, 489 (S.D.Iowa 1974); Maheu v. Reynolds & Co., 282 F.Supp. 423, 429 (S.D.N.Y.1967),12 and casts aspersions on the elevation of a pooling ingredient to exalted status in inquiries concerning a common enterprise. For clearly, in the Koscot scheme, the independence of investor return followed from the independence of each investor's nominal effort in contributing to the materialization of a return. Thus, we cannot accept the district court's view that Continental Commodities did not function as a common enterprise because it invested in different options on commodities futures for some investors than it did for others. Were congruity of investment a prerequisite, then unlike the Koscot scheme, an enterprise would invariably either operate by pooling of investments or remunerate its customers by pro-rata sharing of profits. Rather, as in SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, Inc., supra, the critical inquiry is confined to whether the fortuity of the investments collectively is essentially dependent upon promoter expertise. Continental Commodities renders investment counseling concerning which option on commodities futures to invest in, when to sell or exercise the option, and if the option is exercised, when to sell the specific futures contract. Lacking the business acumen possessed by promoters, investors inexorably rely on Continental Commodities' guidance for the success of their investment. This guidance, like the efficacy of Koscot meetings and guidelines on recruiting prospects and consummating a sale, is uniformly extended to all its investors. That it may bear more productive fruits in the case of some options than it does in cases of others should not vitiate the essential fact that the success of the trading enterprise as a whole and customer investments individually is contingent upon the sagacious investment counseling of Continental Commodities. This conclusion comports with the resilient approach this court adopted to the 'solely from the efforts of others' element in SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, Inc. and the similar approach to the common enterprise element which that decision presaged. The second question for consideration is whether the notes issued by Continental Commodities in partial reimbursement to its customers upon the suspension of trading in unregistered ocmmodities futures options are embraced by the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and hence constitute an alternative basis of subject matter jurisdiction. Section 77b(1) of the '33 Act stipulates that unless the context otherwise requires, 'the term 'security' means any note . . ..' Section 77c(a) exempts from the '33 Act's registration provisions, at issue in the charges under 15 U.S.C. 77e(a) & (c): '(3) Any note, draft, bill of exchange, or banker's acceptance which arises out of a current transaction or the proceeds of which have been or are to be used for current transactions, and which has a maturity at the time of issuance of not exceeding nine months, exclusive of days of grace, or any renewal thereof the maturity of which is likewise limited.' The definitional section of the term security in the 1934 Act, 15 U.S.C. 78c(a) states that unless the context otherwise requires, '(10) The term 'security' means any note . . . but shall not include . . . any note . . . which has a maturity at the time of issuance of not exceeding nine months, exclusive of days of grace, or any renewal thereof the maturity of which is likewise limited.' The record indicates that some of the notes issued by Continental Commodities were to mature in less than nine months. Hence we must determine initially whether the reimbursement notes issued by Continental Commodities are the type of notes sought to be regulated by the Acts and whether their maturity dates bring them within the registration exemption in the '33 Act and within the definitional exemption of the '34 Act. We must also consider whether the transactions in which these notes were issued satisfy the additional jurisdictional prerequisites of the Acts.13 Sanctions under the '33 Act are triggered by a sale or offer to sell a security. See 15 U.S.C. 77e(a) and (c) and 77q(a). The '33 Act defines the terms sale or sell to 'include every contract of sale or disposition of a security or interest in a security, for value.' See 15 U.S.C. 77b(3). Under the '34 Act, and section 10(b), the SEC must establish not only that the notes were the subject of a sale, defined by 15 U.S.C. 78c(a)(14) to 'include any contract to sell or otherwise dispose of,' but also that Continental Commodities engaged in fraud 'in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.' 15 U.S.C. 78j(b). We address these issues seriatim. A. Notes as Securities As the foregoing discussion indicates, the treatment extended to notes under the two Acts, while not precisely the same, is virtually identical. See Bellah v. First National Bank of Hereford, 495 F.2d 1109, 1112 (5th Cir. 1974); Zeller v. Bogue Electric Manufacturing Corp., 476 F.2d 795, 799-800 (2d Cir. 1973); Anderson v. Francis I. duPont & Co., 291 F.Supp. 705, 708 (D.Minn. 1968). The following analysis proceeds from this discernible similitude of the Acts. Taking their cue from the Supreme Court's pronouncement that "instruments may be included within any of (The Acts') definitions, as a matter of law, if on their fact they answer to the name or description," Tcherepnin v. Knight, 389 U.S. 332, 339, 88 S.Ct. 548, 555, 19 L.Ed.2d 564, 571 (1967), quoting SEC v. C. M. Joiner Leasing Corp., 320 U.S. 344, 351, 64 S.Ct. 120, 123, 88 L.Ed. 88, 93 (1943), most courts have countenanced a literal reading of the definition of security to the extent that almost all notes are held to be securities. See Rekant v. Desser, 425 F.2d 872, 878 (5th Cir. 1970); Lehigh Valley Trust Co. v. Central National Bank of Jacksonville, 409 F.2d 989, 991-992 (5th Cir. 1969); Joseph v. Norman's Health Club, 336 F.Supp. 307, 313 (E.D.Mo.1971). Such a literal reading is compatible with the acknowledged policy of strictly construing exemptions from the coverage of the Acts. See SEC v. Ralston Purina Co., 346 U.S. 119, 126, 73 S.Ct. 981, 985, 97 L.Ed. 1494, 1499 (1953); Hill York Corp. v. American International Franchises, Inc., 448 F.2d 680, 689 (5th Cir. 1971). However, it should not be employed to frustrate the spirit or intention of Congress in promulgating the Acts. That the notes issued by Continental Commodities possess a maturity date of less than nine months is not dispositive. This court intimated as much in United States v. Rachal, 473 F.2d 1338 (5th Cir. 1973), where in a case involving the exemption from registration for shortterm notes, we approved the following instruction given by the trial court: 'This exemption was intended by Congress to cover that type of commercial paper available for discount at a Federal Reserve Bank, not generally sold to the public or advertised for public sale. It applies only to such notes, usually high quality commercial paper, as arise out of current transactions and are hence covered by assets readily convertible into cash. The exemption does not apply to common capital stock or an instrument which has the characteristics of such stock generally, regardless of what other characteristics it may have.' 473 F.2d at 1343. Underlying our approval was the premise that the Acts' exemptions for notes extend only to commercial paper, not investment paper. This premise has received increasing acceptance, as indicated by the number of cases rejecting the proposition that notes of less than 9 months maturity are per se exempt from the registration provisions of the '33 Act and the definitional section of security appearing in the '34 Act. See Zeller v. Bogue Electric Manufacturing Corp., supra at 800; Sanders v. John Nuveen and Co., Inc., 463 F.2d 1075, 1080 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 409 U.S. 1009, 93 S.Ct. 443, 34 L.Ed.2d 302 (1972); SEC v. Vanco, Inc., 283 F.2d 304 (3d Cir. 1960), aff'g, 166 F.Supp. 422, 423 (D.N.J.1958); United States v. Hill, 298 F.Supp. 1221, 1226-1227 (D.Conn.1969); Anderson v. Francis I. duPont & Co., supra at 708-709. Additional testimony to its approval is supplied by courts which deem the commercial-investment dichotomy as implicit within the 'unless the context otherwise requires' prefatory language of 15 U.S.C. 77b(1) and 78c(a)(10), see Lino v. City Investing Co., 487 F.2d 689, 694-695 (3d Cir. 1973); Joseph v. Norman's Health Club, Inc., supra at 313, and those courts which read the dichotomy into the definitional sections without positing a precise derivational source. See Davis v. Avco Corp., 371 F.Supp. 782, 787 (N.D.Ohio 1974); SEC v. Thunderbird Valley, Inc., 356 F.Supp. First National Bank of Lubbock, Texas, 352 F.Supp. 454, 457-458 (N.D.Tex. 1973). And it was this impressive line of cases which led this court to hold that the exemption for short-term notes under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 applied only to commercial and not investment paper in Bellah v. First National Bank of Hereford, supra. Accordingly, it is the character of the note, not its maturity date, which determines coverage under both the registration provisions of the Securities Act of 1933, and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The above quoted instruction approved in United States v. Rachal, supra, largely reflects the SEC's position concerning the exemption from the '33 Act's registration provisions. Securities Act.Rel. No.4412, 26 Fed.Reg. at 9159.14 This release, instructive as to the '34 Act's definition of a note, see Bellah v. First National Bank of Hereford, supra at 1112 n. 3; Zeller v. Bogue Electric Manufacturing Corp., supra at 800, sets forth four factors which underscore the commercial-investment dichotomy of notes. These factors are that the notes are (1) of prime quality; (2) used to finance current transactions; (3) not offered to the public; and (4) discountable at a Federal Reserve Bank. While the precise meaning of these criteria has not been extensively addressed by the courts, see Comment, The Commercial Paper Market & The Securities Acts, 39 U. of Chicago L.Rev. 362, 381 (1972), it would appear that notes issued by a company or individual in precarious financial straits are not either prime quality, issued to facilitate current transactions, or eligible for discounting by Federal Reserve Banks. See Sanders v. John Nuveen & Co., Inc., supra at 1079; United States v. Hill, supra at 1227. Continental Commodities' impecunious condition, as witnessed by the fact that its customers were left unsatisfied by the issuance of the notes, would thus dispel the suggestion that the notes it issued fall within the four criteria and hence the characterization of commercial paper which the criteria adumbrate.15 Although the SEC release is entitled to great weight, it is not dispositive, see SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, supra at 483 n. 14; Zeller v. Bogue Electric Manufacturing Corp., supra at 800, and hence the conclusion that the term 'security' embraces the Continental Commodities notes need not rest on an application of the factors contained in the SEC release alone. Rather, it is appropriate and preferable to consider and apply the judicially assessed characteristics ascribed to commercial and investment paper. The paramount concern in this inquiry is upon the nature of the transaction in which the note is issued. In Lino v. City Investing Co., supra, the Third Circuit dismissed on jurisdictional grounds a suit brought under various registration and anti-fraud provisions of the Acts by a purchaser of a franchise sales center license for which promissory notes had been given to the franchisor in partial payment. After observing that there was no indication that the franchisor was soliciting venture capital, the court stated: 'In no way could City Investing be said to have 'purchased' Lino's notes for speculation or investment. City Investing was selling a contract right to Lino, not buying his security. It simply lacks common sense to describe the transaction as City Investing purchasing John Lino's security by paying him the right to operate one of its Franchise Sales Centers.' 487 F.2d at 695. Thus, the Third Circuit concluded that City Investing Company accepted the note, not to invest in Lino's franchise, but to enable the franchise to be financed.16 See also SEC v. Fifth Avenue Coach Lines, Inc., 289 F.Supp. 3, 13, 38 (S.D.N.Y.1968), aff'd on other grounds, 435 F.2d 510 (2d Cir. 1970) (notes issued by director and officer of corporation to corporation to enable it to meet current business obligations treated as personal loans); City Nat'l Bank v. Vanderboom, 290 F.Supp. 592 (W.D.Ark.1968), aff'd, 422 F.2d 221 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, 399 U.S. 905, 90 S.Ct. 2196, 26 L.Ed.2d 560 (1970) (note issued to bank in exchange for a loan, the proceeds of which were subsequently used to purchase stock of a corporation, treated as not within the Acts); Joseph v. Norman's Health Club, Inc., supra (notes issued by purchasers of lifetime memberships in health clubs are commercial notes). But see MacAndrews & Forbes Co. v. American Barmag Corp., 339 F.Supp. 1401 (D.S.C.1972) (bills of exchange issued by purchaser of machines held to be securities). In this sense, City Investing Company extended financing in much the same way that a bank does in a private loan transaction, and in the latter situation, a note received by the bank does not easily lend itself to characterization as investment paper. See Sanders v. John Nuveen & Co., supra at 1080 (dicta); McClure v. First National Bank of Lubbock, supra. Such was the import of our decision in Bellah v. First National Bank of Hereford, supra, where we held that loans extended by a bank to enable the Bellahs to finance a livestock business were private in nature, and hence that a note issued to the bank in exchange was commercial and not investment paper. In Bellah, there was no evidence in the record to suggest that the bank proffered the loan in hopes of realizing a return commensurate with the success of the Bellah's livestock enterprise. Illustrative of the transactions in which a note is deemed to be investment paper is Zeller v. Bogue Electric Manufacturing Corp., supra. Zeller, a shareholder in Belco Pollution Control Corp. (Belco), brought a derivative action against Bogue Electric Manufacturing Corp. (Bogue) its parent corporation, alleging as grounds therefor that Bogue had caused Belco to loan money to Bogue on terms that were purportedly unfair. The individual protagonists, directors and accountants of both parent and subsidiary, had caused Belco to make a series of open account loans to Bogue for which no interest was required to be paid. Over a year later, the open account indebtedness was supplanted by a demand interest bearing note, collateralized by shares of Belco stock owned by Bogue. While the opinion of the Seocnd Circuit does not reveal the reason why the note was issued at this time, it does indicate that the initial loan was prompted by operating losses suffered by Bogue. Thus, the loan constituted an attempt to return Bogue to a position of financial viability. And to the extent that this restoration of Bogue would rebound to Belco's benefit, Belco's supplying of money on open account constituted not a private commercial loan but an investment. Accordingly the court held that since the note if issued at the time of the initial loan would have been a security, it was also a security even though its issuance was delayed. See 476 F.2d at 800. The analogies between Zeller and the instant case compel us to conclude that the notes issued by Continental Commodities were investment and not commercial in nature. Despite unrelenting arguments by Continental Commodities to the contrary, it is apparent from a review of the record that the notes were issued to rejuvenate and not to liquidate the enterprise. Affiants Thomas M. Cain, Jr. and Bob Doss claimed that they had been apprised by Charles Long that upon reimbursement of its customers in part with cash and in part with the notes, Continental Commodities would be permitted to remain in business by the SEC. Similarly, the record contains a letter written to customer Milton Young in which Long states: 'We hope that in a short period of time we are able to register our options as securities and begin selling options again.' Finally, affiant Wayne M. Whitaker, a staff attorney with the Fort Worth Regional Office of the SEC, related the substance of Long's explanation for the payment scheme in an interview as follows: 'Long stated that he does have founds to pay in full the customer's original investments, but that he is only offering a 60% Immediate refund and a note for the remaining 40% To certain large customers in order to leave him with enough cash to sue the West Coast Commodity Exchange and possibly register the options should it become necessary.' To the extent that the district court's disposition may have rested on the finding that the notes issued by Continental Commodities were designed to liquidate the enterprise, the aforementioned evidence establishes and we conclude that this finding was clearly erroneous.17 Once the resuscitative nature of the notes is established, the conclusion is ineluctable that the notes were investment and not commercial paper. Since revival would inure to their benefit, recipients accepted the notes with the hope of realizing a greater return on their investments. To this extent the recipients here were in a position akin to that of the Belco shareholders in Zeller v. Bogue Electric Manufacturing Corp., supra. B. Additional Jurisdictional Prerequisites The final question for review is whether for purposes of the '33 Act, Continental Commodities' issuance of the notes constituted a sale or disposition of a security for value and whether for purposes of the '34 Act, the notes were sold and whether there was any fraud in connection with the sale of such notes. We address the sale aspect under both the Acts, and then turn to the 'in connection with' requirement under section 10b alone. We begin by noting that the meaning of the terms 'sale' and 'purchase and sale' under different sections of the Acts may vary. See SEC v. National Securities, Inc., 393 U.S. 453, 466, 89 S.Ct. 564, 571, 21 L.Ed.2d 668, 679-680 (1968); International Controls Corp. v. Vesco, 490 F.2d 1334, 1343 n.8 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, U.S. , 94 S.Ct. 2644, 40 L.Ed.2d (1974). Amenability of partiuclar securities to these terms is determined by whether the transactions in which the securities are issued are subject to the abuses sought to be eliminated by the individual Acts. The purpose of the registration provisions of the '33 Act is to provide adequate disclosure to members of the investing public, e.g. SEC v. North American Research & Development Corp., 424 F.2d 63, 71 (2d Cir. 1970); SEC v. Harwyn Industries Corp., 326 F.Supp. 943, 954 (S.D.N.Y.1971), and that of the section 10(b), to protect investors from the use of manipulative or deceptive devices in securities transactions. See Sargent v. Genesco, Inc., 492 F.2d 750, 760 (5th Cir. 1974); Smallwood v. Pearl Brewing Company, 489 F.2d 579, 590 (5th Cir. 1974). Under both Acts, the definitions of the term sale are broad. Compare, e.g., Superintendent of Insurance v. Bankers Life & Casualty Co., 404 U.S. 6, 12, 92 S.Ct. 165, 169, 30 L.Ed.2d 128, 134 (1971) and International Controls Corp. v. Vesco, supra at 1343 with e.g., Collins v. Rukin, 342 F.Supp. 1282, 1288 (D.Mass.1972). Continental Commodities claims that the issuance of the notes did not constitute a sale under either Act essentially because it did not receive any value from the recipients. But an examination of the record reveals that an agreement to forbear bringing legal action was a condition exacted by Continental Commodities for the issuance of the notes. The text of a telegram from customer Gerald Rubman to Charles Long is illustrative: 'Gentlemen it is understood that as a condition of withholding legal action, I am to receive within seven days a check for sixty percent of my deposit together with a promissory note for the balance of funds due and payable me.' And as the affidavits alluded to above indicate, Continental Commodities represented that by issuing the notes, it bought not only SEC permission to continue operating, but also time within which it could sue the West Coast Commodities Exchange, seeking a reversal of its prohibition against trading on unregistered commodities options. The question of whether in these circumstances a sale was effected under the relevant portions of the Acts is one yet to be addressed by the courts. An affirmative response seems to be suggested by two vintage cases involving suits for unlawful insider trading where courts held sales to have been effected where securities were issued in payment for past debts. See Blau v. Albert, 157 F.Supp. 816, 820 (S.D.N.Y.1957); Smolowe v. Delendo Corp., 46 F.Supp. 758, 763 (S.D.N.Y.1942), aff'd, 136 F.2d 231 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 320 U.S. 751, 64 S.Ct. 56, 88 L.Ed. 446 (1943). Moreover, in Zeller v. Bogue Electric Manufacturing Corp., supra, the Second Circuit apparently did not deem the absence of tangible consideration flowing from Belco to Bogue concomitant with the issuance of the note to be an impediment to jurisdiction. This conclusion can be supported under the reasoning that the initial open account loans extended by Belco constituted the requisite return to Bogue for the note it subsequently issued-- reasoning equally appropriate here.18 We would also note that Continental Commodities most assuredly would be deemed to have engaged in a sale had it issued promissory notes not to its customers but to other members of the investing public and applied the proceeds to its customer indebtedness. The net effect of this hypothetical transaction and the instant transaction is the same-- time is bought hopefully to enable the enterprise to revive itself. The potential jeopardy to the salutary purposes of the registration and anti-fraud provisions by a conclusion that a sale did not take place in either transaction is the same. To hold that the instant facts did not constitute a sale would thus be tantamount to condoning the view that one can not circumvent these provisions of the Acts directly but can do so indirectly We also hold that for jurisdictional purposes, the requisite fraud in connection with the sale or purchase of a security has been alleged. The complaint charges that Continental Commodities made several fraudulent representations at the time the notes were issued, inter alia, that the SEC had frozen $3,000,000 of Continental Commodities money and had approved its remuneration plan. It also charges that Continental Commodities misrepresented the amount of money it had on reserve to back investments at the time customers initially invested in commodities options. This latter alleged misstatement can be considered as having a continuing effect up to and beyond the time the notes were issued. Accordingly these purported misrepresentations fall clearly within the 'in connection with' requirement, as adumbrated in Superintendent of Insurance v. Bankers Life & Casualty Co., supra, Sargent v. Genesco, Inc., supra, and Smallwood v. Pearl Brewing Co., supra.19 To reiterate, we hold only that the record before the district court on the SEC's motion for a preliminary injunction was sufficient to establish jurisdiction under the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. We intimate no view as to the verity of the SEC's assertions of fraud or the wisdom of issuing a preliminary injunction. Accordingly, this cause if reversed and remanded with instructions to consider the propriety of granting a preliminary injunction and other appropriate relief. To facilitate ease of understanding, the defendants-appellees shall be referred to collectively as Continental Commodities, except as to those transactions where the retention of their separate identities is of significance to this inquiry The relevant portions of 15 U.S.C. 77e (1970) provide: '(a) Unless a registration statement is in effect as to a security, it shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly-- (1) to make use of any means or instruments of transportation or communication in interstate commerce or of the mails to sell such security through the use or medium of any prospectus or otherwise; or (2) to carry or cause to be carried through the mails or in interstate comnerce, by any means or instruments of transportation, any such security for the purpose of sale or for delivery after sale. (c) It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, to make use of any means or instruments of transportation or communication in interstate commerce or of the mails to offer to sell or offer to buy through the use or medium of any propectus or otherwise any security, unless a registration statement has been filed as to such security, or while the registration statement is the subject of a refusal order or stop order or (prior to the effective date of the registration statement) any public proceeding or examination under section 77h of this title.' 15 U.S.C. 77q (1970) provides that: '(a) It shall be unlawful for any person in the offer or sale of any securities by the use of any means or instruments of transportation or communication in interstate commerce or by the use of the mails, directly or indirectly-- (1) to employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud, or (2) to obtain money or property by means of any untrue statement of a material fact or nay omission to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or (3) to engage in any transaction, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon the purchaser.' 15 U.S.C. 78j (1970): 'It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce or of the mails, or of any facility of any national securities exchange-- (b) To use or employ, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security registered on a national securities exchange or any security not so registered, any manipulative or deceptive device or contrivance in contravention of such rules and regulations as the Commission may prescribe as necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors.' 17 C.F.R. 240.10b-5 states that: 'It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange, (a) To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud, (b) To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or (c) To engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.' We intimate no view as to whether the SEC would be entitled to the issuance of the preliminary injunction under the standards announced in Canal Authority of the State of Florida v. Callaway, 489 F.2d 567 (5th Cir. 1974) The subject matter of the options on commodities futures contracts was varied, extending to silver, sugar, coffee, platinum, plywood and cocoa Additional alleged misrepresentations concerned the qualifications and experience of the management of the issuer, the existence of SEC approval of the issuer's method of operation, the nonadverseness of financial interests of the issuer and the investor, the likelihood of increase in the market value of the securities being issued, and the use of proceeds received from purchasers of the issuer's securities In its brief filed on appeal the SEC states that when it moves for a permanent injunction, it will be upon a more extensive record unless the district court should conclude on remand that its jurisdiction with respect to the notes is a sufficient predicate for granting all the requested relief That there is no jurisdictional bar to our consideration of the investment contract issue is evidenced by the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Philadelphia National Bank, 374 U.S. 321, 350 n. 26, 83 S.Ct. 1715, 1734, 10 L.Ed.2d 915, 937 (1963) where the Court considered whether the Bank Merger Act insulated approved mergers from attack as violative of antitrust laws, despite the abandonment of this issue on appeal. See also United States v. Western Pacific Railroad Company, 352 U.S. 59, 63, 77 S.Ct. 161, 164, 1 L.Ed.2d 126, 131 (1956) It is important to be mindful of the distinction between trading on discretionary accounts and the actual commodities futures contract. Courts are in general agreement that a particular commodities futures contract is not an investment contract. Berman v. Dean Witter & Co., Inc., 353 F.Supp. 669, 671 (C.D.Cal.1973); Schwartz v. Bache & Co., Inc., 340 F.Supp. 995, 998-999 (S.D.Iowa 1972); Berman v. Orimex Trading, Inc., 291 F.Supp. 701, 702 (S.D.N.Y.1968); Sinva v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, 253 F.Supp. 359, 360-367 (S.D.N.Y.1966) We recognize that the district court did not have the benefit of our opinion in SEC v. Koscot Interplanetary, Inc., supra, in reaching its conclusion In its opinion the district court did not consider the proliferating number of cases adopting the contrary view. See Marshall v. Lamson Bros. & Co., 368 F.Supp. 486, 489-490 (S.D.Iowa 1974); Johnson v. Arthur Espey, Shearson, Hammill & Co., 341 F.Supp. 764, 765 (S.D.N.Y.1972); Berman v. Orimex Trading, Inc., supra; Anderson v. Francis I. duPont & Co., 291 F.Supp. 705, 709 (D.Minn.1968); Maheu v. Reynolds, 282 F.Supp. 423, 426 (S.D.N.Y.1967) Commentators are in general agreement that promoter dominance of the enterprise provides sufficient commonality and hence that pro-rata distribution of all profits is not required. See I. L. Loss, Securities Regulation 489 (2d Ed.1961); Coleman, A Franchise Agreement: Not A 'Security' Under the Securities Act of 1933, 22 Bus. Law 493, 502-09 (1967); Borton & Abrahams, Options on Commodity Futures Contracts as Securities in California, 29 Bus. Law 867, 872 (1974); Note, Securities Regulation of Pyramid Schemes, 51 Tex.L.Rev. 788, 793 (1973); Note, Pyramid Schemes: Dare to Be Regulated, 61 Geo.L.J. 1257, 1277 (1973); cf. Comment, Pyramid Marketing Plant & Consumer Protection: State & Federal Regulation, 21 J. of Public Law 445, 470 (1972) At oral argument, counsel for Continental Commodities virtually withdrew the contention that the SEC had failed to prove that the issuance of notes was facilitated by use of any means or instruments of transportation or communication in interstate commerce. Accordingly, we do not consider this question The release provides as follows: 'The legislative history of the Act makes elear that section 3(a)(3) applies only to prime quality negotiable paper of a type nor ordinarily purchased by the general public, that is, paper used to facilitate well recognized types of current operational business requirements and of a type eligible for discounting by Federal Reserve banks.' This position tracks in part the description of exempted notes appearing in H.R.Rep.No.85, 73d Cong., 1st Sess. 15 (1933). The release, and its support in the legislative history of the Acts is discussed extensively in Comment, The Commercial Paper Market and the Securities Acts, 39 U. of Chicago L.Rev., 362, 380-396 (1972). At oral argument, counsel for Continental Commodities conceded that the notes were not of prime quality or capable of discounting at a Federal Reserve Bank. That the legislative history reflects that discountable paper was conceived of as paper with 'a record of safety second only to Government bonds' see Hearings on S. 875 Before the Senate Comm. on Banking & Currency, 73rd Cong., 1st Sess. at 94, 95 (1933) would support the conclusion that the notes were not possessed of the requisite financial inviolability Our conclusion on this score should not be read to undermine the observation in Bellah v. First National Bank of Hereford, supra, that under the release criteria, that Bellah's lack of financial viability cannot metamorphize commercial paper into investment paper. This observation was confined to circumstances where the impecunious maker seeks to invoke the protections of the Act. Bellah v. First National Bank of Hereford, supra at 1112 n. 3. Accordingly, it is inapposite where, as here, the maker seeks to avoid the Act's sanctions. In view of the SEC's disapprobation of this decision, we intimate no view as to its propriety. The SEC maintained that the Third Circuit overlooked the fact that the franchisor was seeking venture capital As our analysis indicates, we adopt as the relevant index, not whether what was contemplated did in fact materialize, but rather what was in fact contemplated by the investor and the promoter. Here, the investor was led to expect that his acceptance of the note would help to preserve the trading enterprise's existence. That Continental Commodities may have been more sanguine than the facts warranted, or even misrepresented its future, cannot alter the fact that it represented that the notes would enhance the enterprise's operation Under the Zeller reasoning, payment by customers at the time they opened accounts with Continental Commodities would constitute value. Our appraisal of the note issuance as a resuscitating and not liquidating transaction obviates any need to decide whether it is proper to consider the notes as a segment of one continuous transaction, the inception of which was at the time the trading accounts were opened. The Zeller disposition appears to tacitly endorse such a consideration In Sargent v. Genesco, supra at 763, this court construed Banker's Life to establish that: 'The defendant's fraudulent conduct need not specifically relate to the plaintiff's securities as in a misrepresentation involving the value of securities purchased or sold by the plaintiff. Instead, the requisite nexus exists if such conduct merely touches upon the plaintiff's purchase or sale.'	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3377
__label__wiki	0.607022	0.607022	In Seattle Privacy Is A Valuable Commodity But At What Cost by Alice \| Mar 9, 2018 \| Torrington CT Security Camera Blog Posts \| 0 comments American Civil Liberties Union Wins The Battle, But At Whose Expense The year was 2013, and the security services were supremely enthusiastic about the benefits of surveillance cameras and the ability to track wireless devices across the center of the city. However, a public backlash from privacy campaigners has resulted in the city being landed with a $150,000 bill for having the network decommissioned and physically removed. There is always an element of controversy when new technology that effectively provides the police with added surveillance powers, that certain members of the public might call intrusive starts to be implemented. This story, which has been developing for over five years has recently come to a head with Seattle Information Technology publicly admitting that they have set aside $150,000 to pay an outside contractor, Prime Electric as well as some city employees, to remove over 150 different wireless access points. These small white boxes and surveillance cameras are installed all around the city and provided security services with the ability to accurately track wireless devices across the city. A Waste Of Valuable And Scarce Public Funds? The mesh network was originally paid for with $3.6 million from the Department of Homeland Security. At its launch, the Seattle Police Department talked about how the new system would become a vital public safety tool both for port security and in cases of emergencies then as a communication system for first-responders. The counterargument to this came from the American Civil whose main complaint was that the system was merely an invasive tool which would be used for state surveillance while hiding behind a public-safety mask. Seattle City Council Were Shocked By The Backlash According to people predominantly opposed to the mesh network, the capabilities of this new system were immense. They claimed that the system could not only be used to target single individuals but also track and log every single wireless device that entered Seattle. Whether a person was just passing through the city, visiting a hotel for an illicit meetup with a partner, or innocently grabbing a coffee in the local coffee shop, all of this information was at least potentially being recorded and could then be used by the security services. The City Council went into bunker mode, and only a few short months after this expensive system went live, a spokesperson for the SPD Sean Whitcomb made the following statement. “The Wireless Mesh Network will be deactivated until the city council approves a draft (privacy) policy and until there’s an opportunity for vigorous debate.” For reasons best known to the city council, five years later such a policy had still not appeared, and subsequently, the component parts of the system are now being systematically removed. The good news is that at least some of those parts are being used in other systems across the city, such as transportation traffic camera for instance, but it still does not take away from the fact, that this entire project has been a financial disaster. Erb also commented that the plan initially had been to remove the equipment even earlier, but this had been thwarted due to work-schedule delays. The location of some of the boxes and cameras would be prime real estate for higher paying commercial cellular carriers always interested in upgrading their equipment and improving their signal coverage, Erb said: “Seattle City Light is eager for us to remove old equipment from their poles.” A Granular Victory For Privacy “This is one good, granular victory,” said Shankar Narayan, technology and liberty director of ACLU in Washington State. “It’s an issue we’d advocated around for a very long time. We have a longstanding principle that suspicionless surveillance of general populations is not useful and chills people’s constitutionally protected rights.” One of the key selling points of the system was its versatility, and yet quite ironically it was that very versatility that led to its demise, quickly turning a positive into a public relations disaster. The issue comes down to not only the financial cost but also whether or not the general public is prepared to accept that kind of monitoring and intrusion into their everyday lives. Things that people would previously have done without any concerns or objections, such as attending a protest, they will be less likely to become involved in. The fact that they could be so closely monitored, and even potentially placed on a police watch list, changes the psyche and willingness of people to be involved. History Repeating Itself? When it comes to public surveillance, it seems that the city of Seattle is slow to learn any lessons. Only a few short months ago, the city was forced to abandon its drone network, which had once again been funded by Homeland Security, for much the same reasons – a public outcry over privacy and state intrusion. The problem is that with such a potentially vast quantity of data being collected whether it be by drones or cameras, the value of that data becomes almost immeasurable. Could insurance companies get access to drivers daily driving trips, and subsequently increase their insurance, regardless of whether or not they had an accident? The Council Claim To Have Learned From These Experiences The President of Seattle City Council Bruce Harrell said, “This has been a learning experience for Seattle. The council needed to respect the public process, explain the technology, to the public in a transparent manner, listen to the public’s concerns and obtain council approval via ordinance before installation.” As a consequence of these two separate fiasco’s city departments is now required to report any surveillance-enabled technologies, currently in use and then present them for a full review by the council. At the time of writing a staggering 28 different technologies have so far been identified, with the general public demanding to know what exactly is the purpose of all of these systems. Narayan himself says, “That’s the point, all we have now are vague descriptions – it could be anything from a simple graphic representation of a spreadsheet, to a complex analytical tool that establishes relationships to show that somebody might be a gang member.” As with anything involving the council, the wheels of investigation move at a slow pace, with the scrutiny not due to begin until March. On a positive note, Narayan does admit that following the drone and mesh network issues, the ACLU has had productive conversations with SPD. He Said, “They have a better understanding that if they want to roll out these technologies, they have to be ready to answer tough questions.” City leaders it seems may well have learned their lesson, but unfortunately for the city purse, it cost them well over $4 million to get to this stage. Quite an expensive lesson to learn! Best Video Surveillance Systems for Any Parking Lot CCTV Video Resolution Comparison Chart Gas Station Surveillance Cameras Record Shocking Carjacking Attempts By Criminal How Much Should You Spend on Your Small Business Security System? Alice on Danbury Joins the Ranks of Cities That Have Implemented Public Surveillance Andrew on Fisheye Cameras Vs Multi-Sensor Cameras: What’s Best for Your Needs? Mix-Movie.com on Danbury Joins the Ranks of Cities That Have Implemented Public Surveillance 1 Hartford Square #25 New Britain, CT 06052 New Britain Page	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3378
__label__wiki	0.973023	0.973023	Articles containing Japanese-language text, All articles with unsourced statements, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2007, Japanese animators Anime character designers Manga artists For the Japanese TV presenter, see Mie Sadamoto. File:Nge.JPG Sample of Sadamoto's art, featuring Rei Ayanami of Neon Genesis Evangelion Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (貞本義行, Sadamoto Yoshiyuki?) (born January 29, 1962, in Tokuyama (now Shunan), Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese character designer, mangaka, and one of the founding members of the Gainax anime studio. Before the studio was founded under the official name (it was originally called Daicon Film), he served as animator on the second animated project, the Daicon IV opening animation. His first assignment as character designer in Gainax was for Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise, released in 1987. He also worked as animator on Gunbuster and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and he came back to this specialty for the first episode of Diebuster (also known as Gunbuster 2 or Top wo Nerae! 2). He is also the character designer of the best known Gainax anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion, as well as the author of its manga adaptation (which is also Sadamoto's first full-length manga work). In addition to his work on Evangelion, Sadamoto did character designs for Nadia, FLCL, .hack//Sign, Diebuster, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and Summer Wars. His first artbook is entitled Alpha, and presents a collection of illustrations by Sadamoto that were made before Evangelion (including Nadia and The Wings of Honneamise). In 2003, Viz published a collection of his works, entitled Der Mond (German for "The Moon"). Other artbooks that include some of Sadamoto's works are Die Sterne (German for "The Stars") and Groundwork of FLCL. Sadamoto is also the author of a short manga named Route 20 that was derived from an aborted anime project. He was also author of two manga one-shots, Dirty Work and System of Romance. He is currently serving as co-creator and character designer for the .hack game franchise. Sadamoto also worked as an artist for the cover of Eric Clapton's album Pilgrim. According to Yasuo Otsuka, who guided Sadamoto as a newcomer, there are only three people whom he regarded as more skillful than himself that he has met during his career. One of them is Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. The other two are Sadao Tsukioka who became a visual creator, and award-winning director Hayao Miyazaki. When Otsuka met the three men, he seems to have felt that he was taking off his hat to them at once. However, he thinks that only Miyazaki completely mastered a genuinely superior animation technique at present. He guesses, "A too excellent person might despair in the group work".[citation needed] In recent years, Sadamoto has concentrated primarily on comics and on illustration work. Since the early 1990s, his animation work has consisted primarily of character design and supervision, although this may be changing with his involvement in 2007 as key animator on episode 27 of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and animation director and key animator on Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia Yuki, Masahiro. "The Official Art of .hack//Roots". (May 2007) Newtype USA. pp. 101–107. An interview with Sadamoto, translated in Animerica in Vol. 6, issue No. 8 Interview in Der Mond Sadamoto judges in a Twilight contest The Rose review of Der Mond NAME Sadamoto, Yoshiyuki ko:사다모토 요시유키 it:Yoshiyuki Sadamoto hu:Szadamoto Josijuki ms:Yoshiyuki Sadamoto ru:Садамото, Ёсиюки sv:Yoshiyuki Sadamoto zh:贞本义行 Retrieved from "https://manga.fandom.com/wiki/Yoshiyuki_Sadamoto?oldid=63030" Articles with unsourced statements from October 2007	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3380
__label__cc	0.628779	0.371221	Lumina Gold Announces Closing of Previously Announced Private Placement of Common Shares NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES OR TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES Vancouver, British Columbia - Lumina Gold Corp. ("Lumina") (TSXV: LUM) is pleased to announce that it has completed its non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") of common shares in the capital of Lumina (the "Shares") previously announced in Lumina’s news release dated November 22, 2016. Lumina issued 28,571,428 Shares at a price per Share of $0.70 for gross proceeds of approximately CDN $20 million. The net proceeds of the Private Placement will be used to advance exploration of Lumina’s properties and for general working capital purposes. Shares issued under the Private Placement will be subject to a four month hold period ended April 14, 2017. Shares issued outside of Canada will also be subject to restrictions on resale pursuant to applicable securities laws. Finder’s fees of 4% of the proceeds from certain subscribers were paid to Haywood Securities Inc., Trimark Trading and Vandamme Invest. The securities offered have not been registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or applicable state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold to persons in the United States absent registration or an exemption from such registration requirements. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. Lumina Gold Corp. For further information for Lumina, contact: Martin Rip Signed: "Marshall Koval" tel: + 604 646-1884 Marshall Koval, President & CEO fax: + 604 687-7041 The foregoing information contains forward-looking statements regarding Lumina’s future plans. In making the forward-looking statements in this release, Lumina has applied certain factors and assumptions that are based on information currently available to Lumina as well as Lumina’s current beliefs and assumptions made by Lumina, including the anticipated use of proceeds from the Private Placement. Although Lumina considers these beliefs and assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available to it, they may prove to be incorrect, and the forward-looking statements in this release are subject to numerous risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause future results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements. Such risk factors include, among others, risks associated with the business of Lumina and that Lumina may need to expend the proceeds from the Private Placement in a manner not currently contemplated. Although Lumina has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Lumina does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3383
__label__cc	0.745467	0.254533	Lumina Gold Announces C$7 Million Private Placement of Common Shares July 13, 2018 View PDF NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES OR TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES Vancouver, British Columbia - Lumina Gold Corp. (TSXV: LUM) (the “Company” or “Lumina”)is pleased to announce that it plans to conduct a non-brokered private placement of up to approximately 9.7 million common shares of Lumina (the “Shares”) at a price of C$0.72 per Share to raise gross proceeds of up to approximately C$7 million (the “Offering”). The price of C$0.72 represents a 6.5% discount to the last closing price of Lumina common shares of C$0.77 and a 4.0% discount to the 20 day volume-weighted average price of Lumina common shares of C$0.75. The net proceeds of the Offering will be used to fund working capital for the previously announced spin-out (the “Spin-out”) of Luminex Resources Corp. (“Luminex”) and for general corporate purposes. More details regarding the Spin-out can be found in Lumina’s July 9, 2018 press release titled “Lumina Gold Announces Spin-Out Of Mineral Exploration Assets and Creation of Luminex Resources”. Each Share issued under the Offering will become one “new” share of Lumina and 0.15 shares of Luminex upon completion of the Spin-out, subject to approval of the Spin-out by the Supreme Court of British Columbia and by the affirmative vote of 66 2/3% of Lumina’s shareholders in attendance at a shareholders’ meeting to be held on August 21, 2018. Following the Offering and the Spin-out, it is anticipated that Lumina will have approximately 273.8 million basic shares outstanding and Luminex will have approximately 41.1 million basic shares outstanding. Certain directors, officers and other insiders of Lumina may acquire securities under the Offering. Any such participation would be considered to be a “related party transaction” as defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 – Protection of Minority Securityholders in Special Transactions (“MI 61-101”). However, any such related party transaction will be exempt from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 as neither the fair market value of any Shares issued to or the consideration paid by such persons will exceed 25% of Lumina’s market capitalization. Closing of the Offering is subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (“TSX-V”). Lumina anticipates closing the Offering as soon as practicable following TSX-V approval. Finder’s fees will be payable on a portion of the Offering in accordance with the policies of the TSX-V. The Shares issued under the Offering will be subject to a statutory hold period in Canada of four months and one day following the closing date of the Offering. The securities to be offered pursuant to the Offering have not been, and will not be, registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any U.S. state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration under the U.S. Securities Act and all applicable U.S. state securities laws or compliance with the requirements of exemptions therefrom. This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities in the United States, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. About Lumina Gold Lumina Gold Corp. (TSXV: LUM) is a Vancouver, Canada based precious and base metals exploration and development company focused on gold and copper projects in Ecuador. The Company’s Cangrejos Gold-Copper project is located in El Oro Province, southwest Ecuador, and its Condor Gold-Copper project is located in Zamora-Chinchipe Province, southeast Ecuador. The Company also holds a large and highly prospective land package in Ecuador consisting of 135 thousand hectares. The Company has an experienced management team with a successful track record of advancing and monetizing exploration projects. Further details are available on the Company’s website at https://luminagold.com/. Signed: "Marshall Koval" Marshall Koval, President & CEO, Director For further information contact: Scott Hicks shicks@luminagold.com Certain statements and information herein, including all statements that are not historical facts, contain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements or information include but are not limited to statements or information with respect to: the size of the Offering, use of net proceeds under the Offering, each Share issued under the Offering becoming one “new” share of Lumina and 0.15 shares of Luminex upon completion of the Spin-out, timing of Lumina’s shareholder meeting, the expected participation of insiders in the Offering, the anticipated closing and closing time of the Offering, the receipt of TSX-V approval for the Offering and the number of shares of Lumina and Luminex that will be outstanding following the Offering and the Spin-out. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements or information can be identified by the use of words such as “will” or variations of that word and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results “will”, “could”, are “intended to” or are “anticipated to” be taken, occur or be achieved. With respect to forward-looking statements and information contained herein, the Company has made numerous assumptions including among other things, assumptions about general business and economic conditions, the prices of gold and copper, anticipated costs and expenditures and the completion of the Spin-out. The foregoing list of assumptions is not exhaustive. Although management of the Company believes that the assumptions made and the expectations represented by such statements or information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that a forward-looking statement or information herein will prove to be accurate. Forward-looking statements and information by their nature are based on assumptions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the Company’s actual results, performance or achievements, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. These factors include, but are not limited to: risks associated with the business of the Company; business and economic conditions in the mining industry generally; the supply and demand for labour and other project inputs; changes in commodity prices; changes in interest and currency exchange rates; risks relating to inaccurate geological and engineering assumptions (including with respect to the tonnage, grade and recoverability of reserves and resources); risks relating to unanticipated operational difficulties (including failure of equipment or processes to operate in accordance with specifications or expectations, cost escalation, unavailability of materials and equipment, government action or delays in the receipt of government approvals, industrial disturbances or other job action, and unanticipated events related to health, safety and environmental matters); risks relating to adverse weather conditions; political risk and social unrest; changes in general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets; and other risk factors as detailed from time to time in the Company’s continuous disclosure documents filed with Canadian securities administrators. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3384
__label__wiki	0.594793	0.594793	SCREENSHOTS: The Movie You Want -- A 'Grease' Prequel is in the Works We may finally find out what happened before school started What exactly happened when Sandy and Danny were bowling in the arcade on “Summer Nights?” It looks like we’re about to find out. A prequel to Grease is reportedly in the works. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount Pictures is working on filling in the blanks for one of the most beloved movie musicals of all time. The film is expected to tackle what happened during the talked about but not seen summer romance between the two main characters, played by Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta in the original. Related: SCREENSHOTS: Hugh Jackman Confirms ‘The Greatest Showman 2’ is Being Discussed Grease was released in 1978 but has never gone away. You can catch it on TV at almost any time, and there was a live production for Fox in 2016. Audiences can’t get enough of the story of a mismatched high school love affair that navigated gangs and cliques against the backdrop of an addicting singalong soundtrack. Plans for a prequel are still in the early stages, and there aren’t any details about casting or a release date.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3386
__label__wiki	0.591418	0.591418	New Podcast and Video Series Seeks to Highlight AI Researchers Stories Over Stats Posted on October 13, 2020 October 13, 2020 by Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech With accolades showered upon them, seemingly perfect educational pedigrees, and conversations focused mostly on their groundbreaking work, it’s hard to remember that artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are real people. They’re people who take ballet classes as an adult, who suffer from anxiety, and love art. They’re also people who feel giddy over fresh flowers, have a difficult time staying organized, and roll out of bed just in time for their first meeting. Devi Parikh, an associate professor in the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech (ML@GT) and School of Interactive Computing (IC,) is working to change that with her new podcast and video series, Humans of AI: Stories, Not Stats. The series, which launches on Oct. 20, features 18 conversations with leading AI researchers, including Jeff Dean (head of AI at Google), Animashree Anandkumar (Bren Professor at California Institute of Technology and Director of Machine Learning Research at NVIDIA), Ayanna Howard (School of IC chair and professor at Georgia Tech),and Timnit Gebru (co-lead of ethical AI at Google.) With 45 questions – none of them about a person’s professional work or educational background – Parikh hopes to reveal more about the people behind the algorithms. Rather than hearing about the technical aspects of their latest project, listeners can expect to hear guests talk about their struggles with time management, imposter syndrome, or what makes them nostalgic. “There are a lot of venues where we get to hear people talk about their work, like conferences and seminars. But there aren’t a lot of opportunities to have regular conversations and hear about their day-to-day life — what their favorite part of their daily routine is, what they get excited about, how they wish their life was different, or about their struggles with insecurity or procrastination, which are problems that a lot of grad students and junior researchers are struggling with, too. I think it’s important to mitigate that disconnect and let others see that they are real people too,” said Parikh, who is also a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR.) Parikh hopes that the series will make a career in AI seem more accessible, and that current highly-regarded researchers in the field are approachable human beings. “I hope this series will give the audience a better sense for what lives of AI researchers are like (turns out, lots of meetings!). I also hope they get various interesting tidbits – perspectives, tips, advice – that they may wish to adopt or try out,” said Parikh, “Finally, I hope that this series will encourage people to think bigger, dream bigger, and to see themselves in these roles. I hope they think ‘I can do this, too’ and not ‘that could never be me’ after listening to these conversations.” While Parikh doesn’t have concrete plans yet for additional episodes outside of this set of 18, she’s not entirely ruling them out. New episodes will be available on Tuesdays and Fridays beginning on Oct. 20 on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. For more information, including the full list of guests, visit http://humanstories.ai. Previous Post Google Awards ML@GT Student for Outstanding Machine Learning Research Next Post Learning Machines: Neurocomputing Explained by Chris Rozell	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3388
__label__wiki	0.633064	0.633064	Development financial institutions pledge to sustain coronavirus mitigation Fri, 23 Oct 2020 Source: afdb.org Multilateral development finance institutions on Wednesday, 21 October 2020, pledged to continue to collaborate in their efforts to mitigate the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerate the recovery of economies and livelihoods. At an extraordinary virtual meeting to discuss the impact of their responses to the pandemic and the worsening debt situation, the organizations said that sustaining their joint efforts would protect livelihoods, especially among vulnerable populations, preserve macroeconomic stability and promote a stronger private sector role after COVID-19. The meeting, chaired by Hajjar Bandar, President of the Islamic Development Bank Group, was attended by the heads of 12 Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs). They discussed how to achieve maximum impact in their relief efforts, and the debt sustainability of beneficiary countries. Bandar said the collaboration by the MDBs had proven meaningful in their efforts to swiftly provide crucial financial relief to member countries in the wake of the pandemic. “In the face of this unprecedented crisis, we have shown our responsibility and unity…The total package has already started disbursing and is bearing fruits,” Bandar said. The joint effort of the MDBs has seen a COVID-19 response envelope of about US$230 billion. In addition, the IMF has provided financing to 81 member countries totalling over US$100 billion since mid-March, with further room for member countries to tap into its US$1 trillion lending capacity through program arrangements. He urged members to sustain the collaboration to steer financing towards development, help communities out of poverty and spur digitization and promote education. “This forum is where partnerships make a difference. We need to join forces to support our member countries better.” President of the African Development Bank Group, Akinwumi Adesina, said collaboration among development partners has become more vital than ever to help economies recover from the pandemic and attract private financing to rebuild infrastructure. “We are really in very extraordinary times. There’s no doubt about it, in terms of the devastation that this pandemic is causing. The challenge is huge and the collective resolve must be strong as MDBs,” he said. He said efforts must be deepened to help member states mobilize more domestic resources and attract private creditors to participate in financing capital projects. “It’s time for us to change the paradigm to get the private sector, with incentives, to do a lot of private-public partnerships,” Adesina said, restating the Bank’s commitment to helping Africa rebuild boldly and smartly. The African Development Bank Group introduced a COVID-19 Response Facility (CRF) of up to US$10 billion to support Regional Member Countries and private sector clients in their efforts to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. MDBs represented at the meeting include the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Finance Corporation (IFC), International Monetary Fund (IMF), the New Development Bank (NDB), World Bank Group and the African Development Bank. Source: afdb.org School Reopening: GNAT to audit government delivery of PPEs Coronavirus still prevalent, keep to safety protocols - Sophia Akufo to Ghanaians Coronavirus pandemic affects registration of marriages in Cape Coast Ghana’s active cases rise to 1,404 Coronavirus: Government, school managers must ensure strict protocol adherence in schools - GMA	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3391
__label__wiki	0.780547	0.780547	In a 9 run later ahmad clark made two Posted by on 2 agosto, 2019 Dawkins was released by Tennessee earlier in the week, but he’ll be brought back by the organization as a member of the practice squad. UP NEXT Arizona plays at California on Saturday. It’s not helter-skelter. Freshman Christian Anigwe is the younger brother of No. His most tangible impact on this end comes when he uses his length and leaping ability to create events in the passing lanes and pitching in on the glass. Chris Porter-Bunton scored four free throws in the http://www.mysixstringsblog.com 1 to twice forge ties, the last at 83 with 27 seconds left. Initial jobless claims dropped 23 to 216 in the latest week. I understand where we are from a skill level sometimes and that’s on management to improve our skill level. If healthy we would have been good. Zach LaVine scored 29 points to lead the Bulls, who couldn’t overcome the poor start and lost their sixth straight game. This year, she has been in Hansel and Gretel with the Pittsburgh Opera and The Tempest with the Pittsburgh Public Theater. That’s always the ideal approach because it means you have drafted well. Obviously, we weren’t ready to play the game and that’s a disappointing loss.» Markkanen hit the 30-point mark for the third time in his career. Remember: Foles is 30, so it’s not unreasonable to think an elite Foles could be the Jaguars’ franchise quarterback for five, six, seven years or more. You see that if we do that, what type of outcome there can be. May 17 Come see Sewickley Academy in action! He has a commanding 38-point lead over Nico Hischier, who is second in team scoring. Anaheim Ducks 25. Most of the first five players selected are now household names. But I know that he’s worked really hard to put a young team like this on the field. The defensive center has some appeal in deeper formats. I watched very little Alliance of American Football last weekend; it wasn’t out of protest of disinterest as much as just being busy with other pursuits. Curry sank a 3-pointer with a minute left and raised his hands to show his relief. Just like with Robinson, we get so much out of him. Milwaukee’s opponents are actually shooting more 3-point shots against them under Prunty but making far less of them . 17, they https://www.konaktupbebek.com/ last in the Eastern Conference and most fans were thinking whether they preferred Jack Hughes or Kaapo Kakko, two highly-touted prospects in the upcoming draft. John: Things never get better. Just go out there and play.» BEAT L.A. Looking at the deal the Dolphins gave Ryan Fitzpatrick compared to the Foles deal makes me feel even more like the Jags paid way too much for a quarterback who is arguably marginally better than Bortles. Trevor Richards gave up three runs on six hits and two walks while striking out three over five innings to take the loss against the Phillies on was another disappointing outing for Richards. 9 – The 1st football game is played in the Louisiana Superdome as the Houston Oilers beat the Saints, 13 in a preseason contest before 72; Sept. The star center, now entering his fourth year in the league and the first of an $80-million contract, will act as a tone-setter for the entire team. https://www.outdoordreamsok.com right-hander has a 1 record with a 7 ERA through 12 appearances this season. Colbey Ross led the Waves with 25 points, Kameron Edwards had 15 points and nine rebounds, Dunn made all six of his shots for 15 points and Kessler Edwards scored 13. This is when teams will begin to use the NBDL as a source for untapped talent. He added one steal.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3393
__label__cc	0.567118	0.432882	Home News Breaking News Bolton: Obama Just Plain Wrong On Egypt Response Bolton: Obama Just Plain Wrong On Egypt Response >>Follow Matzav On Whatsapp!<< Former U.S. ambassador John Bolton said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference Saturday that Americans should be wary of the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, arguing that it could lead to the country falling in the hands of anti-American Muslim extremists. It is the “responsibility of our government to protect our interests and our values and our friends and our allies,” Bolton said. Referencing former President Theodore Roosevelt, he adding that “first and foremost we must make the world safe for ourselves.” Mubarak’s fall may end up making America less safe, Bolton said, because in a democracy a radical group like the Muslim Brotherhood may end up in power. He warned of the threat of “rising radicalism in the Middle East” and said Sharia law could soon be imposed on Egypt’s citizenry. “We have to have a careful and prudent approach to these developments, because we’ve seen revolutionary situations go wrong too many times before,” said Bolton, pointing to the Nazis, Hamas and Hezbollah. Bolton, who is considering a GOP presidential run, said that democracy is “a way of life,” not simply a political system. “We have to acknowledge that a Democratic election can produce illiberal results,” he said. The former ambassador argued that allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to participate in Egyptian elections is putting the country on the “road to disaster,” and suggested the Obama administration has been “hesitant, inconsistent, confused and just plain wrong” in its handling of the situation in Egypt. To a standing ovation from the conservative activists gathered for the conference, Bolton described President Obama as “weak, indecisive and apologetic.” Bolton said he does not believe Mr. Obama cares about foreign policy because it gets in the way of his priority of “nationalizing our health care system.” He attacked the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, for suggesting the Muslim Brotherhood is a largely secular organization, saying the reason he opposes Clapper’s resignation is because “in this administration, we could get somebody worse to replace him.” Bolton also attacked the administration for its handling of Russia and its passage of the New Start missile treaty. John Bolton answers questions from reporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Feb. 12, 2011. (Credit: Brian Montopoli) Taking a stand against the call by Libertarian-leaning Republicans like Ron Paul to reduce defense spending, Bolton said it is “not the time for indiscriminate budget cuts in our national defense budget.” He said that domestic spending and entitlement programs should be cut instead, stating, “A dollar well spent on defense is much more important than a dollar well spent in the agriculture department or the interior department.” Bolton was one of a number of potential Republican presidential candidates to address the conference, a gathering of about 11,000 conservative activists. {CBS News/Matzav.com Newscenter} Previous articleGingrich to Decide This Month on Presidential Bid Next articleWho Will Protect the Kosher Consumer? ‘QAnon Shaman’ Asks Trump For Pardon After Storming Capitol One Shot Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccine Shows Immune Response Scientists Say 2020 Was 2nd Hottest Year Ever Ahuvah54 February 14, 2011 at 10:53 am This man has my vote. I hope he runs. And wins. Bolton and Pipes both say that democracy is a process. Although we might wish every society to be a democracy that’s not always congruent with what’s best for them. Bolton has an original point of view and he is not afraid to call it as he sees it. beethovens friend February 14, 2011 at 1:50 pm Bolton is about as astute as an olive sitting in the backyard of pharoah. Aaron February 14, 2011 at 10:34 pm In other words what he’s saying is that the Egyptian people don’t have a right to a democracy and that Mubarak should have continued to rule over them and be our puppet because that suits us. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not really an idealist but we should at least have the guts to be honest and not take a hypocritical stance like Bolton.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3395
__label__cc	0.743757	0.256243	The burden of knowledge Posted bymeredithsell December 15, 2016 July 2, 2017 Posted inthinking, thinking through Scripture, Uncategorized, words of wisdomTags:Aleppo, Donald Trump, God's kingdom on earth, information age, information overload, refugee crisis, scripture, social media fast, Syria I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank in school. I remember reading Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place and fictional stories set during the Holocaust like Number the Stars. I remember reading those things with the not-quite-fully-realized idea that the Holocaust was a real thing that happened to real people. I distinctly remember Number the Stars and the Jewish girl staying with the non-Jewish family and, when the Nazis come, the family pulling out a photo album where they had photos of their older daughter as a child with dark hair like the Jewish girl’s. I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank and being fascinated by the secret annex. I remember reading The Hiding Place and being stung when the Ten Booms were betrayed to the Nazis. I haven’t read any of these books in more than ten years, but I remember them better than many of the books I’ve read since. They’re stories that simultaneously horrify and inspire. They leave readers both bewildered at the horrors carried out by humanity and empowered to stand in the way of such horrors should they ever come around again. We’re living in a perplexing and, yes, bewildering time. To only scratch the surface: The city of Aleppo, Syria, has been the key battleground of the Syrian civil war for four years. President Assad’s Syrian regime is backed by Russia, which has routinely bombarded the city with no concern for civilian safety. November 19, it was reported that all hospitals had been destroyed. The civil war, which has been further complicated by Western involvement and ISIS, spawned the current refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing for their lives. It’s impossible to know how many civilians have been killed in Aleppo alone, but in April a special UN envoy estimated 400,000 Syrians have been killed during the civil war. That’s men, women, and children, not just rebel fighters. To be clear: killing civilians is a war crime. It’s not war as usual (as if that should even be a thing). In the meantime, the United States had a bizarre presidential election with results that, while they may not have been entirely surprising, have left many fearful. This was no normal Donkey-versus-Elephant election cycle. The republican candidate, now president-elect, neither holds conservative values (in terms of government, morals, or ethics), nor does he consistently stand on anything except his own ego. He harnessed the anger and frustration of a demographic that feels unheard and, even after winning, continues spewing baseless vitriol at anyone who dares challenge or disagree with him on his favorite of all social media platforms: Twitter. (Not to mention the regular untruths published by his team, like that he won the election by the greatest number of electoral votes ever. In case you were wondering: that’s not what happened.) I won’t bother touching his despicable treatment of women, his sexual assault allegations, or his crooked business practices. Google exists for a reason. Then, there’s all the racial tension, which has existed under the surface for decades but is now out in the open — both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because you can’t clean an infection if you don’t acknowledge it first. Bad because a certain president-elect has emboldened racist thought, speech, and action. In college, I became a person who reads the news — or at least keeps up with it by following journalists and news organizations on Twitter. This past year, I’ve found myself avoiding not just the news, but even longform stories about current events. Longform stories which I love reading, which I aspire to write, which I shared regularly on this blog on an almost biweekly basis not too long ago. When the Syrian refugee crisis came to more mainstream attention last year, I felt personally connected to the issue because I had already read so much in-depth reporting on the people in those situations. Over the past year, as things escalated internationally and domestically (particularly with the election), I started feeling overwhelmed so I made an unconscious effort to be less informed. In other words, I started avoiding the news. I don’t think that was right. It’s one thing to put down a book of history, like The Diary of Anne Frank or The Hiding Place, or a fictional story like Number the Stars, and move on with your life. It’s entirely different to decide to close yourself off to what real people are enduring in this world right now. No, I can’t carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. No, I can’t solve the Syrian conflict or give a home to every refugee. No, I can’t keep the racists of America from abusing fellow image-bearers. No, I can’t make the president-elect a less despicable human being. But I’m in this world right now. I was created for such a time as this. The reason may remain a mystery until my time here ends, but I know for a fact that I’m not on earth to cover my eyes when the wretchedness of this world spills over. To him who knows to do good and does it not, to him it is sin. (James 4:17) This is a verse I don’t think I’ll ever get past. It’s one that preaches to me about cleaning the recyclables and putting them in the bin instead of the trash. It’s one that gets me pushing the wandering grocery carts into the parking lot corral. It’s one that challenges me to stop avoiding certain people at church and work and in the gym. Recently, this verse has been prodding me to stop closing the browser windows that are open to real things. Navigate away from the YouTube CrossFit tutorials. Don’t scroll past that article. Don’t just add it to your list. Stop. Click. Read. In His first coming, Jesus announced His kingdom on earth: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4:18-19) Christian theologians refer to the period we’re now in as the already-not-yet of God’s kingdom on earth. The Gospel is here, actively transforming lives, but justice and righteousness are not yet flowing as a mighty stream (Amos 5:24). Before Jesus went to the cross, He prayed for His disciples: I pray not that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil. (John 17:15) Evil in this verse could be defined a number of ways. The “be careful little eyes what you see” interpretation might call it evil to seek out information about the world’s atrocities. There’s no argument that the atrocities themselves — governments slaying their own citizens, for example — are evil, but it is good to know what is happening in the world. Especially when it’s ugly. In fact, if anyone should know what’s going on in the world, it should be people whose hope is found elsewhere. We’re not on earth to hold our breath waiting for life to get better. I wasn’t saved to live a comfortable life in a razor-free bubble of my own design. “With great power comes great responsibility,” and if I truly have God on my side, I have great power. It’s a burden, knowing what’s happening on the other side of the world, feeling powerless to do anything about it. A hundred years ago, our knowledge was limited by technology. One newspaper, maybe two. Radio programs. Television hadn’t been invented yet, much less computers. Now we’re carrying the world’s collective knowledge in our back pockets. We could turn it off. I’m a staunch supporter of social media fasts. I grew up in a household without Internet that had regular no-screen weeks (usually as disciplinary measures). But if we’re turning it off to avoid discomfort, if we’re stepping back so we can get on with life as usual while people are being slaughtered in their hometown for no reason, while reporters are receiving death threats for asking challenging questions, while parents have no viable options for keeping their children safe from their own government, then our “fast” is just another exercise in selfishness. To him who knows to do good and does it not, to him it is sin. If I just hear about the ugliness in the world and shrug my shoulders, I am sinning. If I’m turning away from the news because it will awaken me to a responsibility — to pray, to give, to act — that I wouldn’t otherwise be aware of, then I am sinning. To turn away from the ugliness of this world is to shirk my responsibility — not just as a citizen of this country and this earth, but also as a citizen of heaven. To hide my face from the brokenness that surrounds me is to fail to take up my cross and follow Christ, who left His heavenly home to be broken for me. And if I hide my face from the horrors of a land far away, what will I do when similar things come to the place I live? Photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via photopin (license) What I don’t know 2017: Fresh year, fresh set of goals One thought on “The burden of knowledge” Pingback: 2017: Fresh year, fresh set of goals	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3398
__label__wiki	0.677764	0.677764	Will Trump Watch Joe Biden's Inauguration From Mar-a-Lago? Palm Beach Officials Send Letter To Expect Road Closures Around EstateIn a letter sent to Palm Beach residents, top officials said they expect road closures around Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate on January 20th, the day President-Elect Joe Biden is to be inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States. Visit These 5 European Castles Without Leaving The States Filed Under:Eat.See.Play, Randy Yagi, travel Photo Credit: Mark Davis/Getty Images The architecture of some of America’s most popular and most familiar attractions were inspired by the many magnificent castles in Europe, such as Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle, whose resemblance of Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle is strikingly undeniable. But theme parks like Disneyland and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Castle at Universal Studios Hollywood aren’t the only familiar settings for American castle-like structures recreated in such renowned European architectural styles as Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance. Indeed, evidence of classic European designs can be found all over the country and particularly in the eastern portion of the U.S., such as the Smithsonian Castle in Washington D.C. and the Belvedere Castle in New York’s Central Park. Here is a look at five more of the best European castles to visit without having to leave the U.S. With nearly 180,000 square feet of floor space, 35 bedrooms and 250 rooms overall, the iconic Biltmore Estate is the largest privately owned house in America. Located in a dramatic 8,000-acre setting nestled within the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, this extraordinary estate was completed in 1895, near the final stages of the Gilded Age by business magnate George Washington Vanderbilt II and fashioned in a Châteauesque style modeled after the majestic chateaus of the fairytale-like Loire Valley of central France. Still under the ownership from descendants of Vanderbilt’s family, this glorious estate has been open to the public since 1930 and currently operates three lodging facilities, most notably the AAA Four Star and Forbes Four Star Inn on Biltmore Estate, in addition to what’s described as the most visited winery in the country, the historic Biltmore Winery. Also on the sprawling property are several award-winning dining options and a host of popular attractions, such as the kid-friendly farmyard and equestrian center and the lush 75-acre garden, with its beautiful conservatory graced by arched windows. In addition to overnight stays, visitors can also purchase daytime tickets for a self-guided visit of the Biltmore House with access to the gardens and free wine tasting. Special offers are also available online as well as annual passes. Related: Best Mountain Towns In The USA Boldt Castle Accessible only boat, Boldt Castle was originally conceived as a Valentine’s gift to the wife of George Boldt, best known as the former proprietor of New York’s famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Elegantly situated across the 5-acre Heart Island in the Thousand Island Regions bordering Canada and New York State, this elegantly crafted stone structure was founded during the Gilded Age and modeled after 16th century castles of Northern Europe, yet also contains striking elements of Victorian architecture, with a grand staircase and pointed watchtowers. Standing six stories high with 120 rooms, modern furnishings and features like an indoor swimming pool and now abandoned bowling lanes, the castle also is graced with an arched Romanesque entryway and a fashionable stepstone footbridge, in addition to other prominent medieval-like structures elsewhere on the property, such as the Power House and the Alster Tower, in addition to the Boldt Yacht House, located across the waters of the St. Lawrence Seaway on Wellesley Island. Boldt Castle is open daily to the public beginning the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend and through the third Sunday of October. Tickets may be purchased online and a separate fee is required for round trip boat transportation. Additionally, the Yacht House on Wellesley Island is accessible by car or a free shuttle boat from Heart Island and Boldt Castle. Located in the heart of California’s renowned Napa Valley wine region is a Tuscan-styled castle and world-class winery, complete with a torture chamber and an authentic Iron Maiden. First opened to the public in 2007, Castello di Amorosa (Castle of Love) was built by Dario Sattui, a fourth generation member of the celebrated Sattui family, whose multi-award winning V. Sattui Winery was established in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 1885. Described as an authentically-built 13th century Tuscan castle, Castello di Amorosa also features a drawbridge with an imposing portcullis, five defensive towers with battlements, the torture chamber, secret passageways and 107 rooms, with 95 rooms known to be completely devoted to winemaking of such popular varietal wines as cabernet sauvignon, pinot grigio and pinot noir. Open 364 days a year, Castello di Amorosa offers general admission tickets, guided tours and tastings, food and wine pairing and other upgraded experiences. General admission tickets allow for self-exploring of two levels of the castello and premium wine tasting, but does not include access to the lower levels, where the the torture chamber, armory and the Grand Barrel Room can all be found. Castello di Amorosa with its grand roadway protected by Italian cypress trees and bordered by its olive trees and flowing vineyards, is located between Calistoga and St. Helena and approximately 25 miles north of the city of Napa, off California Highway 29. Completed in 1919 and measuring more than 90,000 square feet, Hearst Castle is arguably the most famous castle in America. Perched upon a hilltop overlooking the rugged Central California Coast, this enormous castle with two grand bell towers was originally the private residence of William Randolph Hearst, the powerful business leader, politician, newspaper publisher and founder of the legendary Hearst Corporation, which continues to operate today. A few years after his death in 1951, the property was donated by the Hearst Corporation and then designated as a California State Park. It now acts as one of the most remarkable museums in the country and attracts 750,000 visitors annually. Designed by the famed American architect Julia Morgan in a magnificent Spanish Revival architectural style, Hearst Castle features 56 rooms including the famous grand rooms, 61 bathrooms, an enormous wine cellar and two of the world’s most famous swimming pools, as well as a private villas and a private airport that continue to be used by descendants of the Hearst family. Also on the property are exotic animals like zebras that are the descendants of what was once the world’s largest private zoo. Open to the public for nearly 60 years, a variety of tours can be purchased online. Hearst Castle is located off the Pacific Coast Highway 1, about five miles northeast of the city of San Simeon in San Luis Obispo County. Easily the most spectacular of all the stately mansions that dot Long Island’s legendary Gold Coast, Oheka Castle is often referred to as the Versailles of New York. Completed near the end of the Progressive Era in 1919, Oheka Castle was once the summer home of Otto Hermann Kahn, a prominent financier and patron of the arts who helped reorganized the nation’s railroad systems of the early 20th century. Using an acronym of Kahn’s name, Oheka Castle is the second largest private home in the country with 117 rooms across nearly 115,000 square feet and designed much like the larger Biltmore Estate in a Châteauesque architectural style. Also on the 23-acre property is a lavishly designed garden reminiscent of the renowned gardens of the Palace of Versailles, and fine dining at the Oheka Bar and Restaurant, open daily for lunch and dinner. Today Oheka Castle is under the ownership of local land developer Gary Melius and primarily operates as a luxury hotel, with 32 fabulous guestrooms and suites, as well as one of the finest wedding venues in the world. A member of the prestigious Historic Hotels Worldwide and Historic Hotels of America, Oheka Castle is located in the Town of Huntington, atop the highest point on Long Island. Related: First Time Visitor’s Guide To New York City	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3400
__label__wiki	0.984295	0.984295	Suspect arrested in connection with murder of Quebec woman in Cuba Iman Kassam CTV News Montreal Videojournalist @ImanKassam Contact Published Wednesday, November 25, 2020 12:01PM EST Last Updated Wednesday, November 25, 2020 7:39PM EST MONTREAL -- A suspect has been arrested in connection with the murder of a Montreal woman who was vacationing in Cuba last week. Global Affairs Canada shared the news of the arrest with the woman's cousin, Sami Soussa, who has been acting as a point person between the family and authorities. “It’s a relief, but at the same time there are still other questions,” Soussa told CTV News. Antoinette Traboulsi, an orderly and mother of four from Montreal, was found dead beneath the sand on a public beach in Varadero a few days after she landed in Cuba. She had gone missing the day after she arrived. Global Affairs Canada confirmed Traboulsi's death was a murder -- she had bite marks on her chest and her face had been beaten badly. In an update to Soussa on Wednesday, a Global Affairs Canada management officer said Cuban police in Varadero confirmed there has been an arrest, but didn't share any details such as the name, sex or age of the person who has been taken into custody. “I hope that the Cuban police would be able to give more information to the family because this will help us to better rest and for us to grieve as well," Soussa said. He added that the family has been receiving messages on social media from people who believe they have information that can help them. Soussa is planning to travel to Cuba to retrieve Traboulsi's body, but Cuban authorities said they can't do that just yet because of the ongoing investigation. "For now we can't go there, so we've spoken to a lawyer," Soussa said. The lawyer, Soussa said, helped the family of a woman who was murdered in Varadero earlier this year. Family of Montreal hospital worker found dead on Cuban beach wants answers about homicide	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3404
__label__wiki	0.654481	0.654481	Articles with hCards, Articles using infobox person, Articles incorporating text from Wikipedia, American football defensive ends Green Bay Packers players Wisconsin Badgers football players United States Army soldiers Sportspeople from Wisconsin Players of American football from Wisconsin Jim Temp (1933-10-10)October 10, 1933 November 25, 2012(2012-11-25) (aged 79) Allouez, Wisconsin James Arthur Temp (October 10, 1933[1] – November 25, 2012) was an American football player, businessman, and philanthropist. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Temp attended Aquinas High School in La Crosse.[2] Temp then attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, playing baseball and football. He was named the school's top athlete in his senior year (1955) and eventually inducted into the UW Athletic Hall of Fame (2007).[3] Temp was selected 17th in the second round of the 1955 NFL Draft by the Green Bay Packers, but served two years in the U.S. Army before joining the team in 1957 as a defensive end. He played 43 games with them over four seasons (1957–1960; the last two under Vince Lombardi) before being forced into retirement by a shoulder injury.[3] Temp joined the Green Bay Packers Board of Directors in 1987 and served as a member emeritus of the Executive Committee (1993–2004).[3] Temp was head of the UW-Green Bay Founders Association, whose purpose was development of a philanthropic base for University of Wisconsin–Green Bay (UWGB). He served as Association president in 1980 and 1981. In 1984, he joined Donald J. Long, Sr., to take on yet another challenge on behalf of UWGB, chairing the University's first capital campaign (raising more than $2.5 million). In gratitude, the school named the James A. Temp Hall (a student dormitory) after him in 1989.[3] In addition to his professional work as president of Alexander and Alexander of Wisconsin, an insurance brokerage), Temp served in many community leadership roles with business organizations, civic groups, and health agencies. He continued to work on behalf of UWGB as a director of the Founders Association and University Village Housing Inc.[4] Temp battled heart disease in his later years. On November 25, 2012, while watching football, he became ill and died later that day. He was 79 years old. He was survived by his wife, Carol Jean Temp, 4 daughters, 13 grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.[3] ↑ http://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/T/TempJi20.htm ↑ Statistics Archived September 9, 2015, at the Wayback Machine. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Williams, Scott Cooper (November 26, 2012). "Ex-Packers player, UWGB fundraiser Temp dies at 79". Green Bay Press-Gazette. http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20121126/GPG0101/311260306/Former-Green-Bay-Packers-DE-Jim-Temp-dies-at-79?nclick_check=1. Retrieved November 27, 2012. ↑ "Temp 3366 - Housing and Residence Life". University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. http://www.uwgb.edu/housing/housing-options/residence-halls/temp.asp. Retrieved November 27, 2012. Retrieved from "https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Jim_Temp?oldid=4540511" Articles using infobox person	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3407
__label__cc	0.64647	0.35353	Welcome to USC, one of the most diverse and influential universities in the country. In the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, our students come from all over the country, and the globe. Here, you'll get to learn from acclaimed faculty working on everything from AI to brain imaging, to environmental monitoring, to smartphone technology, quantum computing, and so much more. Below you'll find some useful information and links for prospective students. Learn more about our programs, how to apply, housing, tuition, financial aid, and what USC and Los Angeles have to offer. Why USC? The undergraduate program in Electrical and Computer Engineering is ranked 11th nationally by the U.S. News and World Report. The strength of our undergraduate program relies on the general education and major coursework as well as our research and social opportunities. Learn more! Electrical and Computer Engineering is a diverse discipline with three major areas: computer engineering (software engineering, digital hardware design, embedded systems, VLSI), systems engineering (communications, control, signal processing), and electrical sciences (electronic and photonic devices, nanotechnology, and energy conversion). Learn more! Progressive Degree Program The Progressive Degree Program (PDP) gives continuing USC undergraduates another path to earning a Master’s degree from USC. Exceptional undergraduate students completing an EE or related major can apply for the Progressive Degree Program. Learn More! Electrical and Computer Engineering is one of the highest ranked and one of the largest Engineering Departments at USC. Funded research in Engineering is over $100 million per year, which allows more research and funding opportunities for you. Learn More! The Electrical and Computer Engineering Masters Program at USC is one of the largest in the country. As technology advances at an unprecedented rate, our graduates enter the world with all the skills necessary to land influential positions all over the world. Aside from producing highly technically trained graduates, we emphasize the leadership and entrepreneurial skills necessary to compete in today’s world. Learn more! With over 70 full time faculty, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at USC allows students to pursue research in virtually all branches of electrical engineering. The strength of our program is reflected in the quality of our graduates who have gone on to positions of leadership in business and academia in the U.S. and throughout the world. Learn more! See a detailed overview of programs available online via DEN@Viterbi, offering over 40 graduate degree programs in a variety of disciplines. Explore the programs in each of the engineering fields below and click on your program/s of interest for more information. Masters Tuition and Fees USC Financial Aid USC Housing Viterbi Life	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3409
__label__wiki	0.611188	0.611188	Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein Duk Hee Lee, David R. Jacobs A series of epidemiological studies have suggested serum gamma glutamyltransferase (GGT) within its normal range might be an early marker of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress appears to be a key component of many reactions associated with chronic inflammation. Therefore, we examined the cross-sectional association between deciles of serum GGT and concentrations of serum C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of chronic inflammation, among 12,110 adult participants in the third U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. After adjustment for race, sex, age, cigarette smoking, alcohol intake, and body mass index (BMI), serum concentration of GGT across all deciles was positively associated with serum concentrations of CRP (P for trend < 0.01). For example, adjusted relative risks of serum CRP ≥ 3.0 mg/L by deciles of serum GGT were 1.0, 1.23, 1.40, 1.59, 1.62, 1.61, 2.17, 2.38, 2.45, and 3.41 (P for trend < 0.01). This association was consistently observed among all subgroups; Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black, Mexican American, men, women, non-drinkers, drinkers, non-smokers, ex-smokers, current smokers, BMI < 25, BMI 25-29.9, and BMI ≥ 30. The strong association of serum GGT and CRP suggest that further studies on cellular and/or serum GGT might help to elucidate the association between oxidative stress and inflammation. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2004.08.027 Gamma glutamyltransferase 10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2004.08.027 Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein'. Together they form a unique fingerprint. gamma-Glutamyltransferase Medicine & Life Sciences C-Reactive Protein Medicine & Life Sciences Serum Medicine & Life Sciences Body Mass Index Medicine & Life Sciences Oxidative Stress Medicine & Life Sciences Blood Proteins Medicine & Life Sciences Ex-Smokers Medicine & Life Sciences Lee, D. H., & Jacobs, D. R. (2005). Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein. Atherosclerosis, 178(2), 327-330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2004.08.027 Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein. / Lee, Duk Hee; Jacobs, David R. In: Atherosclerosis, Vol. 178, No. 2, 01.02.2005, p. 327-330. Lee, DH & Jacobs, DR 2005, 'Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein', Atherosclerosis, vol. 178, no. 2, pp. 327-330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2004.08.027 Lee DH, Jacobs DR. Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein. Atherosclerosis. 2005 Feb 1;178(2):327-330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2004.08.027 Lee, Duk Hee ; Jacobs, David R. / Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein. In: Atherosclerosis. 2005 ; Vol. 178, No. 2. pp. 327-330. @article{ccf57f2f4a4f4dd28e59e55ce3b9ee54, title = "Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein", abstract = "A series of epidemiological studies have suggested serum gamma glutamyltransferase (GGT) within its normal range might be an early marker of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress appears to be a key component of many reactions associated with chronic inflammation. Therefore, we examined the cross-sectional association between deciles of serum GGT and concentrations of serum C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of chronic inflammation, among 12,110 adult participants in the third U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. After adjustment for race, sex, age, cigarette smoking, alcohol intake, and body mass index (BMI), serum concentration of GGT across all deciles was positively associated with serum concentrations of CRP (P for trend < 0.01). For example, adjusted relative risks of serum CRP ≥ 3.0 mg/L by deciles of serum GGT were 1.0, 1.23, 1.40, 1.59, 1.62, 1.61, 2.17, 2.38, 2.45, and 3.41 (P for trend < 0.01). This association was consistently observed among all subgroups; Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black, Mexican American, men, women, non-drinkers, drinkers, non-smokers, ex-smokers, current smokers, BMI < 25, BMI 25-29.9, and BMI ≥ 30. The strong association of serum GGT and CRP suggest that further studies on cellular and/or serum GGT might help to elucidate the association between oxidative stress and inflammation.", keywords = "C-reactive protein, Gamma glutamyltransferase, Inflammation, Oxidative stress", author = "Lee, {Duk Hee} and Jacobs, {David R.}", doi = "10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2004.08.027", journal = "Atherosclerosis", publisher = "Elsevier Ireland Ltd", T1 - Association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase and C-reactive protein AU - Lee, Duk Hee AU - Jacobs, David R. N2 - A series of epidemiological studies have suggested serum gamma glutamyltransferase (GGT) within its normal range might be an early marker of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress appears to be a key component of many reactions associated with chronic inflammation. Therefore, we examined the cross-sectional association between deciles of serum GGT and concentrations of serum C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of chronic inflammation, among 12,110 adult participants in the third U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. After adjustment for race, sex, age, cigarette smoking, alcohol intake, and body mass index (BMI), serum concentration of GGT across all deciles was positively associated with serum concentrations of CRP (P for trend < 0.01). For example, adjusted relative risks of serum CRP ≥ 3.0 mg/L by deciles of serum GGT were 1.0, 1.23, 1.40, 1.59, 1.62, 1.61, 2.17, 2.38, 2.45, and 3.41 (P for trend < 0.01). This association was consistently observed among all subgroups; Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black, Mexican American, men, women, non-drinkers, drinkers, non-smokers, ex-smokers, current smokers, BMI < 25, BMI 25-29.9, and BMI ≥ 30. The strong association of serum GGT and CRP suggest that further studies on cellular and/or serum GGT might help to elucidate the association between oxidative stress and inflammation. AB - A series of epidemiological studies have suggested serum gamma glutamyltransferase (GGT) within its normal range might be an early marker of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress appears to be a key component of many reactions associated with chronic inflammation. Therefore, we examined the cross-sectional association between deciles of serum GGT and concentrations of serum C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of chronic inflammation, among 12,110 adult participants in the third U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. After adjustment for race, sex, age, cigarette smoking, alcohol intake, and body mass index (BMI), serum concentration of GGT across all deciles was positively associated with serum concentrations of CRP (P for trend < 0.01). For example, adjusted relative risks of serum CRP ≥ 3.0 mg/L by deciles of serum GGT were 1.0, 1.23, 1.40, 1.59, 1.62, 1.61, 2.17, 2.38, 2.45, and 3.41 (P for trend < 0.01). This association was consistently observed among all subgroups; Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black, Mexican American, men, women, non-drinkers, drinkers, non-smokers, ex-smokers, current smokers, BMI < 25, BMI 25-29.9, and BMI ≥ 30. The strong association of serum GGT and CRP suggest that further studies on cellular and/or serum GGT might help to elucidate the association between oxidative stress and inflammation. KW - C-reactive protein KW - Gamma glutamyltransferase KW - Inflammation KW - Oxidative stress U2 - 10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2004.08.027 DO - 10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2004.08.027 JO - Atherosclerosis JF - Atherosclerosis	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3411
__label__wiki	0.517967	0.517967	Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight James E. Mitchell, Richard L. Pyle, Elke Eckert, Dorothy Hatsukami, Elizabeth Soll In a review of the records of 454 patients with bulimia nervosa, 87 (19.2%) reported having a history of weight greater than 130% ideal body weight, although they were normal weight at evaluation. As contrasted to patients who had no history of having been overweight, this group of patients had a later onset of bulimia symptoms, weighed more and were more likely to be very dissatisfied with their current weight and to fear becoming overweight. The eating problems were similar in both groups. Journal of substance abuse Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight'. Together they form a unique fingerprint. Bulimia Nervosa Medicine & Life Sciences Overweight Medicine & Life Sciences Ideal Body Weight Medicine & Life Sciences Bulimia Medicine & Life Sciences Fear Medicine & Life Sciences Eating Medicine & Life Sciences Mitchell, J. E., Pyle, R. L., Eckert, E., Hatsukami, D., & Soll, E. (1990). Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight. Journal of substance abuse, 2(3), 369-374. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0899-3289(10)80008-2 Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight. / Mitchell, James E.; Pyle, Richard L.; Eckert, Elke; Hatsukami, Dorothy; Soll, Elizabeth. In: Journal of substance abuse, Vol. 2, No. 3, 01.01.1990, p. 369-374. Mitchell, JE, Pyle, RL, Eckert, E, Hatsukami, D & Soll, E 1990, 'Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight', Journal of substance abuse, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 369-374. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0899-3289(10)80008-2 Mitchell JE, Pyle RL, Eckert E, Hatsukami D, Soll E. Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight. Journal of substance abuse. 1990 Jan 1;2(3):369-374. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0899-3289(10)80008-2 Mitchell, James E. ; Pyle, Richard L. ; Eckert, Elke ; Hatsukami, Dorothy ; Soll, Elizabeth. / Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight. In: Journal of substance abuse. 1990 ; Vol. 2, No. 3. pp. 369-374. @article{0fa2ab0b822f4f908974cc76ba443e2e, title = "Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight", abstract = "In a review of the records of 454 patients with bulimia nervosa, 87 (19.2%) reported having a history of weight greater than 130% ideal body weight, although they were normal weight at evaluation. As contrasted to patients who had no history of having been overweight, this group of patients had a later onset of bulimia symptoms, weighed more and were more likely to be very dissatisfied with their current weight and to fear becoming overweight. The eating problems were similar in both groups.", author = "Mitchell, {James E.} and Pyle, {Richard L.} and Elke Eckert and Dorothy Hatsukami and Elizabeth Soll", journal = "Journal of Substance Abuse", publisher = "Ablex Pub. Corp", T1 - Bulimia nervosa with and without a history of overweight AU - Mitchell, James E. AU - Pyle, Richard L. AU - Eckert, Elke AU - Hatsukami, Dorothy AU - Soll, Elizabeth N2 - In a review of the records of 454 patients with bulimia nervosa, 87 (19.2%) reported having a history of weight greater than 130% ideal body weight, although they were normal weight at evaluation. As contrasted to patients who had no history of having been overweight, this group of patients had a later onset of bulimia symptoms, weighed more and were more likely to be very dissatisfied with their current weight and to fear becoming overweight. The eating problems were similar in both groups. AB - In a review of the records of 454 patients with bulimia nervosa, 87 (19.2%) reported having a history of weight greater than 130% ideal body weight, although they were normal weight at evaluation. As contrasted to patients who had no history of having been overweight, this group of patients had a later onset of bulimia symptoms, weighed more and were more likely to be very dissatisfied with their current weight and to fear becoming overweight. The eating problems were similar in both groups. JO - Journal of Substance Abuse JF - Journal of Substance Abuse	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3413
__label__wiki	0.555105	0.555105	Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies: A dynamic model Vincy Fon, Francesco Parisi Academics (Law) In this paper we build upon existing literature on the evolution of the common law. We consider a model of legal evolution in which judges have varying ideologies and propensities to extend the domain of legal remedies and causes of action. Parties have symmetric stakes and are rational. Plaintiffs bring a case to court if the expected net return from the case is positive. The net expected value of the case depends on the objective merits of the case, the state of the law, and the ideological propensity of the judge. Plaintiffs have full control over whether to bring a case to court. In our model, the combined presence of differences in judges' ideology and plaintiff's case selection generate a monotonic upward trend in the evolution of legal rules and remedies. This may explain the stylized fact under which certain areas of the law have been granting increasing levels of remedial protection and recognition of plaintiffs' actions. Published - Sep 1 2003 Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies: A dynamic model'. Together they form a unique fingerprint. legal remedies Social Sciences Litigation Business & Economics Remedies Business & Economics cause of action Social Sciences common law Social Sciences Law Social Sciences Propensity Business & Economics Ideologies Social Sciences Fon, V., & Parisi, F. (2003). Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies: A dynamic model. Public Choice, 116(3-4), 419-433. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024822710849 Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies : A dynamic model. / Fon, Vincy; Parisi, Francesco. In: Public Choice, Vol. 116, No. 3-4, 01.09.2003, p. 419-433. Fon, V & Parisi, F 2003, 'Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies: A dynamic model', Public Choice, vol. 116, no. 3-4, pp. 419-433. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024822710849 Fon V, Parisi F. Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies: A dynamic model. Public Choice. 2003 Sep 1;116(3-4):419-433. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024822710849 Fon, Vincy ; Parisi, Francesco. / Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies : A dynamic model. In: Public Choice. 2003 ; Vol. 116, No. 3-4. pp. 419-433. @article{b3ee34594bf44c5cae2d6e377c50d8ea, title = "Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies: A dynamic model", abstract = "In this paper we build upon existing literature on the evolution of the common law. We consider a model of legal evolution in which judges have varying ideologies and propensities to extend the domain of legal remedies and causes of action. Parties have symmetric stakes and are rational. Plaintiffs bring a case to court if the expected net return from the case is positive. The net expected value of the case depends on the objective merits of the case, the state of the law, and the ideological propensity of the judge. Plaintiffs have full control over whether to bring a case to court. In our model, the combined presence of differences in judges' ideology and plaintiff's case selection generate a monotonic upward trend in the evolution of legal rules and remedies. This may explain the stylized fact under which certain areas of the law have been granting increasing levels of remedial protection and recognition of plaintiffs' actions.", author = "Vincy Fon and Francesco Parisi", doi = "10.1023/A:1024822710849", journal = "Public Choice", T1 - Litigation and the evolution of legal remedies T2 - A dynamic model AU - Fon, Vincy AU - Parisi, Francesco N2 - In this paper we build upon existing literature on the evolution of the common law. We consider a model of legal evolution in which judges have varying ideologies and propensities to extend the domain of legal remedies and causes of action. Parties have symmetric stakes and are rational. Plaintiffs bring a case to court if the expected net return from the case is positive. The net expected value of the case depends on the objective merits of the case, the state of the law, and the ideological propensity of the judge. Plaintiffs have full control over whether to bring a case to court. In our model, the combined presence of differences in judges' ideology and plaintiff's case selection generate a monotonic upward trend in the evolution of legal rules and remedies. This may explain the stylized fact under which certain areas of the law have been granting increasing levels of remedial protection and recognition of plaintiffs' actions. AB - In this paper we build upon existing literature on the evolution of the common law. We consider a model of legal evolution in which judges have varying ideologies and propensities to extend the domain of legal remedies and causes of action. Parties have symmetric stakes and are rational. Plaintiffs bring a case to court if the expected net return from the case is positive. The net expected value of the case depends on the objective merits of the case, the state of the law, and the ideological propensity of the judge. Plaintiffs have full control over whether to bring a case to court. In our model, the combined presence of differences in judges' ideology and plaintiff's case selection generate a monotonic upward trend in the evolution of legal rules and remedies. This may explain the stylized fact under which certain areas of the law have been granting increasing levels of remedial protection and recognition of plaintiffs' actions. U2 - 10.1023/A:1024822710849 DO - 10.1023/A:1024822710849 JO - Public Choice JF - Public Choice	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3414
__label__cc	0.676834	0.323166	Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States: A longitudinal study Sheryl A. Hemphill, Rachel Smith, John W. Toumbourou, Todd I. Herrenkohl, Richard F. Catalano, Barbara J. McMorris, Helena Romaniuk Academics (Nursing) Youth violence is a global problem. Few studies have examined whether the prevalence or predictors of youth violence are similar in comparable Western countries like Australia and the United States (US). In the current article, analyses are conducted using two waves of data collected as part of a longitudinal study of adolescent development in approximately 4,000 students aged 12 to 16 years in Victoria, Australia and Washington State, US. Students completed a self-report survey of problem behaviours including violent behaviour, as well as risk and protective factors across five domains (individual, family, peer, school, community). Compared to Washington State, rates of attacking or beating another over the past 12 months were lower in Victoria for females in the first survey and higher for Victorian males in the follow-up survey. Preliminary analyses did not show state-specific predictors of violent behaviour. In the final multivariate analyses of the combined Washington State and Victorian samples, protective factors were being female and student emotion control. Risk factors were prior violent behaviour, family conflict, association with violent peers, community disorganisation, community norms favourable to drug use, school suspensions and arrests. Given the similarity of influential factors in North America and Australia, application of US early intervention and prevention programs may be warranted, with some tailoring to the Australian context. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology https://doi.org/10.1375/acri.42.3.289 Cross-national study Longitudinal study Youth violence 10.1375/acri.42.3.289 Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States: A longitudinal study'. Together they form a unique fingerprint. Violence Medicine & Life Sciences Longitudinal Studies Medicine & Life Sciences Victoria Medicine & Life Sciences longitudinal study Social Sciences Protective Factors Medicine & Life Sciences determinants Social Sciences violence Social Sciences Hemphill, S. A., Smith, R., Toumbourou, J. W., Herrenkohl, T. I., Catalano, R. F., McMorris, B. J., & Romaniuk, H. (2009). Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States: A longitudinal study. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 42(3), 289-309. https://doi.org/10.1375/acri.42.3.289 Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States : A longitudinal study. / Hemphill, Sheryl A.; Smith, Rachel; Toumbourou, John W.; Herrenkohl, Todd I.; Catalano, Richard F.; McMorris, Barbara J.; Romaniuk, Helena. In: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Vol. 42, No. 3, 01.01.2009, p. 289-309. Hemphill, SA, Smith, R, Toumbourou, JW, Herrenkohl, TI, Catalano, RF, McMorris, BJ & Romaniuk, H 2009, 'Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States: A longitudinal study', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 289-309. https://doi.org/10.1375/acri.42.3.289 Hemphill SA, Smith R, Toumbourou JW, Herrenkohl TI, Catalano RF, McMorris BJ et al. Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States: A longitudinal study. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology. 2009 Jan 1;42(3):289-309. https://doi.org/10.1375/acri.42.3.289 Hemphill, Sheryl A. ; Smith, Rachel ; Toumbourou, John W. ; Herrenkohl, Todd I. ; Catalano, Richard F. ; McMorris, Barbara J. ; Romaniuk, Helena. / Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States : A longitudinal study. In: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology. 2009 ; Vol. 42, No. 3. pp. 289-309. @article{17cc558a3f0147319fb9f3a477b48ef5, title = "Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States: A longitudinal study", abstract = "Youth violence is a global problem. Few studies have examined whether the prevalence or predictors of youth violence are similar in comparable Western countries like Australia and the United States (US). In the current article, analyses are conducted using two waves of data collected as part of a longitudinal study of adolescent development in approximately 4,000 students aged 12 to 16 years in Victoria, Australia and Washington State, US. Students completed a self-report survey of problem behaviours including violent behaviour, as well as risk and protective factors across five domains (individual, family, peer, school, community). Compared to Washington State, rates of attacking or beating another over the past 12 months were lower in Victoria for females in the first survey and higher for Victorian males in the follow-up survey. Preliminary analyses did not show state-specific predictors of violent behaviour. In the final multivariate analyses of the combined Washington State and Victorian samples, protective factors were being female and student emotion control. Risk factors were prior violent behaviour, family conflict, association with violent peers, community disorganisation, community norms favourable to drug use, school suspensions and arrests. Given the similarity of influential factors in North America and Australia, application of US early intervention and prevention programs may be warranted, with some tailoring to the Australian context.", keywords = "Adolescents, Cross-national study, Longitudinal study, Risk and protective factors, Youth violence", author = "Hemphill, {Sheryl A.} and Rachel Smith and Toumbourou, {John W.} and Herrenkohl, {Todd I.} and Catalano, {Richard F.} and McMorris, {Barbara J.} and Helena Romaniuk", doi = "10.1375/acri.42.3.289", journal = "Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology", T1 - Modifiable determinants of youth violence in Australia and the United States T2 - A longitudinal study AU - Hemphill, Sheryl A. AU - Smith, Rachel AU - Toumbourou, John W. AU - Herrenkohl, Todd I. AU - Catalano, Richard F. AU - McMorris, Barbara J. AU - Romaniuk, Helena N2 - Youth violence is a global problem. Few studies have examined whether the prevalence or predictors of youth violence are similar in comparable Western countries like Australia and the United States (US). In the current article, analyses are conducted using two waves of data collected as part of a longitudinal study of adolescent development in approximately 4,000 students aged 12 to 16 years in Victoria, Australia and Washington State, US. Students completed a self-report survey of problem behaviours including violent behaviour, as well as risk and protective factors across five domains (individual, family, peer, school, community). Compared to Washington State, rates of attacking or beating another over the past 12 months were lower in Victoria for females in the first survey and higher for Victorian males in the follow-up survey. Preliminary analyses did not show state-specific predictors of violent behaviour. In the final multivariate analyses of the combined Washington State and Victorian samples, protective factors were being female and student emotion control. Risk factors were prior violent behaviour, family conflict, association with violent peers, community disorganisation, community norms favourable to drug use, school suspensions and arrests. Given the similarity of influential factors in North America and Australia, application of US early intervention and prevention programs may be warranted, with some tailoring to the Australian context. AB - Youth violence is a global problem. Few studies have examined whether the prevalence or predictors of youth violence are similar in comparable Western countries like Australia and the United States (US). In the current article, analyses are conducted using two waves of data collected as part of a longitudinal study of adolescent development in approximately 4,000 students aged 12 to 16 years in Victoria, Australia and Washington State, US. Students completed a self-report survey of problem behaviours including violent behaviour, as well as risk and protective factors across five domains (individual, family, peer, school, community). Compared to Washington State, rates of attacking or beating another over the past 12 months were lower in Victoria for females in the first survey and higher for Victorian males in the follow-up survey. Preliminary analyses did not show state-specific predictors of violent behaviour. In the final multivariate analyses of the combined Washington State and Victorian samples, protective factors were being female and student emotion control. Risk factors were prior violent behaviour, family conflict, association with violent peers, community disorganisation, community norms favourable to drug use, school suspensions and arrests. Given the similarity of influential factors in North America and Australia, application of US early intervention and prevention programs may be warranted, with some tailoring to the Australian context. KW - Cross-national study KW - Longitudinal study KW - Risk and protective factors KW - Youth violence U2 - 10.1375/acri.42.3.289 DO - 10.1375/acri.42.3.289 JO - Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology JF - Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3415
__label__cc	0.596758	0.403242	Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron Todd R. Nelson, Youngki Kim, Alfred F. Michael, Ralph J. Butkowskt, Aristidis S. Charonis Pediatrics - Nephrology Tubulointerstitial nephritis antigen (TIN-ag) is a 58 kDa glycoprotein restricted within the kidney to basement membranes underlying the epithelium of Bowman'S capsule and proximal and distal tubules. Autoantibody formation against this component has been described in association with primary immune-mediated tubulointerstital nephritis, membranous nephropathy and anti-glomerular basement membrane nephritis. In the present report, the ontogeny of this protein was studied in human fetal kidney tissue by immunohistochemical analysis of immature and developing nephrons using a panel of monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies. TIN-ag is first detected in basement membranes underlying the epithelium of Bowman'S capsule of early capillary loop stage glomeruli and the primitive proximal tubule. No detectable expression is observed in the basement membranes of the branching ureteric bud, nephrogenic vesicle, or comma shape and s-shape stages of nephrogenic development. Increased staining of the proximal tubular basement membrane is associated with outgrowth of the primitive tubule from the urinary pole of the developing glomerulus. In more mature fetal tubules, TIN-ag expression closely resembles that of previously reported observations in mature tissue where it is present in high amounts in the basement membranes of proximal tubules, and to a lesser extent in Bowman'S capsule and distal tubules. Our results suggest that TIN-ag expression is developmentally regulated in a precise spatial and temporal pattern throughout nephrogenesis. Connective Tissue Research Kidney development tubulointerstitial nephritis antigen Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron'. Together they form a unique fingerprint. Basement Membrane Chemical Compounds Interstitial Nephritis Medicine & Life Sciences Nephrons Medicine & Life Sciences Bowman Capsule Medicine & Life Sciences Antigens Medicine & Life Sciences Nephritis Medicine & Life Sciences Capsules Chemical Compounds Epithelium Medicine & Life Sciences Nelson, T. R., Kim, Y., Michael, A. F., Butkowskt, R. J., & Charonis, A. S. (1998). Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron. Connective Tissue Research, 37(42006), 53-60. https://doi.org/10.3109/03008209809028899 Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron. / Nelson, Todd R.; Kim, Youngki; Michael, Alfred F.; Butkowskt, Ralph J.; Charonis, Aristidis S. In: Connective Tissue Research, Vol. 37, No. 42006, 01.01.1998, p. 53-60. Nelson, TR, Kim, Y, Michael, AF, Butkowskt, RJ & Charonis, AS 1998, 'Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron', Connective Tissue Research, vol. 37, no. 42006, pp. 53-60. https://doi.org/10.3109/03008209809028899 Nelson TR, Kim Y, Michael AF, Butkowskt RJ, Charonis AS. Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron. Connective Tissue Research. 1998 Jan 1;37(42006):53-60. https://doi.org/10.3109/03008209809028899 Nelson, Todd R. ; Kim, Youngki ; Michael, Alfred F. ; Butkowskt, Ralph J. ; Charonis, Aristidis S. / Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron. In: Connective Tissue Research. 1998 ; Vol. 37, No. 42006. pp. 53-60. @article{0a2278f0945a4109b9476dd672480010, title = "Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron", abstract = "Tubulointerstitial nephritis antigen (TIN-ag) is a 58 kDa glycoprotein restricted within the kidney to basement membranes underlying the epithelium of Bowman'S capsule and proximal and distal tubules. Autoantibody formation against this component has been described in association with primary immune-mediated tubulointerstital nephritis, membranous nephropathy and anti-glomerular basement membrane nephritis. In the present report, the ontogeny of this protein was studied in human fetal kidney tissue by immunohistochemical analysis of immature and developing nephrons using a panel of monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies. TIN-ag is first detected in basement membranes underlying the epithelium of Bowman'S capsule of early capillary loop stage glomeruli and the primitive proximal tubule. No detectable expression is observed in the basement membranes of the branching ureteric bud, nephrogenic vesicle, or comma shape and s-shape stages of nephrogenic development. Increased staining of the proximal tubular basement membrane is associated with outgrowth of the primitive tubule from the urinary pole of the developing glomerulus. In more mature fetal tubules, TIN-ag expression closely resembles that of previously reported observations in mature tissue where it is present in high amounts in the basement membranes of proximal tubules, and to a lesser extent in Bowman'S capsule and distal tubules. Our results suggest that TIN-ag expression is developmentally regulated in a precise spatial and temporal pattern throughout nephrogenesis.", keywords = "Kidney development, immunofluorescence, tubulointerstitial nephritis antigen", author = "Nelson, {Todd R.} and Youngki Kim and Michael, {Alfred F.} and Butkowskt, {Ralph J.} and Charonis, {Aristidis S.}", journal = "Connective Tissue Research", publisher = "Informa Healthcare", T1 - Tubulointerstitial Nephritis Antigen (TIN-ag) is Expresses in Distinct Segments of the Developing Human Nephron AU - Nelson, Todd R. AU - Kim, Youngki AU - Michael, Alfred F. AU - Butkowskt, Ralph J. AU - Charonis, Aristidis S. N2 - Tubulointerstitial nephritis antigen (TIN-ag) is a 58 kDa glycoprotein restricted within the kidney to basement membranes underlying the epithelium of Bowman'S capsule and proximal and distal tubules. Autoantibody formation against this component has been described in association with primary immune-mediated tubulointerstital nephritis, membranous nephropathy and anti-glomerular basement membrane nephritis. In the present report, the ontogeny of this protein was studied in human fetal kidney tissue by immunohistochemical analysis of immature and developing nephrons using a panel of monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies. TIN-ag is first detected in basement membranes underlying the epithelium of Bowman'S capsule of early capillary loop stage glomeruli and the primitive proximal tubule. No detectable expression is observed in the basement membranes of the branching ureteric bud, nephrogenic vesicle, or comma shape and s-shape stages of nephrogenic development. Increased staining of the proximal tubular basement membrane is associated with outgrowth of the primitive tubule from the urinary pole of the developing glomerulus. In more mature fetal tubules, TIN-ag expression closely resembles that of previously reported observations in mature tissue where it is present in high amounts in the basement membranes of proximal tubules, and to a lesser extent in Bowman'S capsule and distal tubules. Our results suggest that TIN-ag expression is developmentally regulated in a precise spatial and temporal pattern throughout nephrogenesis. AB - Tubulointerstitial nephritis antigen (TIN-ag) is a 58 kDa glycoprotein restricted within the kidney to basement membranes underlying the epithelium of Bowman'S capsule and proximal and distal tubules. Autoantibody formation against this component has been described in association with primary immune-mediated tubulointerstital nephritis, membranous nephropathy and anti-glomerular basement membrane nephritis. In the present report, the ontogeny of this protein was studied in human fetal kidney tissue by immunohistochemical analysis of immature and developing nephrons using a panel of monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies. TIN-ag is first detected in basement membranes underlying the epithelium of Bowman'S capsule of early capillary loop stage glomeruli and the primitive proximal tubule. No detectable expression is observed in the basement membranes of the branching ureteric bud, nephrogenic vesicle, or comma shape and s-shape stages of nephrogenic development. Increased staining of the proximal tubular basement membrane is associated with outgrowth of the primitive tubule from the urinary pole of the developing glomerulus. In more mature fetal tubules, TIN-ag expression closely resembles that of previously reported observations in mature tissue where it is present in high amounts in the basement membranes of proximal tubules, and to a lesser extent in Bowman'S capsule and distal tubules. Our results suggest that TIN-ag expression is developmentally regulated in a precise spatial and temporal pattern throughout nephrogenesis. KW - Kidney development KW - immunofluorescence KW - tubulointerstitial nephritis antigen JO - Connective Tissue Research JF - Connective Tissue Research	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3416
__label__wiki	0.600215	0.600215	Interview: Composer Jake Monaco Jake Monaco is a multi-talented composer who has worked on a variety of projects for film and television. His music will be featured in Fox’s highly-anticipated action comedy “Keeping Up With the Joneses,” starring Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot, Isla Fisher, and Zach Galifianakis. He is also currently scoring three family-favorite animated series, “The Stinky and Dirty Show,” Netflix’s “Dinotrux,” and Warner Bros. Animation’s “Be Cool Scooby Doo.” As a producer and composer of additional music for Christophe Beck, Monaco has contributed to the animated magic of “Frozen,” the record-breaking laughs of the “Hangover” trilogy, the furry hijinks of “The Muppets,” and the award-winning documentary “Waiting for Superman.” What he loves about composing for movies and television is creating music that tells the story. He took time from his busy schedule to answer my questions. What was the first instrument you learned to play? Copyright 2016 Jake Monaco I started taking guitar lessons when I was 6, but after a year of not wanting to practice, my parents let up. Then my freshman year of high school, my family moved, which left me with a lot of free time. I started getting more into music in general at this point and so I found that same guitar from when I was 6 and started teaching myself. I think it’s still in my attic actually… I should go and get it at some point 🙂 When did you first realize, watching a movie, that someone composed a score that helped tell the story? My favorite movie as a child was Ghostbusters and although I didn’t know anything about Elmer Bernstein at the time, I remember the music being an integral part of the story. What was the first composing job you got paid for? I was accepted into the USC film scoring program 2006-2007. My first paid gig was with a director named Zeus Quijano on the short “Point of Entry”. A few years later he turned this 5 min short documentary into a 20 min version, which I was also lucky enough to work with him on. He is hoping to turn it into a feature eventually. Fingers crossed! At what stage do you usually come into a project? Before or after filming has been completed? It completely depends on the project. Some smaller projects, I have started working on themes or sound palettes prior to shooting, or in the case of animation, during the storyboard phase. Although on the last two features, I’ve been brought on only a few weeks before completion. I had two and a half weeks for “Absolutely Fabulous” and five weeks for “Keeping up with the Joneses.” It’s kind of exhilarating to be under that sort of deadline; adrenaline gets you through! If you could go back in time and score any movie, what one would you pick? Probably any James Bond film. I love them all (even the bad ones). 