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__label__wiki	0.805752	0.805752	Lunn & Sweet Co. v. Wolfman S. Shore Hellenic Church, Inc. v. Artech Church Interiors, Inc. (Docket Entry # 9-13); see, e.g., Marshall v. Stratus Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 749 N.E.2d 698, 705… Full title:LUNN AND SWEET COMPANY vs. NATHAN WOLFMAN another. SAME vs. SAME Court:Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Suffolk 167 N.E. 641 (Mass. 1929) 167 N.E. 641 Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Suffolk Present: RUGG, C.J., CROSBY, CARROLL, WAIT, SANDERSON, JJ. Contract, What constitutes. Law of the Case. Practice, Civil, Auditor: rulings as to evidence, findings, recommittal; Rules of court; Rescript from Supreme Judicial Court. Rules of Court. Evidence, Competency, Of state of mind. This court, upon a report by a judge of the Superior Court of an action by a Delaware corporation for alleged breach of a contract in writing by the defendant to purchase shoes, determined that the trial judge had erred in ruling that a contract, signed by an agent of the plaintiff but in the name of a Maine corporation which the plaintiff had succeeded, was not the contract of the plaintiff, and held that there was evidence at the trial that the contract was the contract of the plaintiff; and the action was remanded "to the Superior Court for the determination of the question, whether the contract was made by the plaintiff and defendant, as an issue of fact, and for the entry of such judgment as may be required by the finding." That issue then was referred to an auditor, the parties agreeing and the court ordering that his findings of fact should be final. The auditor heard one witness orally and by agreement of the parties also received as evidence a transcript of the evidence at the former trial of the action, and found "that the contract here in question was made by the plaintiff and the defendant." A motion by the defendant that the report be recommitted on several grounds was denied and a motion by the plaintiff for judgment on the report was allowed. The defendant alleged exceptions. No evidence was reported. Held, that (1) The earlier decision of this court in the same action, that there was evidence which would support a finding as matter of fact that the plaintiff was a party to the written contract, was the law of the case binding absolutely upon every tribunal and magistrate dealing with the case; (2) Further trial of the case was confined to the single issue, whether as matter of fact the plaintiff was such party; (3) Under the agreement of the parties and the rule to the auditor, his findings of fact upon that issue were final and conclusive unless tainted in some material particular by error of law; (4) Certain grounds for the defendant's motion to recommit the report to the auditor which were, in substance, that the auditor had made erroneous findings of fact and should have made other and different findings of fact brought no question of law to this court: in the circumstances, it was not the province of this court to review and revise the auditor's findings of fact; (5) Under the rule to the auditor and in the circumstances, a contention that the report should be recommitted to the auditor with an order requiring him to report requests for rulings of law presented to him properly was overruled; (6) It was proper for the auditor to admit testimony by the agent of the plaintiff who had signed to the contract the name of the defendant's predecessor, the Maine corporation, instead of the plaintiff's name, to the effect that, at the time of signing the contract in behalf of the corporation, he did not notice that the name of the Maine corporation had been used in the draft contract and that at the time of making the contract he acted for the new corporation: the agent's state of mind in the circumstances was competent evidence to show that he acted for the plaintiff and for no one else; (7) Subsidiary findings by the auditor, "The . . . [plaintiff] has since October 1, 1919, carried on the same business as that of the Maine corporation and at the same place, Auburn, Maine. On October 1, 1919, the directors of the . . . [plaintiff] voted as follows: — `To continue the business of the . . . [Maine corporation] through the acquisition and ownership of its capital stock, in the name and account of that corporation until the end of its current fiscal year, November 30, 1919.' The Maine corporation continued in existence and is still in existence," did not as a matter of law prevent nor make erroneous the auditor's ultimate conclusion that the contract in suit, which was made on November 20, 1919, was made by the plaintiff and not by the Maine corporation; (8) Upon the record, judgment for the plaintiff properly was entered; (9) Under the rescript, sent when the action previously was before this court, no question of damages was open. TWO ACTIONS OF CONTRACT, with declarations described in the opinion. Writs dated August 7, 1920, and March 26, 1921. The actions first were tried before Lawton, J., then a judge of the Superior Court, and came before this court upon a report by him, when a decision was rendered which is reported 256 Mass. 436. Further proceedings in the Superior Court are described in the opinion. The motions to recommit the actions to the auditor and for judgments to be entered for the plaintiff were heard by Bishop, J. The motion to recommit was denied. The motions for judgment for the plaintiff were allowed. The defendants alleged exceptions. J.J. Kaplan, for the defendants. P.N. Jones, for the plaintiff. RUGG, C.J. These two actions of contract are between the same parties, were tried together, and come before us on a single bill of exceptions. The plaintiff seeks recovery, in one action, for the purchase price of shoes under a written contract, and, in the other action, damages for failure by the defendants to take shoes under the same contract. The controversy arises out of the circumstance that a contract in writing in the name of the Lunn and Sweet Shoe Company, a Maine corporation, was executed with the defendants on November 20, 1919, whereby the latter agreed to purchase shoes made by the corporation, which the plaintiff contends was in truth made and performed by it (a corporation organized under the laws of Delaware and succeeding by purchase on October 1, 1919, to all the assets of the Maine corporation), and that therefore it can maintain this action in its own name and behalf as the real selling party to that written contract. The cases were first tried to a jury. The trial judge directed a verdict for the defendant in each action. Thereafter, upon motion of the plaintiff, new trials were had before the same judge sitting without a jury upon the evidence previously introduced at the jury trial. Upon consideration the judge made certain findings and rulings, and "at the request of the defendants, ruled that, as the contract on which the actions are based was not made by the plaintiff with the defendants, the plaintiff could not recover on any count in either action; and because of that ruling and for that reason alone he found and ordered judgment for the defendants. . . . The cases were reported upon an agreement of the parties that, if the ruling and finding for the defendants were correct, judgment is to be entered for the defendants in each case, otherwise such orders and directions are to be made as justice may require." The cases came before us on that report in Lunn Sweet Co. v. Wolfman, 256 Mass. 436. It there was held that, upon the findings of fact made by the judge, a further finding would be warranted that there was a contract between plaintiff and defendants, that the judge had erred in ruling otherwise, and that, as an issue of fact was presented whether a contract had been entered into between the parties, the plaintiff's contention that as a matter of law judgment should be entered for the plaintiff on the findings could not be supported. The cases were remanded "to the Superior Court for the determination of the question, whether the contract was made by the plaintiff and defendants, as an issue of fact, and for the entry of such judgment as may be required by the finding." 256 Mass. at page 442. The issue thus to be determined was referred to an auditor, — by agreement of the parties the judge who first heard the case and had since retired from the bench. The reference, by agreement of the parties approved by the court, provided that the findings of fact by the auditor should be final. The order further stated that "the auditor may consider all evidence pertinent to said issue or issues which was introduced at the trial in the Superior Court before Judge Lawton." The auditor says in his report that the case was tried before him on the official transcript of the evidence received at the former trial and upon the oral testimony of one Moran. His report briefly narrates the salient facts material under the reference and concludes with the specific finding "that the contract here in question was made by the plaintiff and the defendants." On the coming in of the report of the auditor, the plaintiff in each action filed a motion for judgment. The defendants filed a motion to recommit the auditor's report supported by affidavits. At the hearing upon these motions, the judge (1) granted the requests for rulings presented by the plaintiff and ordered judgment for the plaintiff in each case in accordance with its motion and (2) denied the defendants' motion to recommit and ruled "that upon the motion to recommit evidence and affidavits as to the testimony and evidence at the trials before the court and auditor are not competent or admissible and cannot be considered by the court," and refused to give the rulings requested by the defendants. The exceptions of the defendants bring the cases here. The earlier decision settled in favor of the plaintiff the fundamental question, whether the evidence would support a finding as matter of fact that the plaintiff was a party to the written contract. Having thus settled that underlying contention, that decision confined the further trial of the cases to the single sharply defined issue, whether as matter of fact the plaintiff was such party. Plainly the further trial of the cases might be so confined. Simmons v. Fish, 210 Mass. 563, 567, 568. The settlement of that issue would end the controversy. The questions of law decided when the cases were here before were no longer open to controversy, except as the parties might now ask that the decision then rendered ought to be overruled and hence reversed because wrong in law. We do not understand the defendants to argue that proposition. In any event, that contention could not be maintained. We remain content with that decision. It stands, so far as it goes, as adjudicating the rights of the parties. The doctrine of stare decises applies to it. It was the law of the case binding absolutely upon every tribunal and magistrate dealing with the cases, except one clothed with power to overrule it and finally declare the law to be otherwise. Boyd v. Taylor, 207 Mass. 335. Parker v. American Woolen Co. 215 Mass. 176, 181. Taylor v. Pierce Brothers, Ltd. 220 Mass. 254. Arnold v. Maxwell, 230 Mass. 441, 445. Mabardy v. McHugh, 202 Mass. 148, 152. The stipulation embodied in the rule to the auditor that his findings of fact shall be final means precisely that. His findings of fact are final and conclusive unless tainted in some material particular by error of law. They stand upon the same footing as the verdict of a jury. Marden v. Howard, 242 Mass. 350, 355. The rulings of an auditor as to the admission and exclusion of evidence in appropriate instances may be reviewed by the court. Questions of that nature may be raised by a motion to recommit in a case like the present. Tripp v. Macomber, 187 Mass. 109. Pettey v. Benoit, 193 Mass. 233, 236. W.R. Grace Co. v. National Wholesale Grocery Co. Inc. 251 Mass. 251. Technical Economist Corp. v. Moors, 255 Mass. 591, 598. When inquiries of fact are thus involved, the motion must be supported by affidavit. Koch, petitioner, 225 Mass. 148. Common Law Rule 23 of the Superior Court (1923). The judge, in view of the posture of the cases, ruled rightly to the effect that evidence and affidavits as to the testimony and evidence at the previous trials were not competent. The cases were heard by the auditor in part upon all the evidence previously heard. That evidence had been held to be sufficient to support a finding like that made by the auditor. It would have been futile to listen to evidence already held sufficient to support the conclusion reached after an agreement by the parties sanctioned by order of the court to the effect that the findings to be made by the auditor on that very evidence and such other evidence as parties might introduce should be final. Finality would constantly recede and never be reached if such procedure were permissible. The cases relied on by the defendants, such as Manning v. Boston Elevated Railway, 187 Mass. 496, where facts must be brought to the attention of the court to display alleged errors of law, have no relevancy to the record here presented. In its essence the complaint of the defendants is that the auditor has made wrong findings of facts, not that he has been guided by erroneous rulings of law. The principles of law to govern the cases at bar were settled by the earlier decision. All that remained for further litigation was the ascertainment of a strictly defined and narrowly bounded question of fact. That was to be settled once for all by the auditor. With these general observations, the several grounds urged by the defendants are considered in order. It is to be noted that the motion of the defendants is prefaced by the request that the "court rule with respect to each of the following paragraphs" that the report be recommitted to the auditor with directions to him to do each of the things specified. On analysis of the six paragraphs of the motion, the first three concern pure matters of fact. Those matters depend upon testimony and evidence. It is not the province of the court in an action at law in the posture of the cases at bar to review or revise findings of fact. Moss v. Old Colony Trust Co. 246 Mass. 139, 143. The evidence is not reported, was not required to be reported, and usually is not ordered to be reported in a rule to an auditor. The very purpose of a reference to an auditor commonly is to obtain a finding of facts, not a report of the evidence. The affidavit in support of the motion to recommit is confined by its title as well as by its substance to paragraph 4 of the motion. It contains nothing touching the other paragraphs. 1. The first ground stated in the defendants' motion to recommit is that the court rule that the report be sent back to the auditor to strike out the paragraph to the effect that Moran's "mistake," which at the previous trial he testified he made, "was in inadvertently neglecting to strike out the word `Shoe' from the name in the body of the contract and carelessly putting it into the signature." There are numerous reasons why this could not rightly have been done. What the testimony was cannot be determined. This paragraph states no ruling of law. It is a mere statement of fact. On such a matter the finding of the auditor is final. It was not improper for the auditor to describe Moran's action as a mistake. Whether that exact word existed in the evidence is of no consequence. It was a fact, as is manifest from the record as a whole. It is plain also, from the testimony quoted at length in the supporting affidavit, that Moran's action in this particular rightly might be termed a mistake. It was said by this court in 256 Mass. at page 441: ". . . upon the testimony of Moran a finding would have been justified that an erroneous name was inserted in the contract by reason of his mistake." 2. The auditor found that "some shoes" shipped under the new contract were invoiced on invoice heads of the Maine corporation and paid by check payable to it. The motion is that the auditor be ordered to substitute "all" for "some" in this finding. Whether some or all were so shipped and paid for is immaterial in the light of all the other factors. This finding of the auditor may mean, also, as matter of interpretation, in its context that some shoes were shipped and were paid for, a finding strictly accurate on the contention of the defendants, even if not as broad as they desired. Most of what already has been said is equally applicable to this second ground. 3. The third request is that the auditor be directed to find that, because the plaintiff was a bigger corporation than the Maine corporation, the output of its factory was enlarged and consequently the number of shoes shipped to the defendants was increased. This involved no question of law, related wholly to a matter of fact, and was not a controlling factor touching the identity of the parties to the contract. If the fact was as stated in the motion, its weight on the narrow issue referred to the auditor was wholly for him to determine. Moreover, it was said in 256 Mass. at page 439: "It is also found that if they [the defendants] had known it, they would have been as ready and willing to contract with the new corporation and accept shipments from it as with the one they supposed they were contracting with"; and at page 441: "the personality of the other contracting party was a matter of indifference to the defendants." There is nothing to this alleged ground. 4. The fourth ground for recommittal was to require the auditor to strike out the crucial finding that the contract was made by the plaintiff and the defendants. That was the issue to be found by the auditor as specified in the rule to him. That was the single matter left open for determination by the previous decision of this court. It there was held that the evidence was sufficient to support a finding that it was so made. That evidence, by the express terms of the rule to the auditor, was to be considered by him. It is stated in the report that the case was tried before the auditor upon that and other evidence. There is nothing in the affidavit in any degree meeting or controlling this consideration. It is unnecessary to review it or to summarize it further than to say that it recites some evidence which perhaps might have warranted a different finding from that made by the auditor. It by no means required a finding of an opposite nature and could not well do so in view of the way in which the case reached the auditor. In these circumstances, it is vain to argue that the finding of the auditor as made cannot stand or ought to be sent back for any purpose. 5. The fifth ground is that the auditor must report requests for rulings of law presented to him. Neither under the rule of reference to him nor under proper practice without specific direction was the auditor required to report requests for rulings of law made to him by a party. The primary duty of an auditor is to find the facts. Sometimes, in order to perform this primary duty and as incidental to it, he must make rulings of law. Fisher v. Doe, 204 Mass. 34, 40. Beach Clarridge Co. v. American Steam Gauge Valve Manuf. Co. 208 Mass. 121, 133. Commonly, however, it is no part of the duty of an auditor to make, or pass upon requests for, rulings of law. Such rulings and requests, if made, are not strictly to be regarded as parts of the report. Greene v. Corey, 210 Mass. 536, 546. This general principle has been modified in some respects by G.L.c. 221, § 56, but those provisions are not relevant to the record in the case at bar and need not be discussed. 6. The sixth ground is that the auditor be directed to strike out testimony set forth in the report and objected to by the defendants and to base his report exclusively upon the other evidence. That refers to testimony of Moran to the effect that, at the time of signing the contract in behalf of the corporation, he did not notice that the name of the Maine corporation had been used in the draft contract and that at the time of making the contract he acted for the new corporation. It was held in the earlier decision in effect that upon the facts found the identity of the corporation making the contract may be shown and the contract enforced by that corporation. The corporation in truth making the contract, whether the Maine corporation or the plaintiff, acted through the agency of Moran. That is not open to dispute. The testimony of Moran was offered, not to prove the fact of agency but to show that he acted for the plaintiff and for no one else. When a man's state of mind is a matter in issue, he may testify directly to his intention. Marcy v. Shelburne Falls Colrain Street Railway, 210 Mass. 197, 199. Carriere v. Merrick Lumber Co. 203 Mass. 322, 327. Wilson v. Davison, 242 Mass. 237, 242. Marshall v. Williston, 256 Mass. 147, 153. Freeman's Case, 233 Mass. 287, 291. The case at bar is distinguishable from Stoddard v. Ham, 129 Mass. 383. This is not an instance of attempting to bind the other party to a contract by undisclosed purposes or secret designs. It is a case where the identity of one of two possible persons, each represented by the same agent, as the actual contracting party, must be ascertained from all the circumstances. One such circumstance is the intent of the agent. The case at bar, therefore, is distinguishable from Foster v. Ropes, 111 Mass. 10, 16. It follows from this analysis that the motion of the defendants to recommit was denied rightly. The defendants argue that the judgment ought to be entered in their favor in the face of the findings by the auditor. They rely upon the principle that, where the final conclusion of the auditor is not supported by the subsidiary facts upon which it is based, the final conclusion may be disregarded. Blackington v. Johnson, 126 Mass. 21. That principle is not applicable to the case at bar because the subsidiary facts support the final conclusion of the auditor. The Maine corporation sold all of its assets to the plaintiff on October 1, 1919. There is a further finding that "The Delaware corporation has since October 1, 1919, carried on the same business as that of the Maine corporation and at the same place, Auburn, Maine. On October 1, 1919, the directors of the Delaware corporation voted as follows: — `To continue the business of the Lunn Sweet Shoe Company through the acquisition and ownership of its capital stock, in the name and account of that corporation until the end of its current fiscal year, November 30, 1919.' The Maine corporation continued in existence and is still in existence." There is nothing in this fact to prevent the ultimate conclusion that the contract of November 20, 1919, was made by the plaintiff and not by the Maine corporation. Cases like Whiting v. Malden Melrose Railroad, 202 Mass. 298, and Salomon v. Salomon Co., Ltd. A.C. 22, upon which the defendants rely, are not inconsistent with this view or incompatible with recovery by the plaintiff. This argument of the defendants overlooks the fact that the auditor's report is based on the evidence at the former trial already adjudicated to be sufficient to permit the ultimate conclusion reached by the auditor. The contention of the defendants that, in the second of the two actions here depending, there should be nominal damages only, is not now open. The scope of further inquiry permitted under the earlier decision was whether in truth the plaintiff and the defendants contracted with each other. The question of damages was not reopened. All of the defendants' exceptions have been considered. There was no error in the rulings made or in the refusals to rule or in the orders entered by the trial judge. Exceptions overruled.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1714