🙂 When you work on a film that mixes genres, like the action comedy “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” how is that reflected in the music? I try to make the action sequences as fun as possible. While there are still stakes in the film, the music doesn’t have to play them so seriously, it’s ok to have fun! There’s a long, exciting chase sequence in the middle of “Joneses” that, while it has a driving beat and action elements, has a funk horn section and some crazy EDM synth interjections. The comedy is really all about timing; when is the perfect moment to drop out. A lot of the time, a joke plays funnier when the music pauses for it as opposed to commenting on it. Did you incorporate any unusual instruments? Without giving away too much, there is a running theme through the movie about the Joneses going to this little café in Marrakech in Morocco. So I did a little research and found some instruments native to that region that are sprinkled throughout the score. The two most interesting being the Sintir (or Gimbri), which is a 3 stringed mid/low register plucked instrument that has camel skin stretched over the body and the kemenche which is a bowed instrument that rests on the players knee and has a very distinct, almost nasal, tone to it. Composers Interview Previous PostPrevious VidAngel Gives You the “Airplane Version” of Hollywood Films Next PostNext Crazy Good Turns: A Podcast About Kindness and Generosity VidAngel Gives You the “Airplane Version” of Hollywood Films Just about every movie released these days includes bad language, violence, and crude sexual material. And it is very rarely necessary for the story. Network television shows the “airplane versions,” edited to remove offensive content. On a recent airplane trip, I watched the very R-rated “Keanu,” with substitute language like “mother-father.” VidAngel has a service that will let you get edited versions of Hollywood films. Previous PostPrevious Deepwater Horizon Next PostNext Interview: Composer Jake Monaco Copyright 2016 Lionsgate I’m a fan of director Peter Berg. His excellent “Friday Night Lights” film has been eclipsed by the popular television series it inspired. And I like the much-derided “Battleship,” which I thought was a great example of well-executed action movie, taking its entertainment value seriously without taking itself too seriously. His new “Deepwater Horizon,” based on the 2010 explosion and sinking of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, shows his skill in cinematic storytelling and his gift for pacing and action. But it is curiously constructed, as though for a fictional story more along the lines of Bruce Willis fighting a meteor than a real-life environmental catastrophe that killed 11 people and spread an estimated 3.19 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. It should be an action-movie version of “The Big Short.” Instead, it’s an updating of “The Towering Inferno,” meaning — spoiler alert — the bad guy is the one who tries to cut costs. Berg and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand follow the established formula for action films. The first ten minutes make us fall in love with the hero, his adoring wife, and adorable child. That’s not hard to do. The hero is Mike Williams, Mark Wahlberg, his wife is Felicia (Kate Hudson), and their daughter happens to be working on a report for school about Daddy’s job, which gives us a chance to find out about some very technical stuff in very simple terms. Daddy works on an oil rig out in the middle of the Gulf that pumps up oil from under the ocean. “That oil is a monster like the dinosaurs it used to be. My daddy tames the dinosaurs.” And Mommy will miss him very much when he goes. They are adorable. Got it. The next scene introduces us to hero number 2, the weary veteran who is all about competence and integrity, Captain Jimmy Harrell, superbly played by Hudson’s real-life dad, Kurt Russell. And then there are the guys in suits, who are all about making their numbers and therefore cutting the corners that the veterans knows are not there for show but are actually necessary. There’s a lot of jargon, but basically all you need to know is that the good guys understand that there may be a problem and the bad guys do not want to take the steps necessary to find or prevent it. And the good guys are really endearing, and therefore it all matters a lot. And then it all starts to blow up, and we get to the real reason for the movie, which is the “who will get out of this and how will they do it?” part. This is where Berg’s strengths really show, as each of the set-pieces are thrillingly staged. He has an exceptional clarity in conveying a three-dimensional space on screen — actually, several of them in different locations — and balancing the urgency of the action with genuine emotion. We see how the people on board think through the problems, from the logistics and the mechanics to the choices based in morality and courage. Wahlberg is, as ever, just right to play the guy you’d like to have next door, a decent, hard-working, family-loving man with enormous capability and integrity. Here, as in their previous collaboration, “Lone Survivor,” Berg keeps the focus on the challenges faced by individuals who have little control over the monumental, life-or-death tasks they are assigned by people far away with little understanding of the consequences of their orders. That worked better in the earlier film, as the story of the soldier far from command has existential implications that are inherent and instantly recognized. Here, the action is disconnected from the consequences that a brief text coda before the credits cannot make up for. Parents should know that the movie includes extensive peril and violence, with some disturbing images and characters injured and killed, some strong language, and sexual references and a situation. Family discussion: Why do the people on the rig use the term “Mr.”? Who could have prevented the explosion? If you like this, try: “The 33” and the documentary about Deepwater Horizon, “The Great Invisible” Action/Adventure Based on a true story Previous PostPrevious Interview: “The Hollars” Producer Tom Rice Next PostNext VidAngel Gives You the “Airplane Version” of Hollywood Films Interview: “The Hollars” Producer Tom Rice Copyright Sony Pictures Classics 2016 Producer Tom Rice (“The Way Way Back,” Mississippi Grind”) answered my questions about the endearing independent film “The Hollars,” with director John Krasinski starring as a confused young man about to become a father, who is called home when his mother is hospitalized with a brain tumor. The brilliant cast includes Margo Martindale, Richard Jenkins, Anna Kendrick, Sharlto Copley, and, as a kind-hearted church youth leader, singer Josh Groban. How did you first come upon the script? I read the script on an airplane and immediately fell in love with it. I was laughing out loud, I was crying – people were looking at me, and I didn’t care. I fell for these characters, and saw my own family in the Hollars. I fell in love with the sincerity and love these people have for each other – in the midst of the chaos and dysfunction. It’s such a special story, and it fits right into the Sycamore ethos. What matters most to you in the projects you commit to? Any project we greenlight has to fit the ethos of our company. The Sycamore mission is to make films with elements of redemption, reconciliation, social justice, or what Andy Crouch calls the “full human condition.” We don’t ever set out to make blatantly Christian films – but I hope everything we do will have some type of positive impact on our culture and community. What did John Krasinski bring to the film as director? Everything. It was his passion that kept this project alive during development. It was his vision that attracted the cast. It was his charm, humor and sensibility that’s organically infused in every scene. And it was his leadership that everyone got behind, every step of the way. John is a very well-loved person, and people will come out of the woodwork to support him. What do stories about loving but dysfunctional families help us understand about ourselves? Well, I think everyone will relate to this film in some way. For me, it’s about grace. Family is everything to me, but it’s not always easy. Communication, honesty, forgiveness, love – those are all necessary. We all need to be more giving in those areas, because we all need it to be given to us. It’s grace in action. We’re all messy, we’re all broken – and we all try to pretend like we’re not. When a story like this comes along and shines a light on that – with a perfect blend of heart and humor – I think it inspires us to let down our own guard a little – take of our masks, so to speak – and trust ourselves and our loved ones with who we really are. One of the film’s most endearing characters is singer Josh Groban as a church youth leader. How did he get the role and what does it add to the film? Josh and John are friends, and so Josh took the role when John reached out and offered it to him. Josh is perfect casting here. He brings such a likeable, calm yet authoritative presence to the role. He never has any passages of dialogue where he’s preaching – but his character has a strong impact on another character just by being patient and understanding with him – and this grace – there’s that word again – allows the other character to grow and change. It’s a beautiful and honest portrayal of a good man. Although it is not explicitly a faith-centered film, how does it touch on matters of purpose and connection? I really hope those discussions are about healing. How it’s never too late to make amends, or to grow closer without the burden of the past weighing us down. This is true in human relationships, and central to our relationship with God. We can meet God wherever we are in life, and He’s there for us. And I would hope everyone has someone in their life – a family member or friend – that embodies that. We are all built for community. We need each other, and this film is about our human need for those relationships in so many ways – especially familial. Behind the Scenes Interview Previous PostPrevious Trailer: “Fences” with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis Next PostNext Deepwater Horizon Trailer: “Fences” with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis There is no movie I am looking forward to this fall more than “Fences,” with my two favorite performers, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, and based on the Tony and Pulitzer prize winning play by August Wilson. Here is the first look. Based on a play Race and Diversity Trailers, Previews, and Clips Previous PostPrevious New on DVD: Who Gets the Dog? with Alicia Silverstone Next PostNext Interview: “The Hollars” Producer Tom Rice	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3419
__label__wiki	0.61882	0.61882	Friends of Myall Creek Ngiyani winangay ganunga – We remember them The Massacre Story Memorial Story Our Apology The path to Australia’s future passes through its past. Come with us on this, our incredible, shared journey …. … a strikingly beautiful, iconic Indigenous Cultural and Educational Centre in the landscaped ‘cultural precinct’ setting as a visible demonstration of reconciliation adjacent to the memorial site of the massacre of Aboriginal people at Myall Creek in 1838. … learning of the hundreds of massacres in the frontier wars across Australia. … being inspired by those from Governor to convict who just this once in our history courageously ensured justice was done. … being in a place of healing, and so becoming a place of vibrant cultural expression that brings all Australians together as one. In 2008 in his apology to the Stolen Generations then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke of “the real possibility of reconciliation writ large: … reconciliation across the entire history of the often bloody encounter between those who emerged from the Dreamtime a thousand generations ago and those who … came across the seas only yesterday.”To have true reconciliation all Australians should be aware of the past massacres that occurred. This had led to the formation of a Joint Select Committee to work on constitutional recognition of the First Australians. Respected elder, Patrick Dodson, points out that, “Recognition of the First Peoples in the Constitution of a country starts to send a message that you are valued, are important, that we want to respect you, and we want to deal with the things that have caused us division and discord in the past.” The Myall Creek Cultural and Education Centre will provide information not only about the massacres of the past but also about the people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who stood up against the perpetrators and sought justice. Work on the wording for constitutional recognition is now in progress and has bipartisan support. In regard to constitutional recognition Deputy Leader of the Nationals Barnaby Joyce has stated, “I think that we have a duty to do the right thing. So I’m encouraging you, as a person, who you know is pretty conservative, to try and move yourself to the position where we move this nation forward as one nation…’Cause if we get to a referendum as a nation as one people we can do something that is good and do something that is decent and so something that is right.” The Myall Creek Cultural and Education Centre will have as its goal the reconciliation that is needed to ‘move this nation forward as one nation’, and which provides the setting for a shared cultural expression and development. From a shared dream to a shared reality – a world first Despite the systemic nature of colonial conflict, violence and dispossession of first nation peoples globally, there is as yet no facility commemorating this history and providing year-round reconciliation, education and cultural programs. It seems that building the bridge to close the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples and cultures is as new for Australians as it is for the rest of the world. Yet programs similar to these do exist to respect, remember and learn from – War (memorials), Apartheid (museums), Holocaust (centres) and Genocide (universities). This Centre will be the first of its kind. Not only in Australia but in the world, a unique facility of national significance and international importance as a recognised example of reconciliation and healing and the explosion of cultural expression that has been occuring. On the 10th June, 1838, armed stockmen rode onto Myall Creek Station outside Bingara in north-west New South Wales and massacred 28 Wirrayaraay men, women and children of the Gamilaroi nation. Such massacres were widespread and continued, often unreported, into the twentieth century. However, the trial that followed on from the Myall Creek massacre resulted in an extraordinary outcome. For the first time in Australian history white men were brought to justice for the murder of Aboriginal people. A precedent had been set – that was never repeated. On the 10th June, 2000, the Myall Creek Memorial Committee dedicated a memorial commemorating the massacre of 162 years before. On that day, descendants of both the perpetrators and victims met and embraced in a poignant and meaningful act of reconciliation.The Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, who erected the memorial, were motivated by a sense of justice and a conviction that we must acknowledge the truth of our shared history, if we are to achieve reconciliation between our peoples in Australia. Thousands of people have visited the memorial since that time, with many writing about their gratitude and the profound effect, which the memorial has had on their understanding and attitudes. The memorial site has achieved both national and state heritage listings. It is a testimony to the true history of Australia. Our vision … To obtain funding to build a unique cultural and educational centre, where those who come will: Learn the truth of the Myall Creek massacre and the court trials that followed. They will learn about those so outraged by the massacre that they reported it, investigated the facts and brought to justice some of the perpetrators, actions that affirmed the recognition of race equality under British law at the time (an equality continually flouted in practice thereafter). Understand that massacres of Indigenous people continued across Australia for a further century Gain an appreciation of the impact of this shared history on Aboriginal people and their culture and on life in Australia over the last 226 years of our shared history until now. A commitment to reconciliation: understanding and acknowledging the past and present injustices between Aboriginal and other Australians and to strive for a just reconciliation between all Australians. Witness Aboriginal culture in the now, drawing on the past, and offering the opportunity for sharing of cultures together. This vision involves three stages: The Myall Creek Cultural Precinct The Myall Creek Cultural Precinct is Stage 2 of a 3 stage plan culminating in the construction of a Cultural Centre associated with the national and state heritage listed Myall Creek Memorial in close proximity to the massacre site of 1838. Stage 1 – the Memorial – already exists and is testimony to both a tragic past and a place of astonishing healing. Stages 2 & 3 will enable Aboriginal people to reclaim and transform a place of genocide into a place celebrating Aboriginal culture, both traditional and contemporary. Stage 2 will:· Provide a culturally appropriate outdoor performance space and meeting place for dance, drama and storytelling, introducing the many school groups and general public visiting the precinct to Aboriginal culture, and enable Aboriginal students and local performers to learn and create performances with their elders. Replant Indigenous vegetation, including a ‘bush food’ garden, preserving traditional foods and medicines informing the connection between culture, land and farming practice.· Commission public artworks representative of the cultural explosion generated by the healing that has taken place at Myall Creek. Outdoor artwork will demonstrate how art can generate a spirit of reconciliation. Provide supporting infrastructure of bus/car park bays and amenities for visitors to the site Myall Creek can be seen as the spiritual heart of the Australian nation. The meaning of colonisation: the scarification of trust, the mortification of innocence and the violence of greed – the Cultural and Education Centre this reality will sit side by side with the continuing miracle of the oldest living culture on earth, its survival and its ongoing resilience. How it will work … The Friends of Myall Creek Memorial (FMCM), which is made up of an equal number of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, plans to erect a building of exemplary and striking design, comprised of a number of functional spaces under a very large copper roof shaped in the form of a Rainbow Serpent –the Aboriginal Creator Spirit. The building has been designed by Sydney architect Tim Shellshear and local artist Colin Isaacs, with input from members of the Committee and the wider community. The Centre’s content will guide you through four themes: Myall Creek – the story of Myall Creek and its significance in Australia’s history. Contact – the story of the impact of white contact history throughout Australia resulting in breakdown of traditional culture. Culture – the story of the local Aboriginal people, including traditional and contemporary culture and stories. Reconciliation – the story of the Reconciliation movement and what it means to wider Australian society. Visitors will be able to experience these insights through all of their senses, their emotions, as well as their intellects …. Being informed and engaged by interactive technologies, oral histories, photographs, amazing displays and custodial artefacts. The Centre will also have strong public cultural programs engaging visitors and school groups with local Aboriginal communities. Local support … In planning the Education and Cultural centre, the FMCM has received very strong affirmation, encouragement and assurances of cooperation from local government, educators, and regional business and industry development groups in Northern NSW. The Centre will advance four of the six Regional Development Australia Northern Inland (RDANI) priorities – namely outcomes in Aboriginal reconciliation and health through its emphasis on profoundly socially inclusive practices, as well as increased community regeneration and economic diversification. Strategically situated, the Centre, like the adjacent memorial, is central to major regional hubs such as Tamworth, Armidale, Inverell, Moree and Narrabri. It is located on Fossickers’ Way, a route frequented by tourists travelling north from Victoria, Albury, Wagga and Dubbo, as well as being approximately halfway between Sydney and Brisbane. Busloads of students throughout the region already visit the memorial. Many hundreds of tourists sign the visitors’ book each year. Hundreds come each year to the Massacre commemoration held on the second Sunday in June. With the erection of the Education and Cultural Centre, the FMCM is assured by education planners and tourism promoters that there will be a marked increase in the numbers of students and other visitors. Myall Creek is a part of the NSW Board of Studies curriculum and as such will contribute to the increased number of visitors. Creation of the Centre and year-round reconciliation programs are conservatively projected to triple annual visitation to 10 – 15,000 people. This will create an economic impact for the district of $10-20m during the first five years of operations. International tourism interest in Aboriginal history and culture represents a significant 13% of all visitors. This segment on average stays longer (20% of visitor nights) and spends more (19% of expenditure) than general tourists (Tourism Research Australia 2011). Culture-based tourists are significantly more likely to travel and stay in regional areas (31%). Education and tourism markets will be most significant for the centre. A $10million Foundation is being established to develop and deliver the year-round programs for these markets. Increased visitor spending will also encourage economic diversification. From the outset increased visitation in the area will have synergy with the two other new and nationally significant facilities in Bingara – The Living Classroom regenerative farming education facility; and the Roxy Theatre & Café Complex, a fully-restored tribute to the influence of Greek migrants throughout rural Australia. The FMCM enjoys and is promised the full cooperation of the Gwydir Shire Council in the development and administration of the Centre. The Centre will provide local employment, requiring full and/or part-time indigenous staff, including On-site management. A curator. An educator. An accountant. A retail manager. Additional employment will be offered within the Centre’s reconciliation and education programs, as well as through increased tourism and economic diversification. How you can help … Edmund Burke once said that “Evil prevails when good men do nothing.” In the case of the Myall Creek massacre, good people suffered ridicule and retribution to make the truth known and in so doing changed the way we know our history. You too can be part of changing history and help us to create an amazing space that will inform and educate future generations of the atrocities of the past and the promise of unity. The FMCM is seeking financial support from all levels of Government, community organisations, private corporations and interested philanthropists for the construction and equipping of the Education and Cultural Centre. The challenge is significant but exciting with capital works estimated at $7.4million and the establishment of a Capital Preservation Fund of $10million to cover recurrent expenditure into perpetuity. Detailed estimates are included in the Business Plan available at : Bottom line …we need you …and your support! The contributions of all major donors will be publicly and visually acknowledged. Promotion video https://vimeo.com/220926163/0089f5754c Please address all your enquiries to: Ivan Roberts Co-chair of the Myall Creek Memorial Committee 0475 838 144 / (02) 9446 5715 iroberts2505@yahoo.com.au For any additional information on Myall Creek, please visit our website: www.myallcreek.org We look forward to your joining us. Ngiyani winangay ganunga We remember them. © 2021 Friends of Myall Creek • Powered by GeneratePress	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3427
__label__wiki	0.855221	0.855221	Kim says he, Moon are on starting line of new Korean history Published On: April 27, 2018 08:40 AM NPT By: Associated Press GOYANG, April 27: With a single step over a weathered, cracked slab of concrete, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made history Friday by crossing over the world’s most heavily armed border to greet South Korean President Moon Jae-in for talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Kim then invited Moon to cross briefly back into the north with him before they returned to the southern side. Those small steps must be seen in the context of the last year — when the United States, its ally South Korea and the North seemed at times to be on the verge of nuclear war as the North unleashed a torrent of weapons tests — but also in light of the long, destructive history of the rival Koreas, who fought one of the 20th century’s bloodiest conflicts and even today occupy a divided peninsula that’s still technically in a state of war. “I feel like I’m firing a flare at the starting line in the moment of (the two Koreas) writing a new history in North-South relations, peace and prosperity,” Kim told Moon as they sat at a table, its precise dimension of 2018 millimeters separating them, to begin their closed-door talks. Moon responded that there were high expectations that they produce an agreement that will be a “big gift to the entire Korean nation and every peace loving person in the world.” Earlier, both leaders smiled broadly as Moon grasped Kim’s hand and led him along a blindingly red carpet into South Korean territory, where school children gave Kim flowers and an honor guard stood at attention for inspection, a military band playing traditional Korean folk songs beloved by both Koreas and the South Korean equivalent of “Hail to the Chief.” It’s the first time a North Korean leader has crossed over to the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone since the Korean War ended in 1953. Beyond the carefully choreographed surface, however, it’s still not clear whether the leaders can make any progress in talks on the nuclear issue, which has bedeviled U.S. and South Korean officials for decades. North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests last year likely put it on the threshold of becoming a legitimate nuclear power. North Korea claims it has already risen to that level. Kim’s news agency said that the leader would “open-heartedly” discuss with Moon “all the issues arising in improving inter-Korean relations and achieving peace, prosperity and reunification of the Korean peninsula” in a “historic” summit. The greeting of the two leaders was planned to the last detail. Thousands of journalists were kept in a huge conference center well away from the summit, except for a small group of tightly-controlled pool reporters at the border. Moon stood near the Koreas’ dividing line, moving forward the moment he glimpsed Kim, dressed in dark, Mao-style suit, appearing in front of a building on the northern side. They shook hands with the border line between them. Moon then invited Kim to cross into the South, and, after he did so, Kim grasped Moon’s hand and led him into the North and then back into the South. They took a ceremonial photo facing the North and then another photo facing the South. Two fifth-grade students from the Daesongdong Elementary School, the only South Korean school within the DMZ, greeted the leaders and gave Kim flowers. Kim and Moon then saluted an honor guard and military band, and Moon introduced Kim to South Korean government officials. Kim returned the favor, introducing Moon to the North Korean officials accompanying him. They then took a photo inside the Peace House, where the summit was to take place, in front of a painting of South Korea’s Bukhan Mountain, which towers over the South Korean Blue House presidential mansion. Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, was by his side throughout the ceremony, handing him a pen to sign a guestbook, taking the schoolchildren’s flowers from his hand and scribbling notes at the start of the talks with Moon. Nuclear weapons will top the agenda, and Friday’s summit will be the clearest sign yet of whether it’s possible to peacefully negotiate those weapons away from a country that has spent decades doggedly building its bombs despite crippling sanctions and near-constant international opprobrium. Expectations are generally low, given that past so-called breakthroughs on North Korea’s weapons have collapsed amid acrimonious charges of cheating and bad faith. Skeptics of engagement have long said that the North often turns to interminable rounds of diplomacy meant to ease the pain of sanctions — giving it time to perfect its weapons and win aid for unfulfilled nuclear promises. Advocates of engagement say the only way to get a deal is to do what the Koreas will try Friday: Sit down and see what’s possible. The White House said in a statement that it is “hopeful that talks will achieve progress toward a future of peace and prosperity for the entire Korean Peninsula. ... (and) looks forward to continuing robust discussions in preparation for the planned meeting between President Donald J. Trump and Kim Jong Un in the coming weeks.” Moon, a liberal whose election last year ended a decade of conservative rule in Seoul, will be looking to make some headway on the North’s nuclear program in advance of a planned summit in several weeks between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump. Kim, the third member of his family to rule his nation with absolute power, is eager, both in this meeting and in the Trump talks, to talk about the nearly 30,000 heavily armed U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and the lack of a formal peace treaty ending the Korea War — two factors, the North says, that make nuclear weapons necessary. North Korea may also be looking to use whatever happens in the talks with Moon to set up the Trump summit, which it may see as a way to legitimize its declared status as a nuclear power. One possible outcome Friday, aside from a rise in general goodwill between the countries, could be a proposal for a North Korean freeze of its weapons ahead of later denuclearization. Seoul and Washington will be pushing for any freeze to be accompanied by rigorous and unfettered outside inspections of the North’s nuclear facilities, since past deals have crumbled because of North Korea’s unwillingness to open up to snooping foreigners. South Korea, in announcing Thursday some details of the leaders’ meeting, acknowledged that the most difficult sticking point between the Koreas has been North Korea’s level of denuclearization commitment. Kim has reportedly said that he wouldn’t need nuclear weapons if his government’s security could be guaranteed and external threats were removed. Whatever the Koreas announce Friday, the spectacle of Kim being feted on South Korean soil will be something to behold. Kim and Moon will be enjoying each other’s company in the jointly controlled village of Panmunjom near the spot where a defecting North Korean soldier recently fled south in a hail of bullets fired by his former comrades. Kim Jong Un crosses into South, shakes hands with Moon GOYANG, April 27: With a single step over a weathered, cracked slab of concrete, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un... Kim Jong Un will walk across border for summit with Moon SEOUL, April 26: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon-Jae-in will plant a commemorative tree and inspect... We are starting construction of Kathmandu Tower in two months Bhawan Bhatta is the vice president of Non-Resident Nepalese Association (NRNA). ...	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3429
__label__wiki	0.773106	0.773106	Bold Justice: Trump appointed second-most federal judges through Sept. 1 of a president’s third year By Sara Reynolds We #SCOTUS, so you don’t have to The Supreme Court is currently in recess. The 2019-2020 term begins Oct. 7. Click here to read more about SCOTUS’ upcoming term. The Federal Vacancy Count The Federal Vacancy Count tracks vacancies, nominations, and confirmations to all United States Article III federal courts over a one-month period. This month’s edition includes nominations, confirmations, and vacancies from August 1 – 28, 2019. Vacancies: There was one new judicial vacancy since the July 2019 report. As of August 28, 103 of 870 active Article III judicial positions on courts covered in this report were vacant—a vacancy percentage of 11.8 percent. Under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, the president appoints Article III judges for what amount to lifetime terms on the federal bench. All such appointments must receive Senate confirmation. Article III judges include judges on the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeal, U.S. District Courts, and the Court of International Trade. Including the United States Court of Federal Claims and the United States territorial courts, 112 of 890 active federal judicial positions are vacant. Nominations: There were six new nominations since the July 2019 report. Confirmations: There were two new confirmations since the July 2019 report. Vacancy count for Aug. 28, 2019 One judge left active status, creating an Article III vacancy. As an Article III judicial position, this vacancy must be filled by a nomination from the president. Nominations are subject to Senate confirmation. Judge Rebecca Smith assumed senior status on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. For more information on judicial vacancies during President Trump’s first term, click here. A breakdown of the vacancies at each level can be found in the table below. For a more detailed look at the vacancies on the federal courts, click here. U.S. Court of Appeals vacancies There are currently four vacancies for U.S. Courts of Appeal judgeships. According to a Ballotpedia analysis of federal court vacancies between April 2011 and August 2019, this is the fewest number of vacant Courts of Appeal judgeships during this time. The second-lowest was in June 2019, with five vacancies. The highest number of vacancies—21—was in July, September, and October of 2017. The median number of vacancies was 14. New nominations President Trump announced six new nominations since the July 2019 report. Steven Menashi, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Jodi Dishman, to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma. Karen Marston, to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Richard Myers II, to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Sarah Pitlyk, to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Anuraag Singhal, to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The president has announced 211 Article III judicial nominations since taking office Jan. 20, 2017. The president named 69 judicial nominees in 2017 and 92 in 2018. For more information on the president’s judicial nominees, click here. New confirmations Since July 31, 2019, the Senate confirmed two of the president’s nominees to Article III courts. Miller Baker, confirmed to a seat on the United States Court of International Trade. Timothy Reif, confirmed to a seat on the United States Court of International Trade Since January 2017, the Senate has confirmed 146 of President Trump’s judicial nominees—99 district court judges, 43 appeals court judges, two Court of International Trade judges, and two Supreme Court justices. This is the second-most Article III judicial confirmations through this point in a presidency since Theodore Roosevelt. Only Bill Clinton, with 165 judicial appointments, had more. The average number of federal judges appointed by a president through September 1 of their third year in office is 82. The median number of Supreme Court justices appointed is two. William Taft’s (R) five appointments were the most among this set. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt (D), Jimmy Carter (D), and George W. Bush (R) did not appoint any justices through Sept. 1 of their third year in office. Trump has appointed two justices so far. The median number of United States Court of Appeals appointees is 18. Trump has appointed the most with 43. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt (R) and Woodrow Wilson (D) appointed the fewest with five each. Trump’s 43 appointments make up 24 percent of the total 179 appeals court judgeships. The median number of United States District Court appointees is 56. Clinton appointed the most with 135, and T. Roosevelt appointed the fewest with 10. Trump has appointed 99 district court judges. Those appointments make up 15 percent of the 677 judgeships across the district courts. Need a daily fix of judicial nomination, confirmation, and vacancy information? Click here for continuing updates on the status of all federal judicial nominees. Or, if you prefer, we also maintain a list of individuals President Trump has nominated. Sara Reynolds Sara Reynolds is a staff writer at Ballotpedia. Contact us at editor@ballotpedia.org.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3432
__label__wiki	0.935857	0.935857	Daily Labor Report® The E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, where the D.C. Circuit is located. Photographer: Greg Kahn/Getty Images Challenge to H-1B Spouses’ Work Permits Turns on Job Competition By Laura D. Francis Sept. 27, 2019, 7:55 PM Proof of competition needed to sue over regulation DHS proposal to end work permit program still under review An Obama administration regulation is harming the job prospects of U.S.-born tech workers, an attorney for those workers told a federal appeals court panel. The regulation was “designed to attract and retain H-1B workers,” John Miano of the Immigration Reform Law Institute told the court. It allows the “entry of aliens into the job market,” and that alone is proof of harm to U.S. workers’ interests, he said. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments Sept. 27 in a case that could decide the fate of some 100,000 mostly Indian women who were granted the right to work in the U.S. in 2015. Those spouses of H-1B specialty occupation workers can remain in the U.S. on H-4 visas. The regulation provides work permits to the H-4 spouses of H-1B workers who are waiting for green cards to become available. The U.S. tech workers in the case, who were displaced from their jobs at Southern California Edison by H-1B visa holders, say the regulation creates extra job competition and keeps them out of work. The Department of Homeland Security also acted outside its authority when it implemented the program, the workers say. Proposed Rescission Missing The case stalled for nearly two years after the DHS told the court it was working on a new regulation that would eliminate the program. But no proposed regulation has been released, and the agency recently said it would published one in the spring of 2020 at the earliest. That left the appeals court, which reopened the case last December, wondering what’s going on. “Why in the Lord’s name is it taking the department so long to revoke this rule?” Judge Laurence H. Silberman asked Justice Department attorney Matthew Glover, who represented the DHS before the court. Glover responded that the proposal was still undergoing review at the White House Office of Management and Budget, where it’s been since February. That review currently involves “engaging with stakeholders,” he said. Actual Harm Arguments in the case were limited to whether the U.S. workers can bring the lawsuit at all. To do so, they had to show that the regulation actually harms them. Resolution of that issue likely will turn on the extent to which competition for jobs can be used to prove that injury. Glover said Miano hasn’t shown that the H-1B workers and their spouses who benefit from the regulation directly compete with the former SCE workers, who sued after forming the organization Save Jobs USA. Not all H-1B visa holders benefit from the regulation, Glover said. It only applies to workers who’ve been approved for a green card, meaning the Labor Department has certified that there are no qualified, available Americans for that job, he said. Silberman, a former undersecretary of labor, said he’s familiar with the labor certification process, adding that those decisions aren’t “made with the same deliberation” as the court uses to make its decisions. Even if the DOL’s stamp of approval isn’t conclusive proof that a U.S. worker wasn’t passed over for a job, Glover said Save Jobs USA didn’t show that the “computer jobs” the spouses have are the same as the U.S. workers’, or that they are competing in the same California job market. Judge Thomas B. Griffith also expressed concern that the U.S. workers’ evidence of job competition was all anecdotal despite the opportunity to provide statistics. And Judge David S. Tatel pointed out that all evidence of competition involves H-1B workers, not the spouses with work permits. But the court has held in the past that merely showing that a regulation allows extra job competition is enough, without also having to prove that the competition exists, Miano said. Carl Goldfarb of Boies Schiller Flexner in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., also said the anecdotal evidence of job competition comes from 2014, a year before the regulation even came out. Goldfarb is representing Immigration Voice, an organization that advocates for immigrants in the green card backlog. The group was allowed to intervene in the case in support of the work permit program. Even if there was proof of job competition with H-1B workers, there’s no evidence the work permit regulation increased the number of such workers in the country, Goldfarb said. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Information Technology Industry Council, and the National Association of Manufacturers filed briefs in support of the regulations, but didn’t appear at the oral argument. The case is Save Jobs USA v. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., D.C. Cir., No. 16-05287, oral arguments 9/27/19. To contact the reporter on this story: Laura D. Francis in Washington at lfrancis@bloomberglaw.com To contact the editors responsible for this story: Martha Mueller Neff at mmuellerneff@bloomberglaw.com; Terence Hyland at thyland@bloomberglaw.com Laura D. Francis Ex-Employees of Southern California EdisonSue DHS Over H-4 Work Authorization Rule April 24, 2015, 4:00 AM Work Permits for Skilled Workers’ Spouses May Be Revised Trump Plan to End H-1B Spouse Work Permit Program Delayed Again Appeals Court Dusts Off Challenge to H-1B Spouses’ Work Permits White House Poised to End Work Permits for H-1B Spouses (2) Feb. 21, 2019, 1:17 PM Boies Schiller Flexner Edison International employment authorization documents (immigration) temporary work visas employee turnover and retention	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3433
__label__cc	0.727285	0.272715	Home » Report confirms Kentucky’s public charities provide needed services, boost economy Report confirms Kentucky’s public charities provide needed services, boost economy reportcover_0.jpg June 6, 2012 \| By: Carol Lea Spence Kentucky’s nonprofits are funded more through fees from program services and contracts than from contributions and grants, as stated in a report recently released by the Kentucky Nonprofit Network, an outreach program of the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture. The report also confirmed that the nonprofit sector is diverse and provides a broad spectrum of vital services to the commonwealth’s citizens. The report found that contributions, gifts and grants amount to only 12 percent of their revenue, approximately $2.7 billion, compared to about $19.6 billion from fees for program services and contractual partnerships—in most instances contractual relationships with government. This varies from the national average, which is typically a balance of 73 percent in fees and 22 percent in contributions and grants. “Kentucky nonprofits must become more active in negotiating adequate reimbursement for providing vital services for our communities,” said Danielle Clore, Kentucky Nonprofit Network executive director. “They also need to make their voices heard on public policy issues that impact the financial resources available to fund these vastly important services and programs that improve our quality of life.” In 2010, there were 13,436 charitable nonprofits in Kentucky registered with the Internal Revenue Service, compared to more than 1.16 million nationwide. These numbers do not include certain religious organizations that are automatically considered tax-exempt and are not required to file an annual tax return. Nonprofit organizations cover the gamut of services and expertise. The report found that human service organizations make up 38 percent of reporting organizations in Kentucky—by far the largest group. Education is the second largest group at 17 percent, and health care and mental health is the third largest at 14 percent. Organizations that focus on community improvement and societal benefit are 10 percent of the total; arts, culture and the humanities make up 9 percent; religion-related groups and those dedicated to spiritual development make up 7 percent; environment and animal-related businesses are 4 percent and the remaining 1 percent includes science, technology and social science research groups. Clore said they issued the report to educate the public, policymakers and the nonprofit sector itself. “Most don't understand how large and diverse the nonprofit sector is and the dollars involved,” she said. The nonprofit workforce is the country’s third largest, 15 times larger than the mining industry and 10 times larger than the agricultural industry. In Kentucky, one in 10 people are employed in the nonprofit sector. Expenditures by charitable nonprofits in Kentucky totaled $22.4 billion in 2010, which represents an average increase of nearly 10 percent per year over the past decade. “Kentucky’s nonprofits have huge economic impact through the value of the services they provide and their direct wages to employees and other expenditures,” said Justin Maxson, president of the Kentucky nonprofit organization Mountain Association for Community Economic Development. One of MACED’s missions is to invest capital and technical assistance in people and enterprises in 54 Kentucky Appalachian counties. Their goal is to create economic opportunities, protect assets and provide critical services. “From supporting economic development to restoring our environment to promoting our rich heritage, nonprofits are strategic assets to the state,” Maxson said. Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services Secretary Audrey Tayse Haynes served as senior vice president for the YMCA of the USA before joining Gov. Steve Beshear’s cabinet in April. “Kentucky’s nonprofit organizations are important partners in the cabinet’s efforts to improve the lives and health of Kentuckians,” Haynes said. “My life’s work has been in public service and nonprofits, so I know firsthand the important impact nonprofits have as employers, advocates and service providers. The work they do is critical to our communities and to the commonwealth.” The entire report is available at http://www.kynonprofits.org. The Kentucky Nonprofit Network is the state association of nonprofit organizations. It serves and strengthens Kentucky’s nonprofit sector through educational opportunities, consulting services, and resources for organizations and their leaders.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3434
__label__cc	0.713293	0.286707	Home » In rural Kentucky, strong demand for local foods In rural Kentucky, strong demand for local foods benniewinn.jpg Bennie Winn picks blackberries on his Muhlenberg County farm. Photo by Katie Pratt, UK agricultural communications. July 20, 2018 \| By: Katie Pratt Greenville, Ky. View the video, here. On a hot, humid Kentucky summer morning, Bennie Winn methodically handpicks blackberries and places them in quart-size containers on his Muhlenberg County farm. Just a few hours later, Muhlenberg Countians will arrive well before the county’s Farmers Market opens to get in line to purchase Winn’s blackberries from his cousin John Winn, who is another market vendor. Niche products with a short growing season like blackberries help drive customers to the farmers market, and they sell fast. A retiree of the Ford Motor Company in Louisville, Bennie Winn moved back to his hometown and decided to grow the berries as a hobby, as he fondly recalled picking them for his mother as a young boy. The local food movement may be most closely associated with large metropolitan areas, but it continues to gain traction in rural communities like Muhlenberg County. In 2017, sales at Kentucky farmers markets topped $14 million, up from $7.6 million in 2008. During the same time, 41 community farm markets have opened in the state and an additional 621 vendors have come on board. “Direct markets for produce in Kentucky are very strong,” said Tim Woods, agricultural economist with the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. “We still have some work to do, but we have some great distributor partners and retailers doing an awesome job.” In Muhlenberg County, the farmers market has averaged around 15 vendors a year since a permanent facility was built in Powderly in 2014. Vendors include everyone from full-time farmers to teachers. In 2017, these vendors had a gross revenue of $35,000, which is up from previous years, and a number they will likely surpass in 2018, according to Darrell Simpson, the county’s agriculture and natural resources extension agent. “The locally sourced movement is really starting to drive the market,” Simpson said. “We also have an aging population, and a lot of those folks have stopped growing gardens. It’s so much easier to go to the farmers market and buy that fresh, locally grown produce.” That is good news for growers like John Winn, who is the president of the county’s Farmers Market Association and sells a wide selection from fresh eggs to vegetables to mums at the market. Winn has always gardened, but now that he’s recently retired, he spends the majority of his time producing food. “We try to make the safest, nutritious crop available to our customers,” he said. “We also try to treat everybody fairly.” As a result of the growing market and a suggestion by the county extension council, the county’s Farmers Market Association and Cooperative Extension Service are hosting a Farm to Fork event on Aug. 11 to help introduce growers like the Winns to more consumers, further educate the public on local food production and grow the movement in this Western Kentucky county. “We are just trying to promote local produce and tell people what we have to go through to be able to sell a good quality crop at the market,” John Winn said. “We also want people to be aware that local food is a lot fresher, a lot more nutritious and a lot better for you.” Darrell Simpson, 270-338-3124; Tim Woods, 859-257-7270	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3435
__label__cc	0.529846	0.470154	CDC Report Estimates Half Of Black Gay/Bisexual Men Will Contract HIV "There are very few organizations to take care of it and there are very few dollars that are being shifted to it." - Earl Fowlkes DoNotUse Written By NewsOne Now \| 03.01.16 According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black gay and bisexual men have a fifty percent chance of being diagnosed with the HIV virus. The DailyRecord.com reports, “For the average American, the odds of an HIV infection is 1 in 99 and has been declining. But the risk varies widely for different groups. For example, the projection is 1 in 2 for gay black men but fewer than 1 in 2,500 for heterosexual white men. The lifetime risk of HIV contraction among gay men is 1 in 2 for Black men, 1 in 4 for Hispanic men, and 1 in 11 for White men. Statistics from the CDC indicate that in the last ten years, “from 2005 to 2014, the number of new HIV diagnoses among African American gay and bisexual men increased 22%. But that number stabilized in recent years, increasing less than 1% between 2010 and 2014.” The CDC blames the following socioeconomic factors for the disturbing rates of HIV in African-American gay and bisexual men: limited access to and use of quality health care lower income and educational levels higher rates of unemployment and incarceration On Tuesday’s edition of NewsOne Now, Earl Fowlkes, President of the Center for Black Equity, joined Roland Martin on set to discuss these alarming stats, the causes for the spike in infection, and what can be done to slow down the deadly disease. NewsOne Now panelist Cleo Manago took offense to the CDC’s reasoning as to the causes of the increase in the HIV infection rate saying, “There’s a lot of misconception about this disease.” He believes the issues of poverty and education are non-factors in the spread of the disease because there are “people who are poor without HIV, and it’s very difficult to find a homosexual or bisexual man who doesn’t understand that HIV is an issue and how to get it.” Manago faults the “Black HIV industry” for the rise in infections. He went so far as to call the industry “incompetent” and said it is “run by people who are gay activists as opposed to healthcare professionals and people that understand public health, epidemiology, and how to deal with communicable disease.” Earl Fowlkes explained that resources to fight the epidemic are “not allocated to where the need is great” and there are “fewer organizations now than there were 20 years ago to even do the work in the Black community.” He added, “The resources aren’t there, the organizations aren’t there because they died — they withered on the vine because of the lack of resources.” “Now we have this horrific pandemic that’s been affecting our community for years and there are very few organizations to take care of it and there are very few dollars that are being shifted to it,” Fowlkes said. He added, “This is a result of benign neglect.” Watch Roland Martin, Cleo Manago, Earl Fowlkes, and the NewsOne Now panel discuss the rise in HIV infections within the Black male gay and bisexual community in the video clip above. TV One’s NewsOne Now has moved to 7 A.M. ET, be sure to watch “NewsOne Now” with Roland Martin, in its new time slot on TV One. Subscribe to the “NewsOne Now” Audio Podcast on iTunes. TJMS/NewsOne Now Exclusive: Hillary Clinton Talks Black Women Entrepreneurs, Voting Rights, SCOTUS, & More CDC , Cleo Manago , HIV , HIV / AIDS , LGBT , newsone now , Roland Martin	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3437
__label__wiki	0.53649	0.53649	Next Time On… Everything Fit To Print The Bad Movie Club: The Do-Over Posted by Che Shabazz on June 1, 2016 in Bad Movie Club, Movies \|No Comments Another meeting of the Bad Movie Club where I watch shit so you don’t have to—unless you want to. Netflix gets a lot of attention as the premier platform for streaming. At one point you could even watch movies on there, that’s not really the case anymore, and now that they’re cracking down on VPNs the library grows even more disappointing by the day. Besides its very limited selection of decent original programming—a grand total of three shows—a very few decent stand-ups, and the excellent British shows they’ve managed to somehow get exclusive rights to in the US, there isn’t much to the Netflix library these days. One of the great feathers in the Netflix cap had been the back catalog of one Adam R. Sandler; his movies like Big Daddy, Mr. Deeds, Happy Gilmore, and The Waterboy were at one point some of the most watched on Netflix. Netflix then went on to lose many of the “good” Adam Sandler movies along with most of its film catalog only to completely misread the room and think the solution was to not try and get some of their film rights back but instead to continue to make original programming that no one neither asked for nor wanted and give Sandler a very lucrative three film deal. The first of those films is The Ridiculous 6 an insult to both westerns, classic Japanese film, Native Americans, Black people, anyone who likes Terry Crews (the only talented person in this insult of a film), anyone who likes movies, anyone who likes two hours of their life, anyone who likes comedy or action or romance, but most of all it’s an insult to humanity. But don’t worry Netflix just buried The Ridiculous 6 in their film archives, hoped you’d forget it existed and did the dumb thing and didn’t terminate Sandler’s contract. Really what they should have done is what Universal did when they finally saw final cut of Battleship and pay Hasbro to never make another movie with them ever again. But it’s too late for that now because the second of the three “movies” that Sandler will be releasing under Netflix is out—The Do-Over and I will give it this, it’s better than the first one. What’s Good About It The truth is the concept is a really good idea. In general Adam Sandler has really good ideas for movies but his execution is just abysmal. A movie about your childhood video games coming to destroy the world, one about two people who hate each other being stuck on a vacation together, a man gets a remote that can do anything and it ends up ruining his life, and of course—and idiot is a mall cop. All really solid ideas for films until you shit Kevin James, Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Nick Swardson all over them. But ther truth is besides the concept of the film—man who hates his life reconnects with an old friend who drags him on the journey of his life, only to discover that maybe that old friend isn’t as fun as he might have though—there isn’t much else to this hollow shell of a movie. I’d like to say that it manages to get something out of its weirdly talented supporting cast but the truth is that not only are Kathryn Hahn, Luis Guzmán, and Michael Chiklis wasted on this movie they are made sick jokes of themselves in the process. There was at least one or two times I actually laughed at the movie but for the life of me after it was over I couldn’t remember what those moments were either because of how truly forgettable even the brief moments of humor are or because they are so embroiled in actual garbage it’s hard to remember them. What’s Bad About It I could really just write everything here and move on to the “What Level of Bad are we Talking About” section but I haven’t really written nearly as much as I should have over the year so let me actually put some words on pages and earn those three page views. Adam Sandler has never been one for highbrow humor even when he was “good” but in The Do-Over Sandler really does try and out do himself. Along with a gratuitous close up of a sweaty ball sack there is a torture scene which is just a long anal rape joke. You will laugh during neither but if you cried I wouldn’t blame you. The movie runs an absurd hour and 50 minutes which would be excessive for even a good comedy but the fact that watching The Do-Over feels like being trapped at your shitty friends awful open mic night doesn’t really make the minutes fly by. There were at least three times that the movie felt like it was over and I would check the time and there would somehow still be 40 minutes left. I really can’t fault Sandler for what was basically an excuse to get Netflix to pay for a beach vacation for him and his friends. I just wish that his friends were talented instead of David Spade and Nick Swardson but it’s become very evident as the years go by that Adam Sandler has given up on any artistic vision—the days of Punch-Drunk-Love Adam Sandler are long gone I would even take Reign Over Me Sandler, a pretty bad movie but at least he tried. Adam Sandler’s last five non-animated movies have a total Rotten Tomatoes rating of 48% (for those of you doing the math that is 9.6% on average per movie). Of those five movies two of them were released under Netflix so there is no box office numbers but I can assure you Adam Sandler made a pretty penny. One of them was the Cobbler a very weird decision on everyone’s part involved and managed to lose a whopping 9.15 million dollars at the box office. Even when you take into account all of that those five movies made a total of 373.7 million dollars. Not to mention the money he’s made from the two Grown Ups movies, producing both Paul Barts, and whatever the fuck Just Go With It and Jack and Jill were. In Sandlers’ case it obviously pays to suck. What Level Of Bad Are We Talking So Bad You’ll Hate Yourself Even though you won’t have to shell out the $10+ dollars you would have in the past to see this piece of shit it will still have the impressive ability to make you regret all your life decisions. Should You Watch It Fuck. No. If you are truly starved for a comedy to watch on Netflix just type any other name into the search bar besides Adam Sandler, close your eyes, click. Follow Next Time On… on WordPress.com “Sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side.”	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3440
__label__cc	0.727197	0.272803	Nasdaq News Feed Home Technology Instant variation:: Merck & Co., Inc., (NYSE: MRK) Instant variation:: Merck & Co., Inc., (NYSE: MRK) NNF Team On 14-09-2020 (Monday), Shares of Merck & Co., Inc., (NYSE: MRK) displayed a change of -0.38 after which it closed the day’ session at $84.16. The volume amounted to 8176094 shares which compares with the average volume of 8.53M shares. Merck & Co., Inc., a USA based Company, belongs to Healthcare sector and Drug Manufacturers – General industry. The shares of Merck & Co., Inc. was among the active stocks of the last trading sessions. Performance Review: To clear the blur picture shareholders will need to look a little deeper. The LiveRamp Holdings, Inc. has shown a weekly performance of -1.27% and monthly performance stands at 0.74%. The stock has shown a quarterly performance of 13.7% and a half-year performance stands at 20.37%. Analyst recommendation for this stock stands at -7.47. The stock price moved with change of 0.1068 to its 50 Day low point and changed -0.0415 comparing to its 50 Day high point. Profitability Ratios: Looking into the profitability ratios of MRK stock, the investor will find its ROE, ROA, ROI standing at 39.3%, 12.2% and 19.2%, respectively. The current relative strength index (RSI) reading is 51.21. Target Price MRK: Target Price informs the investors, a stock survey at which a trader is willing to buy or sell a stock. Target pricing at which a trader projects that a buyer will buy a product. Analyst’s mean target price for the company is $95.71. The stock price volatility remained at 1.82 in recent month and reaches at 2.2 for the week. The Average True Range (ATR) is also a measure of volatility is currently sitting at 1.66. Simple Moving Averages MRK: The moving average is easy to calculate and once plotted on a chart, is a powerful visual trend-spotting tool. In theory, there is an infinite number of simple moving averages but the most common are three SMA20, SMA50 and SMA200. SMA20 is the last stop on the bus for short-term traders. Its distance from 20-days simple moving average is -0.96% and its distance from 50-days simple moving average is 2.94% while it has a distance of 2.71% from the 200-days simple moving average. Most Important details of Merck & Co., Inc. (EPS): EPS in next five year years is expected to touch -1.1% while EPS growth in past 5 year was -1.1% along with sales growth of % in the last five years. EPS growth in next year is estimated to reach 58.9% while EPS growth estimate for this year is set at 58.9%. Merck & Co. NYSE: MRK Previous articleData Shows Recession Fears May Be Overblown:: Cloudera, Inc., (NYSE: CLDR) Next articleIn A World Of Uncertainty: Murphy Oil Corporation, (NYSE: MUR) The Importance And The Opportunity:: NIKE, Inc., (NYSE: NKE) The Importance And The Opportunity:: Twitter, Inc., (NYSE: TWTR) Stocks perusal:: Tellurian Inc., (NASDAQ: TELL) Stock to track:: Ambev S.A., (NYSE: ABEV) Stock change summary:: Activision Blizzard, Inc., (NASDAQ: ATVI) Founded in 2019, Nasdaq News Feed focuses on company news, research and analysis, which is even more important in recently are uncertain investment environment. We provide comprehensive coverage of the most important news counting business, earnings reports, dividend, Acquisition & Merger, and global news. NasdaqNewsFeed.com tells the story of US Stocks Exchange, and it offers fresh, compelling content that’s useful and informative for its readers.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3441
__label__wiki	0.639049	0.639049	50 F. 3d 555 - Basf Corporation v. Symington Federal Reporter, Third Series 50 F.3d 50 F3d 555 Basf Corporation v. Symington 50 F.3d 555 BASF CORPORATION, Appellee, Darlene SYMINGTON, next friend or guardian ad litem for Darci Symington, an incompetent, Appellant. Eighth Circuit. Submitted Dec. 15, 1994. Rehearing and Suggestion for Rehearing En Banc April 27, 1995. Robert S. Bogard, St. Louis, MO, argued, for appellant. Stephen W. Plambeck, Fargo, ND, argued, for appellee. Before McMILLIAN, Circuit Judge, JOHN R. GIBSON, Senior Circuit Judge, and WOLLMAN, Circuit Judge. WOLLMAN, Circuit Judge. This is a Declaratory Judgment Act case. The district court granted relief, agreeing with the declaratory plaintiff that the defendant's imminent personal injury claim would be time-barred. Because we conclude that the district court should not have considered the plaintiff's statute of limitations affirmative defense via declaratory judgment action, we vacate the judgment and remand with directions to dismiss the complaint. * Darci Symington, a citizen of North Dakota, was born on July 19, 1966, at Pembina Memorial Hospital in Cavalier, North Dakota. While in the hospital, she was exposed to Loxene, a chemical manufactured by a predecessor to plaintiff. On July 25, 1991, Symington filed suit, through her personal representative, Darlene Symington, against BASF, a New Jersey corporation, in New Jersey court, alleging that this exposure caused her mental retardation. The next day, BASF filed this diversity action in the United States District Court for the District of North Dakota, seeking a declaration that North Dakota's statute of limitations barred Symington's claim. See Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2201. Symington filed a motion to dismiss the declaratory judgment action, based in part on the district court's discretionary power to refuse to hear declaratory actions. The district court denied the motion. Following a two-day trial, the district court determined that it needed guidance on North Dakota's limitations law and tolling provisions. Accordingly, the district court certified two questions of state law to the North Dakota Supreme Court. With answers to these questions in hand, see BASF Corp. v. Symington, 512 N.W.2d 692 (N.D.1994), the district court concluded that North Dakota law time-barred Symington's claim against BASF and entered a final judgment to that effect. (Symington's counsel at oral argument informed us that by informal agreement of the parties the New Jersey action has remained in discovery pending resolution of this case.) Symington appeals, contending that the district court abused its discretion in entertaining the declaratory judgment action. Symington also appeals the merits of the district court's North Dakota law analysis. Because we conclude the district court should have dismissed the action, we do not address the merits issues. In support of her argument that the district court abused its discretion in entertaining BASF's declaratory action, Symington asserts that 1) forum shopping concerns preclude allowing prospective defendants to preemptively raise affirmative defenses in the court of their choice by declaratory action; 2) in a related vein, declaratory plaintiffs like BASF should generally not be permitted to assert defenses in anticipation that they might be sued; 3) again in a related theme, declaratory relief should not be permitted in tort cases; and 4) a declaratory judgment here will unnecessarily complicate the New Jersey case, requiring the New Jersey court to consider complex and unresolved issues of federalism and preclusion law. * In this case, the declaratory plaintiff BASF is seeking to ward off suit by the injured party, Symington. In examining the propriety of such a declaratory action, we realign the parties to reflect the actual controversy underlying the action. Public Service Commission of Utah v. Wycoff Co., 344 U.S. 237, 248, 73 S.Ct. 236, 242-43, 97 L.Ed. 291 (1952). Here, Symington claims injury by BASF, and is therefore the natural plaintiff. Forum non conveniens case law states that the natural plaintiff's choice of forum is controlling unless " 'exceptional circumstances' " exist. Reid-Walen v. Hansen, 933 F.2d 1390, 1395 (8th Cir.1991) (quoting Gulf Oil Corp. v. Gilbert, 330 U.S. 501, 504, 67 S.Ct. 839, 840-41, 91 L.Ed. 1055 (1947)); accord, Piper Aircraft Co. v. Reyno, 454 U.S. 235, 255, 102 S.Ct. 252, 265-66, 70 L.Ed.2d 419 (1981); De Melo v. Lederle Laboratories, 801 F.2d 1058, 1062 n. 4 (8th Cir.1986). Additionally, the plaintiff is normally "master to decide what law he will rely upon...." The Fair v. Kohler Die & Specialty Co., 228 U.S. 22, 25, 33 S.Ct. 410, 411, 57 L.Ed. 716 (1913) (Holmes, J.). In this case, a critical--and indeed, argues Symington, dispositive--question of law is what statute of limitations will control. Forums are free to use local procedural law, including the statute of limitations. Sun Oil Co. v. Wortman, 486 U.S. 717, 722, 108 S.Ct. 2117, 2121-22, 100 L.Ed.2d 743 (1988). Symington seeks to proceed in New Jersey in large part to take advantage of what she anticipates will be a favorable statute of limitations ruling. Therefore, Symington's choice of law prerogatives are bound up with her choice of forum rights. District courts have discretion to decide whether to entertain declaratory judgment actions: "any court of the United States ... may declare the rights and other legal relations of any interested party seeking such declaration...." 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2201(a) (emphasis added); see Brillhart v. Excess Ins. Co., 316 U.S. 491, 494-97, 62 S.Ct. 1173, 1175-77, 86 L.Ed. 1620 (1942); United States Fidelity and Guaranty Co. v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc., 21 F.3d 259, 261 (8th Cir.1994). The Supreme Court articulated an "exceptional circumstances" test for determining whether federal courts should defer to parallel state litigation in Colorado River Water Conservation Dist. v. United States, 424 U.S. 800, 96 S.Ct. 1236, 47 L.Ed.2d 483 (1976) and Moses H. Cone Mem. Hosp. v. Mercury Constr. Corp., 460 U.S. 1, 103 S.Ct. 927, 74 L.Ed.2d 765 (1983). While the circuits are split on whether the Colorado River/ Moses H. Cone exceptional circumstances test applies to declaratory judgment cases, see Murphy Oil, 21 F.3d at 262 n. 4, 262-63, we have decided that only in exceptional circumstances should a district court stay or dismiss a declaratory judgment action subject to parallel state litigation, even if diversity of citizenship is the only jurisdictional foundation, id. at 261; Ins. Co. of Pennsylvania v. Syntex Corp., 964 F.2d 829, 834 (8th Cir.1992). We have applied differing standards of review to a district court's decision to proceed or abstain in such cases. In Murphy Oil, we applied an abuse of discretion standard. 21 F.3d at 263. In Century Indem. Co. v. McGillacuty's, Inc., however, we applied a de novo standard, stating that "we may substitute our judgment for the lower court's." 820 F.2d 269, 270 (8th Cir.1987) (per curiam ). McGillacuty's is distinguishable, however, because there the district court declined jurisdiction. Since the presumption is in favor of declaratory jurisdiction, a district court's decision to refuse jurisdiction should perhaps be subject to plenary review, rather than insulated by the abuse of discretion standard. See Murphy Oil, 21 F.3d at 263 n. 5; Interdynamics, Inc. v. Wolf, 698 F.2d 157, 167 nn. 9-10 (3rd Cir.1982); Exxon Corp. v. FTC, 588 F.2d 895, 900 (3rd Cir.1978). We need not linger over this distinction, for it is clear that we review a decision to go forward with a declaratory action based on diversity jurisdiction under an abuse of discretion standard. Murphy Oil, 21 F.3d at 263. In exercising their discretion whether to entertain declaratory actions, courts have on occasion stated that declaratory actions founded exclusively on a defense to a state law claim should be dismissed as a tactical maneuver calculated to deny potential plaintiffs of their traditional right to choose the forum and time of suit. Cunningham Bros., Inc. v. Bail, 407 F.2d 1165 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 395 U.S. 959, 89 S.Ct. 2100, 23 L.Ed.2d 745 (1969); Koch Eng'g Co. v. Monsanto Co., 621 F.Supp. 1204, 1207 (E.D.Mo.1985); Nat'l Union Fire Ins. Co. v. Lippert Bros., Inc., 233 F.Supp. 650, 656 (D.Neb.1964). See also Wycoff, 344 U.S. at 248, 73 S.Ct. at 242-43 (criticizing declaratory plaintiff's use of Declaratory Judgment Act for procedural advantage, but dismissing ultimately for lack of jurisdiction); First Fed. Sav. & Loan Ass'n v. Anderson, 681 F.2d 528, 533-34 (8th Cir.1982) (same); Lawrence County v. South Dakota, 668 F.2d 27, 30-31 (8th Cir.1982) (same). Declaratory judgment actions may on occasion merit "a closer look" to ensure that the declaratory plaintiff is not motivated by forum-shopping concerns. Northwest Airlines, Inc. v. American Airlines, Inc., 989 F.2d 1002, 1007 (8th Cir.1993); accord, Pacific Employers Ins. Co. v. M/V Capt. W.D. Cargill, 751 F.2d 801, 804 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 474 U.S. 909, 106 S.Ct. 279, 88 L.Ed.2d 244 (1985). "[A] suit for declaratory judgment aimed solely at wresting the choice of forum from the 'natural' plaintiff will normally be dismissed...." Allendale Mut. Ins. Co. v. Bull Data Systems, Inc., 10 F.3d 425, 431 (7th Cir.1993); accord, Nucor Corp. v. Aceros y Maquilas de Occidente, S.A. de C.V., 28 F.3d 572, 577-78 (7th Cir.1994); see also Kahn v. General Motors Corp., 889 F.2d 1078, 1082 (Fed.Cir.1989) (attempts to litigate by declaration issues pending elsewhere will be rejected absent "sufficient reason"). It is also true, however, that courts regularly consider the merits of affirmative defenses raised by declaratory plaintiffs, and so Symington is off the mark in advocating a blanket prohibition on raising affirmative defenses by declaratory action. Kelly v. Robinson, 479 U.S. 36, 40, 107 S.Ct. 353, 355-56, 93 L.Ed.2d 216 (1986) (entertaining without comment the affirmative defense of discharge in bankruptcy); Ernst & Young v. Matsumoto (In re United Ins. Mgmt., Inc.), 14 F.3d 1380, 1383-84 (9th Cir.1994) (statute of limitations); Hotel & Restaurant Employees Union v. J.P. Morgan Hotel, 996 F.2d 561, 563 (2d Cir.1993) (arbitration and award); Hoelzer v. City of Stamford, 933 F.2d 1131, 1135-37 (2d Cir.1991) (statute of limitations); Newman v. First Sec. Bank of Bozeman, 887 F.2d 973, 974-75 (9th Cir.1989) (discharge in bankruptcy); Barry v. Donnelly, 781 F.2d 1040, 1042-43, (4th Cir.1986) (statute of limitations); Shell Oil Co. v. Hickman, 716 F.Supp. 931 (W.D.Va.1989) (same). See also Beacon Theatres, Inc. v. Westover, 359 U.S. 500, 502, 508, 79 S.Ct. 948, 952, 955, 3 L.Ed.2d 988 (1959) (entertaining duress affirmative defense without comment and stating that any defense may be raised by declaratory action); Slice v. Sons of Norway, 34 F.3d 630, 633 (8th Cir.1994) (stating in dicta that the affirmative defense of estoppel could form the basis of an ERISA claim for declaratory relief). Likewise, Symington's similar alternative theory that alleged tortfeasors should never be allowed to seek declaratory relief also falls short. See Ernst & Young, 14 F.3d 1380 (entertaining tortfeasor's affirmative defense). None of the above-cited instances in which courts have seen fit to consider affirmative defense-based declaratory actions involved a threat to an injured party's right to choose its forum. As explained above, the natural plaintiff's choice of forum and law will be disturbed only in exceptional circumstances. Reid-Walen, 933 F.2d at 1394-95. Here, we are convinced that BASF's declaratory action in North Dakota is chiefly calculated to take advantage of favorable statute of limitations law. Symington has chosen to sue in New Jersey, and a judgment in the North Dakota declaratory action will complicate or possibly even preclude her suit there. This is a misuse of the declaratory judgment act of the type discussed above. It is our view that where a declaratory plaintiff raises chiefly an affirmative defense, and it appears that granting relief could effectively deny an allegedly injured party its otherwise legitimate choice of the forum and time for suit, no declaratory judgment should issue. That is the case here. In coming to this conclusion, we have examined the Colorado River/ Moses H. Cone exceptional circumstances factors adopted by Murphy Oil for use in declaratory judgment cases such as this one. 21 F.3d at 263. Despite the fact that forum shopping is not among the factors enumerated in Murphy Oil, it is appropriate that we consider it when relevant. See Federated Rural Elec. Inc. Corp. v. Ark. Elec. Coop., Inc., 48 F.3d 294, 299 (8th Cir. 1995). It must be held in mind that the exceptional circumstances test "does not rest on a mechanical checklist," Moses H. Cone, 460 U.S. at 16, 103 S.Ct. at 937, but rather "is to be applied in a pragmatic, flexible manner with a view to the realities of the case at hand," id. at 21, 103 S.Ct. at 940. See also Elmendorf Grafica, Inc. v. D.S. America (East), Inc., 48 F.3d 46, 50 (1st Cir. 1995) (describing the Supreme Court's lists of factors as "illustrative"); Caminiti & Iatarola, Ltd. v. Behnke Warehousing, Inc., 962 F.2d 698, 701 (7th Cir.1992) (reciting four exceptional circumstances factors in addition to the six articulated in Moses H. Cone and Colorado River ). The only one of the Colorado River/ Moses H. Cone factors worthy of separate comment here is the priority factor. This stems from the familiar first-to-file rule, but has in the context of parallel state-federal litigation developed to require an assessment not just of which case was filed first, but which has made more progress. Moses H. Cone, 460 U.S. at 21-22, 103 S.Ct. at 939-41. Here, of course, the federal declaratory action has resulted in a final judgment after trial, while the state action has by informal agreement of the parties remained in discovery. It should be kept in mind that an order refusing to dismiss is usually not appealable until the case is finally disposed of, as in this case by judgment after trial. Lauro Lines S.R.L. v. Chasser, 490 U.S. 495, 497-99, 109 S.Ct. 1976, 1977-79, 104 L.Ed.2d 548 (1989). Symington acted with due dispatch to bring the challenged refusal to dismiss before us. In such a case, the priority factor alone should not be dispositive when a district court refuses to dismiss. Any other rule would allow such refusals to evade meaningful review, since a decision to go forward will itself lead to progress. See Murphy Oil, 21 F.3d at 263 (parenthetically recognizing this phenomenon, but not in a forum shopping case). (We note that while the substantial body of Colorado River/ Moses H. Cone case law has yet to address the specific issue of what weight to accord progress stemming exclusively from a refusal to stay or dismiss, the priority factor in general has been criticized as leading to absurd results. Linda Mullenix, A Branch Too Far: Pruning the Abstention Doctrine, 75 GEO.L.J. 99, 124-25 (1986).) Here, the progress made in the declaratory case is not alone enough to deny Symington her choice of forum and law. The judgment granting declaratory relief is vacated, and the case is remanded to the district court with directions to dismiss the complaint.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3448
__label__wiki	0.730693	0.730693	A shadow play of distant histories Oli November 25, 2019 April 2, 2020 Live music, Music In parapatric speciation, where two populations diverge in adaptation to varied ecological niches without total reproductive isolation, a sequence of ‘ring species’ can evolve. A commonly cited example is of gulls distributed around the Arctic Circle, where geographically adjacent species, such as the European and American herring gulls, can interbreed, but where the species at either end of the sequence – in this example the European herring gull and the lesser black-backed gull – are mutually infertile. Similar phenomena can arise in cultural speciation, where the most distant cultures in a long chain of adjacent hybrids might look pretty alien to one another, but there is never any absolute structural barrier to cultural fusion. From India to Triana presents music and dance from two cultural regions that are not the ultimate terminals of the exchanges that connect them, but between which there is a significant distance, and elements of the practices that mediate them are missing from this fusion – specifically those that belong to the Arab world. It is also interesting to note that the space of hybridity that the performing group Rootless claim for this performance is a steeply asymmetrical one, with an entire subcontinent as large and diverse as Western Europe at one pole, and a single district of Seville at the other. Such a lop-sided relation might accurately describe the character of the exchanges between, say, New York’s Lower East Side and the very widespread sources of its historical Jewish immigration, but no such mass-migratory relationship exists between Triana and India. The performance that Rootless presents is an imaginative journey then, not a literal one, but for me the experience was more of a meeting-in-the-middle, than a convergence of Indian cultures on one of the historic birthplaces of Flamenco. The nine performers we saw each brought whatever cultural materials they commanded to the table, and found their common ground, which is considerable. Without a more detailed knowledge of the source cultures it was impossible for me to determine exactly what came from where. The overall format of the performance was consistent with the episodic character of Flamenco performances that I’ve seen, but was also reminiscent of alap, the performance schema of Hindustani classical music. Although it is impossible to generalise about ‘Indian music’, improvisation on set modal and rhythmic materials is a common theme there, and Flamenco could be characterised in a similar way – although it is probably more accurate to speak of embellishment than invention with regard to the traditional musics of southern Spain. The fusion was quite seamless: only a corpse could fail to notice that there were stylistic differences among the dancers, between the percussionists or between the vocalists, but there were common formal elements of fluidity, lyricism, polyrhythm, melismatic vocalisation and so forth, while the sequential structure of the performance allowed each dancer and musician to present their materials as an integral part of a coherent whole. Clearly a fusion, a celebration of cultural commonalities, is also an opportunity to note and celebrate difference. Spanish Romani dance appears to involve more dramatic skirt-waving and less intricate footwork than Flamenco; the Indian dance we saw, aside from its more obvious differences, seems to accord more importance to the face and hands than the Spanish traditions, and to have a more explicitly narrative content, abetted perhaps by the clear denotations of the mudras (hand gestures) that are employed. But it is important to bear in mind, when watching a performance like this, that some expertise would be required to distinguish between the inclinations of the individual performers and those of their respective practices. For example, tocaore Daniel Martinez plays his guitar with forward rhythmic and melodic intricacy, while sitarist Ewa Adamiec cleaves to a more accompanimental approach, but this does not reflect any parallel distinction between the roles of the two instruments in their traditional contexts. As I lack a detailed knowledge of any of the raw materials from which From India to Triana is constructed, I was content to take the performance as given, or in a more cosmopolitan sense, as an artistic collaboration between a number of creative individuals, rather than a merging of traditions. However it is interpreted, it is a performance which passes through many dynamic and dramatic positions, layering and modulating its various textural resources to weave a constantly transforming cloth of narrative warp and affective weft. Like the weather in Glasgow, if you don’t like it you only have to wait a few minutes and it will be quite different, although for me there was no call to wait anything out. While Rootless incorporate a variety of performance techniques, the heart of the show is the human body, and its capacity to visibly and audibly embody subjective experience. Both Spanish and Indian vocals deploy melisma and complex phrasing virtuosically, to produce an emotional discourse that is as precise and particular as it is compelling. All four dancers move in ways that speak not just of rhythm, not just of the erotic jouissance of the human form in flow, but of lives lived, and experiences internalised. The percussion and stringed instruments bridge these two domains, with the guitar and tablas in particular drawing parallels between the movements of bodies and the unpredictable flux of voices. My ignorance left me, and I suspect many other members of the audience, disconnected from the history of the sounds and sights I encountered in fusion here. Given the complexity of the music and dance, and the enigmatic but clearly deeply ingrained language which they articulated, the effect was of a dimension lost, an involute three-dimensional geometry projected forward onto a screen. I loved the surface that I apprehended, with its psychedelic intricacies made all the more intriguing and exotic by my inability to interpret them with certainty; but at the same time I thought of an article I read recently, in which I learned that modern audiences of Indonesian wayang shadow puppetry tend to view the show from the same side of the screen as the puppeteer. Sometimes the mechanics of a performance help us to appreciate its surface. While mutual fertility is never excluded by cultural distance – as it is by genetics for the terminal members of a sequence of ring species – to truly appreciate the undoubtedly beautiful children of such a union requires an acquaintance with both parents. What this absorbing fusion articulates most forcefully, irrespective of that acquaintance, is that at either of its poles are human beings with the same fierce need to give voice to their experience. dance, Flamenco, From India to Triana, gypsy dance, gypsy music, Indian Classical music, Indian dance, Indian music, Rootless Previous Truth, warmth and swing Next Knowledge, from extraction to production	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3451
__label__cc	0.500051	0.499949	Historic Huguenot Street is honored to present a remarkable acquisition, a letter to the New York State Legislature from Hendrick Aupaumut, Mohican sachem (traditional leader) and diplomat. The letter was received as a gift to the Historic Huguenot Street Archives by Mary Frances Stokes-Jensen in 2016. The letter is believed to have been acquired by Joseph Hasbrouck, the donor's ancestor. Hasbrouck was a general during the Revolutionary war and served in the militia after the war. He was a New York State senator from 1791 to 1796, around the same time that Hendrick Aupaumut was leading the Stockbridge Mohicans and the tribe was forced to leave the New York area. The letter was originally exhibited as part of the “Brotherhood and Belonging” event held in September 2019. The exhibit was accompanied by text written by Lisa Brooks, Professor of English and American Studies and Chair of American Studies, Amherst College. Her text has been included in this online exhibit. Bonney Hartley, HHS Board Trustee and Tribal Historic Preservation Manager, Stockbridge-Munsee Community, was an advisor on the project. Josephine Bloodgood HHS Director of Curatorial & Preservation Affairs Mohican People → Hendrick Aupaumut Mohican People About Aupaumut Letter to the New York State Legislature Letter Transcription Brotherhood & Belonging This Hudson River Valley Heritage exhibit was created by Historic Huguenot Street.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3452
__label__cc	0.591947	0.408053	Fact Check: No, Hillary Is NOT Going To Get Rid Of The Second Amendment James DeVinne James DeVinne is a student at American University in Washington,… Fact Check: Trump Towers WAS Built With Undocumented Polish Labor Donald Trump has repeated the blatantly false claim that Hillary Clinton would eliminate the second amendment in a racially-tinged hypocritical rant with little basis in fact. Trump’s repeated claims that Mrs. Clinton would “abolish the second amendment” have been debunked over and over again but that did not stop him from repeating those demagogic claims. Minutes after the exchange during the debate his campaign tweeted that the second amendment “will not survive” a Clinton presidency. In reality, Hillary Clinton has never called for anything approaching the repeal of the second amendment. Instead she has advocated common-sense gun control measures that are supported by the majority of the American people, namely universal background checks, prohibitions on straw purchases to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, violent criminals, and the mentally ill, and the ending of special immunity for the arms industry. The only reason these sensible regulations – which would save thousands of lives – are not on the books in the first place is the massive lobbying campaign of the NRA and the demagogic politicians like Mr. Trump who take up their rhetoric in an attempt to appeal to the extremist conservative base. Indeed Trump himself has repeatedly backed new gun control measures in the past. Just last month he suggested that police officers should simply “take the guns away” when they find them on American citizens. This is the very government gun-grabbing that is one of the Republican fear mongers’ favorite straw man arguments whenever Democrats propose the simplest of gun regulations. No Democratic politician has ever proposed such blatant gun confiscation but its no problem for Donald Trump, at least when the gun-owners are African-Americans. The exchange on gun control in the debate was focused on a 2008 Supreme Court decision that found that the right to bear arms is an individual rather than a class right and overturned District of Columbia laws the restricted handgun ownership. Clinton has indeed said that she disagrees with the decision but has made clear that she does not want to see it overturned. The heart of the matter is whether we are going to accept the indisputable facts that looser gun laws translate to more gun violence and more death or continue to believe the delusional propaganda of the NRA and their Republican stooges. They are willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of Americans every year for the sake of an abstract “freedom” to own all manner of mass death machines, a freedom not enjoyed by the hundreds of thousands of Americans killed by gun violence. James DeVinne is a student at American University in Washington, DC majoring in International Service with a focus on the Middle East and South Asia. He is a founding member of Occupy Baltimore and interns at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. James DeVinne October 20, 2016	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3456
__label__wiki	0.816326	0.816326	31 Firms Join The Climate Pledge Thirty-one companies have now joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early. 