__label__wiki	0.881506	0.881506	Below is a snapshot of the Web page as it appeared on 1/15/2021 (the last time our crawler visited it). This is the version of the page that was used for ranking your search results. The page may have changed since we last cached it. To see what might have changed (without the highlights), go to the current page. You searched for: simone kirby wikipedia biography richard We have highlighted matching words that appear in the page below. Bing is not responsible for the content of this page. Richard Pryor - Wikipedia American stand-up comedian, actor, social critic, writer, and MC This article is about the stand-up comedian. For the broadcaster and humorist, see Cactus Pryor. Pryor in February 1986 Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor (1940-12-01)December 1, 1940 Peoria, Illinois, U.S. December 10, 2005(2005-12-10) (aged 65) Los Angeles, California, U.S. Stand-up, film, television Political satire, observational comedy, black comedy, improvisational comedy, character comedy, insult comedy African-American culture Patricia Price Shelley R. Bonus Deborah McGuire Flynn Belaine 7, including Rain RichardPryor.com Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor (December 1, 1940 – December 10, 2005) was an American stand-up comedian, actor, and writer. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time. Pryor's body of work includes the concert movies and recordings: Richard Pryor: Live & Smokin' (1971), That Nigger's Crazy (1974), ...Is It Something I Said? (1975), Bicentennial Nigger (1976), Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979), Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), and Richard Pryor: Here and Now (1983). As an actor, he starred mainly in comedies such as Silver Streak (1976), but occasionally in dramas, including Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (1978), or action films, like Superman III (1983). He collaborated on many projects with actor Gene Wilder. Another frequent collaborator was actor/comedian/writer Paul Mooney. Pryor won an Emmy Award (1973) and five Grammy Awards (1974, 1975, 1976, 1981, and 1982).[1] In 1974, he also won two American Academy of Humor awards and the Writers Guild of America Award. The first Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor was presented to him in 1998. He was listed at number one on Comedy Central's list of all-time greatest stand-up comedians.[2] In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked him first on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.[3] 2.1 1960s 2.4 1990s and 2000s 3.1 Awards and honors 3.2 Retrospectives 3.3 Portrayals 4.1 Marriages 4.2 Children 4.3 Sexuality 4.4 Substance abuse 4.5 Health problems 6 Discography 6.1 Albums 6.2 Compilations Pryor was born on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois. He grew up in a brothel run by his grandmother, Marie Carter, where his alcoholic mother, Gertrude L. (née Thomas), was a prostitute.[4] His father, LeRoy "Buck Carter" Pryor (June 7, 1915 – September 27, 1968), was a former boxer and hustler.[5] After Gertrude abandoned him when he was 10, Pryor was raised primarily by Marie,[6] a tall, violent woman who would beat him for any of his eccentricities. Pryor was one of four children raised in his grandmother's brothel. He was sexually abused at age seven,[7] and expelled from school at the age of 14.[8] While in Peoria, he became a Prince Hall Freemason at a local lodge.[9] Pryor served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960, but spent virtually the entire stint in an army prison. According to a 1999 profile about Pryor in The New Yorker, Pryor was incarcerated for an incident that occurred while he was stationed in West Germany. Angered that a white soldier was overly amused at the racially charged scenes of Douglas Sirk's film Imitation of Life, Pryor and several other black soldiers beat and stabbed him, although not fatally.[8] 1960s[edit] Publicity photo of Pryor for one of his Mister Kelly's appearances, 1968–1969 In 1963 Pryor moved to New York City and began performing regularly in clubs alongside performers such as Bob Dylan and Woody Allen. On one of his first nights, he opened for singer and pianist Nina Simone at New York's Village Gate. Simone recalls Pryor's bout of performance anxiety: He shook like he had malaria, he was so nervous. I couldn't bear to watch him shiver, so I put my arms around him there in the dark and rocked him like a baby until he calmed down. The next night was the same, and the next, and I rocked him each time.[10] Inspired by Bill Cosby, Pryor began as a middlebrow comic, with material far less controversial than what was to come. Soon, he began appearing regularly on television variety shows, such as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. His popularity led to success as a comic in Las Vegas. The first five tracks on the 2005 compilation CD Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966–1974), recorded in 1966 and 1967, capture Pryor in this period. In September 1967 Pryor had what he described in his autobiography Pryor Convictions (1995) as an "epiphany". He walked onto the stage at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas (with Dean Martin in the audience), looked at the sold-out crowd, exclaimed over the microphone, "What the fuck am I doing here!?", and walked off the stage. Afterward, Pryor began working profanity into his act, including the word nigger. His first comedy recording, the eponymous 1968 debut release on the Dove/Reprise label, captures this particular period, tracking the evolution of Pryor's routine. Around this time, his parents died—his mother in 1967 and his father in 1968.[11] In 1969 Pryor moved to Berkeley, California, where he immersed himself in the counterculture and rubbed elbows with the likes of Huey P. Newton and Ishmael Reed.[12] In the 1970s Pryor wrote for such television shows as Sanford and Son, The Flip Wilson Show, and a 1973 Lily Tomlin special, for which he shared an Emmy Award.[13] During this period, Pryor tried to break into mainstream television. He also appeared in several popular films, including Lady Sings the Blues (1972), The Mack (1973), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Silver Streak (1976), Car Wash (1976), Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976), Which Way Is Up? (1977), Greased Lightning (1977), Blue Collar (1978), and The Muppet Movie (1979). Pryor signed with the comedy-oriented independent record label Laff Records in 1970, and in 1971 recorded his second album, Craps (After Hours). Two years later, the relatively unknown comedian appeared in the documentary Wattstax (1972), wherein he riffed on the tragic-comic absurdities of race relations in Watts and the nation. Not long afterward, Pryor sought a deal with a larger label, and he signed with Stax Records in 1973. Pryor performing in 1974 When his third, breakthrough album, That Nigger's Crazy (1974), was released, Laff, which claimed ownership of Pryor's recording rights, almost succeeded in getting an injunction to prevent the album from being sold. Negotiations led to Pryor's release from his Laff contract. In return for this concession, Laff was enabled to release previously unissued material, recorded between 1968 and 1973, at will. That Nigger's Crazy was a commercial and critical success; it was eventually certified gold by the RIAA[14] and won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album at the 1975 Grammy Awards. During the legal battle, Stax briefly closed its doors. At this time, Pryor returned to Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, which re-released That Nigger's Crazy, immediately after ...Is It Something I Said?, his first album with his new label. Like That Nigger's Crazy, the album was a hit with both critics and fans; it was eventually certified platinum by the RIAA and won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording at the 1976 Grammy Awards. Pryor's release Bicentennial Nigger (1976) continued his streak of success. It became his third consecutive gold album, and he collected his third consecutive Grammy for Best Comedy Recording for the album in 1977. With every successful album Pryor recorded for Warner (or later, his concert films and his 1980 freebasing accident), Laff quickly published an album of older material to capitalize on Pryor's growing fame—a practice they continued until 1983. The covers of Laff albums tied in thematically with Pryor movies, such as Are You Serious? for Silver Streak (1976), The Wizard of Comedy for his appearance in The Wiz (1978), and Insane for Stir Crazy (1980).[15] Pryor performed in the Lily Tomlin specials. He is seen here with Tomlin and Alan Alda in Tomlin's 1973 special. Pryor co-wrote Blazing Saddles (1974), directed by Mel Brooks and starring Gene Wilder. Pryor was to play the lead role of Bart, but the film's production studio would not insure him, and Mel Brooks chose Cleavon Little, instead. Before his horribly damaging 1980 freebasing incident, Pryor was about to start filming Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I (1981), but was replaced at the last minute by Gregory Hines.[citation needed] Pryor was also originally considered for the role of Billy Ray Valentine on Trading Places (1983), before Eddie Murphy won the part.[citation needed] In 1975 Pryor was a guest host on the first season of Saturday Night Live and the first black person to host the show. Pryor took longtime girlfriend, actress-talk show host Kathrine McKee (sister of Lonette McKee), with him to New York, and she made a brief guest appearance with Pryor on SNL. He participated in the "word association" skit with Chevy Chase.[16] He would later do his own variety show,The Richard Pryor Show, which premiered on NBC in 1977. The show was cancelled after only four episodes probably because television audiences did not respond well to his show's controversial subject matter, and Pryor was unwilling to alter his material for network censors. During the short-lived series, he portrayed the first black President of the United States, spoofed the Star Wars Mos Eisley cantina, took on gun violence, and in another skit, used costumes and visual distortion to appear nude.[17] In 1979 at the height of his success, Pryor visited Africa. Upon returning to the United States, Pryor swore he would never use the word "nigger" in his stand-up comedy routine again.[18][19] While on a freebasing binge during the making of the film Stir Crazy (1980), Pryor doused himself in rum and set himself on fire.[20] Pryor incorporated a description of the incident into his comedy show Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982). He joked that the event was caused by dunking a cookie into a glass of low-fat and pasteurized milk, causing an explosion. At the end of the bit, he poked fun at people who told jokes about it by waving a lit match and saying, "What's that? Richard Pryor running down the street." After his "final performance", Pryor did not stay away from stand-up comedy long. Within a year, he filmed and released a new concert film and accompanying album, Richard Pryor: Here and Now (1983), which he directed himself. He also wrote and directed a fictionalized account of his life, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, which revolved around the 1980 freebasing incident. In 1983 Pryor signed a five-year contract with Columbia Pictures for $40 million and he started his own production company, Indigo Productions.[21][22] Softer, more formulaic films followed, including Superman III (1983), which earned Pryor $4 million; Brewster's Millions (1985), Moving (1988), and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989). The only film project from this period that recalled his rough roots was Pryor's semiautobiographic debut as a writer-director, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, which was not a major success. Despite his reputation for constantly using profanity on and off camera, Pryor briefly hosted a children's show on CBS called Pryor's Place (1984). Like Sesame Street, Pryor's Place featured a cast of puppets (animated by Sid and Marty Krofft), hanging out and having fun in a friendly inner-city environment along with several children and characters portrayed by Pryor himself. Its theme song was performed by Ray Parker, Jr.[citation needed] However, Pryor's Place frequently dealt with more sobering issues than Sesame Street. It was cancelled shortly after its debut.[citation needed] Pryor co-hosted the Academy Awards twice and was nominated for an Emmy for a guest role on the television series Chicago Hope. Network censors had warned Pryor about his profanity for the Academy Awards, and after a slip early in the program, a five-second delay was instituted when returning from a commercial break. Pryor is also one of only three Saturday Night Live hosts to be subjected to a rare five-second delay for his 1975 appearance (along with Sam Kinison in 1986 and Andrew Dice Clay in 1990).[citation needed] Pryor developed a reputation for being demanding and disrespectful on film sets, and for making selfish and difficult requests. In his autobiography Kiss Me Like a Stranger, co-star Gene Wilder says that Pryor was frequently late to the set during filming of Stir Crazy, and that he demanded, among other things, a helicopter to fly him to and from set because he was the star. Pryor was also accused of using allegations of on-set racism to force the hand of film producers into giving him more money: One day during our lunch hour in the last week of filming, the craft service man handed out slices of watermelon to each of us. Richard, the whole camera crew, and I sat together in a big sound studio eating a number of watermelon slices, talking and joking. As a gag, some members of the crew used a piece of watermelon as a Frisbee, and tossed it back and forth to each other. One piece of watermelon landed at Richard's feet. He got up and went home. Filming stopped. The next day, Richard announced that he knew very well what the significance of watermelon was. He said that he was quitting show business and would not return to this film. The day after that, Richard walked in, all smiles. I wasn't privy to all the negotiations that went on between Columbia and Richard's lawyers, but the camera operator who had thrown that errant piece of watermelon had been fired that day. I assume now that Richard was using drugs during Stir Crazy.[23] Pryor appeared in Harlem Nights (1989), a comedy-drama crime film starring three generations of black comedians (Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Redd Foxx). 1990s and 2000s[edit] In his later years starting in the early to mid-1990s, Pryor used a power-operated mobility scooter due to multiple sclerosis (MS).[24] To him, MS stood for "More Shit".[25] He appears on the scooter in his last film appearance, a small role in David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) playing an auto-repair garage manager named Arnie.[citation needed] Rhino Records remastered all of Pryor's Reprise and WB albums for inclusion in the box set ...And It's Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (2000). In late December 1999 Pryor appeared in the cold open of The Norm Show in the episode entitled "Norm vs. The Boxer". He played Mr. Johnson, an elderly man in a wheelchair who has lost the rights to in-home nursing when he kept attacking the nurses before attacking Norm himself. This was his last television appearance.[26] In 2002 Pryor and Jennifer Lee Pryor, his wife and manager, won legal rights to all the Laff material, which amounted to almost 40 hours of reel-to-reel analog tape. After going through the tapes and getting Richard's blessing, Jennifer Lee Pryor gave Rhino Records access to the tapes in 2004. These tapes, including the entire Craps album, form the basis of the February 1, 2005, double-CD release Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966–1974).[27] Richard Pryor's star at the Hollywood Walk of Fame, covered with items left by fans Jerry Seinfeld called Pryor "the Picasso of our profession"[28] and Bob Newhart heralded Pryor as "the seminal comedian of the last 50 years."[29] Dave Chappelle said of Pryor, "You know those, like, evolution charts of man? He was the dude walking upright. Richard was the highest evolution of comedy."[30] This legacy can be attributed, in part, to the unusual degree of intimacy Pryor brought to bear on his comedy. As Bill Cosby reportedly once said, "Richard Pryor drew the line between comedy and tragedy as thin as one could possibly paint it."[31] In 1998 Pryor won the first Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. According to former Kennedy Center President Lawrence J. Wilker, Pryor was selected as the first recipient of the Prize because: as a stand-up comic, writer, and actor, he struck a chord, and a nerve, with America, forcing it to look at large social questions of race and the more tragicomic aspects of the human condition. Though uncompromising in his wit, Pryor, like Twain, projects a generosity of spirit that unites us. They were both trenchant social critics who spoke the truth, however outrageous.[citation needed] In 2004 Pryor was voted number one on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.[2] In a 2005 British poll to find "The Comedian's Comedian," Pryor was voted the 10th-greatest comedy act ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. Pryor was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.[32] The animal rights organization PETA gives out an award in Pryor's name to people who have done outstanding work to alleviate animal suffering. Pryor was active in animal rights and was deeply concerned about the plight of elephants in circuses and zoos.[citation needed] In 1999, he was awarded a Humanitarian Award by the group,[33] and worked with them on campaigns against the treatment of birds by KFC.[34] Artist Preston Jackson created a life-sized bronze statue in dedication to the beloved comedian and named it Richard Pryor: More than Just a Comedian. It was placed at the corner of State and Washington Streets in downtown Peoria, on May 1, 2015, close to the neighborhood in which he grew up with his mother. The unveiling was held Sunday, May 3, 2015.[35] Retrospectives[edit] In 2002 a television documentary entitled The Funny Life of Richard Pryor depicted Pryor's life and career.[36] Broadcast in the UK as part of the Channel 4 series Kings of Black Comedy,[37][38] it was produced, directed and narrated by David Upshal[36] and featured rare clips from Pryor's 1960s stand-up appearances and movies such as Silver Streak (1976), Blue Collar (1978), Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1978), and Stir Crazy (1980). Contributors included George Carlin, Dave Chappelle, Whoopi Goldberg, Ice-T, Paul Mooney, Joan Rivers, and Lily Tomlin. The show tracked down the two cops who had rescued Pryor from his "freebasing incident", former managers, and even school friends from Pryor's home town of Peoria, Illinois. In the US, the show went out as part of the Heroes of Black Comedy[39][40] series on Comedy Central, narrated by Don Cheadle.[41][42] A television documentary, Richard Pryor: I Ain't Dead Yet, #*%$#@!! (2003) consisted of archival footage of Pryor's performances and testimonials from fellow comedians, including Dave Chappelle, Denis Leary, Chris Rock, and Wanda Sykes, on Pryor's influence on comedy. On December 19, 2005, BET aired a Pryor special, titled The Funniest Man Dead or Alive. It included commentary from fellow comedians, and insight into his upbringing.[43] A retrospective of Pryor's film work, concentrating on the 1970s, titled A Pryor Engagement, opened at Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinemas for a two-week run in February 2013.[44] Several prolific comedians who have claimed Pryor as an influence include George Carlin, Dave Attell, Martin Lawrence, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Colin Quinn, Patrice O'Neal, Bill Hicks, Sam Kinison, Bill Burr, Louis C.K., Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Eddie Murphy, Eddie Griffin, and Eddie Izzard.[citation needed] On May 31, 2013, Showtime debuted the documentary Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Marina Zenovich. The executive producers are Pryor's widow Jennifer Lee Pryor and Roy Ackerman. Interviewees include Dave Chappelle, Whoopi Goldberg, Jesse Jackson, Quincy Jones, George Lopez, Bob Newhart, Richard Pryor, Jr., Lily Tomlin, and Robin Williams.[45][46] From June 7 to 9, 2013, SiriusXM hosted "Richard Pryor Radio", a three-day tribute which featured his stand-up comedy and full live concerts. "Richard Pryor Radio" replaced The Foxxhole for the duration of the event.[citation needed] On March 12, 2019, Paramount Network debuted the documentary I Am Richard Pryor, directed by Jesse James Miller. The film included appearances by Sandra Bernhard, Lily Tomlin, Mike Epps, Howie Mandel, and Pryor's ex-wife, Jennifer Lee Pryor, among others. Jennifer Lee also served as an executive producer on the film.[47] Portrayals[edit] In the episode "Taxes and Death or Get Him to the Sunset Strip"[48](2012), the voice of Richard Pryor is played by Eddie Griffin in the satirical TV show Black Dynamite. A planned biopic, entitled Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said?, was being produced by Chris Rock and Adam Sandler.[49] The film would have starred Marlon Wayans as the young Pryor.[50] Other actors previously attached include Mike Epps and Eddie Murphy. The film would have been directed by Bill Condon and was still in development with no release date, as of February 2013.[51] The biopic remained in limbo, and went through several producers until it was announced in January 2014 that it was being backed by The Weinstein Company with Lee Daniels as director.[52] It was further announced, in August 2014, that the biopic will have Oprah Winfrey as producer and will star Mike Epps as Pryor.[53] He is portrayed by Brandon Ford Green in Season 1 Episode 4 "Sugar and Spice" of Showtime's I'm Dying Up Here. In the Epic Rap Battles of History episode George Carlin vs. Richard Pryor, Pryor was portrayed by American rapper ZEALE.[54] Pryor met actress Pam Grier through comedian Freddie Prinze. They began dating when they were both cast in Greased Lightning (1977).[55] Grier helped Pryor learn to read and tried to help him with his drug addiction.[56] Pryor married another woman while dating Grier.[20] Pryor dated actress Margot Kidder during the filming of Some Kind of Hero (1982). Kidder stated that she "fell in love with Pryor in two seconds flat" after they first met.[57] Marriages[edit] Pryor was married seven times to five women:[7][8][11] Patricia Price, to whom he was married 1960–1961.[58] Shelley Bonus, to whom he was married 1967–1969.[58] Deborah McGuire, an aspiring model and actress whom he married on September 22, 1977. They dated on and off for four years prior to their marriage.[59] They separated in January 1978, and their divorce was finalized in August 1978.[60][61] Jennifer Lee, an actress and interior designer whom Pryor had hired to decorate his home.[62][63] They married in August 1981, and divorced in October 1982 due to his drug addiction. They remarried on June 29, 2001 and remained married until Pryor's death.[20] Flynn Belaine, an aspiring actress whom he married in October 1986. They met when Pryor was performing in Washington D.C. in 1984.[64] Two months after they married, Pryor filed for divorce, but withdrew the petition the same day. A week later he filed for divorce again.[65] Their divorce was finalized in July 1987. They remarried on April 1, 1990, but divorced again in July 1991. Children[edit] Pryor had seven children with six different women: Renee Pryor, born February 13, 1957, the child of Pryor and girlfriend Susan, when Pryor was 16.[8][66][67] Richard Pryor Jr., born July 31, 1962, the child of Pryor and his first wife, Patricia Price. Elizabeth Ann, born April 28, 1967, the child of Pryor and girlfriend Maxine Anderson. Rain Pryor, born July 16, 1969, the child of Pryor and his second wife, Shelley Bonus. Steven, born August 1, 1984, the child of Pryor and Flynn Belaine, who later became his fifth wife. Franklin, born April 11, 1987, the child of Pryor and actress/model Geraldine Mason. Kelsey, born October 25, 1987, the child of Pryor and his fifth wife, Flynn Belaine. Sexuality[edit] Nine years after Pryor's death, in 2014 the biographical book Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul stated that Pryor "acknowledged his bisexuality"[68] and in 2018, Quincy Jones and Pryor's widow Jennifer Lee claimed that Pryor had had a sexual relationship with Marlon Brando, and that Pryor was open about his bisexuality with his friends.[69][70] Pryor's daughter Rain later disputed the claim,[71] to which Lee stated that Rain was in denial about her father's bisexuality.[72] Lee later told TMZ, in explanation, that "it was the 70s! Drugs were still good... If you did enough cocaine, you’d fuck a radiator and send it flowers in the morning".[73][74] In his autobiography Pryor Convictions, Pryor admitted to having a two-week sexual relationship with a transvestite, which he called "two weeks of being gay."[75] Substance abuse[edit] In 1978, Pryor was arrested for drunk driving, for which he was sentenced to 5 months in jail. Late in the evening of June 9, 1980, Pryor poured 151-proof rum all over himself and lit himself on fire.[76][20] The Los Angeles police reported he was burned by an explosion while freebasing cocaine. Pryor claimed his injuries were caused by burning rum.[77] While ablaze, he ran down Parthenia Street from his Los Angeles home, until being subdued by police. He was taken to a hospital, where he was treated for second- and third-degree burns covering more than half of his body. Pryor spent six weeks in recovery at the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital. His daughter Rain stated that the incident happened as a result of a bout of drug-induced psychosis.[78] Pryor's widow Jennifer Lee recalled when he began freebasing cocaine: "After two weeks of watching him getting addicted to this stuff I moved out. It was clear the drug had moved in and it had become his lover and everything. I did not exist."[20] Health problems[edit] In November 1977, after many years of heavy smoking and drinking, Pryor suffered a mild heart attack at age 37.[77] He recovered and resumed performing in January the following year. In 1986, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.[79] In 1990, Pryor suffered a second heart attack while in Australia.[64][80] He underwent triple heart bypass surgery in 1991.[81] In late 2004 his sister said he had lost his voice as a result of his multiple sclerosis. However, on January 9, 2005, Pryor's wife, Jennifer Lee, rebutted this statement in a post on Pryor's official website, citing Richard as saying: "I'm sick of hearing this shit about me not talking ... not true ... I have good days, bad days ... but I still am a talkin' motherfucker!"[82] Death[edit] On December 10, 2005, nine days after his 65th birthday, Pryor suffered a third heart attack in Los Angeles. He was taken to a local hospital after his wife's attempts to resuscitate him failed. He was pronounced dead at 7:58 a.m. PST. His widow Jennifer was quoted as saying, "At the end, there was a smile on his face."[22] He was cremated, and his ashes were given to his family.[83][84] His ashes were later spread in 2019 by his widow, Jennifer, in Hana, Hawaii.[citation needed] Forensic pathologist Michael Hunter believes Pryor's fatal heart attack was caused by coronary artery disease that was at least partially brought about by years of tobacco smoking.