13 new signatories—Atos, Brooks, Canary Wharf Group, Coca-Cola European Partners, ERM, Groupe SEB France, Harbour Air, ITV, Microsoft, Neste, Rubicon, Unilever, and Vaude—have joined The Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s goal of 2050. Signatories to The Climate Pledge agree to: Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon emission elimination strategies Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040 “Last year, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge to encourage companies to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement ten years early. Today, we have exciting news: 13 more companies, including Unilever and Microsoft, are joining this commitment to confront climate change together and save the planet for future generations,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “There are now 31 companies from around the world that have signed The Climate Pledge, and collectively we are sending an important signal to the market that there is significant and rapidly growing demand for technologies that can help us build a zero-carbon economy.” As a leader in secure and decarbonized digital services, Atos’ mission is to pave the way for a carbon-neutral and sustainable economy through technology innovations. Committed to reducing its environmental footprint and helping businesses succeed in their climate ambitions, Atos uses digital solutions and highly specialized skills to offer one of the most comprehensive approaches to decarbonization in the market. This year, Atos announced its commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2035 across scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions, setting the highest decarbonization standards for its industry and accelerating its decade-long environmental program. Brooks’ commitment to sustainability spans a decade, and the high-performance running brand recently adopted a roadmap to reduce scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions in line with climate science, and to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. Canary Wharf Group Canary Wharf Group (CWG) is responsible for Europe’s biggest urban regeneration project in London, and has delivered one of the largest environmentally certified portfolios in the UK, with over 10 million square feet of sustainably certified buildings to date. As part of its commitment to The Climate Pledge, CWG has launched its net-zero carbon pathway, setting out tangible steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions, to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) aspires to become net zero by 2040 across its entire value chain, and it will reduce its absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030, in alignment with a 1.5°C pathway and the Science-Based Targets Initiative. CCEP has already reduced its emissions across its value chain by 30.5% since 2010 by shifting to using 100% renewable electricity with the support of RE100; reducing the energy intensity of its cold drink equipment fleet by 60% since 2010; and reducing its use of virgin oil-based plastic by a third in its PET bottles. ERM works with companies around the world to help them identify and address critical climate risks and opportunities. ERM’s deep experience in climate science, policy, and economics, coupled with its digital expertise, provides its clients with the tools and insights required to navigate the complexities of the transition to a low-carbon future. ERM is acutely aware of its responsibility to reduce its own footprint through better energy management, so the company has switched to renewable power and is seeking credible approaches to offset emissions from travel. Groupe SEB France Aware of its responsibility to create a more sustainable planet, Groupe SEB France is committed to reducing the environmental impacts stemming from its business activities. Since first establishing its environmental commitments, Groupe SEB France has recorded a 21% decrease in the energy used at its industrial and logistics sites, exceeded its objective on recycling with 35% of recycled materials in its products and packaging, and exceeded its goal on the reduction of logistics-related carbon emissions, with a 33% reduction per unit sold. Harbour Air Named one of Canada’s best managed companies for 11 consecutive years, Harbour Air has been calculating and offsetting the airline’s carbon footprint for over a decade. In 2007, the regional airline became the world’s first and only carbon-neutral airline. Since then, Harbour Air has offset 100% of its emissions associated with seaplane fuel use and corporate operations. Last year, Harbour Air took its commitment to sustainability one step further, and on December 10, 2019, the airline successfully converted and achieved the world’s first flight of a fully electric commercial aircraft. The ePlane is now being certified and approved by the FAA and Transport Canada—a critical next step in Harbour Air’s goals to become the first fully electric commercial airline. ITV, the UK TV company, believes that television has a critical role to play not only in reducing emissions, but also in shifting culture and creating the new normal. ITV has committed to becoming net zero in operations, productions, and business travel by 2030. The company’s strategy for achieving net-zero emissions is to reduce its impact to be as close to zero as possible--in line with the latest climate science. The company will also sequester the emissions it absolutely cannot reduce through third party-verified tree planting and blue-carbon offsetting projects. In January 2020, Microsoft committed to being carbon negative by 2030 and remove from the environment all the carbon it has emitted directly or by electrical consumption by 2050. The company has been carbon neutral since 2012 and is committed to promoting sustainable development and low-carbon business practices globally through its cloud-enabled technologies. Collaboration is key for Microsoft to meet its ambitious commitments and help partners and customers meet their own climate goals—that is one of the primary reasons Microsoft is signing on to The Climate Pledge. Neste, a global leader in renewable and circular solutions, is the first major energy company to sign The Climate Pledge. 15 years ago, Neste decided to transform from an oil company to a renewable products company. Since then, Neste has been consistently recognized for its pioneering sustainability leadership. The company has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for 14 consecutive years and three years in the top three of the Global 100 list of the world’s most sustainable companies by Corporate Knights. Continuing the journey, Neste has set two ambitious climate commitments—to reduce customers’ greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 million tons annually by 2030, and to reach carbon neutral production by 2035. These goals are driven by Neste’s purpose to create a healthier planet for our children. Rubicon is a software company that provides smart waste and recycling solutions for businesses and governments worldwide. Using technology to drive environmental innovation, they help businesses become more sustainable enterprises, and help neighborhoods become greener and smarter places to live and work. Through the design and implementation of circular solutions—which divert waste away from landfills--they help partners cut greenhouse gas emissions and create a more sustainable world. Rubicon’s mission is to end waste by helping its partners find economic value in their waste streams and confidently execute on their sustainability goals. Unilever first set value chain greenhouse gas footprint targets from cradle to grave back in 2010, as part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. These include halving the greenhouse gas footprint of its products across the value chain and to have no greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations by 2030. The latter target was introduced in a new strategy launched in 2015 ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) and included a shift to 100% renewable energy by 2030, with an interim milestone of 100% renewable grid electricity worldwide by 2020—which was achieved in January this year. In June this year, Unilever committed to net zero emissions from all its products, from sourcing to point of sale, by 2039. Vaude is committed to reducing its carbon emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. Since 2012, the company’s headquarters have been certified as climate neutral. Vaude has now set an ambitious, science-based goal to produce all of its products worldwide with climate-neutral manufacturing. “The Paris Agreement set out a unifying roadmap for all countries and all people to address the climate crisis by taking action,” said Christiana Figueres, the UN’s former climate change chief and Global Optimism founding partner. “By joining The Climate Pledge, signatories are not just making a statement of commitment to the future, they are setting a pathway to significant actions and investments that will create jobs, spur innovation, regenerate the natural environment, and help consumers to buy more sustainable products starting now.”	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3458
__label__wiki	0.885238	0.885238	Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History Oxford Research Encyclopedias African History Afrocentrism Colonial Conquest and Rule Early States and State Formation in Africa East Africa and Indian Ocean Historical Preservation and Cultural Heritage Historiography and Methods Image of Africa Intellectual History Invention of Tradition North Africa and the Gulf Northeastern Africa Oral Traditions Slavery and Slave Trade Full Article (36) Colonial Conquest and Rule (5) East Africa and Indian Ocean (2) Historical Preservation and Cultural Heritage (4) Historiography and Methods (16) Image of Africa (2) Intellectual History (36) Invention of Tradition (3) North Africa and the Gulf (1) Northeastern Africa (1) Oral Traditions (1) Religious History (4) Slavery and Slave Trade (1) Women’s History (2) 1-20 of 36 Results for: Intellectual History x African Biography and Historiography Heather Hughes Biography in the African context can take many forms, from brief entries in a biographical dictionary or obituary in a newspaper to multivolume studies of single individuals. It can encompass one or many subjects and serves both to celebrate the famous and illuminate obscure lives. Biographies can be instructional as well as inspirational. Sometimes, it is hard to draw a line between biography and autobiography because of the way a work has been compiled. An attempt is made to understand this vast range of forms, with reference to social and political biography. The main focus is on work produced since the 1970s, with examples drawn from all regions of sub-Saharan Africa (although Southern Africa is better represented than others, as is English-medium material). Matters that preoccupy biographers everywhere, such as the relationship between writer and subject and the larger relationship between biography and history, are raised. Biography can be an excellent entry point into the complexities of African history. African Feminist Thought Amina Mama African feminist thought refers to the dynamic ideas, reflections, theories and other expressions of intellectual practices by politically radical African women concerned with liberating Africa by focusing women’s liberation, and as such cannot be easily defined or captured. However, the conditions out of which Africa’s feminist movements form, and the intellectual labor that they carry out in the pursuit of women’s rights and freedoms can be explored and discussed. African feminist thought is the potentially limitless product of movements that are themselves constantly in the making, succeeding in changing the conditions of their formation by their very existence. African feminist political thought can be traced to the world’s women’s movements that formed in the context of transnational liberal and emancipatory political discourses of the late 19th and 20th centuries of European empire. Out of these liberal emancipatory reformist, international labor, communist, socialist revolutionary, and Pan-African Diasporic and African nationalist movements were all formed. However, following the flag independence of over fifty nation-states, women who joined the anti-colonial freedom movements have had to pursue further struggles in independent nation-states, because Africa’s new states often hesitated or reverted to conservative patriarchal views when it came to extending freedom and equality to African women. It is as citizens of new nations that 20th century African women have formed independent feminist movements that continue to demand freedom, equality and rights, for example, by seeking freedom of movement, political representation, educational and economic equality, and perhaps most commonly of all, freedom from sex and gender-based violence. Contemporary publications and writings by African feminists are the primary sources consulted here, because of the need to correct the spurious mis-representation of African feminism as “un-African,” a position that hinges on the definition of feminism as exclusively Western. This view is advanced by conservative African men and women who seek the restoration of pre-colonial cultures, as well as in some of the early scholarly literature on the subject. African feminism is a radical proposition: it refers to the liberatory political philosophies, theories, writings, research and cultural production, as well as the organizing work of the transnational community of feminists from Africa. These respond to objective conditions of global systemic inequality that have led African women to resume the struggle for freedom and liberation. African feminists in 2019 identify with earlier generations of women freedom fighters but enunciate visions of a future in which the women of Africa will be afforded human rights and freedoms, on a continent liberated from a global neoliberal capitalist system that continues to marginalize the vast majority of the world’s peoples and exploits natural and human resources to a degree that now threatens planetary survival. African Philosophies of History and Historiography Toyin Falola and Abikal Borah Since the late 1950s, the field of African historiography has undergone many changes. While discussing African philosophies of history, one must acknowledge shifts within the discipline of history and the Afrocentric vision of historical scholarship as two constitutive processes through which different historiographical trends have come into being. It is difficult to take an essentialist position on African philosophies of history, because Africa has been at the center of various transnational and global processes of historical formation. As a result, the scope and scale of African historiography signals a variety of entanglements. The imperative lies in recognizing such entanglements in the longue durée of Africa’s past, to dislodge the narrowly framed imagination attached to African historiography. Considering the complexity of the terrain, it would be appropriate to view African philosophies of history and historiography from three different vantage points. Firstly, historical scholarship centering on Africa has produced critiques of the post-Enlightenment philosophy of history in Europe and elsewhere. This strand highlights the interventions posed by African historiography that decenter a globalized philosophical tradition. Secondly, the inclusion of African indigenous epistemological formations into historical scholarship has transformed the scope of African historiography. This shows shifts in the methodological approaches of historical scholarship and highlights the question of access to the multiplicity of Africa’s past. Thirdly, Pan-Africanism and Afropolitanism expanded the scope and scale of the African philosophy of history by thinking through the transnational and global connections of Afrocentric thought. In other words, Afrocentric historiography attends to the ideas of globalism and cosmopolitanism within its scope and scale. The Ahiara Declaration Samuel Fury Childs Daly The Ahiara Declaration was a speech made by Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the head of state of the secessionist Republic of Biafra, on June 1, 1969, in the town of Ahiara. It was issued in the final year of the war between Nigeria and Biafra, also known as the Nigerian Civil War. The Eastern Region of Nigeria seceded from Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra in May 1967 following a series of mass killings of easterners, especially members of the Igbo ethnic group, in northern Nigeria the previous year. In his address, Ojukwu gave a partisan account of the war and the events leading up to it, rallied Biafrans to continue the fight, and set out a political philosophy that would guide Biafra from that point on. It was written by a committee of Biafran intellectuals, most notably the novelist and poet Chinua Achebe. The declaration had multiple meanings: it was both ideology and propaganda, and it served both proscriptive and descriptive purposes. Its influences included the broader intellectual currents of black internationalism, a novel theory of radical anticolonialism, and the idea of “African Socialism”—a communitarian philosophy that emerged in distinction to socialist thought in other regions of the world. The Ahiara Declaration was not meaningfully implemented, both due to limited resources and to the fact that Biafra was defeated six months later. Nonetheless, the declaration is an important source for Nigeria’s history, and for the broader study of political philosophy in postcolonial Africa. Amílcar Lopes Cabral, 1924–1973 Abel Djassi Amado Amílcar Cabral, the founding father of Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau, was one of the African political leaders who masterfully exercised key and decisive roles in the twin realms of political action and theoretical development. As the founding leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, Cabral wore several hats: he was the chief diplomat and the commander in chief of the liberation movement; he was also the master organizer of the party and of the incipient state in the liberated areas. Yet, Cabral was far from solely a man of action; he developed a complex and sophisticated political theory of national liberation that gave substance and meaning to political action. Anthropological and Ethnographic Methods and Sources For scholars of African history, anthropology offers a number of valuable and invigorating methodological avenues, from engaging directly in ethnographic fieldwork to analyzing anthropological data compiled by others. Given the asymmetries of written documents and the biases of archival material for Africa, anthropological methods and sources offer a different type of access to those who, for various reasons, tend not to appear in other forms of documentary record. The materials of past ethnographic research—texts and material objects, produced and collected by anthropologists and their assistants as well as by missionaries, government officials, travelers, and others—constitute one of the largest categories of written source material. However, the contexts in which such research was conducted can present certain challenges when using these materials as sources. For example, the complex entanglements between colonial governance and the making of anthropological knowledge make it imperative for historians to be aware of the discipline’s intellectual history and how its ways of seeing and ordering have shaped portrayals of Africa’s diverse cultures. Methodologically, historians are also experimenting with field methods that draw heavily on ethnographic techniques. The emergence of historical ethnography has developed a rich, syncretic approach, in which communities’ own relationships with, and understandings of, the past are brought to the fore. Although ethnography is known for its immersive and long-term fieldwork, elements of the technique can also be incorporated into other historical methods. This is in part a matter of approach, rather than of different source material. For example, engaging ethnographically with archives can offer different insights into issues of governance and the production of knowledge. Colonial History and Historiography Marie-Albane de Suremain The colonial condition in Africa has been revisited by all of the main historiographic currents of thought, from a heroizing, highly political and military history of colonization primarily considered from the colonists’ standpoint, to a much more complex and rich history integrating the colonized perspective. This history has been enhanced by contributions from Postcolonial Studies and Subaltern Studies as well as from New Imperial History and perspectives opened by its global interconnected history. At the intersection of these issues and methods, colonial studies offers an innovative reinterpretation of various facets of colonial Africa, such as the factors and justifications for colonial expansion; conquests and colonial wars; processes of territorial appropriation and border demarcation; and the organization and control of the colonies. In these fundamentally inegalitarian societies, accommodation and social and cultural hybridization processes were also at work, as well as multiple forms of resistance or subversion that paved the way for African states to win their independence. In addition to the role played by the First and Second World Wars, the emergence of nationalist and separatist movements helps to clarify the multifaceted nature of these independences, when approached from a political as well as a cultural and social perspective, while questioning the durability of the legacy of the colonial phase in African history. Cory Library for Humanities Research Jeff Peires Cory Library in Makhanda (Grahamstown), South Africa, was established on the basis of historical papers bequeathed by Sir George Cory, a professor of chemistry and enthusiastic amateur historian. Initially characterized by a strong settler and colonial bias, the Library was transformed by the deposit of records from black tertiary institutions threatened by the apartheid “Extension of Universities Education” Act of 1959. These included the valuable manuscripts of the Lovedale Press, which had been, for many years, the sole publisher of books in isiXhosa and other African languages. Civic organizations such as the Black Sash, the End Conscription Campaign, and the Surplus Peoples Project, which sprang up following the Soweto uprising of 1976, likewise deposited their records. The Cory Library thus became a valuable resource for all the peoples of the Eastern Cape, rather than only for its privileged sector. Its unique and comprehensive collection of books, maps, manuscripts, official documents, and visual representations across all disciplines of all things Xhosa and Eastern Cape make the Cory Library an essential resource for all researchers with interests in this area. The Dakar School of African History Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch The Dakar School, as the historians of Cheikh Anta Diop University (the University of Dakar) were called, had a brief French antecedent in Yves Person, whose teachings communicated to students the importance of African oral sources. He himself worked primarily on such sources from the 19th century. The Dakar School was then taken over and given its name by the young Guinean historian Boubacar Barry, who had been based in Senegal since the 1960s. Research collaborations between Cheikh Anta Diop University and the University of Paris 7 (today known as Paris-Diderot) then became active through exchanges involving both instructors and doctoral students. The Senegalese department strengthened over time, thanks to well-established historians, a number of them being non Senegalese scholars expelled from their own country by dictatorial regimes such as Boubacar himself or others who taught several years in Dakar such as Sekene Mody Cissoko, a well known Malian historian, or Thierno Moctar Bah from Guinea. After Boubacar Barry, the department was headed successively between the years 1975 and 2000 by Mbaye Gueye, Mamadou Diouf, Mohamed Mbodj, Penda Mbow, Ibrahima Thioub, and Adrien Benga, among others. They and their colleagues understood how to maintain and reinforce the quality and cohesion of an original and diverse research department over the course of many years, one that was simultaneously independent of any political power and rather opponent to any authoritarian State and tolerant toward its colleagues. Among them, several scholars are currently enjoying late careers in the United States, while Ibrahima Thioub has become vice chancellor of Cheikh Anta Diop University. However, their succession has been consistently assured by their own doctoral students. Nowadays, does the “Dakar school” still exist? Yes because historians remain proud of and faithful to this innovative past, no because Senegalese historians are now part of the world wide international community of historians. Documentary Sources and Methods for Precolonial African History Christina Mobley The goal of African history is not only to establish a chronology of events but also to recover the past from the local African perspective. The challenge is how to recover local ways of knowing and being in societies far different from the perspectives of both the contemporary scholar and the authors of many of the sources used to write history. For written documents, the question is how to extract meaningful data from sparse, biased, or unreliable texts. In a historical context, a documentary source is writing, whether ink or inscription, on material such as paper, papyrus, ceramic, stone, or any of the other surfaces upon which, in relation to Africa, Africans and travelers to Africa have chosen to write the continent’s history. While more and more written evidence from precolonial Africa is coming to light, the relative dearth of documents remains a major challenge for scholars seeking to investigate Africa’s past. This paucity also means that those sources available should be examined especially carefully with an eye to bias and to context. Such careful, grounded examination has not always been a strength of the field, which was initially divided between scholars who dismissed documentary sources (perceived as written by outsiders) as unreliable, and those who uncritically accepted them as eyewitness observation. Neither approach is helpful for historians seeking a nuanced understanding of Africa’s past. Used critically, written documents can provide a window into how human actors understood themselves, their history, specific events, and the world around them, which is difficult to discern in the absence of textual or visual representation. Scholars have developed to major strategies to utilize the unique strengths of documentary sources whilst minimizing their weaknesses. Firstly, historians pay close attention to local context, cultural bias, and pre-existing genealogies of knowledge about Africa and Africans evident in textual sources. Secondly, historians triangulate between different kinds of historical methods and sources such as archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, oral tradition, and even genetics and palynology. Education in Colonial Sudan, 1900–1957 Iris Seri-Hersch In the first half of the 20th century, Sudan, which included the territories of present-day Sudan and South Sudan, was ruled by a dual colonial government known as the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956). Britain was the senior partner in this administration, Egypt being itself politically and militarily subordinated to Britain between 1882 and 1956. During most of the colonial period, Sudan was ruled as two Sudans, as the British sought to separate the predominantly Islamic and Arabic-speaking North from the multireligious and multilingual South. Educational policy was no exception to this: until 1947, the British developed a government school system in the North while leaving educational matters in the hands of Christian missionaries in the South. In the North, the numerically dominant government school network coexisted with Egyptian schools, missionary schools, community schools, and Sudanese private schools. In the South, schools were established by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, the Roman Catholic Verona Fathers, and the American Presbyterian Mission. Whereas Arabic and English were the mediums of instruction in Northern schools, the linguistic situation was more complicated in the South, where local vernaculars, English and Romanized Arabic were used in missionary schools. The last colonial decade (1947–1957) witnessed a triple process of educational expansion, unification, and nationalization. Mounting Anglo-Egyptian rivalries over the control of Sudan and the polarization of Sudanese nationalists into “pro-British” independentists and “pro-Egyptian” unionists led the British authorities in Khartoum to boost government education while giving up the policy of separate rule between North and South. In practice, educational unification of the two Sudanese regions meant the alignment of Southern curricula on Northern programs and the introduction of Arabic into Southern schools, first as a subject matter, then as a medium of instruction. Missionary and other private schools were nationalized one year after Sudan gained independence from Britain and Egypt (1956). The Ethiopian Red Terror Jacob Wiebel The Red Terror was a period of intense political and inter-communal violence in revolutionary Ethiopia during the late 1970s. This violence erupted two years after the revolution of 1974 and was concentrated in the cities and towns of Ethiopia, particularly in Addis Ababa, Gondar, Asmara, and Dessie. In the struggle over the direction and ownership of the revolution, opposition groups of the radical left violently opposed a military regime that itself came to embrace and promulgate Marxist-Leninist language and policies, and that relied heavily on the use of armed force to stifle dissent. While much of the violence was carried out by security personnel, the delegation of the state’s means and instruments of violence to newly formed militias and to armed citizens was a defining feature of the Red Terror. The number of casualties and victims of the Red Terror remains heavily contested and is subject to divergent counting criteria and to definitions of the Terror’s scope in relation to other concurrent conflicts in the region, such as the Eritrean and Tigrayan civil wars; plausible figures suggest more than 50,000 deaths, in addition to many more who were subjected to torture, exile, personal losses, and other forms of violence. To this day, the Red Terror constitutes a period that is remembered in Ethiopia as much for the forms of its violence as for the extent of its harm. Its ramifications, from the support it triggered for the ethno-nationalist insurgencies that overthrew the military regime in 1991, to its role in the emergence of a sizeable Ethiopian diaspora, make the Red Terror an episode of defining and lasting significance in the modern history of Ethiopia. Ethnicity in Africa Gabrielle Lynch Among today’s scholars there is a near consensus that precolonial African identities were relatively fluid, permeable, overlapping, and complex; that ethnic identities are socially constructed; and that a colonial order of delineated control encouraged Africans to rethink group identities and heightened a sense of socioeconomic and political competition along ethnic lines. There is also growing consensus that ethnic identities are nevertheless the subject of ongoing (re)negotiation and that, to find resonance, the politicization of ethnicity, while instrumental in motivation and opportunistic in character, must be rooted in linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic similarities and communal experiences of marginalization, neglect, injustice, and achievement. Many scholars also emphasize how the realities of ethnically delineated political support reflect pragmatism and expectations of patronage in the context of difficult and unequal socioeconomic contexts, as well as the significance of remembered pasts and associated narratives of justice and strategies of acquisition. Such realities and discursive repertoires provide a list of grievances that elites can use to foster a sense of difference and mobilize local support bases, but that also provide nonelites with a means to question and counter intra- and intercommunal differences and thus social and spatial inequalities. Ethnic support then strengthened by a reinforcing cycle of ethnic bias and expectations of greater levels of assistance from co-ethnics. According to such arguments, ethnic identification and political support are rational, but not for the simple reasons that classic primordial, instrumental or neo-patrimonial accounts suggest. Christopher J. Lee Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean island of Martinique. He died in 1961 from leukemia in a hospital outside Washington, DC. Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon achieved fame as a philosopher of anti-colonial revolution. He published two seminal books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that addressed the psychological effects of racism and the politics of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), respectively. He also wrote a third book, Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (1959, reprinted and translated as A Dying Colonialism in 1967), as well as numerous medical journal articles and political essays, a selection of which appear in the posthumous collections Toward the African Revolution (1964) and Alienation and Freedom (2015). Despite the brevity of his life and written work, Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and decolonization has remained vital, influencing a range of academic fields such that the term Fanonism has become shorthand to capture his interrelated political, philosophical, and psychological arguments. Through penetrating views and a frequently bracing prose style, the small library of Fanon’s work has become essential reading in postcolonial studies, African and African American studies, critical race theory, and the history of insurgent thought, to name just a few subjects. Fanon is a political martyr who died before he could witness the birth of an independent Algeria, his stature near mythic in scale as a result. To invoke Fanon is to bring forth a radical worldview dissatisfied with the political present, reproachful of the conformities of the past, and consequently in perpetual struggle for a better future. The History and Historiography of Science Helen Tilley There is no escaping the fact that the history of science took European places and people, broadly construed, as its original object of study. There is also no escaping that in African history, scholars interested in science, technology, and to a lesser extent environmental knowledge have concentrated the bulk of their investigative energies on developments since European (and North African) conquest. This focus on the period since the 1870s has tended to foreground dynamics relating to colonial rule and state-building, extractive economies and development, and decolonization and geopolitics. A handful of Africanists in the history of science have explicitly worked to cross the colonial divide, often taking single topics deeper back in time. The field as a whole, however, still needs to debate more systematically what the overarching narratives and benchmark phenomena should be for the precolonial periods. It also needs to grapple more explicitly with methodological tensions that arise from a focus on human agency and specific places (and the languages this requires) versus a focus on ideas, tools, and phenomena that transcend local or state containers (and the trade-offs this produces). As historians of science extend their reach into Africa’s pasts and bridge the colonial and post-colonial divides, it raises thorny questions about different approaches. Among others this includes how we produce histories of science, why they matter, and what we ought to bear in mind as we do. To this end, four goals are advanced here simultaneously: First, is the aim to open a dialogue with historians of science working outside Africa about ways Africanist scholarship speaks to and could be incorporated into the field as a whole (encouraging non-Africanists to consider the blind spots of “global” histories). Second, is the objective to draw attention to the pitfalls and benefits of different research methods and theoretical assumptions, especially as they relate to expert knowledge (an analysis that may be most useful for students entering the field). Third, is the ambition to explore a set of topics that connect deeper time periods to more recent developments (topics that invite critical scrutiny from specialists and generalists alike). Finally, is the desire to foreground the many different ways people across sub-Saharan Africa have initiated, responded to, and been incorporated into the production of knowledge. Africa has been a site of rich and varied epistemological and material experiments for millennia—some deleterious, some beneficial, and all imbued with different kinds of power. Acknowledging this long-standing history can serve to correct stereotypes that suggest otherwise. It can also contribute to debates within the history of science as the field continues to move away from its original focus on Europe and Europeans. The History of Islam in East Africa Felicitas Becker The history of Islam in East Africa stretches back to around 1000 CE. Until the mid-20th century, it remained largely confined to the coast and closely bound up with the history of the Swahili towns situated on it. The Swahili language remains central to many East African Muslims, hence the occasionally heard phrase, “Swahili Islam.” East African Muslims are mostly Shafiites and some belong to Sufi orders, especially Qadiriyya and Shadhiliyya. Since c. 1850, Islam, with many variations in ritual, has become the religion of speakers of a multitude of languages across the region, second only to Christianity. The region’s independent nation-states initially promised equality for all religions within a secular order. Since c. 1990, though, the minority status of East African Muslims has fed into a multitude of grievances related to the region’s economic and political impasses. This situation has led to growing movements of Islamic preaching and activism, supported by increased contacts with congregations elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. At times, they have influenced electoral politics, especially in Zanzibar, where Islamic activism resonates with fear of marginalization by the mainland. In Kenya, Somali-influenced Islamist terrorists committed a series of atrocities in the 2010s. East African governments, in turn, have been proactive in tracking and disrupting such networks, and in Kenya, the government engaged in targeted assassination. Nevertheless, peaceful coexistence between Muslims and adherents of other religions remains the norm in East Africa, and its dynamics are often poorly understood. African Intellectual History and Historiography Jonathon L. Earle Intellectual historians of Africa are principally concerned with how Africans have understood and contested the contexts that they inhabited in the past, and how ideas and vernacular discourses change over time. As a particular approach in historical methodology it is closely associated with cultural history, and its evolution followed the emergence of political history writing during the 1960s and social history during the 1980s. The first innovative works in African intellectual history were concerned with pan-Africanism and Négritude. These studies were followed by histories of religious ideas and social dissent. Historians have since offered varying descriptions of Africa’s “intellectuals.” For some, Africa’s colonial intellectuals were mostly missionary-educated literati, while others emphasize Africa’s rural intellectual histories and the importance of studying “homespun,” or vernacular historiographies. African epistemologies and knowledge production have also remained a central concern in the study of African intellectual history. To illuminate Africa’s intellectual registers, historians interrogate different topics, regions, and temporalities. Historians of precolonial Africa use historical linguistics to understand the intersection of ideas about public healing and social organization. Scholars of the colonial period challenge many of the earlier assumptions held by colonial researchers and policy makers, who had cast African communities as primordial, conquered peoples. Intellectual historians, by contrast, explore the constantly changing arenas of ideational disputation and political contestation within African societies. Intellectual historians of gender have shown how ideas about production, masculinity, and femininity have informed competing nodes of authority. By the early 21st century, global intellectual historians began demonstrating how Africans reworked European political ideas into local vernacular debates about the past, and how Africans have shaped the making of the modern world. To write Africa’s intellectuals histories, scholars draw from a range of sources, which are often maintained in institutional archives, public libraries, and private homes. These sources—textual, oral, and material—include letters, diaries, annotated libraries, vernacular newspapers, grammars, novels, oral histories, linguistic etymologies, sculptures, clothing, paintings, photography, film, and music. Islamic Historical Sources: Manuscripts and Online Amidu Olalekan Sanni Of central interest here are the historical sources on Islam and Africa, the role and contributions of manuscripts to the narrative, and how the new cyber world has become a domain for those sources as instruments for the generation and utilization of knowledge. Africa came in contact with Islam right from the birth of the faith in the 7th century. Although Judeo-Christian, Late-Antique, and pre-Islamic materials provided the earliest historical sources on Islam and its people, the Qur’an, hadith (statements of the Prophet Muhammad), and the sira/maghāzī (biography/expeditions) were the first original sources on Islamic history on which later writings, including those from Africa, drew. The manuscript tradition in Islam is as old as the faith itself; it was one of the earliest material sources on Islamic sciences, and in the case of Africa, it provided a treasure trove of materials. At the beginning of the 21st century, the approach to scholarship and utilization of manuscripts changed radically, as digitization, creation of online databases, interconnected portals and links to universal portals, catalogs of manuscripts and published materials, among other innovations, redefined the ways knowledge of Islamic history is generated, accessed, and utilized. Mariama Ba Souad T. Ali Mariama Ba was a renowned feminist, author, and advocate for women’s rights in her home country of Senegal, Africa, and globally. After attending and thriving at the French École Normale postsecondary school for girls, Ba became a teacher and education inspector for many years. Ba went on to write two novels: So Long a Letter, originally published in 1979, and Scarlet Song, published in 1981. Both novels are critical of polygamy in African life and examine the various ways in which women deal with similar situations, celebrate sisterhood, and demonstrate that there is no right or wrong way to be a feminist. Mariama Ba’s texts demonstrate clear criticism of the polygamous society she grew up in and the abuse of religion by some men to further their agenda. Ba’s essay, “The Political Functions of Written African Literatures,” describes her belief that a writer should be political and serve as a critic of surrounding society and misogynist practices. Mariama Ba’s personal life clearly influenced her written works, a topic that has been thoroughly examined in much of the scholarly literature that has been written about her. Ba did not try to define feminism. Rather, she understood that it is different for every woman and is a reflection of background, culture, history, and religion. Ba believed it was her mission as a writer to be a voice for the most vulnerable members of society. Ba was a leader in emerging global feminism and created written works that discussed topics that cross cultural barriers and demonstrate the unity of humanity. Newspapers as Sources for African History Emma Hunter Newspapers have become increasingly important as a source for African history, and the range of historical questions newspapers have been employed to address has expanded dramatically. Newspapers are not only sources for political history, they also have much to teach us about the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Africa. They were spaces of literary and textual experimentation. They also played an important role in the creation of new identities. It is essential, however, that we approach newspapers critically as sources and think carefully about their limitations, as well as the opportunities they present to the historian. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, African History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3464
__label__wiki	0.966443	0.966443	Brands Answer Tumultuous Election Year With Merch and Initiatives In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, as tens of millions of citizens already cast ballots in early voting states, brands devised ways to make their own voices heard. In a particularly turbulent election season in which President Donald Trump has repeatedly challenged the integrity of voting by mail […] In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, as tens of millions of citizens already cast ballots in early voting states, brands devised ways to make their own voices heard. In a particularly turbulent election season in which President Donald Trump has repeatedly challenged the integrity of voting by mail and rallied his base to show up at polling sites, fashion companies jumped into the discourse by fervently promoting voting-themed collaborations with artists and designers, as well as various voting initiatives. More from WWD Brands are sensing increasing pressure to weigh in on political issues, though they tend to be wary of taking stances that could alienate part of their customer base, experts said. Advocating for the nonpartisan endeavor of voting is a neutral way to engage audiences and seize on the energy of the moment, said Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of “The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind,” which came out this year. “I think brands have realized, particularly smart brands have realized, that taking perspectives on issues is both a way to get attention and also a way to connect with customers,” said Berger. “It’s not just about what you’re selling — it’s about what the meaning is in what you’re selling,” he said. “So brands are interested in not only selling clothing and fashion items, but also in selling an ethos, a way of being, an identity, a set of values. “And encouraging people to vote is one way to dip your toe in broader social issues,” he said. In the past few months brands issued special voting-themed collections, launched partnerships with voting advocacy organizations, set up donations to civil rights efforts, and waded into the logistics of civic engagement, such as voter registration and filling out census forms. H&M USA, one of a number of companies this year to undertake a voter registration initiative, also launched a special collection in September billed H&M Votes x Blanks Artist Collab, selling hoodies and T-shirts emblazoned with voting-themed graphics by artists. A representative for the retailer said the company’s voter registration initiative helped more than 4,000 people register to vote and to “make a plan to vote and understand their voting rights.” The H&M Votes x Blanks Artist Collab also helped donate $70,000 to the local ACLU chapters of the hometowns of the artists involved in the collaboration, and the retailer also donated $100,000 to the ACLU this year to support voting rights efforts, according to the representative. The company will also give all its U.S. employees three hours of paid time off on Election Day to vote, the representative said. Puma said in October that it teamed with Los Angeles Lakers player Kyle Kuzma, who designed a “Vote” T-shirt. The activewear brand also said it would donate $25,000 to support the ACLU’s campaign “to protect and expand the freedom to vote,” according to a statement at the time. A representative for the company also said it allows its U.S. employees paid time off to vote and that its corporate offices in the U.S. have “implemented a meeting-free day on Nov. 3 to encourage all to vote.” The Detroit-based watch brand Shinola teamed with the “I Am a Voter” campaign by the philanthropy organization Entertainment Industry Foundation. Shinola linked up with the campaign, which itself sells voting-themed shirts and hoodies, to launch the “I Voted Detrola” timepiece and direct customers to voting information. The brand also teamed with Detroit-based art publisher 1xRun to produce a small collection of “I Voted” watches, each sold for $450, and donated $3,000 to the Detroit Pistons’ Get in the Game: Vote initiative, according to Shinola. The accessories brand has said it has given its employees Nov. 3 off so that staff can vote and volunteer at the polls. In October, jeans and apparel brand AG released a “Voter” capsule collection including sweatshirts and Ts with original graphic designs. Corporate fanfare around voting comes in a particularly fraught election year. Trump has repeatedly tweeted for his campaign supporters to show up at election sites as “poll watchers” — a move that experts have warned could amount to voter intimidation, and which at least one trial court in Philadelphia has explicitly rejected so far. The president has also tweeted doubts about the integrity of mail-in ballots, when such ballots have provided a safer alternative for millions of voters during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Twitter, under its new policy aimed at curtailing misinformation on its site, began to hide tweets challenging the reliability of mail-in ballots behind its new warnings about claims that are “disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” “The president is certainly attacking both, in-person voting and mail ballots, both trying to prevent them and undermine their veracity,” said Berger, the Wharton School professor. “So if he loses, he has more ‘evidence’ that the result was wrong.” Some in the worlds of fashion, sports and entertainment also banded together to address specific voting issues, including voter suppression. Abrima Erwiah, one of the cofounders of Fashion Our Future 2020, said the group’s voting effort sought to direct customers to quickly register to vote and fill out the census. The effort followed in part from Erwiah’s conversations with her Studio One Eighty Nine cofounder, actress Rosario Dawson, as well as discussions during the Black Lives Matter protests this summer with fashion designers including Virgil Abloh, Tanya Taylor, Victor Glemaud and others. The FoF effort used the “Action Button,” a product by tech start-up Speakable, to create widgets that fashion brands could add to their web sites. The buttons would direct customers to check their voter registration, register to vote, fill out the census and to get information about voting, Erwiah said. Another widget helped direct customers to e-mail their representatives in Congress about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, she said. “We tried to make the actions simple by providing designers with information and buttons and actionable tools that can be fast,” Erwiah said. “This is not something that should end at this election, this is the beginning.” The Action Button features will help the brands measure customer engagement with those actions, she said. “In fact, through the button, we will ultimately be able to track results and see how each brand has performed and how the project performed so we can understand and learn how we can improve for the future,” she added. Lakers star LeBron James has led a campaign billed “More Than a Vote,” and launched the “More Than a Vote” merch store along with creative agency Harper + Scott, a B Corp. All the proceeds of the merchandise would go toward the non-profit Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, to address voter suppression efforts. Several other fashion brands and retailers have pushed their own initiatives, and similarly sought to show they’re walking the walk by giving employees time to vote and volunteer at the polls. Nordstrom, which launched its “Make Your Voice Heard” initiative in September, said it has made Nov. 3 a holiday to allow its staff to vote, and that it is also “offering flexible scheduling for employees at our stores, fulfillment and distribution centers,” according to a company representative. “We believe every voice matters and our country is stronger when we all participate,” a Nordstrom representative said. Reebok, which put out a short film in October about voting, as well as a T-shirt line, said it would open its U.S. retail stores at 1 p.m. on Nov. 3, and give paid time off to employees volunteering at poll stations on that day. The company said it is also giving workers at its U.S. distribution centers paid time off and “voluntary time off” on Election Day, with the “opportunity to make up hours.” “We’re encouraging our U.S. corporate employees to prioritize voting and manage their meeting schedule accordingly,” a company representative said. The shoe brand Dr. Martens said in September that it teamed with the online voter registration support platform TurboVote to advise customers on registering to vote before deadlines. The brand said also that it would give its employees paid time off to vote in the presidential election. “Eight hours of paid time will be provided for each employee so that we can register to vote, research the candidates and issues, and cast our votes (in person or by mail) in time for the Nov. 3 general election,” a company representative said. The men’s fitness apparel brand Fourlaps said in September that it launched a limited-edition “Vote” T and plans to donate the proceeds from the sale to non-partisan voting advocacy group HeadCount. A Fourlaps representative said employees receive time off for voting and “have flexible schedules leading up to the election, and they are encouraged to prioritize efforts to vote.” The nonprofit Favored Nations, founded this year by actor Noah Centineo and Josh Heller, and which also issued its own voting capsule collection in October, said its voting initiative used custom tracking links through groups including HeadCount and NextGen America to direct voters to register. “Last month, tens of thousands of young people clicked through their custom links via NextGen America,” a representative for Favored Nations said. Steve Madden, which teamed up in 2018 with the voting advocacy nonprofit Voto Latino, cofounded by Rosario Dawson, has continued efforts with the group this year, according to a representative for Steve Madden. Steve Madden’s corporate offices will also be closed on Election Day, the representative said. “I think it reflects a broader trend we’re seeing within the private sector to become more politically active, to encourage citizen participation in the political process,” said Costas Panagopoulos, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science Northeastern University, who was a Congressional Fellow in the office of former Sen. and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Posted in FinanceTagged #Answer #Brands #Election #Initiatives #Merch #tumultuous #Year Software Firm Coupa to Buy Supply-Chain Tech Provider Llamasoft Mon Nov 2 , 2020 Coupa Software Inc. is buying supply-chain planning company Llamasoft Inc. for roughly $1.5 billion, as the pandemic brings greater attention to technology that helps businesses make operations from raw materials sourcing to distribution more resilient. The acquisition expands the supply-chain capabilities of San Mateo, Calif.-based Coupa, whose cloud-based enterprise software […] Coca-Cola CFO Helps Company Make Cuts, Operational Changes Lysol sales surge as the condom business goes limp under lockdown, consumer goods giant reports An All-Embracing Platform for Digital Luxury Razer CEO on how gamer giant plans to spend its $500m cash balance amid record results Suze Orman says Americans get this wrong about financial advisers McDonald’s Unveils Its Own Meatless Burger, The McPlant	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3465
__label__wiki	0.962531	0.962531	Previn cancels Rune Bergmann André Previn, who was scheduled to conduct the Pacific Symphony in three concerts in October, marking his return to Southern California as a performing musician after more than two decades, has cancelled. The 88-year-old musician has withdrawn from the concerts due to injury and doctor’s orders not to travel. No other details were given in the press release. Luckily, his replacement, Norwegian conductor Rune Bergmann, has agreed to take over Previn’s program in its entirety. It includes the West Coast premiere of one of Previn’s newest works, “Almost an Overture,” which had its premiere this summer at the Newport Contemporary Music Series in Newport, RI; Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9, K. 271, with Garrick Ohlsson as soloist; and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. The concerts are slated for Oct. 19-21 in Segerstrom Concert Hall. Bergmann, music director of the Calgary Philharmonic and artistic director and chief conductor of Poland’s Szczecin Philharmonic, made his debut with Pacific Symphony last November. photo:Kristin Hoebermann This entry was posted in classical music, news and tagged Andre Previn, cancellation by pacificsymphony. Bookmark the permalink.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3466
__label__cc	0.506757	0.493243	Tag Archives: primo levi September 2, 2020 · 01:54 Our Heart of Darkness and Failure to Understand rather than Just Condemn Evil Friends of Padre Steve’s World, Joseph Conrad wrote in his book Heart of Darkness: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” Likewise, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” As I struggle to understand President Trump and his criminal administration and cult followers in regard to the epic disaster of Coronavirus 19 in the United States, his unabashed authoritarian actions in destroying the guardrails of the Constitution and our Institutions, his open and flagrant disregard for law and the unwritten norms that have helped preserve and protect our resilient yet fragile system of government which depends on the constitutional separation of powers and the need for compromise in order to keep us from falling in into an authoritarian and yes, Fascist dictatorship. He has so corrupted the institutions charged with preserving the rights and liberties of our people, regardless of their political party, race, ethnicity, religion or lack thereof, and turned the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security into instruments of domestic terror that it boggles the mind. Despite all Trump has done to corrupt and poison the American political system, he has done little to take his terror abroad, although he seldom speaks up when other authoritarian rulers use their power to kill and imprison their opposition. The fact is that the current American President is a serial liar, adulterer, business failure, deceiver, swindler and grifter who has no respect for our ideals as written in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the laws enacted by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. But those are just the surface issues, for honestly he is an evil man who could care less about the life of any American, even his followers. The fact is that President Trump is a malignant narcissistic sociopath and open racist who only cares about himself, his power, and his wealth that the lives of people don’t matter to him. Property and businesses yes, but victims of racism and violence committed by Police officers, or right wing racist and fascist individuals or groups don’t matter to him, because they are sub-human criminals who don’t deserve to live as equals in this country. That was never more on display than several times this year after Numerous Black men including George Floyd of Minneapolis who had a police officer who happened to work with him as a club bouncer, kneeled with his knee across Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, despite Floyd’s plea that he couldn’t breathe before he died. Before that there was Brianna Taylor, a paramedic and EMT in Louisville who had her home invaded by Louisville Police and was dunned down. Last week it was the turn of another Black Man, this time Jacob Blake who was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer who was holding on to his shirt as Blake attempted to get in his car with his three young children. Blake survived but will most likely be crippled for life. There are hundreds of other incidents of police brutality and killings of Blacks and other minorities over the past several decades. Then there are the killings committed by White Supremacists at Black churches, Jewish Synagogues, Islamic Mosques, Sikh Temples, people protesting Confederate monuments and other locations which do not seem to even register in President Trump’s perverted soul. It seems to me that many, if not most Americans do not want to believe that any American President is capable of the commission of gross and unspeakable crimes or approve of them. Trump may not be the first of such men, as we can go back much father, but as President he is the worst, even topping Andrew Johnson in that category of racist criminals, and yes both were impeached, but not removed from office. So how did we as Americans get to such a place where such a criminal, scofflaw, and unrepentant racist could not only be elected to office, but could based on inflaming the fears of white people could be re-elected. I find that interesting because of something that Gustave Gilbert, an American Army Psychologist assigned to watch over the Major Nazi War Crimes Defendant’s at Nuremberg came to see. He wrote about a truth that we cannot see in President Trump and his cohort of racist cult followers. Gilbert wrote: “In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” That absence of empathy is common to Trump and the vast majority of his White Christian supporters. The evidence is show in almost every poll, 80-90% of them see nothing wrong in what he is doing and has done. Personally, after having been a Republican for more than half of my life I cannot imagine just how low the GOP has sunk under Trump’s authoritarian leadership. When I left the GOP in 2008 after returning from Iraq, I refused to belief that the party could abandon all principle and support a man with no moral center, no integrity, and no loyalty to family, wives, children, his employees, his investors, or the country. I honestly believe that one of our greatest problems in the United States is to believe the myths of our nation being a light to the world, our manifest destiny, as well as the twin myths that have shaped us since Reconstruction, the myth of the Noble South, and the myth of the Lost Cause. Likewise the racist crimes committed against committed against almost every immigrant group going back to the Irish and Germans, Then the southern and Eastern Europeans, the Jews, the Japanese, the Chinese, Filipinos, those of Mexican or Latin American Descent, and yes Arabs regardless of their religious beliefs, and last but not least the genocide committed by our English ancestors and our own genocide and confinement to reservations of the descendants of America’s First Nation, more commonly called Native Americans, tend to be minimized by almost all of White America, as well as by other minorities who simply don’t know about the crimes committed by our nation against every Original Nation since the English landed at Jamestown in 1607. We tend to show little empathy for others, especially those darker than us. Malcom X said something very appropriate, and which if you have not experienced poverty, and discrimination, you may find it hard to empathize with the plight of American Blacks. The often misunderstood Civil Rights leader said: “The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities – he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.” What we tend to forget is that such treatment in Europe brought many English, Scots, Irish, Germans, and others to the United States, where their descendants emulated the behaviors of their ancestor’s oppressors, especially towards Blacks who many believed were sub-human, the same term used by the Nazis to describe the Jews. Think about if you or I were the products of such longstanding, pervasive, and institutionalized discrimination, how would you feel or what would you do? If you cannot answer the same as Malcom X, then you will never understand. One of our chief problems is that we want to believe that evil is simply done be evil people, especially the leaders of enemy nations, because we cannot abide the reflection that we see when we look in the mirror and see our own crimes committed at home and abroad, once again proving that for much of our national existence we have had little empathy for the victims of slavery, the wars against our First Nations, which included biological warfare, and the forced marches of them from their ancestral homelands to desolate lands, which once we found contained gold, silver, or oil, we took back from them, despite our treaty obligations. I could go on to our conquests and geographical expansion against weaker opponents like Mexico, Spain, and the relatively newly independent nations of Central American and the Caribbean. It was no wonder that Ulysses Grant in his memoirs wrote of the conquest of Mexico: “Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day, regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” That is why when we see a Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or the monsters of the so-called Islamic State, we are often strangely comforted, because we cannot see ourselves in them. This is often because we We look abroad we can point to a single person with a wicked ideology and proclaim that “they are evil!” all the while forgetting that they are, or were, like us, also human. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reminds us of the folly of that type of thinking: A few years ago I took a break from my Gettysburg studies and writing and dusted off an old academic paper dealing with the one of the more uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. I did that because I felt that I needed to reexamine the nature of evil in the modern world. Since that time I have gone back, done more study, more writing, and made more visits to locations of Nazi evil. I was not able to do so this year because of Europe’s well reasoned travel ban on Americans due to the incomprehensible When I ponder the evil committed by supposedly civilized men and women of Germany, I realize that they are little different than others who incompetence and insipid evil of the Trump Regime regarding COVID19 share the immoral culture of the West. These people were the products of a culture of learning, and of science. They were part of a culture formed by the Christian tradition, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, the age of Reason. As I pondered this I came to remember something said by the late Iris Chang, “civilization is tissue thin.” Lynching in the American South That series of articles about the Einsatzgruppen dealt with the ordinary men, and the bureaucratic systems that implemented an ideology so twisted and evil that it is unimaginable to most people. In fact even in the Nazi system the majority of the genocide was not committed in the death camps, but up close and personal by men standing over pits with pistols, rifles, and machine guns. While most people in the United States know a little about the Holocaust, most do not fully comprehend how devilish and insidious the crimes of the Nazis were. More frightening is the fact that in a 2015 survey 46% of people worldwide have never heard of the Holocaust, and of the 54% who are aware of it some 32% think it is a myth or has been greatly exaggerated. The numbers will only get worse as we become farther removed from these events and the survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators die off. The same is true for other genocidal acts. We typically know about the extermination camps like Auschwitz, but the lesser known dark side of the Holocaust, perhaps the scariest part, is the story of the men of the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen and affiliated units, including those of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS, the mobilized battalions of the Order Police, and locally recruited units, rounded up massive numbers of people and killed them up close and personal. In all these units murdered over two million people, about 1.3 million of whom were Jews. My study of the Holocaust began in college as an undergraduate. My primary professor at California State University at Northridge, Dr. Helmut Haeussler had been an interpreter and interrogator at the Nuremberg trials. I was able to take a number of lecture classes from him a large amount of research and independent study courses in a year of graduate work while finishing my Army ROTC program at UCLA. It was an immersion in the history, sociology, and the psychology of evil, during which I was able to meet and talk with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Einsatzgruppen and Ordungspolizei in Russia Since then I have continued to read and study. I lived in Germany for over four years, and made many other visits, during which I went to a number of Concentration Camp sites. I visited the rebuilt synagogue in Worms which had been destroyed during the infamous Kristallnacht, and other museums and Holocaust memorial sites in Germany. I visited the Zeppelin field, the site of Hitler’s massive Nazi Party rallies in Nuremburg, as well as the graveyards which contain the victims of other Nazi crimes, including the Nacht und Nebel or night and fog actions, where people simply disappeared and were murdered by the Gestapo. For me, those visits were sobering, maybe even more so because I understood exactly what happened in those sites. These are uncomfortable places to visit, and I can understand why many people would not want to visit them, or even study them. The darkness that they remind us of is a part of our human condition. Traces of the evil on display in those places is present in every human being. Frankly, most people cannot bear looking into that abyss, for fear that they might be swallowed by it. I can understand that and I have to admit that it is hard to do so. I am a historian as well as a clinician with much experience dealing with death and trauma. With my training I do a pretty good job of keeping my emotional distance to maintain objectivity when confronted with evil. However, it is hard for me not to have some emotional reaction when visiting these places, or reading about the events and people, and in writing about them. Likewise, I am very troubled by the growing lack or awareness or denial of the Holocaust. It is very hard for me not to have a virulent reaction when I see books and websites dedicated to Holocaust denial, or that minimize other well documented genocides, and crimes against humanity. Soviet Mass Killings in Ukraine My sensitivity to human suffering and the terrible indifference of people in this country to it was greatly increased by my experience of war, and my post-war struggles with PTSD, depression, anxiety, which at points left me very close to committing suicide. A non-chaplain friend, a now retired Navy Command Master Chief Petty Officer that I served with at my last duty station recently remarked that I am a tremendously empathic person, and that I have a large capacity to feel the pain and suffering of others. This capacity for empathy and the ability to feel the suffering of others is part of who I am. It is a good thing, but it makes my work studying and writing about the Holocaust, other genocides, crimes against humanity, and subjects like American slavery, racism, and Jim Crow a sometimes difficult and often very emotionally consuming task. This sometimes leaves me even more sleepless and anxious than normal; especially when I see the indifference of so many people to the suffering of others today. The Killing Fields It is that indifference which motivates me to write; because if these events are not recalled and retold, they, like any part of history will be ignored and then forgotten. The statistics bear this out. There are people today, who say that we should stop talking about these events, that they are old news, and they cannot happen again; but history tells us different, and not just the Holocaust, but indeed every genocide. Then there are those who shamelessly use the Holocaust imagery to spread fear among their followers even as they openly demonize minority groups and religions as the Nazis did to the Jews. I have to agree with the late Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who said, “Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.” The late Iris Chang, who wrote The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II wrote something that is pertinent to almost every modern episode of genocide, or other crime against humanity. It is the ability of leaders, be they political, military, or religious to convince people to rationalize actions that they normally would find repulsive. “After reading several file cabinets’ worth of documents on Japanese war crimes as well as accounts of ancient atrocities from the pantheon of world history, I would have to conclude that Japan’s behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise.” There are many other such events that we could note; the American decimation and genocide committed against native American tribes that spanned close to two centuries, the 1915 Turkish genocide of Armenians, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Chinese Communist “Great Leap Forward,” the actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the more recent but seldom discussed action of the Myanmar government and military against its Rohingya Muslim minority. What we call civilization, to use the words of Iris Chang, is tissue thin. That is why we must never forget these terrible events of history, and that part of human nature, and in a sense part of every one of us, that makes them so easy to repeat. That is why we must periodically take the time to remember and reflect on the Holocaust, other genocides and crimes against humanity. It is even more important now with the rise of fascist, nationalist, and racist regimes around the world. Even in the United States these demons of the past, racism, nationalism, and fascism have come out into the open as those who believe in them have become emboldened by the words of President Trump and members of his administration. In fact in trying to clean up his inaction after the violence committed by neo-Nazis and KKK sympathizers in Charlottesville the President first equated the Nazis and Klansmen with the people that they attacked and under pressure made a speech condemning the Nazis and Klansmen. According to Bob Woodward, when a Fox News correspondent said that was an admission that he was “almost an admission that he was wrong.” The President exploded at Rob Porter, the aide who convinced him to make the speech: “That was the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made,” the President told Porter. “You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?” A few days later the President returned to the subject and again made the argument of moral equivalence. Coupled with so many of the President’s words and policies directed against Blacks, Mexicans and Central Americans, Arabs, Africans, and others; as well as his attacks on the First Amendment and his praise and defense of cold blooded dictators around the world one has to take it more seriously. This is not an issue that simply lurks in the past, it is a very real part of the present. Historian Timothy Snyder wrote: “The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.” Yes, these are terribly uncomfortable subjects, but we cannot allow this generation to allow them to be forgotten, lest they be repeated. That is why that I must continue to write about them and do my best to make sure that they are not forgotten as we cannot afford to let them happen again. Filed under civil rights, Coronavirus 19 Pandemic, crimes against humanity, ethics, Foreign Policy, germany, History, leadership, national security, nazi germany, News and current events, philosophy, Political Commentary, racism, Religion, us army, war crimes, White nationalism Tagged as absence of empathy, alfred north whitehead, american imperialism, Brianna Taylor, christopher browning, Donald trump followers, eric hoffer, evangelical christians, evil, George Floyd murder, gustave gilbert, heart of darkness, Hurricane Dorian, Jacob Blake, joseph conrad, narcissism, On Tyranny, paranoia, police brutality, president donald trump, President Ulysses S. Grant, primo levi, richard hofstadter, sociopathic personality disorder, The nature of evil, the paranoid style in american politics, timothy snyder, tyranny, war with mexico, white nationalist militias, White racism “If I Offended You… I’m not in the least Sorry” The Liberation of Buchenwald at 75 During our trip to Germany last year we visited the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, which as a Major Camp had numerous sub-Camps, including Ohrdruf which Generals George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower visited shortly after its liberation in April 1945. Both went out of their way to describe the horrors they saw. In our day there are fewer and fewer people who lived through or personal saw or documented the evils of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Likewise, there are a host of Holocaust deniers who produce a plethora of pseudo-scholarly articles claiming to be legitimate historians. Even more frighteningly the rise of apologists for the Nazi regime including those who are active members of allegedly conservative parties in the United States and the European Union is beginning to influence politics. The abject racism, rejection of anyone considered racially inferior, and quite often their unhidden anti-Semitism show that what lies in the dark heart of Naziism is not dead and in fact is rising. In the United States its rise is being fueled and legitimized by the Presidency of Donald Trump who has referred to American Nazis and White Supremacists as “very good people” after one of their protests where an anti-Nazi demonstrator was murdered and others brutally attacked. In the same time frame a good number of Republican candidates have exposed themselves as White Supremacists and actual Nazis while running for office. A host of new-Nazi and White supremacist organizations openly meet and flood the internet with their race hatred, and it goes unchecked by the Administration and the Justice Department. The fact is that anyone who denies the Holocaust, attempts to minimize it, or advocates the same policies of race hatred and violence against political, religious, or other opponents is no better than the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Likewise, those who stand by and say nothing are worse. As Yehuda Bauer wrote: “The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.” The good thing is that there were people who took the time to record what they saw in the Nazi Concentration Camps and exposed those deeds to the world in such a way that only perverted and evil people could brazenly deny those facts. One of the most detailed descriptions of a liberated Concentration Camp was written by General George Patton in his memoirs entitled War as I Knew It. … we drove to Ohrdruf and visited the first horror camp any of us had ever seen. It was the most appalling sight imaginable. A man who said he was one of the former inmates acted as impresario and showed us first the gallows, where men were hanged for attempting to escape. The drop board was about two feet from the ground, and the cord used was piano wire which had an adjustment so that when the man dropped, his toes would just reach the ground and it would take about fifteen minutes for him to choke to death, since the fall was not sufficient to break his neck. The next two men to die had to kick the board out from under him. It was stated by some of the Germans present that the generals who were executed after the Hitler bomb incident were hanged in this manner. Our guide then took us to the whipping table, which was about the height of the average man’s crotch. The feet were placed in stocks on the ground and the man was pulled over the table, which was slightly hollowed, and held by two guards, while he was beaten across the back and loins. The stick which they said had been used, and which had some blood on it, was bigger than the handle of a pick. Our guide claimed that he himself had received twenty-five blows with this tool. It later developed that he was not a prisoner at all, but one of the executioners. General Eisenhower must have suspected it, because he asked the man very pointedly how he could be so fat. He was found dead next morning, killed by some of the inmates. Just beyond the whipping table there was a pile of forty bodies, more or less naked. All of these had been shot in the back of the head at short range, and the blood was still cooling on the ground. In a shed near-by was a pile of forty completely naked bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime – not, apparently, for the purpose of destroying them, but to reduce the smell. As a reducer of smell, lime is a very inefficient medium. The total capacity of the shed looked to me to be about two hundred bodies. It was stated that bodies were left until the shed was full and then they were taken out and buried. The inmates said some three thousand people had been buried from this shed since January 1, 1945. When our troops began to draw near, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crimes. They therefore used the inmates to exhume the recently buried bodies and to build a sort of mammoth griddle of 60 cm. railway tracks laid on a brick foundation. The bodies were piled on this and they attempted to burn them. The attempt was a bad failure. Actually, one could not help but think of some gigantic cannibalistic barbecue. In the pit itself were arms and legs and portions of bodies sticking out of the green water which partially filled it. General Walker and General Middleton had wisely decided to have as many soldiers as possible visit the scene. This gave me the idea of having the inhabitants themselves visit the camp. I suggested this to Walker, and found that he had already had the mayor and his wife take a look at it. On going home those two committed suicide. We later used the same system in having the inhabitants of Weimar go through the even larger slave camp (Buchenwald) north of that town. (Excerpted for G. Patton War as I Knew It) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote after seeing the camp: The same day [April 12, 1945] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock. Eisenhower was so moved that he ordered that the best reporters and newsmen come and record what he had seen. He did not want the horrors to be denied by history. He wrote: I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’ Some members of the visiting party were unable to through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt. One of those reporters was Edward R. Murrow who broadcast his visit to Buchenwald: There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were ploughing…. [I] asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description. They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book — nothing more — nothing about who had been where, what he had done or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled 242 — 242 out of 1200, in one month. As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling toward the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it. In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only 6 years old. One rolled up his sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. B-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die. An elderly man standing beside me said: “The children — enemies of the state!” I could see their ribs through their thin shirts…. We went to the hospital. It was full. The doctor told me that 200 had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said: “tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.” He pulled back the blanket from a man’s feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move. I asked to see the kitchen. It was clean. The German in charge….showed me the daily ration. One piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb, on top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew, was what they received every 24 hours. He had a chart on the wall. Very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each 10 men who died. He had to account for the rations and he added: “We’re very efficient here.” We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised; though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. I arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and boys lay there in two neat piles. There was a German trailer, which must have contained another 50, but it wasn’t possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last 12 years. Thursday, I was told that there were more than 20,000 in the camp. There had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now? I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words. If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry…. The fact is that as much as we want to pretend that what happened a Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Soribor, Belzec, and Treblinka are images from history that cannot happen again, they are an ever present reality and they cannot be ignored. Sadly, I cannot help but to imagine that this can and will happen again in my lifetime. The late Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian philosopher and survivor of Auschwitz wrote: “It happened, it can happen again.” I will now quote from one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation called The Drumhead uttered by Jean Luc Picard: We think we’ve come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches it’s all ancient history. Then – before you can blink an eye – suddenly it threatens to start all over again. That is our reality. There are people, even neighbors and those that we think are friends who would become perpetrators or remain bystanders when those that transgress the way of Trump . I would love to be wrong about this, but I am a historian and a theologian and I know the human condition far too well to sit back and remain silent, no matter what the cost. I often quote historian Timothy Snyder, but he was all too correct when he wrote these words about three and a half years ago: If you don’t believe me read the words of the President, his closest supporters, the prominent political preachers of the Christian Right, and any number of Trump leaning columnists, pundits, and politicians. There are some who are so far gone that they will accuse any opponent of being disloyal, not the the Constitution or the law but to President Trump. Some of the preachers even blame the Jews for the current Coronavirus 19 pandemic, as well as abortion and pornography. One, a supposed “Christian Pastor” and I use those two words loosely, named Rick Wiles specifically blamed the Jews for controlling abortion and pornography. He said that President Trump wouldn’t take executive action to shut down porn or abortion because his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jarod Kushner are Jews. Earlier in the month he blamed the Jews for Coronavirus as well. I can fault Jarod and Ivanka for much, but being Jews or being responsible for abortion and pornography, my God no. Sadly, there a lot more like Wiles out there. Others don’t directly blame the Jews, but use other terms coined by the American and German eugenicists in the 1920s, 1930s, and were finally put into action by the Nazis in 1939. These people, often very learned decided that others, particularly the elderly, the chronically sick, the mentally ill, the physically or mentally disabled, “asocials”, babies born with disabilities or illnesses, were not worth keeping alive. Bill O’Reilly, formerly of Fox News described most of the victims of the virus “were on their last legs anyway.” His words reminded me of the terms of the eugenicists and the Nazi killers, “Life unworthy of life.” In 2018, one of those people tried to get my commanding officer to have me tried by Court Martial for a sermon in which he lied about what I said. I had to spend my money to hire a lawyer to defend me from the false charges and have them dismissed during the preliminary investigation. No we are living in the middle of a deadly pandemic that has officially killed over 20,000 Americans, infected a half million more, and has a death rate of 41% among resolved cases, that is those who have died or survived the virus. Sadly, that number represents under 10% of the total official number of cases, of which around 481,00o are still active. Within weeks the economy has crashed, and the unemployment rate is over 10%. Mass graves for the dead are being dug in New York. If the President desired to use them, there are a host of Executive Orders that would give him nearly absolute power. I am sure that his executive centric Attorney General, Bob Barr would no doubt implement in order to secure total power. So far the President has not shown the will to truly wield his executive powers during the current national emergency. For the first time all 50 States are under emergency declarations. I hope that the President resists the urge to listen to people like the Attorney General, or anyone advocating such action. Trust me, if this happens and we lat it go, our fate will be worse than that of Nazi Germany because we should have known better. We should have learned from Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. We should have learned fro Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, we should have learned from the Nuremberg trials, but we have not. So with all of that happy commentary I will leave you until tomorrow. Until then have a good night, and please, never forget. Filed under Coronavirus, Diseases Epidemics and Pandemics, euthanasia, germany, History, holocaust, laws and legislation, natural disasters, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary, world war two in europe Tagged as Attorney General Barr, buchenwald, Coronavirus 19, Donald trump followers, Dwight D Eisenhower, Edward R Murrow, executive orders, Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, George Patton, Holocaust, holocaust deniers, martin niemoller, nazis, neo-nazis, Ohrdrof, president donald trump, primo levi, Reichsbishof Müller, rick wiles, state of emergency, War as I knew it, white supremacists, yehuda bauer January 20, 2020 · 01:08 Wannsee at 78 Years: Monsters do Exist Last night I wrote about the Wannsee Conference yesterday. The references were more from films based on history than documents themselves. This is different, it uses the words of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to deal with the conference