[85] Albums[edit] 1968 Richard Pryor Dove/Reprise Records 1971 Craps (After Hours) Laff Records Reissued 1993 by Loose Cannon/Island 1974 That Nigger's Crazy Partee/Stax Reissued 1975 by Reprise Records 1975 ...Is It Something I Said? Reprise Records Reissued 1991 on CD by Warner Bros. Records 1976 Are You Serious ??? Laff Records 1976 Rev. Du Rite Laff Records 1976 Holy Smoke! Laff Records 1976 Bicentennial Nigger Warner Bros. Records Reissued 1989 on CD by Warner Bros. Records 1976 Insane Laff Records 1976 L.A. Jail Tiger Lily Records 1977 Who Me? I'm Not Him Laff Records 1977 Richard Pryor Live World Sound Records 1978 The Wizard of Comedy Laff Records 1978 Black Ben The Blacksmith Laff Records 1978 Wanted: Live in Concert Warner Bros. Records Double-LP set 1979 Outrageous Laff Records 1982 Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip Warner Bros. Records 1982 Supernigger Laff Records 1983 Richard Pryor: Here and Now Warner Bros. Records 1983 Richard Pryor Live! Phoenix/Audiofidelity Picture disc 1983 Blackjack Laff Records Compilations[edit] 1973: Pryor Goes Foxx Hunting (Laff.) Split LP with Redd Foxx, containing previously released tracks from Craps (After Hours) 1975: Down And Dirty (Laff.) 1976: Richard Pryor Meets ... Richard & Willie And ... The SLA!! (Laff) Split LP with black ventriloquist act Richard And Willie, containing previously released tracks from Craps (After Hours) 1977: Richard Pryor's Greatest Hits (Warner Bros. Records) Contains tracks from Craps (After Hours), That Nigger's Crazy, and ... Is It Something I Said?, plus a previously unreleased track from 1975, "Ali". 1982: The Very Best of Richard Pryor (Laff.) 2000: ... And It's Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (9-CD box set) (Warner Bros. Records/Rhino) Box set collection containing all Warner Bros. albums plus a bonus disc of previously unissued material from 1973 to 1992. 2002: The Anthology (2-CD set) (Warner Bros. Records/Rhino, 2002 in music) Highlights culled from the albums collected in the ... And It's Deep Too! box set. 2005: Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966–1974) (2-CD set) (Warner Bros. Records/Rhino, 2005 in music) Pryor-authorized compilation of material released on Laff, including the entire Craps (After Hours) album. 2013: No Pryor Restraint: Life In Concert (7-CD, 2-DVD box set) (Shout! Factory) Box set containing concert films, albums and unreleased material from 1966 to 1992. 1967 The Busy Body Lt. Whitaker Film debut 1968 Wild in the Streets Stanley X 1969 Uncle Tom's Fairy Tales Unknown Also producer and writer; uncompleted/unreleased 1970 Carter's Army Pvt. Jonathan Crunk 1970 The Phynx Richard Pryor (cameo) 1971 You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat Wino 1971 Live & Smokin' Richard Pryor Stand-up film; also writer 1971 Dynamite Chicken Richard Pryor 1972 Lady Sings the Blues Piano Man 1973 The Mack Slim 1973 Some Call It Loving Jeff 1973 Hit! Mike Willmer 1973 Wattstax Richard Pryor / Host 1974 Uptown Saturday Night Sharp Eye Washington 1976 Adiós Amigo Sam Spade 1976 The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings Charlie Snow, All-Star (RF) 1976 Car Wash Daddy Rich 1976 Silver Streak Grover T. Muldoon 1977 Greased Lightning Wendell Scott 1977 Which Way Is Up? Leroy Jones / Rufus Jones / Reverend Lenox Thomas 1978 Blue Collar Zeke Brown 1978 The Wiz Herman Smith (The Wiz) 1978 California Suite Dr. Chauncey Gump 1979 Richard Pryor: Live in Concert Richard Pryor Stand-up film; also writer 1979 The Muppet Movie Balloon Vendor (cameo) 1980 Wholly Moses! Pharaoh 1980 In God We Tru$t G.O.D. 1980 Stir Crazy Harold "Harry" Monroe 1981 Bustin' Loose Joe Braxton Also producer and writer (story) 1982 Some Kind of Hero Eddie Keller 1982 Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip Richard Pryor Stand-up film; also producer and writer 1982 The Toy Jack Brown 1983 Superman III August "Gus" Gorman 1983 Richard Pryor: Here and Now Richard Pryor Stand-up film; also director and writer 1985 Brewster's Millions Montgomery Brewster 1986 Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling Jo Jo Dancer Also director, producer and writer 1987 Critical Condition Kevin Lenahan / Dr. Eddie Slattery 1988 Moving Arlo Pear 1989 See No Evil, Hear No Evil Wallace "Wally" Karue 1989 Harlem Nights Sugar Ray 1991 Another You Eddie Dash 1991 The Three Muscatels Narrator / Wino / Bartender 1996 Mad Dog Time Jimmy the Grave Digger 1997 Lost Highway Arnie Final film role Books[edit] Pryor, Richard; Gold, Todd (1995). Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 9780679432500. OCLC 31660376. Retrieved January 24, 2019. ^ "Richard Pryor". Recording Academy Grammy Awards. ^ a b "Why Chappelle is the man". Vox Magazine. September 30, 2004. Archived from the original on September 14, 2016. Retrieved September 1, 2016. Pryor was voted No. 1 in Comedy Central's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time in April. ^ The 50 Best Stand-up Comics of All Time. Rollingstone.com, retrieved February 15, 2017. ^ Getlen, Larry (May 28, 2013). "Richard the Great". New York Post. New York City. Retrieved June 8, 2013. ^ "Richard Pryor's official biography". RichardPryor.com. ^ "Richard Pryor website". Richardpryor.com. Archived from the original on May 23, 2010. Retrieved June 17, 2010. ^ a b Jones, Steve (December 10, 2005). "Comedian Richard Pryor dies at 65". USA Today. Mclean, Virginia. ^ a b c d Als, Hilton (September 13, 1999). "A Pryor Love". The New Yorker. New York City. ^ "Richard Pryor". freemasonry.bcy.ca. 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(May 4, 2010). "Pam Grier Tells What She's Learned in 'Foxy'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. ^ Rabin, Nathan Rabin (March 3, 2009). "Random Roles: Margot Kidder (interview)". The A.V. Club. ^ a b Richard Pryor : the life and legacy of a "crazy" Black man. McCluskey, Audrey Thomas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2008. ISBN 9780253352026. OCLC 191732567. CS1 maint: others (link) ^ "Pryor Stuns Friends With Wedding: Off To Oz In "Wiz"". Jet. 53 (4): 56–57. October 13, 1977. ^ "Pryor's Wife Wants Out, Hits Him With A Divorce". Jet. 53 (23): 57–58. February 23, 1978. ^ "Divorce Final In August, Pryor Gives Debbie Big Sum". Jet. 54 (19): 60. July 27, 1978. ^ "Pryor Gets New Love As Wife Files For Divorce". Jet. 54 (2): 57. March 30, 1978. ^ "Richard Pryor Finds Love At Last". Jet. 61 (4): 53–55. October 8, 1981. ^ a b "Richard Pryor Re-Weds Fifth Wife After Illness That Threatened His Life". Jet. 78 (5): 54–55. May 14, 1990. ^ "Richard Pryor's estranged Wife Tells Why Their Marriage Failed". Jet. 72 (6): 54–56. May 4, 1987. ^ "Richard Pryor biography". Hollywood.com. ^ Scott Saul (December 9, 2014). Becoming Richard Pryor. ^ Janet Maslin (December 4, 2014). "Laughter Along the Path to Oblivion". The New York Times. Retrieved August 4, 2019. ^ Cush, Andy (February 7, 2018). "Richard Pryor's Widow Confirms Her Husband Had Sex With Marlon Brando". Spin. Retrieved February 7, 2018. ^ Quinn, Dave (February 9, 2018). "Richard Pryor's Daughter Slams His Widow as a 'Bottom Feeder' for Marlon Brando Sex Claims". People. Retrieved February 9, 2018. ^ Crucchiola, Jordan. "Richard Pryor's Daughter Dismisses Claim He Had Sex With Marlon Brando". Vulture. Retrieved February 9, 2018. ^ "Richard Pryor's Widow Says His Daughter is in Denial About His Bisexuality". TMZ. April 9, 2018. Retrieved August 3, 2019. ^ Mumford, Gwilym (February 8, 2018). "Richard Pryor and Marlon Brando were lovers, Pryor's widow confirms" – via www.theguardian.com. ^ Philip Gooden (September 5, 2019). Bad Words: And What They Say About Us. Little, Brown Book Group. p. 10. ISBN 978-1-4721-4156-9. ^ "RICHARD PRYOR'S PEORIA WAS THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND". NY Daily News. Retrieved February 8, 2018. ^ Farber, David (2019). Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. Cambridge University Press. p. 41. ISBN 9781108425278. OCLC 1122680981. ^ a b "Richard Pryor's Tragic Accident Spotlights a Dangerous Drug Craze: Freebasing". People. June 30, 1980. ^ "Interview with Rain Pryor". People. November 6, 2006. p. 76. ^ "The Official Biography of Richard Pryor". Indigo, Inc. Retrieved May 8, 2016. ^ "Richard Pryor Suffers a Minor Heart Attack in Australia". Los Angeles Times. March 23, 1990. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved June 20, 2017. ^ "Richard Pryor Cracking Jokes After Triple Bypass". tribunedigital-orlandosentinel. Retrieved June 20, 2017. ^ "Richard Pryor". Richard Pryor. Retrieved June 17, 2010. ^ Benoit, Tod (2015). Where Are They Buried?: How Did They Die? Fitting Ends and Final Resting Places of the Famous, Infamous, and Noteworthy. Hachette Books. ISBN 9780316391962. ^ Scott, Wilson (2016). Resting Places: The Burial Sites of Over 10,000 Famous Persons (3rd ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ISBN 9781476625997. OCLC 894938680. ^ "Autopsy: The Last Hours Of Richard Pryor." Autopsy. Nar. Eric Meyers. Exec. Prod. Ed Taylor and Michael Kelpie. Reelz, March 25, 2017. Television. Bailey, Jason (2015). Richard Pryor: American Id. Raleigh, NC: The Critical Press. ISBN 9781941629130. OCLC 929499929. Balducci, Anthony (2018). Richard Pryor in Hollywood: The Narrative Films, 1967-1997. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-7382-0. OCLC 1013167477. Brown, Cecil (2013). Pryor Lives! How Richard Pryor Became Richard Pryor: Or, Kiss My Rich, Happy Black Ass!: A Memoir. Scotts Valley, Cal.: CreateSpace. ISBN 9781481272049. OCLC 896479605. Haskins, James (1984). Richard Pryor, a Man and His Madness: A Biography. New York: Beaufort Books. ISBN 9780825302008. OCLC 474968281. Henry, David; Henry, Joe (2013). Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. ISBN 9781616200787. OCLC 900929967. Retrieved January 24, 2019. Pryor, Rain; Crimmins, Cathy (2006). Jokes My Father Never Taught Me: Life, Love, and Loss with Richard Pryor. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 9780061195426. OCLC 865250887. Retrieved January 24, 2019. McCluskey, Audrey Thomas, ed. (2008). Richard Pryor: The Life and Legacy of a "Crazy" Black Man. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253352026. OCLC 300041360. Retrieved January 24, 2019. Rovin, Jeff (1983). Richard Pryor: Black and Blue. London: Orbis. ISBN 9780856136979. OCLC 668427103. Saul, Scott (2015). Becoming Richard Pryor. New York: Harper. ISBN 9780062123305. OCLC 869267234. Retrieved January 24, 2019. Williams, John A.; Williams, Dennis A. (1991). If I Stop I'll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 9781560250081. OCLC 23463494. This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (February 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Richard Pryorat Wikipedia's sister projects Media from Wikimedia Commons Quotations from Wikiquote Richard Pryor on IMDb Richard Pryor at the TCM Movie Database Richard Pryor: Stand-Up Philosopher, City Journal, Spring 2009 Jennifer Lee Pryor on IMDb Post by Richard Pryor on his official website rebutting voice-loss rumors at the Wayback Machine (archived September 27, 2011) Richard Pryor's Legacy Lives On Bright Lights Film Journal career profile at Archive.today (archived January 18, 2013) Richard Pryor at Emmys.com Richard Pryor at Find a Grave Richard Pryor's Peoria Richard Pryor: Icon (video). PBS. November 23, 2014. Biographical special—includes full version. Richard Pryor discography at Discogs Image of Richard Pryor and Lou Gossett backstage, 1978. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Richard Pryor (1968) Craps (After Hours) (1971) That Nigger's Crazy (1974) ...Is It Something I Said? (1975) Bicentennial Nigger (1976) L.A. Jail (1976) Wanted: Live in Concert (1978) Live on the Sunset Strip (1982) Here and Now (1983) ...And It's Deep Too! (2000) The Anthology (1968–1992) (2002) Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966–1974) (2005) The Richard Pryor Show (1977) Pryor's Place (1984) Live & Smokin' (1971) Live in Concert (1979) I Ain't Dead Yet (2003) The Funniest Man Dead or Alive (2005) Omit the Logic (2013) Awards for Richard Pryor Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special Bob Ellison and Marty Farrell (1971) Anne Howard Bailey (1972) Joseph Bologna and Renée Taylor (1973) Rosalyn Drexler, Ann Elder, Karyl Geld Miller, Robert Illes, Lorne Michaels, Richard Pryor, Jim Rusk, Herb Sargent, James R. Stein, Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner, Rod Warren and George Yanok (1974) John Bradford, Cy Coleman and Robert Wells (1975) Ann Elder, Christopher Guest, Lorne Michaels, Earl Pomerantz, Jim Rusk, Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner, Rod Warren and George Yanok (1976) Buz Kohan and Ted Strauss (1977) Chevy Chase, Tom Davis, Al Franken, Charles Grodin, Lorne Michaels, Paul Simon, Lily Tomlin and Alan Zweibel (1978) Chris Rock (2009) Dave Boone and Paul Greenberg (2010) Dave Boone, Matt Roberts and Mo Rocca (2011) Louis C.K. (2012) Sarah Silverman (2014) Patton Oswalt (2016) Samantha Bee, Ashley Nicole Black, Pat Cassels, Eric Drysdale, Mathan Erhardt, Travon Free, Joe Grossman, Miles Kahn, Jo Miller and Melinda Taub (2017) John Mulaney (2018) Hannah Gadsby (2019) Dave Chappelle (2020) Between 1979–2008, writing specials competed alongside Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album Ross Bagdasarian Sr. – "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)" (1959) Homer and Jethro – The Battle of Kookamonga / Shelley Berman – Inside Shelley Berman (1960) Jo Stafford & Paul Weston – Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris / Bob Newhart – The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! (1961) Elaine May & Mike Nichols – An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1962) Vaughn Meader – The First Family (1963) Allan Sherman – "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp)" (1964) Bill Cosby – I Started Out as a Child (1965) Bill Cosby – Why Is There Air? (1966) Bill Cosby – Wonderfulness (1967) Bill Cosby – Revenge (1968) Bill Cosby – To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With (1969) Bill Cosby – Sports (1970) Flip Wilson – The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress (1971) Lily Tomlin – This Is A Recording (1972) George Carlin – FM & AM (1973) Cheech & Chong – Los Cochinos (1974) Richard Pryor – That Nigger's Crazy (1975) Richard Pryor – ...Is It Something I Said? (1976) Richard Pryor – Bicentennial Nigger (1977) Steve Martin – Let's Get Small (1978) Steve Martin – A Wild and Crazy Guy (1979) Robin Williams – Reality...What a Concept (1980) Rodney Dangerfield – No Respect (1981) Richard Pryor – Rev. Du Rite (1982) Richard Pryor – Live on the Sunset Strip (1983) Eddie Murphy – Eddie Murphy: Comedian (1984) "Weird Al" Yankovic – "Eat It" (1985) Whoopi Goldberg – Whoopi Goldberg (Original Broadway Show Recording) (1986) Bill Cosby – Those of You with or Without Children, You'll Understand (1987) Robin Williams – A Night at the Met (1988) Robin Williams – Good Morning, Vietnam (1989) Peter Schickele – P.D.Q. Bach: 1712 Overture and Other Musical Assaults (1990) Peter Schickele – P.D.Q. Bach: Oedipus Tex and Other Choral Calamities (1991) Peter Schickele – P.D.Q. Bach: WTWP Classical Talkity-Talk Radio (1992) Peter Schickele – P.D.Q. Bach: Music for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion (1993) George Carlin – Jammin' in New York (1994) Sam Kinison – Live From Hell (1995) Jonathan Winters – Crank(y) Calls (1996) Al Franken – Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations (1997) Chris Rock – Roll with the New (1998) Mel Brooks & Carl Reiner – The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (1999) Chris Rock – Bigger & Blacker (2000) 2001−present George Carlin – Brain Droppings (2001) George Carlin – Napalm & Silly Putty (2002) Robin Williams – Robin Williams: Live on Broadway (2003) "Weird Al" Yankovic – Poodle Hat (2004) Jon Stewart and the cast of The Daily Show – The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents ... America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction (2005) Chris Rock – Never Scared (2006) Lewis Black – The Carnegie Hall Performance (2007) Flight of the Conchords – The Distant Future (2008) George Carlin – It's Bad for Ya (2009) Stephen Colbert – A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All! (2010) Lewis Black – Stark Raving Black (2011) Louis C.K. – Hilarious (2012) Jimmy Fallon – Blow Your Pants Off (2013) Kathy Griffin – Calm Down Gurrl (2014) "Weird Al" Yankovic – Mandatory Fun (2015) Louis C.K. – Live at Madison Square Garden (2016) Patton Oswalt – Talking for Clapping (2017) Dave Chappelle – The Age of Spin & Deep in the Heart of Texas (2018) Dave Chappelle – Equanimity & The Bird Revelation (2019) Dave Chappelle – Sticks and Stones (2020) Mark Twain Prize winners Jonathan Winters (1999) Carl Reiner (2000) Whoopi Goldberg (2001) Bob Newhart (2002) Lily Tomlin (2003) Lorne Michaels (2004) Steve Martin (2005) Neil Simon (2006) Billy Crystal (2007) George Carlin (2008) Bill Cosby (2009) Tina Fey (2010) Will Ferrell (2011) Ellen DeGeneres (2012) Carol Burnett (2013) Jay Leno (2014) Eddie Murphy (2015) Bill Murray (2016) David Letterman (2017) Julia Louis-Dreyfus (2018) NAACP Image Award – Hall of Fame Award Lena Horne / Ray Charles (1983) Ella Fitzgerald / Marian Anderson / Gordon Parks / Alberta Hunter / Paul Robeson (1984) Esther Rolle / Linda Hopkins (1987) Marvin Gaye (1988) Sammy Davis Jr. / Oprah Winfrey / Ossie Davis / Ruby Dee (1989) Etta James (1990) Four Tops / The O'Jays / The Temptations / The Dells (1992) Carmen McRae and Jerry Butler (1993) Earth, Wind & Fire (1994) Aretha Franklin / George Clinton (1997) Nancy Wilson / The Isley Brothers (1998) Kathleen Battle (1999) Sidney Poitier (2001) Little Richard (2002) Spike Lee (2003) Ray Charles (2004) Oprah Winfrey (2005) Carlos Santana (2006) Clarence Avant (2009) NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture Raymond St. Jacques (1969) Jim Brown (1970) Donald Sutherland (1971) Billy Dee Williams (1972) No Award (1973) Bernie Casey (1974) James Earl Jones (1975) Paul Winfield (1978) Michael Jackson (1979) LeVar Burton (1980) Louis Gossett Jr. (1982) Prince (1984) Adolph Caesar (1985) Gregory Hines (1986) Danny Glover (1987) Denzel Washington (1988) Morgan Freeman (1989) Wesley Snipes (1992) Djimon Hounsou (1998) Cuba Gooding Jr. (2004) Jamie Foxx (2005) Samuel L. Jackson (2006) Forest Whitaker (2007) Will Smith (2009) Laz Alonso (2012) David Oyelowo (2015) Michael B. Jordan (2016) Daniel Kaluuya (2018) Chadwick Boseman (2019) Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay Original Drama William Goldman (1969) Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North (1970) Penelope Gilliatt (1971) Jeremy Larner (1972) Steve Shagan (1973) Robert Towne (1974) Frank Pierson (1975) Paddy Chayefsky (1976) Arthur Laurents (1977) Nancy Dowd, Robert C. Jones and Waldo Salt (1978) Mike Gray, T. S. Cook and James Bridges (1979) Bo Goldman (1980) Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths (1981) Melissa Mathison (1982) Horton Foote (1983) Original Comedy Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker (1969) Peter Bogdanovich, Buck Henry, David Newman and Robert Benton (1972) Melvin Frank and Jack Rose (1973) Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor and Alan Uger (1974) Robert Towne and Warren Beatty (1975) Bill Lancaster (1976) Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman (1977) Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller (1978) Steve Tesich (1979) Nancy Meyers, Harvey Miller and Charles Shyer (1980) Steve Gordon (1981) Don McGuire, Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal (1982) Lawrence Kasdan and Barbara Benedek (1983) Woody Allen (1984) William Kelley and Earl W. Wallace (1985) John Patrick Shanley (1987) Ron Shelton (1988) Barry Levinson (1990) Callie Khouri (1991) Neil Jordan (1992) Jane Campion (1993) Richard Curtis (1994) Randall Wallace (1995) Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (1996) James L. Brooks and Mark Andrus (1997) Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (1998) Alan Ball (1999) Kenneth Lonergan (2000) Julian Fellowes (2001) Michael Moore (2002) Sofia Coppola (2003) Charlie Kaufman (2004) Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco (2005) Michael Arndt (2006) Diablo Cody (2007) Dustin Lance Black (2008) Mark Boal (2009) Christopher Nolan (2010) Spike Jonze (2013) Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness (2014) Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer (2015) Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney (2016) Jordan Peele (2017) Bo Burnham (2018) Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won (2019) MBA: ba503a17-848c-4773-aa58-208f4163124f RERO: 02-A006280748 SNAC: w67m3zhn Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Pryor&oldid=998873380" 20th-century American comedians 20th-century American male actors Actors from Peoria, Illinois African-American film directors African-American male actors African-American male comedians African-American military personnel African-American screenwriters African-American stand-up comedians African-American television producers American humorists American male comedians American male comedy actors American male non-fiction writers American male screenwriters American Prince Hall Freemasons American satirists American social commentators American stand-up comedians American television writers Censorship in the arts Comedians from Illinois Film directors from Illinois Free speech activists American Freemasons Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Male actors from Illinois American male television writers Mark Twain Prize recipients People with multiple sclerosis Screenwriters from Illinois Stax Records artists Television producers from Illinois United States Army soldiers Warner Records artists Writers from Peoria, Illinois 20th-century American male writers Articles with unsourced statements from March 2017 Articles with unsourced statements from August 2020 Wikipedia external links cleanup from February 2020 Wikipedia spam cleanup from February 2020 Pages using Sister project links with wikidata namespace mismatch Pages using Sister project links with hidden wikidata Turner Classic Movies person ID same as Wikidata Webarchive template archiveis links Wikipedia articles with RERO identifiers	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1717
__label__cc	0.555888	0.444112	← Why I Ask and Doubt, but Have Strong Faith A New Day, A New Way → Mount Sinai and the Birth of Freedom by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks The revelation at Mount Sinai – the central episode not only of the parsha of Yitro, but of Judaism as a whole – was unique in the religious history of mankind. Other faiths (Christianity and Islam) call themselves religions of revelation, but in both cases the revelation of which they spoke was to an individual (“the son of God,” “the prophet of God”). Only in Judaism was God’s self-disclosure not to an individual (a prophet) or a group (the elders) but to an entire nation, young and old, men, women and children, the righteous and not-yet-righteous alike. From the very outset, the people of Israel knew something unprecedented had happened at Sinai. Moses had no doubt that it was an event without parallel: “Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created man on earth; ask from one end of the heavens to the other. Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of? Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have, and lived?” (Deut. 4:32–33). For the great Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages, its significance was primarily epistemological. It created certainty and removed doubt. The authenticity of a revelation experienced by one person could be questioned. One witnessed by millions could not. God disclosed His presence in public to remove any possible suspicion that the presence felt, and the voice heard, were not genuine. Looking at the history of mankind since those days, it is clear that there was another significance also – one that had to do not with religious knowledge, but with politics. At Sinai a new kind of nation was being formed, and a new kind of society – one that would be an antithesis of Egypt, in which the few had power and the many were enslaved. It was to be, in Abraham Lincoln’s words in the Gettysburg Address, “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Indeed without the covenant at Mount Sinai, Lincoln’s words might have been inconceivable. For nowhere else do we find anything like the politics of Mount Sinai, with its radical vision of a society held together not by power but by the free consent of its citizens to be bound, individually and collectively, by a moral code and by a covenant with God.[1] Standard works on the history of the politics of freedom trace it back through Marx, Rousseau and Hobbes to Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, and the Greek city states (Athens in particular) of the fifth century BCE. This is a serious error. To be sure, words like “democracy” (rule by the people) are Greek in origin. The Greeks were gifted at abstract nouns and systematic thought. However, if we look at the “birth of the modern” – at figures like Milton, Hobbes and Locke in England, and the founding fathers of America – the book with which they were in dialogue was not Plato or Aristotle but the Hebrew Bible. Hobbes quotes it 657 times in The Leviathan alone. Long before the Greek philosophers, and far more profoundly, at Mount Sinai the concept of a free society was born. Three things about that moment were to prove crucial. The first is that long before Israel entered the land and acquired their own system of government (first by judges, later by kings), they had entered into an overarching covenant with God. That covenant (Brit Sinai) set moral limits to the exercise of power. The code we call Torah established for the first time the primacy of right over might. Any king who behaved contrarily to Torah was acting ultra vires (beyond legitimate authority), and could be challenged. This is the single most important fact about biblical politics. Democracy on the Greek model always had one fatal weakness. Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill called it “the tyranny of the majority.”[2] J.L. Talmon called it “totalitarian democracy.”[3] The rule of the majority contains no guarantee of the rights of minorities. As Lord Acton rightly noted, it was this that led to the downfall of Athens: “There was no law superior to that of the state. The lawgiver was above the law.”[4] In Judaism, by contrast, prophets were mandated to challenge the authority of the king if he acted against the terms of the Torah. The classic example is the accusation God tells Elijah to make to King Ahab for seizing Naboth’s vineyard: “Thus says the Lord: Would you murder and take possession?” (1 Kings 21:19). Individuals were empowered to disobey illegal or immoral orders. The first example was the Hebrew midwives who “feared God and did not do what the Egyptian king had commanded” (Ex. 1:17). Another key moment was when King Saul ordered his servants to kill the priests of Nob, who had given shelter to David, “But the king’s servants would not raise a hand to strike down the priests of the Lord” (Samuel 22:17).[5] It was on this tradition that Calvin – inspiration of the seventeenth-century Puritan radicals in England and America – drew, when he said “prophets and teachers may take courage and thus boldly set themselves against kings and nations.”[6] It was on the same tradition that Thomas Paine based his pamphlet Common Sense (1776), widely credited at the time as the inspiration that led to the American revolution.[7] Historically, it was the covenant at Sinai and all that flowed from it, not the Greek political tradition, that inspired the birth of freedom in Britain and America, the first people to take that road in the modern age. The second key element lies in the prologue to the covenant. God tells Moses: “This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and tell the people of Israel. ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me. Now, if you obey Me fully and keep My covenant, you will be My treasured possession, for the whole earth is Mine. You will be for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation…’” (Ex. 19:3–6) Moses tells this to the people, who reply: “We will do everything the Lord has said” (Ex. 19:8). Until the people had signified their consent, the revelation could not proceed. The principle at stake was that there is no legitimate government without the consent of the governed,[8] even if the governor is Creator of heaven and earth. I know of few more radical ideas anywhere. To be sure, there were sages in the Talmudic period who questioned whether the acceptance of the covenant at Sinai was completely free. There is a famous statement in the Talmud: “And they stood under [normally translated as, “at the foot of ”] the mountain” (Ex. 19:17) – this teaches that the Holy One, blessed be He, overturned the mountain above them like a cask and said to them, “If you accept the Torah, it is well, but if not, this will be your burial place.”[9] What the sages are doing here is to question whether the Israelites really had a free choice at Sinai. They had not yet entered the land. They were dependent on God for their food, water and protection. Where could they go, and to whom could they turn, if they said no to God? The Talmud itself says that “Nonetheless, they re-accepted it in the days of Ahasuerus,”[10] that is, at the time described in the book of Esther – one of the only two books in the Bible that does not contain the name of God.[11] In that context there could be no question of divine coercion. However, at the simplest level, this is the significance of the two covenant renewal ceremonies, one at the end of Moses’ life, as the Israelites were about to enter the land (Deut. 29–31), the other at the end of Joshua’s life, when the people had conquered the land (Joshua 24). The covenant was renewed precisely so that no one could say that it had been entered into coercively when there was no alternative. At the heart of Judaism is the idea – way ahead of its time, and not always fully realised – that the free God desires the free worship of free human beings. God, said the rabbis, does not act tyrannically with His creatures.[12] The third, equally ahead of its time, was that the partners to the covenant were to be “all the people” – men, women and children. This fact is emphasised later on in the Torah in the mitzvah of Hak-hel, the septennial covenant renewal ceremony. The Torah states specifically that the entire people is to be gathered together for this ceremony, “men, women and children” (Deut. 31:10–13). A thousand years later, when Athens experimented with democracy, only a limited section of society had political rights. Women, children, slaves and foreigners were excluded. In many respects this held true until very recently. In Britain, women did not get the vote until 1918. In America, women’s suﬀrage was complete only in 1920, though some states had enacted it earlier. According to the sages, when God was about to give the Torah at Sinai, He told Moses to consult first with the women and only then with the men. This is the meaning of the verse “This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and tell the people of Israel” (Ex. 19:3). The house of Jacob, our sages tell us, refers to the women.[13] The Torah, Israel’s “constitution of liberty,” includes everyone. It is the first moment, by thousands of years, that citizenship is conceived as being universal. Perhaps the greatest testimony to the politics of the Hebrew Bible was given by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in an unpublished manuscript discovered after his death: The Jews provide us with an astonishing spectacle: the laws of Numa, Lycurgus, Solon are dead; the very much older laws of Moses are still alive. Athens, Sparta, Rome have perished and no longer have children left on earth; Zion, destroyed, has not lost its children…. What must be the strength of legislation capable of working such wonders, capable of braving conquests, dispersions, revolutions, exiles, capable of surviving the customs, laws, empire of all the nations…to last as long as the world?…any man whosoever he is, must acknowledge this as a unique marvel, the causes of which, divine or human, certainly deserve the study and admiration of the sages, in preference to all that Greece and Rome offer.[14] With the revelation at Sinai, something unprecedented entered the human horizon, though it would take centuries, millennia, before its full implications were understood. At Sinai, the politics of freedom was born. [1] “The government of the Israelites was a Federation, held together by no political authority, but by the unity of race and faith, and founded, not on physical force, but on a voluntary covenant.” Lord Acton, Essays in the History of Liberty (Liberty Press, 1985), 7 [2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, bk. 1, chap. 15; John Stuart Mill, introduction to On Liberty [3] J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Secker and Warburg, 1955) [4] Lord Acton, Essays in the History of Liberty, 13 [5] On civil disobedience in Judaism, see the essays by Moshe Greenberg, Maurice Lamm and Milton Konvitz in Contemporary Jewish Ethics, ed. Menachem Kellner (Sanhedrin Press, 1978), 211–254; and Harold Schulweis, Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey ( Jewish Lights, 2008) [6] Calvin, Jeremiah, lecture 2: r.44. Cited in Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 63 [7] Reprinted in Thomas Paine, Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3–38. The pamphlet sold 100,000 copies in 1776 alone. Paine drew entirely on the anti-monarchical passages in the Hebrew Bible [8] The phrase comes from the American Declaration of Independence [9] Shabbat 88a [11] The other is Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs. [12] Avoda Zara 3a [13] Mekhilta, ad loc [14] These unpublished notes are preserved in the public library at Neuchatel. Cited in Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), vol. 3:104–5 As taken from, Posted by yishmaelgunzhard on January 24, 2019 in Uncategorized	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1720
__label__wiki	0.53818	0.53818	Green light given for new community hub in Great Linford Planning permission has been given for an new community building in Great Linford Parish, with work due to start at the end of September. The Marsh Drive Pavilion redevelopment project will turn a little-used grassy space into a multi-use community centre, which is intended to benefit not just Great Linford but the whole North MK area. Lead councillor for planning and communications David Stabler said the site will encourage sports teams to hold social, fundraising and promotional events. He said, “Building a multi-use community hub and social area will boost the use of the site for the many football, cricket and tennis players by encouraging them to socialise after games have finished, or hold fundraising and promotional events to celebrate their achievements. “It will also provide a much-needed opportunity to bring together our scattered parish communities of young and older residents, and encourage their participation in leisure and social activities as well as sports, helping physical, mental and social wellbeing, in partnership with volunteer groups and businesses.” Cllr Stabler added the plans would provide an upgrade on the current Marsh Drive facilities, which were built in the 1970s and are not to current FA standards. He said, “Marsh Drive playing fields and pavilion is currently the only sports and recreation area in the parish owned by Great Linford Parish Council (GLPC). It has no meeting hall, only pitches, tennis courts, changing rooms and a small kitchen. “The existing changing rooms were built by the Development Corporation in the 1970s, and are not to the current Football Association standards. “Although the sporting facilities are well used, the ability of clubs to develop further, particularly in terms of promoting opportunities for female and young players, is hampered by the lack of appropriate changing and ancillary facilities,” he added. The majority of cash for the new build – almost £344k – is coming from Section 106 funding, while GLPC will provide an additional £100,000 of reserve funds for the project. This first phase of the redevelopment is expected to take 10 weeks to complete and will be overseen by contractors Paragon Space Ltd. In 2021, the existing pavilion will also be much improved, with better insulation, heating and ventilation. The changing rooms will be upgraded, and a meeting facility for users of the sports pitches and tennis courts will be a new feature. “GLPC covers 13 grid squares with no central location or facilities for all parishioners,” David added. “This development is going to change that. It is incredibly good news and will impact so many people in a positive way.” Previous Self-care economy booms as women seek more ‘me time’ Next Destination Milton Keynes appoints new Membership Manager	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1721
__label__wiki	0.51979	0.51979	The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/2019/11/25/poore-being-an-intellectual-is-nice-but-i-still-need-a-job/) POORE \| Being an Intellectual Is Nice, but I Still Need a Job By Colton Poore \| November 25, 2019 More on Opinion Subscribe to Opinion Every day, I pass by the wise words of former Cornell President Hunter R. Rawlings III in Goldwin Smith gatekeeping the entrance to the Temple of Zeus: “Genuine education is not a commodity, it is the awakening of a human being.” Though I will not argue here about whether the education at Cornell is to be considered genuine or not, I have often thought that if it costs over $60,000 a year to awaken myself, I’d much rather have stayed in bed. I assume that the notion of a genuine education is tightly linked to age-old sayings like “explore your interests” and “follow your passion.” And I assume that awakening a human being probably involves something more than an alarm clock. The author of the quote I pass each day was probably thinking in more abstract terms of becoming an engaged citizen and a better person. But isn’t spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to allow clueless 18 year-olds to spend four years removed from society in the pursuit of vague ideas like self-improvement and intellectual rigor just a way to say that you’re rich? I didn’t come to Cornell to become a better person. I’m not reading novels in my English classes that aren’t easily available from Amazon. I don’t suspect that I’ve uncovered any secrets about biology in any of my required courses. It’s generally agreed across academia, I think, that a tibia is a tibia, that being pre-med is hard and that intro chemistry is a weed-out course. I came to Cornell because I was accepted, because I received enough financial aid and because it wasn’t the one in Iowa. I came to Cornell because I knew there was something inexplicably impressive about the fact that I learned a tibia was a tibia at Cornell University. It’s in upstate New York. Four hours from New York City. One and a half hours from Syracuse. Lots of pretty waterfalls. Oh, and — gaze averted, modest tone — it’s an Ivy. And when I utter those magic words — Ivy League — I have previous generations of rich males to thank. The ones that had the ability to explore their interests without worrying about what happens at the end of four years, to read the English canon for the sake of self-improvement and to emerge as citizens of the world. The ones who helped maintain the idea of a university as a finishing school for the elite. Because those are the associations that I assume people make when they hear me say Cornell. They think that I’m metamorphosing into one of those worldly citizens. I’m only half-sorry to report that I’m really just looking for a job. Hunter R. Rawlings III’s greatest nightmares might be coming true because I don’t think I’m an outlier in my sentiments. I’ve heard more students discuss job searches than Latin syntax. More students talk about their summer internships than about the Odyssey and the Iliad combined. When our former president returns to Ithaca, he’ll find his campus swarming with students that are destroying its intellectual prowess all for the sake of getting an interview. To him, perhaps, he’ll return to Ithaca only to find his vision burning. But Ithaca isn’t burning; it’s only changing. What Rawlings would see as hellfire springs from the idea that many of us have grown disenchanted with the idea that the university is a place to improve ourselves. At the very least, we’ve become disenchanted with the price tag associated with that improvement. What we saw in Cornell wasn’t the chance to awaken our humanity but the opportunity to access a brand name that would provide us with social mobility — or at least social stability. And though I don’t deny that I’ve spent countless hours discussing Middlemarch and Beowulf with my professors or that I do believe I’ve improved myself over my time here, I’m not ashamed to admit that I came here, first and foremost, to secure a solid job for myself and to uplift my family by doing so. The University is no longer an Elysium where students with the necessary means can become enlightened human beings. I’m afraid, former president Rawlings, that it’s been made pedestrian by the souls of those that are simply trying to earn a living. Elite universities like Cornell are now caught between two values systems. On one hand lie the echoes of the upper class — a past in which a student’s goal was to become a citizen of the world. On the other hand is a modern promise of skill-learning and social mobility. The former produces good people, and the latter produces good workers. And though I’d like to become both someday, I suppose that for now, I’ll have to settle — I’ll be keeping Cornell University in its place at the top of my resume. Hunter R. Rawlings III: Ithaca is here, but it’s no longer the epic destination that you envisioned. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Colton Poore is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at cpoore@cornellsun.com. Help Me, I’m Poore runs every other Monday this semester. Cornell Nets $12.8 Million From Coronavirus Relief Bill As Pollack Warns of Mounting Deficit, Likely Layoffs By Johnathan Stimpson April 23, 2020 Cornell is set to receive $12.8 million in federal grant money as part of a relief bill meant to ease financial burdens on higher education institutions. Huang, EVP of Student Assembly, to Create a Journal of Higher Education By Stacey Blansky January 21, 2020 When first coming to Cornell, Cat Huang ’21, executive vice president of the Student Assembly, had not initially considered higher education policy to be a particularly gripping field. But shaped by her experience serving on the S.A. — regularly working with administrators and discussing campus policy — Huang is now working to create The Cornell Higher Ed.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1722
__label__wiki	0.772628	0.772628	Crippling medical research October 20, 2014 Healthcare, Vaccinesbig government, CDC, diseases, health research, Lawrence Solomon, medicine, National Institutes of Health, Pharmaceuticals, R&D, research and developmentLawrence Solomon The medical-industrial-governmental complex spends more and more but has less and less to show for it. This article, by Lawrence Solomon, first appeared in the National Post Over the last 30 years, spending on medical research and development soared more than five fold, but it didn’t produce five times as many research geniuses whose insights brought us five times the life-saving discoveries, not by a long shot. Instead of the extra billions finding their way to a new generation of ever better funded, ever more empowered intellects, the money went mostly to medical mediocrities spawned by the expanding government bureaucracies that sucked up the monies, and that, too often, helped squelch rather than advance knowledge. Before the rise of major health bureaucracies such as the Centres for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, science gave us the breathtaking breakthroughs that medicine still relies on today — penicillin and antibiotics, vitamins and insulin, vaccines for typhus and polio, devices like x-rays, electrocardiographs, contact lenses, kidney dialysis machines, CT scanners, MRIs and pacemakers and procedures like blood transfusions, laser treatments, open-heart surgery and organ transplants. Medical breakthroughs haven’t stopped under the bureaucratic weight but they’ve slowed to a crawl. CNN’s “10 medical advances of the last 10 years,” published last year, mostly listed improvements on earlier discoveries such as refinements for laparoscopic surgery, invented a century ago. CNN’s list includes items to make bureaucrats proud, such as expansions in smoke free laws. Before the rise of major health bureaucracies such as the Centres for Disease Control, science gave us the breathtaking breakthroughs. While the amount spent developing new drugs has soared — U.S. companies spent $49-billion in 2010 compared to $15-billion in 1995 — the number of new drugs entering the market has plunged. Worse, most of them are deemed “me-too” drugs because they aren’t much different from existing drugs. According to the World Health Organization, a dollar invested in R&D between 2005 and 2010 was 70% less productive in terms of producing a profitable drug than a dollar spent in the previous decade. What hasn’t declined in the medical field is dogma, as best illustrated by the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine, awarded to Barry Marshall for an outside-the-box discovery more than two decades earlier. Marshall, a trainee in internal medicine in Australia, realized that ulcers — then a very serious ailment — were caused by an easily treated bacterial infection rather than by stress, as commonly believed. Marshall was ridiculed, called a quack, dismissed when he presented his findings to an annual meeting of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, dismissed by the pharmaceutical companies, dismissed by funding bodies that held the purse strings to research grants, dismissed by important medical journals. Although he soon successfully cured his own patients without subjecting them to conventional treatments — like antidepressants to allay the patients’ presumed stress-induced gastric acids or surgical removal of their ulcerated stomachs — the medical world treated him as a fraud, asserting his results couldn’t be replicated and in any case couldn’t be true. Even after Marshall, in desperation, decided to prove that infections caused ulcers by infecting himself, and then curing the resulting ulcer with an antibiotic, he remained a charlatan to most for another decade. A breakthrough came when Marshall’s story was published — not in an august scientific journal but in Star, a supermarket tabloid that ran stories about Nancy Reagan adopting alien babies, and then in Reader’s Digest and National Enquirer. To the establishment’s chagrin, these periodicals’ readers increasingly demanded his cure for their ulcers, and physicians, after seeing the results, slowly were won over. Eventually, the scientific research establishment was forced by popular opinion to investigate the science and Marshall’s nightmare — and that of millions of needless sufferers — was over. Today, not only have ulcers disappeared as a major debilitating disease, stomach cancers have too — the same bacterium had been responsible for them both. Why the dogma and the personal attacks on Marshall? How could so many for so long ignore the evidence that was so obvious and so easy to verify? An answer lies in the willful blindness of the vested interests that dominate the medical field. Money provides one vested interest. Anti-ulcer medicines represented the largest therapeutic drug market worldwide, with sales in the 1990s growing to almost $20-billion. Big pharma had no interest in gutting this moneymaker and neither did individual practitioners. “Every gastroenterologist was doing 20 or 30 patients a week who might have ulcers, and 25% of them would,” Marshall later explained. “Because it was a recurring disease that you could never cure, the patients kept coming back.” Surgeons whose bread and butter was removing stomachs also weren’t interested in hearing their particular specialty wasn’t needed; neither were the numerous scientists grinding out me-too papers by the hundreds on topics such as how to better manage ulcers by tweaking the dose of this or that antidepressant. Money aside, personal egos and professional reputations were at stake. And cementing these powerful incentives together to form a near-impenetrable groupthink were government agencies that amplified the conventional wisdom and increasingly influenced what research should and shouldn’t be done, what papers should and shouldn’t be published, what drugs should and shouldn’t be licensed. In this medical-industrial-governmental complex, there was and is little appetite for out-of-the-box thinkers who challenge the status quo; there was and is an insatiable need to squelch dissent. Does more government money in the hands of this already bloated complex save lives, or destroy them? That will be the subject of a future column in this series. This column is the second in a series. For the first column, see: We’re more vulnerable to diseases. Lawrence Solomon is a columnist with Canada’s National Post and is research director of Consumer Policy Institute. Book Lawrence Solomon to speak on vaccine related issues to your parent group, organization or other, at no charge in the GTA. Contact Mr. Solomon to arrange a booking directly at: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com Follow Lawrence Solomon on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LSolomonTweets For previous columns by Lawrence Solomon on vaccines, see here. ← We’re more vulnerable to diseases Don’t rush to hand out the Ebola vaccine → 1 thought on “Crippling medical research” The Sustainabilitist says: Excellent! We have a 4-Part Medicine series which touched upon the questionably cozy ties between different players in medicine as well: http://sustainabilitist.wordpress.com/category/health/medicine/	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1724
__label__wiki	0.963465	0.963465	UCI Leadership Cyber Resources Bryan Cunningham, CPRI Executive Director UCI Cyber Security Policy & Research Institute As the first Executive Director of UCI’s multidisciplinary Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute, Cunningham is focused on solution-oriented strategies address technical, legal and policy challenges to combat cyber threats, protect individual privacy and civil liberties, maintain public safety and economic and national security and empower Americans to take better control of their digital security. Cunningham is a leading international expert on cybersecurity law and policy, a former White House lawyer and adviser and a media commentator on cybersecurity, technology and surveillance issues. He has appeared on Bloomberg, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX and other networks. Cunningham has extensive experience in senior U.S. government intelligence and law enforcement positions. He served as Deputy Legal Adviser to then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. He also served six years in the Clinton Administration as a senior CIA officer and federal prosecutor. He drafted significant portions of the Homeland Security Act and related legislation, helping to shepherd them through Congress. He was a principal contributor to the first National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, worked closely with the 9/11 Commission and provided legal advice to the President, National Security Advisor, the National Security Council, and other senior government officials on intelligence, terrorism, cyber security and other related matters. Cunningham also practice privacy, cybersecurity, and data protection law at the Los Angeles law firm Zweiback, Fiset, & Coleman LLP. Mr. Cunningham was founding vice-chair of the American Bar Association Cyber Security Privacy Task Force and was awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement for his work on information issues. He has served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Biodefense Analysis, the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Cyber Security Task Force. He is also the principal author of legal and ethics chapters in several cybersecurity textbooks. ©2021 University of California, Irvine Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute All Rights Reserved • Privacy Policy This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Read our policy.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1725
__label__wiki	0.832075	0.832075	Home / Case Studies / About Charles Manson About Charles Manson Charles Manson was born the illegitimate son of Kathleen Maddox on November 12, 1934. Kathleen was a 16 year old prostitute. Charles’ last name did not come from his father but rather one of his mother’s ‘short-term’ husbands. His father was thought to be a ‘Colonel Scott’ of Ashland Kentucky who for a time paid child support to Katherine in the name of “Charles Milles Manson”. Scott died in 1954. It was never determined whether or not Charles was indeed his son. In 1939 Charles was forced to live with an aunt when his mother was convicted of robbing a West Virginia gas station. Charles endured a fair amount of abuse during this time, once being sent off to school dressed as a girl because his aunts husband thought he was too sissy and wanted to teach him how to be a man. When Charles’ mother was paroled in 1942 she returned home to reclaim her son. However, he fared little better with her. He was often left in the care of neighbors, or whomever seemed to be handy at the time, whilst his mother engaged in various activities with her male and female lovers. Within five years Katherine was searching for foster homes for Charles. In 1947 she sent him to Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana. After only a short time here Charles ran away and started living on the streets. His mother showed no interest in him. It was during this time that Charles started his life of crime, using theft as a means of supporting himself. He was arrested in Indiana and sentenced to time in the local Juvenile Center, but was later moved to Father Flanagan’s Boy’s Town after escaping from the center. He escaped from Boy’s Town as well and decided to take a joy ride and to visit relatives in a stolen car. During this ride he committed more robberies which led to further arrests. Charles was 13 years old at the time. Charles was sentenced to a reform school at Plainfield, Indiana. Here he says he was abused by other boys and even guards. According to Charles he was raped and tortured by older boys who were once encouraged by a guard who sat by and masterbated while the abuse was taking place. In 1951 Charles escaped from Plainfield. He was arrested in Beaver, Utah and sentenced to federal time for driving stolen cars across the state line. A year later, whilst in a minimum security prison, Charles assualted another boy with a razor blade and sodomized him. Because of this he was moved to a higher security lock up during which time he had several major disciplinary infractions and homosexual assaults. During the same year he was moved again to Chilicothe, Ohio Reformatory. He became a model prisoner and was paroled in May 1954. Manson was 20 years old. Manson landed himself back in prison, again for auto theft, in March 1956. This time he was sent to the federal prison at Terminal Island, California. He was released in 1958 but was again in jail 6 months later in Los Angelos for forging and cashing stolen US Treasury checks. For this he received probation which was revoked in 1960 when he was arrested for pimping. For this Manson was incarcerated at McNeil Island. During which time he proclaimed himself a scientologist and was tested as having an IQ of 121. Despite objecting to it himself he was again paroled in March 1967. After leaving McNeil Island Manson Haight-Ashbury district which was at that time overrun with teenage runaways and drifters who were, singing tunes to flower power with an infusion of drugs and seeking new enlightement and meaning in life. In San Francisco Manson began attracting groups of young drop outs and runaways. They were both male and female and came from all social classes. Some were even college gradutes. Some were involved in cults. Most were just hopelessly confused during an age of free sex and even freer drugs. Manson took advantage of this confusion and injected himself into their lives as a father figure and a lover, amongst other things. Manson called his group the ‘Family’ and they drifted in and out of towns. In addition to his own Scientology beliefs Manson also drew his Family into the realms of the Church of Satan and the Process Church of Final Judgement which worshipped both Satan and Jehovah. In was during this time that Manson’s famous ‘Helter Skelter’ ideology came about. Helter Skelter was his interpretation of lyrics from the Beetles which predicted a race war in America. Manson believed that once the whites would be annialated once ‘Blackie’ was driven to the point of violence and He and his Family alone would remain. On October 13, 1968 Nancy Warren, pregnant, and Clida Delaney her 64 year old grandmother were found ritualistically murdered outside of Ukiah, California. Each victim was beaten to death and strangled and had 35 leather thongs wrapped around their throat. The Family were in the vacinity at the time. On January 1 1968 the body of Marina Habe, a 17 year old West Hollywood girl, was found, after having been abducted near her home two days earlier, with multiple stab wounds in the neck and chest. It soon came to light that the Habes were acquaintances of Mansons Family. Manson’s 64 year old grandfather, Darwin Scott, was found hacked to death on May 27, 1969 in his home in Ashland Kentucky. Scott had been pinned to the floor by a butcher knife. During this time Manson and his Family had mysteriously gone missing. Sixteen year old Mark Walts disappeared from Chatsworth, California on July 17, 1969. The next morning his body was found. He had been beaten, shot, and run over by a car. Walts too had been a friend of Manson and his Family. During the time of Mark Walts death the Manson Family were living on a commune ranch. The death of Walts was the first death in which Manson was publically and vehemently implicated. This was due in large part to the outcry by Walts’ brother. Despite all the accusations, however, Manson, nor any member of his Family, were charged with the murder. An unidentified corpse was discovered just northeast of Mansons ranch around this time. Though the body was never officially identified it was presumed to be Susan Scott. A Family member. Scott had been living on the Manson ranch when she disappeared. During the next month Musician Gary Hinman was hacked to death in his home and his blood was used to smear graffiti on the walls. In August the Family murdered and mutilated Leno and Rosemary LeBianca in Los Angeles. Leno had been stabbed multiple times and a knife and fork were found protruding from his body. Rosemary had been stabbed forty-one times. Sharon Tate:Associated Press It was during this time that the infamous Polanski murders occured. On August 9, 1969, several members of the Manson Family entered the home of movie director Roman Polanski. Steven Parent, a houseguest of Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate, was found in his car outside the house. He had been shot four times and stabbed once. There were three other houseguests murdered. Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski were found on the back lawn of the estate. Abigail had been stabbed twenty-eight times and Voytek was shot twice, struck over the head thriteen times and stabbed fifty-one times. The fourth guest, Jay Sebring was found inside the house with Sharon Tate. The two were tied together by a rope around their necks which was hung over a rafter in the ceiling. Sharon was eight months pregnant at the time. She had been stabbed sixteen times in the chest and in the back. Jay had been stabbed seven times and shot once. He had bleed to death. Neither of the victims had actually died from the hanging. The Polanski murders consumed public attention and caused general panic in everyone. Though it was the LaBianca murders which would play a very important role in the investigation and arrest of the Manson Family. The Los Angeles Sheriffs Office had jurisdiction over the LaBianca muders whilst the Los Angeles Police Department were in charge of the Tate investigation. Lack of communication between the two bodies caused a fair amount of problems during the early stages of the investigations. In the beginning the official stance taken by both departments, particularly the Los Angeles Police Department which made a public announcement, were that the two cases were not related. This was in spite of the fact that the word “PIG” was written on the door at the Tate scene and the words “Death to Pigs” were written, in the victim’s own blood, at the LaBianca scene. In addition to poor communication between the two departments there were also problems with evidence collection and preservation. Later officers would say that it was the sheer horrificness and senselessness of the muders which made them lose all sense of crime scene protocol. A week after the murders Manson and members of his family were arrested at his ranch on drug related charges. He was held for ten days and then released. That night he ordered the murder of Donald Shea, an ‘outside follower’ of the Family whom Manson believed knew too much and was talking to the police. His body was dismembered. Despite the unorganized investigations taking place in the different camps the Los Angeles Sheriffs and Police Departments caught a lucky break in September when members of the Family burned a piece of road grading equiptment which they said was obstructing one of their dune buggy routes. Arson investigators traced the evidence to the Faimly and Manson was arrested on October 12. The next day Susan Atkins, a Family member who was spending time in an LA jail told a cellmate of the LaBiana and Tate murders. With Manson already in jail indictments followed. Despite his confinement his Family carried on without him. Charles Manson Mugshot:Associated Press Another Family member was shot and killed in November during a game of Russian Roulette. Less than two weeks later another body, later to be identified as Family Friend Sherry Cooper was found near the site where Marina Habe’s body had been discovered in 1968. Two Scientologists, James Sharp, 15 and Doreen Gaul, 19, were found dead in an LA alley. They had been stabbed more than fifty times each. A further testament to Manson’s influence was the death of Joel Pugh. Family associates Pugh and Bruce Davis flew to London in 1968 to engage in ‘business’ concerning Satanic Orders in Britian. Though Davis returned home Pugh stayed on and his body was found in a London hotel room on December 1, 1969. His throat had been slit with razor blades. There were “backwards writings” and “comic book drawings” written on the mirrors with his blood. Manson Girls:Associated Press Along with three of his Family, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, Manson was officially charged with the Tate-LaBianca murders. Over a year after the deaths they finally went to trial. It began in June 1970 and ended on November 19 of the same year. In 1971 Charles ‘Tex’ Watson was convicted and sentenced to die for his part in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Six member faimlys tried to steal 140 weapons from a gunshop in August that year with a view to breaking Manson out of jail. They were captured in a confrontation with the police which involved gunfire. All were convicted. Amongst them was Mary Brunner, an original Manson Disciple. She was also sentenced for her role in the Hinman murder. Susan Atkins and Robert Beausoleil were sentenced once again to death for the Hinman murder. Manson, Bruce Davis and Steve Grogan were convicted in the Shea and Hinman murders. In 1972 a number of death sentences which were handed out to the Manson family were overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Whilst Manson was in prison the Family was headed by Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme. In September 1975 she attempted to assasinate President Gerald Ford. She was sentenced to life in prison. Attorney Ronald Hughes, who represented Leslie Van Houten, disappeared a week after the trial. He was last seen being driven away by two Family associates ‘James’ and ‘Lauren’. His corpse was found five months later. According to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi ‘James’ and ‘Lauren’ were James and Lauren Willett. On November 8, 1972, the body of 26 year old James Willett was found in a shallow grave near Guerneville, California. He had been shot and decapitated. Three days later his station wagon was found outside a house in Stockton. Police arrested three Manson Family members in the house. Lauren Willett, James Willett’s wife, was found buried in the basement. Later four suspects pled guilty to the murder charges. Charles Manson’s is eligible for parole. His next hearing is 2002. Next Story → Interview with Usamah Bin-Ladin (Osama Bin-Laden) 5 viewsIs there a serial killer at large in Ohio? 5 viewsReal life “Hannibal Lecter” killed by police after eating his girlfriend’s face 5 viewsProfiling Angels of Death: Nurses that kill	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1728
__label__cc	0.560464	0.439536	SpongeBob SquarePants Popcorn Bar with Salty and Sweet Options – Film and action summary Little Riding Hood David Noodle Aaronson and his lifelong accomplices, Max, Rooster and Patsy, along with their friends, grew up in New York’s tough Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side. A long period in America followed them from the 1920s to the final years of Prohibition in the early 1930s, and then in the late 1960s, when the Noodler elder returned to New York after years in hiding. Once Upon a Time in AmericaFilm Summary Below is an overview of the spoilers. We open the film with three villains searching for a remarkable man at the Hauang Chinese Theater in New York’s Lower East Side Jewish neighborhood in 1932. Before they find him, the Chinese hosts alert a 30-year-old drug-addicted gangster named Noodle and help him escape, but not before his girlfriend is shot and his friend Fat Mo is brutally tortured for wanting to know where Noodle is. Noodle sneaks in and saves Fat Mo by killing one of the gangsters. Soon after, he learns that three of his childhood friends, Patsy, Rooster and Charred Max, have been murdered in a botched bank robbery. He went to the local bus station before discovering that he had been cheated out of a million dollar suitcase kept in a secret safe at the station. Noodle buys a ticket to leave town somewhere and disappears into the night for the next 36 years…. In 1968, old Noodle, very suspicious, returned to New York and called his bar the same Fat Mo. They discuss what happened in 1932, and Noodle realizes that Mo didn’t take the money. Noodle goes into the pantry and looks through the peephole into the past…. In 1918, 12-year-old Deborah, Fat Moe’s sister-in-law who dreams of becoming a ballerina and actress, is spat on by teenagers. Noodle begins a search and finds his tyrant friends Patsy, Rooster and Dominic. They are petty thieves and after committing arson at a local shop, they try to rob a drunk, but get beaten up by an older teenage thief, Max. Noodle tries to get revenge on Max, but a crooked cop shows up and forces the two boys to take his side. The boys immediately become friends and begin committing petty theft for a local thug named Bugsy. The boys blackmail the con man with a photo that allows them to commit more crimes that Bugsy doesn’t like. Bugsy finds out, and he and his gang attack Max and Noodle to kill them. Noodle goes to Deborah for help, but she ignores him, knowing he’s on the wrong track. Max, Noodle and the gang of miners decide to dismantle a local smuggling operation with a new invention invented by Noodle. In the process, he irritates Bugsy again, but he gets more money and more arrogance for the boys. They decide to put all their cheated money in a suitcase at the bus stop, saving half the money and only being able to open it with all the members at once. As they leave the station, Bugsy passes them outside and shoots Dominique 8, who dies in his arms. Noodle stabbed Bugsy and a police officer before being subdued and sent to prison for 12 years. In 1930 Noodle is released from prison and joins the gang, while Max, Rooster and Patsy become local smugglers and spearmasters where they take the crime out of Fat Mo’s sweet spear. The gang is recruited by a Detroit gangster to rob a diamond store, where Noodle rapes the cashier Carol, which is expressly forbidden by the Detroit gangster. During the diamond exchange, Max and the gang open fire and kill all the gangsters for Noodle’s plans. Still, Noodle leaves with a car at the end of the pier and makes the gang laugh. In 1968, Noodle goes to the extravagant crypt built for the bodies of his gang and discovers that it was built under his name, which he did not do, and finds a second key to the bus locker. He goes to his locker and finds a million dollar case that says you have to pay in advance for your next order. Returning nervously to Moe’s, he blinked 1932…. Noodle and the gang have become powerful and evil. They save the life of a local union leader and make more enemies among other mafia groups and the police. The gang plays a nasty trick on the police chief to help the union, and pisses off a rival. They kill the muscles of their opponents and feel invincible. While they are partying at the local bathhouse, they find Carol working there and she ends up with Max. Noodle has a date with Deborah the day before he leaves for Hollywood to work as an actress. On the way home, Noodle rapes Deborah. The next morning she takes the train out of town, and when he shows up to apologize, she draws a line and ignores him. Max decides they will work for a local team, but Noodle says he won’t. To make all his money at once, Max wants to go on a suicide mission and rob the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Noodle tells him he’s crazy. While Carol makes an offer for the bank, she asks Noodle to turn the gang in, so they serve a short sentence but escape themselves. That night at the party, Noodle calls the police to report them, but just after Max goes crazy again, he knocks Noodle out and tries to rob the bank without him… and the unfortunate job at the bank is what opens the movie. In 1968, Noodle stalked Deborah, now known in New York as an actress. He asks her what she knows about a mysterious Home Secretary named Bailey. Noodle discovers that Deborah is Bailey’s lover and together they have a son named David, who looks a lot like young Max. Noodle goes to a big party at Bailey’s Mansion, where Noodle is invited to talk to the secretary, who turns out to be Max. Max gets death threats from a gangster. So he decides to hunt down Noodle and have him kill Max so he can get it from a friend instead of an enemy. Noodle claims he doesn’t know who Bailey is and refuses to kill him. Noodles leaves, and as he goes through the gate, he encounters a garbage truck that threatens to start its engines as Max approaches Noodles. Max disappears as the truck continues on its snail wings, leaving us to wonder if Max was thrown into the snail, committed suicide, or jumped off the side of the truck and disappeared into the night. Noodles continues and we are transported to an opium den in 1932 where we see a drug addicted Noodle looking at the camera and smiling as it gets dark. 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__label__wiki	0.901121	0.901121	Home » Breaking News » Bid to axe ‘Mayor of Clare’ title divides council members Bid to axe ‘Mayor of Clare’ title divides council members ACCUSATIONS of an ambush on Clare’s first citizen, as she chaired the monthly meeting of Clare County Council, were robustly denied by three members who tabled a motion calling for a ban on the use of the title ‘Mayor of Clare’. Councillors Ann Norton, Mark Nestor and Paul Murphy refused a number of requests from fellow councillors to withdrawn their motion. They noted that, under the Local Government legislation, the only mayoral title is that of ‘Mayor of the Ennis Municipal District,’ owing to the population of the area, and that the title for the county council chair is ‘Cathaoirleach’. Their motion asked “that the executive use the correct titles of Cathaoirleach of County Clare and Mayor of Ennis in all correspondence and media releases”. Responding, Councillor Howard, who is the current council chair, said she found it hard not to take the motion personally. She agreed with the assertion of Councillor Clare Colleran Molloy that it represented an ambush. Discussion of the matter ended without the motion being withdrawn or put to a vote. Outlining their concerns, Councillor Murphy described the motion as “fairly straight forward”. “We believe that the Local Government Act isn’t being adhered to with our use of the titles,” he said. “I’m the traditionalist. Our chain of office says ‘Cathaoirleach’ on it. I firmly believe that we should be using that title.” Councillor Mark Nestor said he didn’t have much to say on the motion other than that if it was laid out in the Local Government Act that there was an option to use the Irish language form of the title, that should be done. “Tá easpa measa léirithe arís ar an nGaeilge ag an Comhairle Contae,” he said. He added that he didn’t want to be complaining or giving out about anyone, or to personalise the issue, but to show respect for the Irish language. Councillor Ann Norton said that back in 2014, the Local Government Reform Act came in and was brought up at the council meeting in Clare by former councillor, James Breen, and that members had sought details of the naming conventions. “We did get a letter back detailing that,” she said. “Within the Ennis Municipal District, because we are a town equal or greater than 20,000, we are entitled to the name ‘Mayor of Ennis’… I feel that [because] we are a Municipal District that the Mayor of town is being undermined… I would appreciate it if the media would refer back to the proper titles of Cathaoirleach and Leas Cathaoirleach of Clare and Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Ennis. I think if there is any issue with this, then it’s time that we write to the minister for local government to actually clarify if the legislation has been changed, because as far as I’m aware it hasn’t.” Councillor PJ Ryan expressed his surprise at the motion. “I understand that we had the option to use Cathaoirleach or Mayor,” he said. “I think we certainly need to look at it again and if we have to write to the minister, I don’t have a problem with that. I certainly wouldn’t be in favour of not using the title of Mayor.” Councillor Pat McMahon referred to formal meetings with international delegations. “When introduced as ‘Cathaoirleach’ there’s no reaction,” he said. “When introduced as ‘Mayor,’ there is a very positive reaction.” Councillor Colleran Molloy expressed her surprise at the motion. “I was taken by surprise at its prematurity,” the Fianna Fáil member said. “It’s my recollection that this matter was brought up in Any Other Business (AOB) at the Ennis Municipal District Meeting that was held in December. It was brought up by Councillor Norton and, at the time, the undertaking was that it would be brought to the attention of management and that it would be addressed and that we would hear back. That was my understanding, so when this motion appeared for the County Council at large, I thought it was inappropriate and somewhat premature. There was no consensus sought from me by the proposers of this motion and it was unilateral and without consultation. I consider that disappointing. I had the honour of serving as the Mayor of the Ennis Municipal District and the Mayor of County Clare and I feel a great unease about this motion and the sense that it could be considered akin to an ambush on the sitting Mayor and Cathaoirleach of the day. I query where is the evidence of the undermining of the title of Mayor, as per Councillor Norton’s assertion.” She added that, as a qualified barrister, she could concede that the statutory basis for the motion was sound. “However, the spirit and the custom and practice of many local authorities is, as it has been here in County Clare, [is that] the Cathaoirleach being referred to as Mayor,” she said. Councillor Johnny Flynn described the timing of the notice of motion as “not great”. “I think we are in a time where we need to be united and show the leadership that has been shown by you, Mayor, and your predecessors in this office… I consider that the first citizen of our county is a hugely important role and I have no difficulty at all with the use of ‘Mayor’.” Councillor Pat Daly said he had been Mayor of Ennis and