at the Villa overlooking the lake in the south Berlin district of Wannsee. Primo Levi wrote, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Seventy-eight years ago today a group of 15 relatively common men of various German government, police, and party agencies sat around a table and discussed the implementation of what is called the Final Solution. The meeting was chaired by SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich, who had been charged with the task of solving Germany’s “Jewish Problem” shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Hermann Goering, the number two man in the Nazi Reich sent Heydrich the following message: Berlin, July 31st 1941 To: Gruppenfuhrer Heydrich Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24th 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of evacuation and emigration in the best possible way by according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlosung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation. Where the competency of other organizations touches on this matter, the organizations are to collaborate. I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for the carrying out the desired final solution (Endlosung) of the Jewish question.” Goering Heydrich When Goering wrote Heydrich, the head of the Reichssiecherhiethauptampt (RSHA) or Reich Security Main Office, in July 1941 it seemed that Nazi victory in Europe was all but assured. Goering’s words were businesslike. Early measures taken by Heydrich to rid Germany and annexed Austria had been reasonably successful to rid those areas of their Jews through emigration and evacuation. These were not benign measures, people were forced to leave their homes, businesses, communities, and had most of their belongings taken from them in order to leave the Reich, and subjected to much violence and segregation. However with the occupation of most of Europe following the Nazi military success and the looming occupation and subjugation of the Soviet Union the process of giving the Jews a chance to emigrate to lands outside Nazi control had come to an end. In fact the Nazis occupied the countries that may Jews had found refuge. Less than six months after he received the directive from Goering, on January 20th 1942 Heydrich summoned representatives from various Reich agencies were called for what turned out to be a brief, two hour meeting which decided the fate of the Jews. The meeting was originally scheduled for early December 1941, but the combination of the Soviet counteroffensive at Moscow and the German declaration of war against the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but was deflated for just over a month until the situation on the Eastern Front had been stabilized. The meeting was held at an estate located in the southern suburbs of Berlin, called Wansee. Organized by Heydrich’s deputy Adolph Eichmann, involved Heydrich, Eichmann and 13 mid level representatives from various economic, governmental, justice and police entities. At the conference Heydrich established his authority through Goering’s directive to overcome the bureaucratic and personal attempts of various attendees to take control of the Final Solution process. Despite objections from some attendees who favored sterilization and the use of Jews in the war armaments industries, Heydrich made it clear that the Final Solution would be a campaign of extermination. He was quite clear: “Approximately 11 million Jews will be involved…in large single sex labor columns, Jews fit to work will work their way eastward constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated through natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtlessly consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately, because otherwise by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival.” The Nazi leadership decided that its race war against the Jews needed to forge ahead. Within days of Wansee the orders went out and SS commanders at various concentration camps began devising more efficient means to exterminate Jews and other “sub-humans.” It was a matter of pride and efficiency for them. As Rudolph Hoess the Commandant of Auschwitz said at Nuremberg “the camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas, and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyclon B….” Hoess estimated that some 2.5 million people were exterminated at Auschwitz at rates as high as 10,000 a day. Einsatzgruppen in Action Before the Conference took place, four Einsatzgruppen followed each of the German Army Groups and systematically began to massacre the Jews of every city and village which German soldiers captured. The Einsatzgruppen, Ordungspolizei battalions, Army Security Divisions and locally recruited units in fewer than six months, killed over a million and a half Soviet Jews, and the slaughter would continue unabated until the dying days of the Reich. One of the participants at the conference, the SS Major and commander of Einsatzkommando in Latvia, had been in charge of exterminating over 30,000 Jews, before the meeting was organized. When the Nazis began their attack into the Soviet Union, Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich’s friend and superior told a gathering of senior SS leaders: “I also want to mention a very difficult subject before you here, completely openly. It should be discussed among us, and yet, nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public…I am talking about the “Jewish evacuation” the extermination of the Jewish people.” It is One of the things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated,” every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter.” But then along they all come, all the decent upright Germans and each has his decent Jew. They all say: the others are all swine, but here is a first class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, or when there are 500 or 1000. And to have seen this through, and –with the exception of human weaknesses– to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned….” Himmler and his entourage Whether the words are those of Goering, Heydrich, Hoess or Himmler, there is a certain businesslike banality to them. But these men, and many others like them orchestrated a campaign of genocide and race hatred unmatched in history. Yes, there have been other genocides, the Turks killing the Armenians during the First World War and the Hutu and Tutsi slaughter in Rwanda but neither they or the politically motivated campaigns of mass slaughter conducted by the Soviets, the Chinese Communists and the Khamer Rouge killing fields can match the systematized extermination campaign waged by the Nazis against the Jews. The truly terrifying thing about the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust to me is that most of the men at Wannsee; as well as the men that commanded the Concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen were very ordinary men who simply believed that they were doing their jobs. They are all a very fascinating group of men to study. Very few could be described as psychopathic killers by nature. They were lawyers, doctors, career police officials, businessmen, and bureaucrats who carried out an extermination campaign that killed by their own numbers between 5.5 and 6 million Jews, not to mention others deemed to be subhuman including the handicapped, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and other non-Jewish minorities like the Gypsies not to mention the wide variety of those considered political enemies. But it was the Jews that bore the most tragic fate. It is something that we must never forget.When it comes to Wannsee, the men there had few qualms about what they were doing. Most of those who opposed Heydrich did so because he was centralizing the power of action against the Jews in his Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) and subordinating the the other Reich ministries to it. But by the end of the conference all of the participants had agreed to Heydrich’s terms. Some did what they could afterwards to use their Bureaucratic abilities to prevent some of the protocols from being fully implemented, while others did all they could to implement it. After the war it meant the difference between life and death for the attendees, except Heydrich who was killed by Czech partisans a few months after the Wannsee Conference, SS Major Rudolph Lange, who died fighting the Red Army toward, the end of the war, Martin Luther Unter Staatssekretär of the Foreign ministry who died of a heart attack, in a concentration camp after opposing Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1945; Roland Freisler who represented the Ministry of Justice who died in early 1945 during a bombing attack on Berlin while serving as the head of Hitler’s extrajudicial People’s Court, and Gauleiter and Staatssekretär Alfred Meyer who committed suicide near the Weser River in May 1945. A few of the rest received the death penalty, but most received relatively brief prison sentences, and some lived to old age. In the end, only one, Friedrich Kritzinger showed remorse for his and his country’s actions during Nazi rule. One man of fifteen. I wonder if the same ratio applies to the officials of the governments of evil, repressive, authoritarian regimes. Possibly even the one emerging in the United States. I will leave it at that. Filed under ethics, film, History, holocaust, laws and legislation, leadership, nazi germany, Political Commentary Tagged as adolf eichmann, Alfred meyer, auschwitz, concentration camps, einsatzgruppen, final solution, Friedrich Kritzinger, heinrich himmler, Hermann Georing, Himmler Posen Speech, jewish question, Martin Luther, primo levi, Reinhard Heydrich, roland freisler, Rudolph Hoess, Rudolph Lange, Treblinka, wansee conference “Functionaries Ready to Believe and Act Without Asking Questions” Trump’s Orwellian Administration As I have thought about the actions of President Trump of the last week or so that I remembered the words of historian Timothy Snyder. He wrote in his book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America: “Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.” Sadly it seems that there are many Americans, a vocal minority who can no longer tell the difference between truth and what they find appealing. Much of this cannot be ascribed to any other motive than racism, admitted or not. Likewise, there is probably a larger number of Americans who have become so cynical that they have made the decision that there is no truth. They are the people who really make authoritarian regimes possible. Hannah Arendt wrote: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction ( i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false ( i.e ., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” That is a big part of the danger that we face today. Such people become the willing functionaries who drive the machine of the criminal state. The late and great Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi wrote: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Last night I quoted from the book The Participants: the Men of the Wannsee Conference in the chapter dealing with Friedrich Kritzinger, State Secretary for the Reich Chancellery, whose job it was to make the bureaucracy of the Third Reich run as smoothly as possible. The writers of that chapter noted: “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” (St. Augustine). This might not be a quote from Kritzinger, but it serves as a reminder that, by working as a lawyer for a regime, which he has known from the start to be criminal, he made himself a stooge.” (The Participants p.217”) I wonder how many like Kritzinger are currently serving in the Trump Administration, or in Congress defending his every misdeed. From my perspective I could name more than a dozen without blinking an eyelash, men an women who purposely subvert the law and Constitution in the name of Trump, as if loyalty to him is more important than their oath, or if his word “trumps” the law and Constitution. In the Third Reich it was said by many leading Nazis that Hitler’s word was above the law and that it was the law. Be it whether they are true believers of lies, or cynics who have stopped believing in truth, they make possible the existence and functionality of the criminal authoritarian state. Both the true believers and the cynics refuse any personal responsibility and commit themselves to a system that knows no bounds of cruelty or lawlessness. Hoffer wrote: “There is also this: when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.” So anyway, I am tired. It has been a long day. Filed under History, holocaust, laws and legislation, leadership, Military, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary Tagged as adolf hitler, constitution, eric hoffer, Friedrich Kritzinger, hannah arendt, oaths of office, president donald trump, primo levi, The law, timothy snyder, trump administration “If You Are Offended I am not In the Least Bit Sorry” Witnesses to Genocide: George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower and Edward R. Murrow I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.I The fact is that as much as we want to pretend that what happened a Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Soribor, Belzec, and Treblinka are images from history that cannot happen again, however, they are an ever present reality and they cannot be ignored. Sadly, I cannot help but to imagine that this can and will happen again in my lifetime. The late Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian philosopher and survivor of Auschwitz wrote: “It happened, it can happen again.” That is our reality. There are people, even neighbors and those that we think are friends who would be perpetrators or bystanders when those that transgress the way of Trump are take us from our homes and families because of our beliefs. I would love to be wrong about this, but I am a historian and a theologian and I know the human condition far too well to sit back and remain silent, no matter what the cost. Last year I had a Facebook exchange with a friend who is a retired Navy Chaplain. He is very much a Trump supporter and apologist. He is very happy about Justice Kavanaugh being in the Supreme Court. The stories of the victims and their claims did not matter to him. Despite that I do not believe that he is a bad man or an evil person. I simply believe that like Martin Niemöller that he has made a bad choice in the man and party that he currently supports and that he will eventually regret it. I could be wrong, he might not turn out to be a Niemöller, but a Reichsbishof Müller. Sincerely hope that he does not become the latter. I keep quoting historian Timothy Snyder, but he was all too correct when he wrote these words less than two years ago: Last year, one of those people tried to get my commanding officer to have me tried by Court Martial for a sermon in which he lied about what I said. I had to spend my money to hire a lawyer to defend me from the false charges and have them dismissed during the preliminary investigation. Trust me, I know what resistance will mean if this President and his cult like followers are not stopped. Our fate will be worse than that of Nazi Germany because we should have known better. We should have learned from Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. We should have learned fro Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, we should have learned from the Nuremberg trials, but we have not. Facing possible impeachment, and with a growing likelihood that the Democrats will extend their control of the House, possibly regain the Senate, and maybe defeat Trump in the 2020 elections, a desperate Trump, backed by his true believers may very well attempt to circumvent those elections and impeachment hearings. With the laws already enacted in the Patriot Act and numerous executive orders there is little to stop a President who has no respect for the law or the Constitution from declaring full emergency powers should any war, terrorist act, or natural disaster be declared. That’s what makes all of this so frightening. Trump only needs an event which is scary enough to frighten people into following any emergency decree. Americans wouldn’t be the first to do so, it’s human nature: the need for security overrides the need for the rule of law and freedom. Filed under ethics, faith, History, holocaust, leadership, Military, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary Tagged as buchenwald, Donald trump followers, Dwight D Eisenhower, Edward R Murrow, Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, George Patton, Holocaust, holocaust deniers, martin niemoller, nazis, neo-nazis, Ohrdrof, president donald trump, primo levi, Reichsbishof Müller, War as I knew it, white supremacists, yehuda bauer The First Rule: Above All Thou Shall Not Be a Bystander Jewish Men being Rounded Up in Baden with Citizens looking on Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer wrote: “Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” These words from his book Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 serve as a warning to members of a society where various minority groups are being labeled as enemies of the state and often less than human. Two years ado we have watched as a rabid Trump supported sent pipe bombs to a dozen men and women who the President has personally attacked in speeches, interviews, or on his Twitter account. We have watched as a White man gun down two Black senior citizens in a Louisville, Kentucky Kroger store after failing to gain access into a Black Baptist Church. Last year have watched as a hate filled anti-Semite kill eleven Jews, mostly senior citizens in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Likewise we watch as the President turns a caravan of Honduran refugees, mostly women and children, nearly 1,000 miles from the US border into a terrorist caravan full of MS-13 and ISIS killers, something that he reprises at nearly every rally that he headlines. The President has blamed the intended victims for the actions of a very real terrorist who happened to be one of his most stalwart supporters. He ignored the racially motivated murder of Black senior citizens. He made jokes about having a “bad hair day” within hours of the massacre at Tree of Life on his way to a political rally where he again excoriated the press and his political opponents blaming them for the violent acts of his supporters or men who have fully bought in to the President’s racial conspiracy theories. Many people wonder how this can happen, but it happens all too easily. All that is needed is a population that has been conditioned by propaganda, based on historical myth, untruth, a prevailing climate of fear, and in which the threat of crisis, real or imagined, can delude even good, able, and even extraordinary people to commit crimes that if they were not real, would be incomprehensible to the mind. In such times decisions have to be made, difficult decisions, the decision to stand for what is right, even if the country’s leaders, and their most vocal followers threaten violence and the use of government force against those who dissent. Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who survived Auschwitz wrote, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” The excuse of just following orders has been shown to be no excuse. Men and women who follow such orders under a thin veneer of technical legality will be condemned by history. The men of the Wehrmacht who gave logistic, communication, and security support to the Einsatzgruppen that were committing genocide in the Soviet Union were as guilty as the trigger pullers. Genocide begins when those who know better turn their backs on crimes committed against a few. The last lines of the classic film Judgement at Nuremberg are illuminating when it comes to understanding men and women who do just that. In the film, Burt Lancaster playin the convicted Nazi judge Janning asks Judge Heywood played by Spencer Tracy to visit him. In that closing scene Janning implored Heywood to understand that he never believed that things would go so far. Ernst Janning: “Judge Haywood… the reason I asked you to come: Those people, those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it, You must believe it!” Judge Dan Haywood: “Herr Janning, it “came to that” the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.” Being a perpetrator is one thing, but being a bystander is worse. As Hannah Arendt noted: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Filed under History, holocaust, laws and legislation, leadership, nazi germany, Political Commentary Tagged as einsatzgruppen, hannah arendt, Judge dan haygood, judgment at numemberg, president donald trump, primo levi, Primo livi, racism, Tree of Life Synagogue, wehrmacht, yehuda bauer Fear, Paranoia, Trump, Evil, and the Absence Of Empathy Every day that I see a tweet or hear President Donald Trump go into incoherent streams of banal blathering I am reminded that the man has no ability to empathize with any other human being, even his family. It does not matter whether it is people suffering in a hurricane, people who have seen mass numbers of family and friends murdered by domestic terrorists, labeling racial and religious minorities as terrorists, criminals, animals, or vermin; or encouraging violence against political opponents and the press at his rallies, he always makes things about him, and plays to the fears of his base. His lies are often whoppers and those he has been proven by many organizations to have lied or distorted the truth well over 10,000 times during his presidency, often to the detriment of his policies and programs, and which subvert the alliances and treaties that help to keep America great. I cannot imagine any other American President with such an absence of empathy. He displays all the traits of a narcissistic sociopath, devoid of empathy or the capacity to love anyone other than himself. Everything else is fungible to him. He has no real friends, only temporary partners, and that includes his multiple wives and paramours. Yet for some reason the bulk of the Republican establishment and its conservative Christian base not only supports him but make up theological jibber-jabber to justify their support on the thinnest Biblical support, usually biblical verses or stories taken completely out of context. But he appeals to their fears, and I doubt that they will abandon him unless the economy completely collapses leaving them destitute, in which case they will likely blame whoever he blames and still support him, just like so many religious people who in other nations have tied their religion to despots. Believe me, religious people of any faith can live to the highest and most commendable humanitarian deeds as a result of their faith, while others can sink to depravity which only true believers can sink. The distinguished British Mathematician and Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote: “Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty…” Whitehead was right, and the latter will follow the President into the abyss. The American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote: “A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.” Sadly, such people are capable of anything. Historian Timothy Snyder reminded us shortly after President Trump’s Election reminded us in his book On Tyranny: Last night I wrote about the uncomfortable necessity of trying to understand evil, its causes and those who perpetuate and encourage it, including the current American President, a man incapable of feeling for others, or taking responsibility for his words and actions. The same is true of many of his supporters. Gustave Gilbert who served as a psychologist to the major war crimes defendants at Nuremberg noted: The President has a dark Charisma which his devout followers find irresistible, and since he is not a fringe character, but the leader of one of the most powerful countries on the planet, this is not something that we can easily dismiss. Nor can we dismiss the ever increasing power of the Executive branch of the government, the specialization and distancing of bureaucrats from the policies they implement, and the pressure of pastors, employers, family, church members, and party officials on people who would normally not harm a fly. However, as Conservative columnist and former Bush Administration staffer Michael Gerson wrote in July of 2017: “The president and his men are incapable of feeling shame about shameful things.” While President Trump is a catalyst for many of the things happening in the country and the world, he is not the cause. The seeds have been planted for decades by preachers, pundits, and politicians that specialize in promoting fear and paranoia in their followers. The late American historian, Richard Hofstadter wrote: “The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.” This is important at a time of increasing economic uncertainly, a world where the old stable democratic orders are under attack, the paranoia increases, along with it fear, racism, and war across the spectrum. A leader who encourages violence and turns every issue into a personal animus only emboldens his followers. Historian Christopher Browning wrote of this in his book Ordinary Men: “I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.” Holocaust survivor and philosopher Primo Levi warned us of them, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Whether President Trump wins re-election or doesn’t the danger will not decrease. Many of his followers, and many Trump himself may refuse to stand aside if he loses. some threatening civil war if he loses. But, if he wins he has the power to further dismantle the Constitutional guardrails that have been the protectors of our political system, as well as turn all the instruments of power into his personal weapons. He is already doing so. This is the practice of tyrants throughout history. Anyway, I’m done for the night as we wait for Hurricane Dorian to reach us sometime overnight. Having been through quite a number of hurricanes in North Carolina and Virginia I know how dangerous they are. My heart is with all of Dorian’s victims in Bermuda and in the Southeastern United States. I have many friends in harm’s way. I cannot ignore their suffering, unlike the President, and many of his minion. So until tomorrow, as long as we weather the storm without major power outages, flooding, or storm damage, I will write again. Filed under ethics, faith, History, holocaust, leadership, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary, weather Tagged as alfred north whitehead, christopher browning, Donald trump followers, eric hoffer, evangelical christians, evil, gustave gilbert, Hurricane Dorian, narcissism, On Tyranny, paranoia, president donald trump, primo levi, richard hofstadter, sociopathic personality disorder, The nature of evil, the paranoid style in american politics, timothy snyder, tyranny Einsatzgruppen and Ordinary Men: Religion, Ideology, and True Believers, Now this is a follow up to yesterday’s article about the Einsatzgruppen and Ordungspolizei action in Poland from 1939 to early 1942, the period before Hitler and his minions made the decision to enact the Endlosung, the Final Solution to what they referred to in academic and clinical terms of the Jewish Problem. I cannot think for you, but the social and political climate of the United States and many other Western Democracies, what happened then is not simply an academic question that we can leave in the past, unless we are to submit ourselves to repeat that tragedy, that Holocaust. Eighty years ago the members of Heinrich Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen were following the German Army into Poland. These forces were intended to do one thing, to eliminate any Poles capable of resisting the Reich and to round up and kill Jews. The sad thing is that while the Genocide committed by the Nazis is in a league of its own, the propensity for others to write about, urge, and promote genocidal practices is not unique. One of the most troubling aspects of genocide is the degree to which people will go to rationalize and justify it, especially if it is supposedly commanded by their “God.” This includes people who exalt their human leader’s pronouncements to that of a god. Eric Hoffer wrote: “The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish.” Thus, today’s article is difficult to write. I realize that some people will be offended because to those that cannot see the nuance that any criticism of their beliefs is akin to an attack on God. That is not my intent at all, there are too many people of faith in all religions who work against the extremists who claim to speak evil in the name of their God. Likewise I am not attempting by any stretch of the imagination to broad brush or demonize people of faith. That being said, there are people of every faith and ideology who are capable of planning and committing genocide. Yes there are extremists, but there are also many ordinary people who obey without questioning, and if ordered by a high enough authority will commit unspeakable acts. As Primo Levi noted, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” But my purpose today, in fact the sole intent of this article is to point out some of the questions and issues that people of faith need to ask when they faced with the killing of innocents or defenseless people in the name of God, or of a political leader. The fact that the Trump administration has already began rounding up people including American citizens and separating them from their families in what amount to concentration camps. (And yes, I do know the difference between a concentration camp like Dachau and a death camp like Treblinka, or Auschwitz so don’t even go there Mr. Trump Cultist.) But the fact is that once you go down the path that the Trump administration has elected to trod there is not much more to overcome before the killing begins. Historian Timothy Snyder wrote: Thus, one only has to look at history and the words or actions of people who live among us to realize that the seeds of genocide are always being sown by those who find others less than human. The men and women who sow the seeds of future genocide can do so in the name of their God, their religion, their religious or secular political ideological, or their views on the superiority of their race. The Nazis provide us a road map of the twisted logic used by the perpetrators of such actions, but they are not alone in history, and people like them exist today, some peddling their hatred in the name of God and religion, but not always. When one reads the speeches, the after action reports, and the post-war testimony of those who orchestrated and conducted the worst terror of the Nazi regime against the Jews and others that they considered to be less than human, or in the case of the handicapped and the mentally ill, “life unworthy of life” they are stunning, and troubling. I just finished reading Horst Bieshold’s Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany, and I am currently reading Christopher Browning’s The Origins Of the Holocaust: The Evolution Of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. During his Posen speech of October 1943 SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler was quite clear about the aims of the Nazis, and their goals regarding the Jews and other Untermenschen (Sub humans) including infants and children. Himmler said: “We came to the question: what to do with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – that is, to kill them or have them killed – and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth…” One would think that killing babies, any babies, but in the particular case Jewish babies to prevent them from growing up to avenge the deaths of their parents would be repulsive, especially to Jews. For most Jews it is, but like every religion Judaism has its share of extremists. One of them is the controversial Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, the dean of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva near Nablus in Israel. In a chapter in his book Torat ha-Melekh [The King’s Teaching] entitled “Deliberate harm to innocents,” which provides numerous justifications to kill gentiles, even babies, Shapira wrote: “In any situation in which a non-Jew’s presence endangers Jewish lives, the non-Jew may be killed even if he is a righteous Gentile and not at all guilty for the situation that has been created… Hindrances—babies are found many times in this situation. They block the way to rescue by their presence and do so completely by force. Nevertheless, they may be killed because their presence aids murder. There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.” The Rabbi’s followers have engaged in frequent violence against Palestinians and Jews who do not hold his radical views. In 2006 he was detained for questioning after writing an article in which he said that all Palestinian males from age 13 and up should be killed or expelled from the West Bank. The rabbi condemns any moderation by the Israeli Defense Forces, and he criticizes Israel’s legal system and judiciary when its rulings conflict with his uncompromising views. To be sure his book was condemned by other Rabbis, especially of the Reformed School, but some Orthodox Rabbis supported it. Those views are not unlike the stated views of the leaders of the so-called Islamic State when it comes to the killing of non-believers. In that organization’s 2013 Declaration of War those leaders stated: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be. Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling. Both of them are disbelievers. Both of them are considered to be waging war [the civilian by belonging to a state waging war against the Muslims]. Both of their blood and wealth is legal for you to destroy, for blood does not become illegal or legal to spill by the clothes being worn.” Many Imam’s and Mufti’s around the world and in the Middle East have issued Fatwah’s against the Islamic State and condemned its teachings. But many of these clerics, who often represent their tribal or government leaders, are considered to be disbelievers and “defenders of Israel” by the Islamic State. As such, many Moslem clerics, and large numbers the vast oppressed masses of impoverished, and often disenfranchised Arab Moslems are attracted to that ideology, especially that directed against the Jews, who are seen as the ultimate enemy. There are Christians too that find theological justification for killing children, and their reasons are chillingly like those of Himmler: The author of an article on the blog Rational Christianity wrote: “Why were the children killed, if they weren’t guilty? Apparently, they were considered as morally neutral, since they weren’t yet old enough to be held accountable or to have done much right or wrong. While not as corrupt as their parents, they were part of the society that was judged, and shared its earthly (though not its eternal) fate.” Another author, a man named Wayne Jackson of Apologetics Press writes of the children of the Canaanites, “Would it not have been infinitely worse, in view of eternity, had these children grown to maturity and adopted the same pagan practices as their parents?” William Lane Craig, a frequent apologist wrote in the Reasonable faith website a comment that sounds like it could have come from the lips of Himmler in dealing with the effect of the mass murders of Jews and others on the troops of the Einsatzgruppen. Craig wrote: “So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.” However, Craig has no qualms about what the Israelites did, simply because the genocide was commanded by God. If one substitutes “Hitler” for “God” one sees a similar rationalization used members of the Einsatzgruppen. Colonel Walter Blume, a Police Colonel at Vitebsk who tried to “care” for his troops during a mass execution of Jews. He wrote: “If I am now asked about my inner attitude which I then held, I can only say that it was absolutely split. On the one hand there was the strict order of my superior… and as a soldier I had to obey. On the other hand I considered the execution of this order cruel and humanly impossible. My very presence at this execution convinced me of this in a final manner. I still know that I wanted to make the situation easier for my men who were certainly moved by the same feelings. When ten men were shot there was always a pause until the next had been brought in. During these pauses I let my men sit down and rest and I joined them. I still know what I said exactly the following words to them at this time: “As much as it is no job for German men and soldiers to shoot defenseless people but the Fuhrer has ordered these shootings because he is convinced that these men would otherwise shoot at us as partisans or would shoot our comrades and our women and children were to be protected if we undertake these executions. This we would have to remember when we carry out this order.” Furthermore, I tried talking about neutral subjects to make the difficult spiritual situation easier and to overcome it.” That is the troubling issue for me. Genocide is genocide and evil, no matter who commands it. We can try to wiggle around and avoid the subject by saying that whatever God we have is above normal law, or that our secular leader’s commands are above the law, but we cannot escape the fact that genocide is immoral and an immutable evil; even if we do it in the name of our God. I think that is the problem that I have with people who follow their leaders down the path to genocide, even those who they believe are speaking for God. Likewise, I am very much concerned when people seem to care more about the emotional and spiritual effects of mass murders on the perpetrators than on the victims. But then, the victims are dead and have no one left to speak for them, unless we do. Never forget. Filed under ethics, faith, Foreign Policy, History, holocaust, leadership, middle east, nazi germany, Political Commentary, war crimes, world war two in europe Tagged as Apologetics press, christopher browning, donald trump supporters, einsatzgruppen, endlosung, eric hoffer, genocide, heinrich himmler, Horst bieshold, Islamic State, life unworthy of life, ordungspolizei, president donald trump, primo levi, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, Rational Christianity, timothy snyder, trump administration, Wayne Jackson ”The Lessons Have Not Been Learned” Reflections after International Holocaust Remembrance Day Sunday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. I took the time to write about it after completing reading the book Hitler’s Death Squads: The Logic Of Mass Murder, by Helmut Langerbein, Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with Disabilities, Perpetrators: the World Of the Holocaust Killers, by Gunter Lewy, and Operation Eichmann by Zvi Aharoni and Wilhelm Dietl. I also watched a number of films and documentaries about the Holocaust. Sunday was the anniversary of the day that the Red Army liberated the Nazi extermination and slave labor camp at Auschwitz. Seventy-seven years ago this a group of 15 relatively common bureaucrats of various German government, police, and party agencies sat around a table and discussed the implementation of what is called the Final Solution. The meeting was chaired by SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich, who had been charged with the task of solving Germany’s “Jewish Problem” shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Hermann Goering, the number two man in the Nazi Reich sent Heydrich the following message: When Goering wrote Heydrich, the head of the Reichssiecherhiethauptampt (RSHA) or Reich Security Main Office, in July 1941 it seemed that Nazi victory in Europe was all but assured. Goering’s words were businesslike. Early measures taken by Heydrich to rid Germany and annexed Austria had been reasonably successful to rid those areas of their Jews through emigration and evacuation. These were not benign measures, people were forced to leave their homes, businesses, communities, and had most of their belongings taken from them in order to leave the Reich. However with the occupation of most of Europe following the Nazi military success and the looming occupation and subjugation of the Soviet Union the process of giving the Jews a chance to emigrate to lands outside Nazi control had come to an end. In fact the Nazis occupied the countries that may Jews had found refuge. Less than six months after he received the directive from Goering, on January 20th 1942 Heydrich summoned representatives from various Reich agencies were called for what turned out to be a brief, two hour meeting which decided the fate of the Jews. The meeting was held at an estate located in the suburbs of Berlin, called Wansee. Organized by Heydrich’s deputy Adolph Eichmann, involved Heydrich, Eichmann and 13 mid level representatives from various economic, governmental, justice and police entities. In the Soviet Union four Einsatzgruppen followed each of the German Army Groups and systematically began to massacre the Jews of every city and village which German soldiers captured. The Einsatzgruppen, Ordungspolizeibattalions, Army Security Divisions and locally recruited units in fewer than six months, killed over a million and a half Soviet Jews, and the slaughter would continue unabated until the dying days of the Reich. Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich’s friend and superior told a gathering of senior SS leaders: The truly terrifying thing about the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust to me is that most of the men at Wansee, men that commanded the Concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen were very ordinary men who simply believed that they were doing their jobs. Very few could be described as psychopathic killers by nature. They were lawyers, doctors, career police officials, businessmen, and bureaucrats who carried out an extermination campaign that killed by their own numbers between 5.5 and 6 million Jews, not to mention others deemed to be subhuman including the handicapped, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and other non-Jewish minorities like the Gypsies not to mention the wide variety of those considered political enemies. But it was the Jews that bore the most tragic fate and it was the Jews who were the object of Hitler’s most bloodthirsty actions. But without the bureaucrats, the mayors, district leaders, party functionaries, police officers, soldiers, railroad officials, businessmen, and others who helped there could have been no Holocaust. As British Historian Laurence Rees wrote: “human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it’s just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice.” Timothy Snyder correctly observed that “The world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler’s time, and to which Hitler responded. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.” That is something that we must never forget lest the would be architects of annihilation of our day; the politicians, preachers, propagandists, and profiteers, who demonize the Jews, Muslims, dark skinned immigrants, LTBTQ people and other inconvenient elements and prepare people to do evil or ignore it: the ordinary men who just obey orders. Primo Levi who I quoted at the beginning was right, the common me, those that don’t think but simply follow orders or turn their heads and ignore the evil who are the most dangerous. Milton Mayer wrote in his book They Thought They Were Free about a German colleague during the 1950s that had lived through the Hitler years as an academic. The man tried to explain how changes were so gradual that people like him who should have known better did not take action, if they did at all until it was too late. The man asked Mayer: “How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.” We cannot forget and we must always be vigilant or we too could easily succumb, it is not that hard. History and human nature shows it all too clearly. Padre Steve Filed under History, holocaust, nazi germany, Political Commentary, war crimes, world war two in europe Tagged as Adolph Eichmann, auschwitz, Death camps, einsatzgruppen, final solution, heinrich himmler, herman goering, holocaust remembrance, jewish problem, laurence rees, milton mayer, primo levi, Reinhard Heydrich, timothy snyder, Wannsee Conference Trump’s Freedom As I have thought about the actions of President Trump of the last day and a half I remembered the words of historian Timothy Snyder. He wrote in his book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America: Sadly it seems that there are many Americans, a vocal minority who can no longer tell the difference between truth and what they find appealing. Much of this cannot be ascribed to any other motive than racism, admitted or not. Likewise, there is probably a larger number of Americans who have become so cynical that they have made the decision that there is no truth. They are the people who make authoritarian regimes possible. Primo Levi wrote: Be whether they are true believers of lies, or the cynics who have stopped believing in truth make possible the existence and functionality of the criminal authoritarian state. Both the true believers and the cynics refuse any personal responsibility and commit themselves to a system that knows no bounds of cruelty or lawlessness. Hoffer wrote: So anyway, Judy is getting her first knee replacement surgery tomorrow so I will sign off for tonight. Filed under History, Loose thoughts and musings, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary Tagged as democracy, donald trump supporters, eric hoffer, hannah arendt, president donald trump, primo levi, Tim othy snyder, tyranny	cc/2021-04/en_head_0003.json.gz/line3467

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