Mayor of Clare and couldn’t support the motion. He said he believed the change in the legislation of the naming convention had been “a major mistake”. “I think the people who put this forward should look for a vote or withdraw it,” he said. “It’s not appropriate.” Chief Executive Pat Dowling said that the executive would respect the democratic decision of a majority of council members. He noted that many submissions on the matter had been made to the ministers in government over the years. “The sentiment is always really that there is one first citizen of County Clare in any given year, and there are chairs of municipal districts, one of whom is rightfully called ‘Mayor,’ as is provided for in the Act, but there’s one first citizen for County Clare and it’s up to the members whether you call that person Mayor or Cathaoirleach,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to create much upset with the public at large.” Responding, Councillor Howard said: “It’s hard not to take offence. It’s hard not to take it personally considering it’s my three MD colleagues that put forward this notice of motion… It certainly feels like an ambush. In the week where we are looking at the highest numbers ever of people with Covid… I think this motion, in all honesty, is very frivolous. I wear a chain that’s been worn since 1899 and it says, ‘the Mayor of Clare ‘on it. I’m one of 59 people to wear it. I’m very proud to do so and I continue to do so. The day I became Mayor in this very room last June, you can check out my speech, I said I would answer to whatever you call me, be it Mayor, be it Cathaoirleach, be it Mary or be it Councillor. I really don’t mind.” Councillor Norton denied any suggestion the motion represented an ambush. “We are just looking that the right titles are used,” she said. “I’m questioning whether Clare County Council are actually breaking the law by not using our right titles. Councillor Molloy can insult me and say what she likes, but at the end of the day, being a barrister and being a solicitor, she should understand the law of the day, and this is something that needs to be questioned. We have a Taoiseach, we have a Tánaiste that are extremely proud to leave our country, and are known as the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste across this world and [those words] are in the Irish language. I cannot understand why people are afraid to use the word ‘Cathaoirleach’ of the county.” Councillor Shane Talty described the motion as “almost ridiculous”. He added that, “in fairness to the three members that bought the motion, any member can [do that] either collectively or individually, so in fairness to those that put the motion forward, it’s entitled to be heard and a decision made”. Councillor Murphy said he took the accusation that he was involved in an ambush personally. “I’m leaving this motion stand as it is,” he said. “If anybody has a problem with it, they should be writing to the minister.” Because he is incoming chair from next June, Councillor Howard asked if Councillor PJ Ryan might like to have the closing comments or suggest whether the motion should be put to a vote. “I would certainly like to have the honour of being Mayor of Clare for 2021,” he said. “I would like to see the title being that of ‘Mayor’. I am a bit concerned about conflict coming into it. Realistically, we should be all able to agree among ourselves. This has gone down a road it shouldn’t gave gone. If members of Clare County Council wish that the Mayor should be referred to as the Mayor, the minister can think what he likes, I’m not too bothered about the minister.” The meeting was then adjourned to February. Tags Cathaoirleach of Clare County Council clare county council Councillor Ann Norton Councillor Clare Colleran-Molloy Councillor Mark Nestor Councillor Mary Howard Councillor Paul Murphy Mayor of Ennis Municipal District Previous No January fight for Paddy Donovan Next Warning over threat of land de-zoning in national planning rules	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1739
__label__wiki	0.661805	0.661805	‘One Island: Two Systems. The Future of Rights Post Brexit’ Wednesday, 10th April 2019 Conor Gearty A series of loose remarks given as the annual Hibernian Law Lecture and revised the other day, inspired (or, one might say, incited) by the latest developments in the Brexit saga (or should I say tragedy?) This entire Brexit can be summed up by the section of the EU Withdrawal Act which boldly states “The Charter of Rights is not part of domestic law on or after Brexit day” while the next bit of the very same section in essence says “please can we have it back”. In essence “let’s please the fools” and “let’s stay the same way as we are”. On the notion of Parliament “taking back control”, this nonsensical position was produced by people who may be well-educated but who are in other ways intensely stupid – and stupidity is underestimated as a factor in Brexit – it is the entry point into the public square for puerility, facetiousness and confected passion. The UK Government was forced to explain in a White Paper why they had left the European Union or were proposing to do so. In that White Paper, produced by civil servants desperately trying to square political demands with factual reality, it says that actually, parliamentary sovereignty had not been eroded by the European Union. It just “felt” like parliamentary sovereignty had been eroded and this is literally contained within a government White Paper. It is feelings that drive the suicide of a country. After a long delay, explanatory Brexit “Notes” were published by the UK Government; these would have gone down well in a cult that had relocated to some inner-Brazilian rainforest so as to kill itself. At the time of this talk, fifty-six such notes have been published and collectively these explain why there is going to be a catastrophe in the case of a Hard-Brexit. The best of the idiotic explanations of the supposed (by Brexiteers) hardening of the Irish Government position as Brexit nears came from the UK Minister whose invention of universal credit has caused such misery in Britain, Ian Duncan Smith MP. This former leader of the Conservative Party (and it is surprising quite how many Brexit leaders are sacked former Tory ministers) said around November last year, when asked about this perception of growing Irish intransigence, that “it’s all about the Presidential election”. It was a bizarre position and yet, Ian Duncan Smith MP is one of the architects of Brexit. Presumably he believed it when he said it. I have four points to make to you on the theme of this Annual Lecture, a more polemical offering I fear than the usual august academic fare with which this usually society is familiar. The first point is not a point. It is a kind of introductory remark which is a cheat, a type of preface, and it is this. The Spectator magazine in the week of this lecture had a front page which I thought was terrific and this included a map of Ireland and Britain, while Jean-Claude Juncker (with his glass of wine) and Michel Barnier were pouring over a map of Ireland moving forces. It was a brilliant image of how Europe has occupied Ireland and is defeating Britain and there was a tremendous anxiety about this. But actually I think it was quite interesting. The relationship between Ireland and Britain has been mediated by European conflict for as long as we all know. It was the threat of Spain that produced the settlements of what has led to what you might describe as “the Northern Ireland problem” after the defeat in the Armada through bad weather, which the British claim was a great victory. Then it was fear of Napoleon and the occupation of that large island to Britain’s west that caused them to enact the Act of Union in 1800. It was of course conscription that later produced the amazing revolt in Ireland that led in the end to the success of the Sinn Féin movement and a splintering of the island with two thirds of it going its own way, something which, hardly any of those within the Brexit camp acknowledge. (But then we have had a Brexit Secretary who says he has never read the Good Friday Agreement and a current Northern Ireland Secretary who has admitted that she did not know that unionists and nationalists didn’t vote for one another.) With Brexit what we have seen realized is what has been the nightmare of British policy since not so long after the Norman landings: it has united Europe against the British and Europe has with the agreement of Ireland, occupied Ireland, but Ireland is part of the occupation of itself, as Europeans. The only issue, as I said recently at a British Academy / Royal Irish Academy joint seminar a few weeks ago for the English press (there is a tremendous civic responsibility to try and educate the English on this), the only issue of interest is the terms of the surrender. A further thread to my first point is the Irish anomaly. For the British Brexiteer we Irish are not European and it has a huge impact on the story that we are telling here. There is this Brexit-inspired eccentricity of the denial of our independence producing such descriptions of our jurisdiction as southern Ireland (David Davis, when Brexit Secretary). The point is a long-standing one, and its effect is that we have been left out of all the British statistics over generations – which is to our benefit now in terms of rights. That is a big win for us because the British do not think we are a separate country. It is aggravating and annoying, but it means that the Common Travel Area is maintained but more to the point, we can pop in to hospitals in the United Kingdom, we can easily apply for jobs and rent within the UK. Of course there are worrying outliers to this. As things are shaping up, the Irish from Northern Ireland (forced into being British) and those who marry or partner foreigners may be caught in the Brexit anti-other net, but even these may be saved after a fight. Not so long ago, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown held sway over British politics, Lord Goldsmith, a Labour peer, thought it would be a good idea to stop the Irish voting in UK elections. He was promptly taken into a room and told to “pull himself together”. Hence the Irish still vote in UK elections and of course, the reason he was told to pull himself together was not only that the Irish were Labour voters but for the same reason they do not even count us in their statistics, because they have no idea where we even are. We are everywhere. We are like some weird spectre. So they ignore us. They ignore us. Bravo! This first point is clear and straightforward. But we must not be complacent. We do not know how bad it is going to get because this is a revolutionary moment and in revolutionary moments, mad people always get the next stage under way. So you are always trumped and you are always trumped by the madder person beside you and it is not impossible that actually there will be squeezes. There may be a clamp down on the Irish and it is not impossible that the European Union will look at areas like the Common Travel Area and as Union, they might force us to make difficult choices further down the line. We may end up fighting hard to keep the Human Rights Act to protect the Irish as well as other “others” My second point this evening relates to the Good Friday Agreement. In respect of the Human Rights Act, a crucial part of the Good Friday Agreement, a notable Parliamentary written answer by the UK Solicitor General, when asked about plans to repeal the Human Rights Act, was a rather lame answer saying in essence that “we have got rather a lot on our plate”. But Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC speaking here before me this evening is right when she that the UK’s Conservative Government is planning its repeal in the future. The Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights was, after all, the stalking horse for Brexit, the hostile act the anti-European ultras floated when not even they truly believed that they would get leaving the EU (Brexit as it was not then called) on the mainstream political agenda. (I am not yet fully convinced that Prime Minister Theresa May knew the difference between the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice and that her bizarre red line “thou shalt not have the European Court of Justice” was in fact one which she intended would reach the European Court of Human Rights. I am not sure but I do know that it is not an impossible deduction from the level of political discourse in Britain today.) The European Union is obviously built into the architecture of the Good Friday Agreement. It is really quite important to note that the DUP wants to break the Good Friday Agreement and the DUP’s rationale is an end to cross-border co-operation. Ian Paisley Sr. made his start in life by throwing snow balls at then Taoiseach Seán Lemass and he brought a mob to try and take over when the Good Friday Agreement was being negotiated So this is in their blood and it is the reason that the DUP is now the most successful Unionist party in Northern Ireland: they have never allowed themselves to be outmanoeuvred by extremists. However on this second of my four points, I might offer an optimistic observation. I think the DUP may have over-played its hand. One, they announced they were going to bring down the UK Government over the budget but nothing happened and they did not bring down the government. Two, Arlene Foster thought that she could stop the agreement on the back-stop, then stopped it for a few days, yet Theresa May, later went to Brussels and agreed everything. Nevertheless, Theresa May’s government is still in post. Somebody had the bright idea when there was an Northern Ireland Assembly of sending some of the rather difficult men off to Westminster to play games but who would have thought there would be no Assembly and that they would have been the people who would matter? They may yet destroy the DUP, especially if they deliver a no-deal Brexit, a disaster in Great Britain but a greater one in Northern Ireland. As things stand the possibility of a withdrawal agreement is still in play. It cannot surely be the case that Northern Ireland will accept its collapse when the Backstop is the most astonishing win for Northern Ireland conceivable. The vast majority of people in Northern Ireland voted for Remain parties. The DUP has by no means a majority of the votes. The situation is escalated by the fact that Sinn Féin does not take its Westminster seats of course. But the Backstop does not entail just two citizenships. There are going to be three citizenships involved. Those from Northern Ireland are going to be citizens of Britain when they feel like it, with all the subsidies from Britain; they are going to be citizens of Europe when they feel like it; and if they want to come down to the Irish Republic, they will be citizens of Ireland. They have a fantastic win and they are going to realise it. The head of the CBI Northern Ireland has said that he is moving his business south. The official Unionist leader has said that the DUP has brought unionism into the swamp. We shall see. There has been very good cross-party co-operation apart from the DUP and in particular, a Joint-Statement on human rights issued in June of this year, by Sinn Féin, the SDLP, the Alliance Party and the Green Party. In addition, there has been a complaint made by the Committee on the Administration of Justice to the European Ombudsman about human rights matters. The departure of Gerry Adams from the Sinn Féin leadership has freed up quite a lot of space in Sinn Féin and Sinn Féin, together with the Alliance Party and Green Party, as a progressive alliance has more votes by far than the DUP. It seems impossible now but change seemed impossible in 1988 and 1989 in Poland and East Germany. The current situation in Northern Ireland is a fundamentally rotten position and it cannot survive, so I think the Backstop will be protected, whether before or after Brexit, hard or soft. The only rationale for Brexit from a British perspective is a deregulated economy without safeguards and, essentially turning it into a cash haven, a Cayman Islands or something akin to that. There is no other rationale for it. To that extent, the ardent Brexiteers are right, in that mimicking Europe without any influence in Europe is idiotic. So the problem is that it was such a stupid proposal to start with, that there is no rationale behind it, but if there had been a rationale that would have been it. And if that happens, Northern Ireland needs a Backstop to protect itself from the destruction that will be wrought by a government that does not believe in state subsidies. Northern Ireland needs to be careful about governments, if I may say so politely, that do not believe in state subsidy. Third point. There are three options that I am going to put before you and they all have direct implications on rights but the issue of rights is inseparable from the whole issue of Brexit. Here are my suggested three options: One, there is going to be a deal with the backstop. Britain will surrender in that way and the backstop will kick in. Of course, there be no subsequent, fabulous deal. The backstop will continue and over time there will be de facto unity. It will be impossible to distinguish Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic and it will be very possible to distinguish Northern Ireland from Britain. There may well be pressure for some type of plebiscite but there may not even be that. Meanwhile, over in Great Britain, there is going to be increased secessionist fury from Scotland but that is not our concern. Second what happens if there is no deal and Remain? How can this come about? A deal may be rejected by the ruling party or by the UK Parliament. As I speak I think this is a highly likely scenario. This takes us to “no deal” deals and it is interesting how the optimistic view about no deal in Britain has usually hinged on the reason why there is no deal in the first place suddenly disappearing. In essence “we will be able to fly planes because Europe is going to be nice to us about planes” and “we will be able to get Mrs May and other people their insulin because the Europeans will let us have it”. In material Northern Irish terms, it seems nobody will mind about electricity being shared between Britain and Ireland because after all, a no-deal without “no-deal deals” on the margins is impossible, right? I think what will happen is that when it is apparent that no-deal comes as a “no deals no deal”, I think there is going to be a collapse in Britain in Spring/early Summer 2019, a genuine moral collapse. They have not been prepared for it and I think there is going to be pandemonium. The ECJ will by then have ruled on the application which is being heard this week about the legal possibility of revocation of Article 50 and may come to the rescue of the British in this respect which would be quite comic, wouldn’t it? (And of course we now know that it has, in the shape of the Wightman ruling.) If the UK Government does renege on Brexit, in panic, it is very important who does this. This takes me to that much discussed idea, populism. What is populism? Populism is a rejection of all authority. It is rooted in antagonism. “Populism” as understood today is a cipher for anger and hatred. As such populism is not anything positive. Populism has no agenda and that is why there is no populist running the country. It is why they wanted David Cameron to stay on, why all the populists keep resigning from the Cabinet. Populists cannot do stuff. They just wreck stuff. That is the definition of populism. They wreck judges, they wreck executives, they wreck courts. Everything is elite, everything is elite, everything is elite. The scapegoats are all available. So, I am all for reneging on Brexit as long as it is those people responsible for Brexit that are tasked with the act of reneging and even then, I am not sure. At very least a revocation of article 50 should be accompanied by legislation setting up a public inquiry with wide powers of compulsion into the causes of Brexit – it should run for years and have a power to refer to the Attorney General for the pressing of criminal charges where appropriate. The third option is no deal and Brexit. In this scenario, we have disaster and I think there will be disorder in the streets. There will be chaos and pandemonium. It will be the Suez economic crisis multiplied by ten. The British public is not aware of what is in store for them. The pound will have disappeared and the latest reports from the credit agencies say there will be a recession. What happens then? Waves of revolt. And I do not know how this is going to play but it will be one of two things. It will either be more populism of the left or of the right. Indeed, the Labour Party is today led by people who are Brexit people but it could also entail a return to a Macron-type figure in British politics or the great, and much underestimated, Tony Blair. But this is very difficult to achieve in British political culture. I cannot imagine a Macron-type figure gaining any steam in the British system because the British system is so dependent on “first past the post” and its parliamentary tradition but we live and hope, we live and hope. My fourth and last of my main points deals with underlying problems. I am not keen, as has become obvious, on Britain being saved from itself by elites, courts, referenda and so on. One of the reasons is because I think the country has not even begun to address what I call three underlying problems here. I chaired an amazing LSE event on 23rd June 2016, on the evening of the Brexit referendum when the results were pouting in, and there were about 400 people in the room. We had all these experts in and we had the vote coming through and it was incredibly exciting to be chairing something like that. At about 3am in the morning, I made a little speech about how this was not unexpected and how you cannot undo all this Europhobia in three months. The UK Government had to run “Project Fear” because they had nothing good to say and they could not do anything else. They need to actually stop instrumentalising the EU and firstly, to learn that it is about more than transactions. What is happening in British politics is that everything is thought to have a price. It is the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. Everything is instrumentalised in monetary terms. And so the majority of the British public cannot understand that there might be anything more to the EU than German cars and they are still nowhere near to understanding that. They need the equivalent of an economic disaster. Unfortunately, on a par with some sort of military occupation, in order to understand the value of partnership. Great British is the only country that has not experienced this. Theresa May talked about how awful it would be to have a divided country and pleaded to the European Council not to divide Northern Ireland from the UK. In the same room, was the Taoiseach, whose country was divided in order to get Northern Ireland. Also in the same room was the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose country was divided until 1989. Both Czech and Slovak leaders, Cypriot too, it did not seem to occur to Theresa May that this was something that has happened to other nation. I am afraid that needs to be understood. The second missing element is that there is an amazing constitutional illiteracy in Britain. The British have been destroyed by the notion of “taking back control”. They have made such a song and a dance about parliamentary sovereignty that their word counts for nothing in international agreements – if parliament really is sovereign then it can always change its mind, all the time – there is no constitution to constrain it. It is quite remarkable to observe because the British boast to domestic audiences that they will not obey that which they have just agreed and they seem oblivious of the fact that people in Europe are listening and can understand English. Just because the UK’s political leaders never listen to, or follow, German or French discourse, does not mean that others do not follow theirs. The British really are trapped by that because trust in them is zero. Ireland is quite unusual as most European Union countries, at least the big ones, have imperialistic pasts, such as Austria, Poland and Sweden. Ireland is quite unusual in being always pretty small. But Britain has absolutely not come to terms with that for complicated reasons related to having never been occupied, thanks to the assistance of the Russians or the Americans to help them win wars (as well as the weather of course, as earlier noted) they then think they won by themselves, including Waterloo. So, there needs to be a really strong critical examination of how small Britain is today. I do not think any of that will be addressed by resiling from the implications of Brexit. So I am a “returner”. I am a returner and I foresee a situation where there is an application from the UK to rejoin the European Union and we fast-track it. Perhaps Cyprus, and maybe Ireland, and so on, will come as a Troika to assess Britain’s suitability. Previous PostThe UDHR at 70: What Next for Human Rights?Next PostMy initial thoughts on Miller/Cherry In Quarantine The People versus Social Sciences Ireland v United Kingdom – Forty Years on Was Michael Collins A Terrorist Or Human Rights Worker? Imagining A Catholic Future	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1741
__label__wiki	0.9686	0.9686	Eric Abidal to return to Barcelona November 12, 2014 by Kelly Davies 3 Comments Eric Abidal has already decided: sooner or later to return to FC Barcelona. The French defender is playing at Olympiacos, “the final phase of his career” and he is beginning to think about life after hanging the boots.When that time comes, it is clear, he will return to Barcelona, the club where he played for the glory, accepting the offer made in 2013 by the Barca board. Some news have it that Abidal has decided to hang up his boots this season and hope to rejoin Barca. It is his intention to retire this year, although initially the player stepped out of the news to avoid problems with the fans of Olympiacos. The novelty is that the French already knows what he will do: return to the club where he is a real crowd-pleaser for his integrity to his ailment. That’s the reality: ‘Abi’ has decided to return to Barca, but have not defined the ‘timing’ of his return. “Right now he is playing and being important” says Michel. The Frenchman signed for Greek club last July from Monaco and has since become one of the regulars of the Greek side. The best proof of this is that he has started all four games of their Champions League group that Olympiacos has played so far, two of them against Juventus, one against Atletico Madrid and another against Malmö. After four days, Olympiakos is second in the group and remains hopeful for the knockout round of the Champions League. Since he is a player who has the confidence of his coach, it’s still not clear when he will announce his retirement to join Barca. There are two options: One coincides with the winter break, the other- end of the current season. Abidal is aiming to take the position of: the sporting director of FCB Escoles (FCB schools) that are scattered throughout the world. This is what was offered in 2013 when the club decided not to renew his contract as a player. Abidal has given the big news by saying ‘yes‘ to the offer. The French did not miss work. At present there are eleven FCB Escoles in the world, particularly those in Sao Paulo, Miami, Santo Domingo, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Warsaw, Dubai, New Delhi, Singapore, Seoul and Fukuoka. The headquater is in Barcelona, obviously, and there are other branches in other parts of the Spanish geography. The work of Eric Abidal will be to ascertain that in all the schools, the FC Barcelona football model that is applied to the base of the football club is implemented. Also indirectly Abidal will become an extraordinary ambassador and recognized around the world of FC Barcelona. The French is a beloved player by Barça fans for the enormous fortitude with which he faced his disease, liver cancer when he had surgery twice, once to remove his tumor and to undergo yet another liver transplant. Filed Under: Football, Sports Jeffery says Ejinwa Anthony says I think barca might need such an experienced player back on their team ubesie chukwuebuka chidiogo says we Barcelona fans don’t need him	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1742
__label__wiki	0.651407	0.651407	COVID-19 – The Countries in the Wealthy West That Lag Behind June 13, 2020 Editor Off Brand Buzz, Social, Image by cromaconceptovisual from Pixabay “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina). Most of the countries in the wealthy west have started to reopen their economies. As we enter this new phase of the pandemic, there are still stark differences between the countries that really seem to have things under control and those that don’t. I name no names… at least for a couple of paragraphs. Below is a graph showing the number of daily new cases since March 1 in the U.S., Canada, and a dozen countries that comprise about 90% of the population of western Europe. We’ve used exponential smoothing, an averaging technique that emphasizes recent datapoints more strongly. This approach tones down peaks and valleys, but it does smooth out the bumpiness and makes trends visually easier to spot. This graph looks messy at first glance. But look closely, tracing single country curves, and you’ll see commonality – most of the countries saw rapid increases in new cases throughout March, with peaks in early- to mid-April and new cases declining steadily after that. The peaks ranged from about 25 New Cases per 1MM population per day for Finland up to about 160 New Cases/MM/day for Spain. However, by the end of May, three of the fourteen countries – Canada, Belgium, and Spain – had seen reductions to about 20 New Cases/MM/day, and eight had even fallen to 10 New Cases/MM/day or less. Switzerland, one of the earliest hot spots, is now down to a just handful of new cases each day. Sadly, three countries stand out, each with a slightly different story. At the “top” of our list is the U.S. Like most of the rest of the wealthy west, the U.S. began shutting down its economy at the end of March, but unlike almost all the other countries shown, new cases have declined only slightly since then. For much of May, the U.S. led the world in New Cases/MM/day. The U.S. is a particularly baffling case. The pandemic hit the U.S. a week or two later than the rest of the wealthy west, so we had some time to learn from other countries, but it doesn’t seem that we did. The reasons will be studied for years to come, but they will probably have less to do with science than with national will. The shutdown has been controversial in a nation whose citizens pride themselves on their right to act as they please. And while our federal system – with most governing power in the 50 states – has made us a marvelously efficient and effective economic engine, it can prove a challenge when a coordinated national response is called for. The reopening has now begun, but do we have the same control over the pandemic that the rest of the countries described above have? The graph suggests that we don’t. The second “standout” country is Sweden. More than any other country in the wealthy west, Sweden chose to take a laissez-faire approach to the pandemic, keeping schools and most businesses open. Sweden’s rate of New Cases peaked later than the other countries shown – and at a relatively low level – but over the last eight weeks that rate of New Cases has stubbornly failed to decline, and in the wealthy west is matched only by the U.S.’s. Moreover, the death rate from COVID-19, measured on a per-capita basis, is now nearly seven times higher in Sweden than in the neighboring Scandinavian countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland. Recent news stories suggest that even in Sweden there is increasing debate about whether that country chose the right path for dealing with the pandemic. The U.K. is a special case. Even though the U.K.’s rate of New Cases has been declining, I include it as a “standout” not just because its rate of New Cases is still the third-highest of the countries shown, but also because the death rate from COVID-19 – a topic for a separate discussion – is one of the highest in the world and continuing to rise. This is a dangerous and uncertain time. As the pandemic begins to rage ever more strongly throughout the developing world, it’s essential for the nations of the wealthy west to build on what they have accomplished in the last two months, and not suffer a relapse. And of the countries in the wealthy west, the next two months will be especially challenging for the U.S., the U.K., and Sweden. Tags: COVID-19 – The Countries in the Wealthy West That Lag Behind, Most of the countries in the wealthy west have started to reopen their economies. As we enter this new phase of the pandemic	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1748
__label__wiki	0.909529	0.909529	The Disease Women & Alzheimer’s Stats & Costs Alzheimer’s Genome Project Genes to Therapy / Stem Cell Screening Immune System Structures & Processes Interaction of the Microbiome Pathological Pathways & Systems Therapeutic Strategies & Drug Discovery Other Areas of Investigation 3DDS Alzheimer’s in a Dish Amyloid Hypothesis Brain Lymphatic System Microglia 2019 Annual Appeal Heroes & Heroines In Memory & In Honor Artists Giving Back Charity Watchdogs 2018 Symposium Video The Face of Alzheimer’s Better Your Brain World Alzheimer’s Day The science that has advanced our understanding of Alzheimer's disease Since our inception in 2004, our steadfast focus has been providing research grants to the worlds’ leading scientists researching Alzheimer’s disease. We are honored to work with scientists who are passionate in their pursuit to rid our world of this debilitating disease. Many of the funded projects have resulted in significant breakthroughs in developing a better understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and getting closer to a cure. Researcher Deselect All Ajit Varki, M.B.B.S. Aleister J Saunders, Ph.D. Alejandra Camacho-Soto, M.D., M.P.H.S. Alexandra C. Newton, Ph.D. Alfred L. Goldberg, Ph.D. Ali Ertürk, Ph.D. Ali Ezzati, M.D. Amylyx Ana Griciuc, Ph.D. Ananth Annapragada, Ph.D Andreas R. Pfenning, Ph.D. Andrew S. Yoo, Ph.D. Anja Schneider Anthony Fitzpatrick, Ph.D. Bart De Strooper, M.D., Ph.D. Ben A. Barres, M.D., Ph.D. Benjamin M. Hampstead, Ph.D., ABPP/CN Benjamin Wolozin, M.D. Ph.D. Berislav Zlokovic, M.D., Ph.D. Beth Stevens, Ph.D. Beverly L. Davidson, Ph.D. Brad Racette Bradley T. Hyman, M.D., Ph.D. Brian P. Head, Ph.D. Bruce Lamb, Ph.D. Bruno Giordani, Ph.D. Caleb Finch, Ph.D. Carmela R. Abraham, Ph.D. Casey A. Maguire, Ph.D. Charles Glabe, Ph.D. Cheryl Wellington, Ph.D. Christian Haass, Ph.D. Christian Pike, Ph.D. Christiane Wrann, D.V.M., Ph.D. Christoph Lange, Ph.D. Christopher K. Glass, M.D., Ph.D. Costantino Iadecola, M.D. Cynthia A. Lemere, Ph.D. Daniel Laskowitz, M.D., M.H.S. Darren J. Baker, Ph.D., M.S. David L. Brody, M.D., Ph.D. David Holtzman, M.D. Deborah Blacker, M.D., Sc.D. Deepak Kumar Vijaya Kumar Deepak Kumar Vijaya Kumar, Ph.D. Dennis Choi, M.D., Ph.D. Dennis Selkoe, M.D. Dominic Walsh, Ph.D. Doo Yeon Kim, Ph.D. Dora M. Kovacs, Ph.D. Eckhard Mandelkow, Ph.D. Elizabeth R. Sharlow, Ph.D. Eng H. Lo, Ph.D. Eric E. Schadt, Ph.D. Erik S. Musiek, M.D., Ph.D. Erin H.Norris, PH.D. Eva-Maria Mandelkow, M.D., Ph.D. Fanny Herisson, M.D., Ph.D. Fernanda Marques, Ph.D. Filip Swirski, Ph.D. Frances Edwards, Ph.D. Frank La Ferla, Ph.D. Frederick Maxfield, Ph.D. Gal Bitan, Ph.D. Gary Landreth, Ph.D. GENEWIZ Gentry Patrick, Ph.D. George S. Bloom, Ph.D. Geraldine J. Kress, Ph.D. Gilbert Gallardo, PH.D. Giuseppe Faraco, M.D., Ph.D. Giuseppina Tesco, M.D., Ph.D. Gopal Thinakaran, Ph.D. Greg Lemke, Ph.D. Guojun Bu, Ph.D. Hansang Cho, Ph.D. Henry Paulson, M.D., Ph.D. Hermann Stellar, Ph.D. Howard L. Weiner, M.D. Huaxi Xu, Ph.D. Jacob Hooker, Ph.D. Jaehong Suh, Ph.D. Jaime Grutzendler, M.D. Jason Eriksen, Ph.D. Jason D. Ulrich, Ph.D. Jean-Pierre Roussarie, Ph.D. Jeannie Chen, Ph.D. Jeffrey Savas, Ph.D. John Chen, M.D. Ph.D. John D. Fryer, Ph.D. John Hardy, PH.D. John C. Mazziotta, M.D., Ph.D. John S. Lazo, Ph.D. John Sondek, Ph.D. John Q. Trojanowski, M.D., Ph.D. Jonathan Kipnis, Ph.D. Joseph Park, Ph.D. Joseph R. Ecker, Ph.D. Karen Chang, Ph.D. Karen Duff, Ph.D. Karen Reeves, M.D. Kenneth Pearce, Ph.D. Kevin Eggan, Ph.D. Krista L. Moulder, Ph.D. Lars Bertram, M.D. Laura Cox, Ph.D. Lawrence Rajendran, M.D. Leah Cuddy, Ph.D. Lee Goldstein, M.D., Ph.D. Leonard Petrucelli, Ph.D. Leslie M. Shaw, Ph.D. Li-Huei Tsai, Ph.D. Liisa Galea, Ph.D. Lisa Mosconi Lucas Restrepo, M.D., Ph.D. Lucía Chávez-Gutiérrez, Ph.D. Luisa Quinti, Ph.D. Maarten Dewilde, Ph.D. Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc. Manolis Kellis, Ph.D. Marc Diamond, M.D. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Ph.D. Marco Colonna, M.D. Mark H. Tuszynski, M.D., Ph.D. Mathew Blurton-Jones, Ph.D. Mathias Jucker, Ph.D. Matthias Nahrendorf, M.D., Ph.D. Meng Chen, Ph.D. Michael Placzek, Ph.D. Michelle E. Ehrlich, M.D. Miranda Orr, Ph.D. Nancy Ip, Ph.D. Nanda Kumar Navalpur Shanmugam, Ph.D. Natura Myeku, Ph.D. Nicholas Seeds, Ph.D. Nissi Varki, M.B.B.S. Norelle Wildburger, Ph.D. Oleg Butovsky, Ph.D. P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS Paola Bovolenta, Ph.D. Pascal Gagneux, Ph.D. Paul Greengard, Ph.D. Paula Grammas, Ph.D. Phil Haydon, Ph.D. Philip Scheltens, M.D., Ph.D. Pilar Esteve, Ph.D. PsychoGenics Qisheng Zhang, Ph.D Randall J. Bateman, M.D. Richard Daneman, Ph.D. Richard L. Huganir, Ph.D. Richard Lipton, M.D. Rik van der Kant, Ph.D. Riqiang Yan, Ph.D Robert C. Malenka, M.D., Ph.D. Robert Moir, Ph.D. Robert Vassar, Ph.D. Roberto Malinow, M.D., Ph.D. Roger D. Kamm, Ph.D. Ronald C. Petersen, M.D., Ph.D. Rudolf Jaenisch, M.D. Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D. Sam Gandy, M.D., Ph.D. Sandeep Robert Datta, M.D., Ph.D. Sangram S. Sisodia, Ph.D. Scott Noggle, Ph.D. Se Hoon Choi, Ph.D. Shane Liddelow, PH.D. Shirley H. Wray Shirley Wray, M.D., Ph.D., FRCP Sidney Strickland, Ph.D. Srdjan D. Antic, M.D. Stephan Kaeser, Ph.D. Stephen R. Salton, M.D., Ph.D. Stephen Strittmatter, M.D., Ph.D. Stephen T.C. Wong, Ph.D. Steven L. Wagner, Ph.D. Subhash Sinha, Ph.D. Susan Searles Nielsen, Ph.D. Taconic Biosciences Tae-Wan Kim, Ph.D. Takahisa Kanekiyo, M.D., Ph.D. Tal Nuriel, Ph.D. Tamir Ben-Hur, M.D., Ph.D. Teresa Gomez-Isla, M.D. Terrence Town, Ph.D. Thomas C. Südhof, M.D. and Nobel Laureate Timothy Huang, Ph.D. Tony Wyss-Coray, Ph.D. Tsuneya Ikezu, M.D., Ph.D. Victor Bustos, Ph.D. Vince Groppi, Ph.D. Virginia M.-Y. Lee, Ph.D. Vishwa Deep Dixit, D.V.M., Ph.D. Weiming Xia, Ph.D. William Mobley, M.D., Ph.D. William Eimer, Ph.D. William Klunk, M.D., Ph.D. William Van Nostrand, Ph.D. Wilma Wasco, Ph.D. Winston Hide, Ph.D. Won-Suk Chung, Ph.D. Yueming Li, Ph.D. Zhen Zhao, Ph.D. Zhongcong Xie, M.D., Ph.D. Focus Deselect All ALZ Genome Project Amyloid Drug Development Drug Discovery Foundational Genetics Genes to Therapies™ Genes to Therapies™ / Drug Screening Genes to Therapies™ / Stem Cell Drug Screening Identification Identification and Early Detection Immune System Structures Immune System Structures and Processes Individual Projects (Other) Inflammation Innate Immunity Microbiome Other Areas of Investigation Pathological Pathways and Systems Stem Cell Models Tangle The Microbiome Therapeutic Strategies Therapeutic Strategies + Drug Discovery Therapeutic Strategies and Drug Discovery Translational Research Whole Genome Sequencing Whole Genome Sequencing and Epigenetics Year Deselect All 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Consortia Deselect All 3DDS APOE Berg Brain Entry & Exit Circuits Gifford Neuroinflammation Consortium Women and ALZ Sort by Date — Newest Date — Oldest Name — A-Z Subhash Sinha, \| 2020 Virtual High-Throughput Screening for CD33 Inhibitors Qisheng Zhang, John Sondek, Kenneth Pearce, \| 2020 Small Molecule Activators of PLC-gamma-2 as Novel Therapeutics for Alzheimer’s Disease Gilbert Gallardo, \| 2020 Investigating the Contribution of Astrocytic-Dependent Inflammation on Amyloid-Induced Tau Pathology Stephen Wong, \| 2020 Uncovering the Molecular Mechanisms of Selected Drug Candidates Derived from Systematic Alzheimer’s Drug Repositioning Weiming Xia, \| 2020 Proteomics of Alzheimer’s Disease Three-Dimensional Cultures George S. Bloom, Elizabeth R. Sharlow, John S. Lazo, \| 2020 Adult Human iNeurons: A Next-Generation Drug Screening Platform for Alzheimer’s Disease Mathew Blurton-Jones, \| 2020 Neuroinflammation Consortium: Examining the Role of Human Microglia in the Transition Between Parenchymal and Vascular Amyloid Beta Pathology Maarten Dewilde, Bart De Strooper, \| 2020 Novel Entry Routes for Therapeutic Biologicals to the Brain Deepak Kumar Vijaya Kumar, Nanda Kumar Navalpur Shanmugam, Rudolph Tanzi, William Eimer, \| 2020 Characterizing Gut Microbiome Synergy With Emphasis on Mycobiome and Its Impact on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) Pathology in AD Mouse Models Doo Yeon Kim, Luisa Quinti, \| 2020 High-Throughput Drug Screening for Alzheimer’s Disease Using Three-Dimensional Human Neural Culture Systems Ana Griciuc, \| 2020 Modulating CD33 Function and Neuroinflammation as a Therapeutic Approach for Alzheimer’s Disease Liisa Galea, \| 2020 Sex Matters: Understanding the Influence of Sex and Apolipoprotein E (APOE) Genotype on Hippocampal Plasticity and Cognition Register for email updates about our latest news: © 2005 - 2021 Cure Alzheimer's Fund. All rights reserved. Cure Alzheimer’s Fund is a “doing business as” name for the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity with federal tax ID #52-239-6428. Donate \| 100% goes directly to research	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1749
__label__wiki	0.780665	0.780665	supreme court live streaming Got a confidential news tip? The link to live webcasts are made available up to 24 hours before the hearing. The Supreme Court's nine-member panel has a conservative majority, with five justices appointed by Republicans and four by Democrats. The cases have the highest profile of the court's term and are the first in which Trump's personal financial dealings have come to the justices. broadcasting live audio of oral arguments. And in a historic first, it's also allowing oral arguments to be aired live … Watch welcome ceremonies of Supreme Court judges. © 2020 CNBC LLC. The high court has published files before, but that's been on a week-long delay. The consolidated congressional cases are Trump v. Mazars, No. In the congressional cases, they have argued that House Democrats have essentially taken on the role of prosecutor, rather than legislator. The president is asking the justices to reverse three lower court rulings that would require his banks and longtime accounting firm to turn over his financial documents to Democratic-led congressional committees and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. On occasion, the Court of Appeal webcasts appeal hearings and/or judgments. Read a selection of judgment summaries from the Court of Appeal and Trial Division. Watch Class Actions in the Common Law Division. We welcome your feedback which will remain anonymous. Global Business and Financial News, Stock Quotes, and Market Data and Analysis. These proceedings are streamed live on the day of the argument. Justices and the lawyers involved will be teleconferencing instead of showing up to court due to the pandemic. We want to hear from you. ET. The committees have said they are pursuing investigations into whether Trump lied about his finances before he became president in addition to possible foreign money laundering. In response, the congressional Democrats have said they are well within their rights to pursue an investigation that could lead to relevant legislation. And Vance's office has argued that its subpoenas are unlikely to burden the president because they are directed to third parties, concern information unrelated to his job as president, and do not require him to take any action. Watch the appointments of senior counsel from 2012 to 2019. The Supreme Court could determine who is elected president if it takes up a court case from Pennsylvania involving mail-in ballots. 19-715 and Trump v. Deutsche Bank, No. To watch the live feed, please visit the Nevada Supreme Court Live Stream YouTube page. Of course, the live broadcast is not the only unusual thing happening. Two, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were appointed by Trump. The Justice Department has appealed to the Supreme Court. Vance has not named specific charges or targets. The Manhattan district attorney has said he is investigating potential violations of New York state law related to hush money payments to two women, who have said they had affairs with the president, ahead of the 2016 election. Before the justices, Booking.com argues the government has been inconsistent and already approved protections for Weather.com, Karaoke.com, Law.com and Dating.com. (CNN)The Supreme Court is broadcasting live audio of oral arguments for the first time Monday, as they hear cases via teleconference. Checks and balances on the one hand, and the rule of law and the notion that no one is above the law on the other.". Get this delivered to your inbox, and more info about our products and services. Video link - Supreme Court Live. Assassin's Creed Origins Memphis Side Quests, How To Make Lasagna With Cottage Cheese, The Mailroom: Hollywood History From The Bottom Up Pdf, How To Get A Friend Back After You Hurt Them, Micron 5300 Pro Vs Max, Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks Vinyl, Ice Cream Size Chart, Kfc Original Recipe Chicken Drumstick, Ac Origins Level Past 40, Names Like Vesper, What's In Menudo, 1 Square Meter To Cm, El Shaddai Translation, Terra Madre Translation, Monsters Vs Aliens Susan Alien Suit, How Many Inches Of Water Column Is 1 Psi, Name Popularity Uk 2019, Sandesh Vidhan Sabha 2020, Verb Preposition Combinations, Mission Hill Winery Entrance Fee, The Big Muddy River, What Does The Symbol H Stand For In Chemistry, Thailand Average Temperature By Month, Sleeping On Top Of Blanket, Classic Catalogue Clothing, Bill O'reilly Vs John Lennon Lyrics, Nj Chelsea Cutler Chords, The Middle Ages Fill In The Blank Answer Key, Generous Meaning In Tamil, Do I Have To Pay For My Parents Care Home, Lake Hickory Beach, Women's Soccer Field Size, Whisky Auctioneer Reviews,	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1750
__label__cc	0.644782	0.355218	American National Standards Institute http://www.ansi.org/ The institute oversees the creation, promulgation and use of thousands of norms and guidelines that directly impact businesses in nearly every sector. American Society for Testing and Materials www.astm.org/Standard/index.shtml ASTM International, formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), is a globally recognized leader in the development and delivery of international voluntary consensus standards. Cal Lab Magazine http://www.callabmag.com/ Cal Lab Magazine is a quarterly publication that covers measurement science and instrument calibration for managers, engineers, and technicians. http://www.cdc.gov/ www.CDC.gov is the Center for Disease Control’s primary online communication channel and provides users with credible, reliable health information on regulation control. Institute for Thermal Processing Specialists www.iftps.org/ The Institute for Thermal Processing Specialists is a 501 (c) (6) not-for-profit corporation of the State of Virginia organized to serve the needs of those working in thermal processing. www.iso.org ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the world’s largest developer of voluntary International Standards. International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering http://www.ispe.org/ ISPE helps connect like-minded pharmaceutical industry professionals. National Institute of Standards and Technology http://www.nist.gov/index.html Founded in 1901 and now part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST is one of the nation’s oldest physical science laboratories. Parental Drug Association http://www.pda.org The Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) is the leading global provider of science, technology and regulatory information and education for the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical community. http://www.qualitydigest.com/ Quality Digest is part of the family of Millennium 360 Inc., a company that has moved beyond “just” publishing to embrace the challenges of a “new media” world. United States Pharmacopeia www.usp.org The United States Pharmacopeia (USP) is a scientific nonprofit organization that sets standards for the identity, strength, quality, and purity of medicines, food ingredients, and dietary supplements manufactured, distributed and consumed worldwide. Record your data in real time with our powerful DataTrace Pro software. Get it now! >>> Compliance & Validation(28) Data Logger Accessories(7) Data Logger Calibration(3) Data Logger Maintenance(2) Data Logging Best Practices(16) Data Reporting & Software(4) FDA Regulations(19) ISO Regulations(16) News & Events(15) Temperature Data Loggers(9) FSMA: The Sanitary Transport Rule DataTrace Confidential Client; a Case Study End of Repair Service Notice for Taper-tip Flexible Loggers About Mesa Labs Mesa Laboratories, Inc. 12100 West 6th Ave. datatracesales@mesalabs.com	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1761
__label__wiki	0.650139	0.650139	George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father Title: George Washington: The Political Rise of America's Founding Father Published by: Dutton Books ASIN: B089S72R9H Buy the Book: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Apple A fascinating and illuminating account of how George Washington became the single most dominant force in the creation of the United States of America, from award-winning author David O. Stewart Washington's rise constitutes one of the greatest self-reinventions in history. In his midtwenties, this third son of a modest Virginia planter had ruined his own military career thanks to an outrageous ego. But by his midforties, that headstrong, unwise young man had evolved into an unassailable leader chosen as the commander in chief of the fledgling Continental Army. By his midfifties, he was unanimously elected the nation's first president. How did Washington emerge from the wilderness to become the central founder of the United States of America? In this remarkable new portrait, award-winning historian David O. Stewart unveils the political education that made Washington a master politician—and America's most essential leader. From Virginia's House of Burgesses, where Washington learned the craft and timing of a practicing politician, to his management of local government as a justice of the Fairfax County Court to his eventual role in the Second Continental Congress and his grueling generalship in the American Revolution, Washington perfected the art of governing and service, earned trust, and built bridges. The lessons in leadership he absorbed along the way would be invaluable during the early years of the republic as he fought to unify the new nation. “[An] insightful . . . balanced portrait of Washington. . . Even readers well-versed in Washington’s life will learn something new from this meticulous look at how he became the ‘paramount political figure’ of his era.” Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power" "David O. Stewart brings his characteristic grace and skill to this portrait of the political George Washington, liberating the most elusive of our Founders from the mists of myth to discover a shrewd and approachable human being. At a time when politics seems beyond redemption, Stewart's book is a welcome reminder of the possibilities, however imperfect, of the public arena." Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (The American Revolution Series Book 2) "By focusing on the political genius of George Washington, David O. Stewart has produced an important new portrait of our first president. As Stewart demonstrates time and time again, with vivid prose and a wonderful sense of pacing, great leaders are also great learners. In this time of division and turmoil, this is the book we need.” Edward G. Lengel, author of General George Washington: A Military Life “David Stewart’s innovative and important study of George Washington’s political career succeeds because it places his successes as president of the United States within the context of his whole life and times. The most fascinating thing about Washington is not how he was great, but how he became great over the course of a dramatic career, compellingly chronicled in this book."	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1764
__label__cc	0.576811	0.423189	11 Best Day Trips From London by Train 23 of the All-Time Best Days Out in Kent 10 Epic Picnic Spots in England's National Parks 10 MAGICAL Airbnbs in England to Book for Autumn 15 of the Greatest Days Out in Worcestershire Worcestershire is a rural English county in the heart of the West Midlands. The largest settlement in the region is Worcester, with numerous small villages and towns attracting visitors to the beautiful countryside. Great walking opportunities abound, particularly in the Malvern Hills Area of Outstanding National Beauty. There are also fabulous attractions for the whole family – kids will love seeing the animals at West Midlands Safari Park and dressing up in costumes at the Tudor House Museum. History buffs, meanwhile, can visit a host of fascinating museums and galleries, including the birthplace of composer Edward Elgar. However you like to spend your days out, you’re sure to find plenty to keep you busy in Worcestershire. Here is our guide to the best days out in the county. Best Days Out in Worcestershire Author: Ben Bromley Day Out in the Midlands Expert Ben specialises in group travel in destinations around the world. He lives in Warwickshire, and his favourite day out is in Stratford Upon Avon. 1. Hike the Malvern Hills The Malvern Hills make a fantastic day out for any lover of the great outdoors. The hills can be seen for miles around, a collection of peaks stretching along an eight mile ridge. There are plenty of marked walking routes, and an app can make life even easier for you. A decent level of fitness is required, as some of the hills are quite steep. But the rewards are worth the effort, with incredible views and exhilarating ridge walks, as the land falls away steeply on either side. The area is classed as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, with lovely countryside views and a host of native wildlife residing in the area. The surrounding villages of Great Malvern are also a great place to explore, with plenty of cafes and coffee shops offering refreshments to hikers. 2. Drive through West Midlands Safari Park Representing a great family day out, West Midlands Safari Park has deservedly earned its reputation as one of the best zoos in the UK. The main attraction at the park is the drive through safari area, with species including white rhino, tigers, elephants, and lions on display in large open enclosures. Other attractions at the safari park include a Discovery Trail, which is home to smaller animals such as penguins, as well as an aquarium, reptile world and insect house. And kids will love the Land of the Living Dinosaurs attraction, where a host of animatronic dinosaurs are ready to give you a fearsome fright. Don’t worry, the T-rex won’t bite! 3. Explore Broadway The Cotswolds is a gem in the English countryside, attracting a host of city-livers, looking for a rural escape. And Broadway is probably the pick of the area. The entire village is built in sand-coloured Cotswold stone, giving it a charm unlike other villages in the area. There are a host of captivating independent shops in the village, including a traditional English sweet shop, and nature lovers can enjoy a walk to the Broadway Tower. Russell’s Fish and Chips also serves up some of the best fish and chips in the country – you have been warned! Edward Elgar and William Morris both resided in Broadway for a time, with a host of cultural sites to see as well. 4. Put the pedal to the metal at Worcester Indoor Karting Worcester’s only indoor go-karting track is a great day out for petrol heads and dads who want to prove to the kids that they’re still top dogs. It has had the seal of approval from some true racers as well, with Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton even paying a visit to the facility in 2016 to film a piece for Sky Sports alongside Martin Brundle, Johnny Herbert, and others. Visitors can book packages depending on who they are racing with, such as a family package or an adult package for a group of friends. Safety equipment is provided, and qualified instructors are on hand throughout to make sure you drive the karts safely. 5. Discover Worcester Cathedral Worcester Cathedral’s long history and extensive renovation mean it is in the unusual position of having architectural elements from a number of English periods – medieval, Norman and Gothic to name but a few. The Norman crypt is the oldest part of the cathedral, dating back to the 11th century, whilst visitors will also want to see the tomb of King John and the magnificent Victorian stained glass windows. Tech-savvy visitors can download the Worcester Cathedral app before their visit, in order to follow a guided historical trail through the cathedral on their phones. There is a cathedral shop, and the Cloister Café serves refreshments including coffee and sandwiches. 6. Ride on the Severn Valley Railway You may have read about the Severn Valley Railway before, as it featured in our days out in Shropshire article. The railway connects the counties of Shropshire and Worcestershire, providing a fabulous day out for the whole family, as you chug through the English countryside onboard a steam locomotive. The 16-mile line runs from Bridgnorth to Kidderminster, giving guests a chance to admire the rural English countryside and tuck into a delicious dinner onboard as they complete the journey. Sunday roasts are served on Sundays and a calendar of special events can be booked, including Christmas-themed journeys and murder mysteries. 7. Visit The Firs – birthplace of Elgar Edward Elgar is one of England’s most well-known figures. The composer was born in a humble cottage in the Worcestershire countryside, all the way back in 1857. This cottage is now a museum dedicated to the great man and represents a wonderful day out for anybody interested in Elgar’s work. Visitors can explore the cottage and garden, which is managed by the National Trust. Exhibits explore Elgar’s story and display work including his original music manuscripts, as well as a host of personal letters and other possessions that were gathered during his lifetime. 8. Stroll through Gheluvelt Park A somber but peaceful day out, Gheluvelt Park was constructed as a memorial after the First World War, in honour of those who died in the conflict. The park is named after the 1914 Battle of Ypres, which centered around the Belgian village of Gheluvelt and was one of the deadliest battles of the war – the Worcestershire Regiment’s 2nd Battalion was heavily involved in the fighting. Today the park is a peaceful place for a stroll, home to a quiet duckpond and a bandstand, with concerts and other events playing out at the weekend. There are also tennis courts, an environment centre, a café and a children’s water play area, which is open in the summer. 9. Browse Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum Housed in an attractive Elizabethan building, the Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum is a great place to visit for anyone looking for a dose of culture. The facility displays a mixture of 19th and 20th century artwork, as well as a number of historic exhibits including a Roman mosaic, dinosaur footprints and a totem pole from North America. The county’s most famous export also has an exhibit, with the jug used to make the first ever batch of Worcestershire Sauce on display. 10. See the animals at All Things Wild All Things Wild is a family-friendly attraction which aims to help kids get in touch with nature. There are numerous things to do, which will provide endless entertainment for the little ones. There’s an outdoor play area, an indoor soft play area, a lemur walk, petting zoo and a dinosaur exhibit. Animals to see at the park include meerkats, beavers, kangaroos, camels and zebra. Other activities that children can enjoy include pond dipping and bug hunting, while the park even offers the chance for kids to be a ‘keeper’ for the day – prebooking is required. 11. Visit Hanbury Hall Another attraction which is brilliantly managed by the National Trust, Hanbury Hall is an extensive restored 18th century manor house, home to a beautiful garden. Fans of these country estates know what to expect – attractive and grand rooms, perfectly manicured gardens, and a range of interesting artefacts and paintings on display. A great way to spend a day is simply to stroll around the house and gardens, admiring the work that has gone into restoring them. Hanbury Hall also has a café serving up refreshments and a range of seasonal attractions, including a winter garden. 12. Explore Worcester Woods Country Park If you’re after a day out that makes the most of the countryside, then look no further than Worcester Woods Country Park. The 110-acre park is taken up mostly with protected ancient woodland, which makes a perfect place to take the dogs for a walk or to unpack a picnic for the entire family. Birds chirp in the trees and walking trails take you deep into the woodland. If you’re visiting in April or May then you may be lucky enough to see the forest floor carpeted in a sea of beautiful bluebells. The park is extremely popular in the summer months, with a range of attractions including an adventure playground, mini-golf and a bouncy castle during the school holidays. There’s also an indoor café with free Wi-Fi. 13. Step back in time at the Tudor House Museum If you’re looking for free things to do in Worcestershire then it doesn’t get much better than the Tudor House Museum. Housed in a classic timber-framed building, the museum used to be a weaver’s cottage, before becoming a pub and later a Victorian coffee house. It also served as an Air Raid Precautions wardens office during the Second World War. The colourful history of the building is charted throughout the museum, with artefacts and characters dressed in period costume. Kids will love dressing up in traditional Tudor garments, and there’s a Victorian themed coffee shop for adults to enjoy. 14. Enjoy a day at Worcestershire County Cricket Club It doesn’t get more traditionally English than cricket. And fans of the game will struggle to find a better place to watch the sport than at Worcestershire County Cricket Club. New Road is the club’s ground, holding up to 5,500 spectators at any time. The club are one of England’s most successful, with England star Moeen Ali batting for the team alongside a host of Australian stars. Cricket matches tend to last several hours and booking needs to be made in advance but if you can get hold of tickets then you are sure to enjoy a fantastic day out – as long as the rain stays off! 15. Visit the Infirmary Museum In the heart of Worcester and just a couple of minutes’ walk from the city art gallery, the Infirmary Museum is another fascinating attraction for visitors to explore. The Georgian building was once home to the Worcester Royal Infirmary before the site closed in 2002. It is where the British Medical Association met for the first time and is now open once again as a museum, run by Worcester University. Anyone interested in medicine will be fascinated by the exhibits on display, including historic medical equipment, bones, and installations regarding the future of medical technology. Day out in Worcestershire As you can see, Worcestershire is a diverse county, home to numerous attractions. Nature lovers will love exploring the countryside, particularly the Malvern Hills, which offers some of the best walking territory in the whole of England. West Midlands Safari Park is a great day out for the entire family, whilst the Severn Valley Railway provides an experience like no other. There are also a range of interesting museums and attractions, charting the rich history of the county from medieval times. However you wish to spend your days out in Worcestershire, you are certainly going to be spoiled for choice! cultural culture walking One Year and 101 Posts on Day Out in England	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1765
__label__cc	0.689535	0.310465	CompaniesAppleMobileSmartphones Rising Sales of iPhone 7 Is Helping Apple Win Back Lost Ground [REPORT] By Pranav Poddar Android has been dominating the smartphone OS market with nearly 85% of the market share in 2016. For the last few years, Android has further strengthened its smartphone market share as iOS from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been losing grounds. However, looks like Apple iOS is all set to reclaim its lost market in the smartphone segment. In a recent report from Kantar World Panel, Apple iOS has witnessed a positive YoY growth in smartphone sales for the three months ending October 2016. This growth is witnessed in most of the regions except Germany and Urban China. So, what has helped Apple to bounce back and register a positive growth in Smartphone OS market after a long time? The credit goes to the latest iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Sales of iPhone 7: Apple’s Smartphone Market Presence is Strengthening Among all the regions that witnessed the strong sales of iPhone (Smartphone iOS sales share) during the 3-months ending October 2016, Japan tops the list with 51.7% share. The sales jumped up by 1.4% point during the period compared to the same period a year ago. Japan is closely followed by Great Britain, USA and Australia with 44%, 40.5%, and 39.3% of smartphone OS sales share, respectively. In a competitive market, it is the growth rate that matters the most for any brand. And for Apple iPhone, it was much needed. The US witnessed the highest year-over-year growth at 7% point in Apple iPhone sales during the said three months in 2016. Australia, Japan and EU5 each recorded a positive 1.4% point year-over-year growth. Probably it is the first time in the last two years when the Apple recorded some positive growth in all of these regions, while the sales declined in China and Germany. Premium smartphones mostly drive the smartphone market in the USA. This could be a reason Android OS sales in the country has declined by 5.6% point. Despite extreme criticism for not innovating iPhone enough in the last two years, Apple has squeezed the gap with Android in the last 12 months. During the 3-month period ending in October 2015, more than 3 out of every 5 smartphones sold in the US were powered by Android. Fast forward 12 months, less than 3 out of every 5 smartphones sold during the 3-months were Android powered. The difference between the sales share of iOS smartphone and Android Smartphones decreased from 30% point in Oct. 2015 to 17.4% point in Oct. 2016, which is almost half. The changing market equation in the US clearly indicates smartphone buyers in the US are leaning back towards Apple iPhone. Apple’s Daring Stance with the Headphone Jack Apple made a daring move by removing the headphone jack from iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, which was criticised, globally. However, the growth rate indicates that it wasn’t really an issue for the US iPhone customers. During the three months ending in October 2016, around three iOS devices made to the top four positions in the list of top-selling smartphones in the USA. iPhone 7 was the highest selling smartphone in the USA, attaining 10.6% of the total smartphone sales. iPhone 7 Plus stood at the fourth position with 5.3% share, just behind iPhone 6s and Samsung Galaxy S7. Google and China: Potential Threat to iPhone Google’s newly launched Pixel Phones captured 0.5% share of the total smartphone sales in a span of just ten days. Considering the pace at which Pixel Phones are gaining popularity, it could pose a major threat to Apple in several markets. Chinese smartphone market has never favoured iOS devices. Chinese OEMs like Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi and Vivo continue to provide consumers with a variety of smartphones at a highly competitive price. As a consequence, Apple iPhone sales share has taken a hit in the world’s largest smartphone market, China. In China, iPhone sales declined by 5.4% point from 22.5% in three months ending in October 2015 to 17.1% during the same period in 2016. Amidst the declining share, iPhone 7 still came out as the second best selling smartphone with 3.8% share of overall smartphone sales in Urban China, followed by Oppo’s R9. iPhone 7 Plus even made it to the list of the ten top-selling smartphones with 1.9% share. Japan is the only country where the iPhone sales have beaten Android smartphones sales. During the three months ending in October 2016, Apple iOS captured a major 51.7% share of all smartphone sales. Compared to this, Android accounted for 47.5% of all sales in Japan. This indicates that the smartphone market in Japan is highly driven by premium smartphones, iPhones being the consumers’ favourite. Android sales declined by 0.2% point, while iOS sales increased by 1.4% point. Sales of iPhone 7 in EU5 Market For the three months ending in October 2016, iOS accounted for almost 21.2% share in sales in Europe’s big five market (EU5). EU5 includes Germany, Great Britain, Italy, France and Spain. Android, on the other hand, had a share of over 75% in this market. iOS witnessed a positive year-over-year growth across most of the regions in EU5 except Germany where its sales declined by 2.7% point from 19.2% in Oct. 2015 to 16.5% in Oct. 2016. Out of these five regions, iOS holds the highest share in Great Britain, with 44% of smartphone sales and the lowest in Spain, with 7.9% share. In Great Britain, iPhone 7 was the top-selling device, followed by iPhone 6s and iPhone SE at the second and third position, respectively. In the rest of the regions, iPhone 7 was successful in making its spot in the top ten list, except in Spain. Spain has an Android dominated ecosystem with the OS capturing a whopping 91.7% of the total smartphone sales. Looking at the sales performance of iOS devices across all the regions, Apple seems to have a promising market. Even though Apple’s market share is very less compared to that of Android’s, but iPhone 7 made its place in the list of top 10 selling devices, in 9 out of 10 regions. It even gained the top spot in the USA and Great Britain. In China’s smartphone market, even though iOS sales have declined, iPhone 7 captured the second position in the list of top-selling smartphones, along with iPhone 7 Plus which made the top ten list as well. Undoubtedly, the credit for Apple’s reviving market share goes to iPhone 7. It is next to impossible for Apple to reach Android’s level of penetration since almost all the devices available in the market hosts Android OS. But if we talk about the premium segment, Apple remains unbeatable. Apple launches one smartphone every year with premium pricing, whereas new Android-powered smartphones come up almost every month from multiples OEMs. Previous articleDemonetisation Effect: Workers To Receive Cashless Salary Only Next articleFacebook Is All Set to Revolutionise The Broadcasting of Live Video With 360 Brief Abhradeep Ghosh - January 15, 2021 0 To Setup VPN On iPhone or iPad Can’t Be Easier Than This Brief Dazeinfo - January 11, 2021 0 Mobile Internet has not only confidently won the lead among all methods of viewing content and communicating in social networks. He continues... Apple Plans To Launch iCar By 2024, But Has It Straightened Out The Challenges? Apple Abhradeep Ghosh - December 22, 2020 0 Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), for long, has been a pioneer in the field of consumer electronics. Now, it plans to soon establish... After Apple, Now Samsung Is Heavily Investing In India: A Big Blow to China? After Apple, now Samsung will set up a manufacturing base in India. The South Korean-tech giant is all set... After Facebook, Now WhatsApp Criticises Apple For Their New Privacy-First Initiative! After Facebook, now WhatsApp has begun to protest against Apple’s privacy-first measures. What went wrong? Let’s find out. A... Tata Sons Wants India To Become Apple’s New Manufacturing Powerhouse for iPhones! It seems like the Tata Group has taken it upon themselves to make sure India becomes Apple's new manufacturing powerhouse for iPhones.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1767
__label__wiki	0.830583	0.830583	HomePosts tagged '50’s Media' 50’s Media The 50’s Albums: A Brief Recap and Reevaluation January 24, 2017 January 24, 2017 bookcase Albums 50's Media, Album Recap, Album Review, Update Now that we’re through with the 50’s section of the book, which contains a total of twenty-three albums, I’d like to just take a quick moment to look back and reevaluate each and every one of them, with the benefit of hindsight. I believe many of my reviews and rankings placements were originally unfair, and many albums I’ve written about deserve a second chance. So without further ado, let us begin! In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra (1955) The book definitely starts off on a high note with this one. Through all of my first twenty-three reviews, this one has remained at the top of the rankings, and while it has now moved down to the second or third spot, I still believe it to be one of the greatest albums of the entire decade. Each track is just permeating with lonliness, and even though he didn’t write most of the songs (except for one, “This Love of Mine, which even then is only a co-writer credit), he still performs each piece with emotion and makes the song his own. What truly makes the album however, in my opinion, are the arrangements of Nelson Riddle. With the help of his strings and jazz orchestra, each track is an absolute treat for the ears. His instrumentation is moving, soothing and captivating. This is made immediately evident from just the first few seconds of the album, and continues to live up to that standard for the remainder of the album’s fifty-minute running time. In the world of 50’s pop, these sixteen tracks have no equal. Elvis Presley by Elvis Presley (1956) I’m going to be completely honest. This is a highly flawed album. It’s uneven, lopsided, even a little bit unfinished-sounding at parts. In fact, I believe it’s the weakest of the book’s 50’s rock and roll albums. But despite all that, it’s still a highly enjoyable listen, not to mention a major landmark in music history. Being one of the first rock albums to achieve commercial success, this is certainly a great place to start if you wish to witness rock and roll in its early, primordial state. It’s basic, unadorned and straightforward, both lyrically and musically (and that’s definitely not a bad thing). It alternates between energetic rock songs and quiet, soulful love ballads, and Elvis is equally skilled at both. In fact, one of the album’s ballads, “Blue Moon,” is not only my favorite song off the album, but one of my favorite songs of the decade. Overall, despite the album’s flaws, this album is still absolutely worth your time. For all its negatives, it still deserves its place in the book. Tragic Songs of Life by The Louvin Brothers (1956) I really didn’t like this one when I first reviewed it. But in the time since, it’s started to grow on me. Granted, it’s still on the lower half of the rankings, but I’ve started to appreciate this album much more with time. Ira and Charlie are excellent at harmonizing with each other, the guitar playing is excellent and the set of songs is supremely dark and gloomy, however cheery the melodies may make it sound. “Knoxville Girl” still manages to unsettle, with its casual recounting of a brutal and heartless murder of an innocent girl, with the narrator showing neither a shred of remorse nor any semblance of a motive. Other tracks are painfully emotional expressions of grief, heartbreak, longing, and just all-around human misery in its most basic form. The stand-out track in my opinion has to be “What is Home Without Love,” which is a strong contender for the album’s biggest downer, topped only by “Mary of the Moor,” an almost absurdly dark and depressing ballad about a mother who dies in the freezing cold with her newborn child in her arms. Christ. That’s so depressing it borders on parody. In conclusion, as the book’s first country album, it’s a great way to introduce the genre. Great harmony, expert guitar playing, and morbid-as-hell lyrics. What more could a good country album want? The Wildest! by Louis Prima (1956) Now, in contrast with the previous album, we have one that I loved at first, but then sort of grew indifferent towards over time. It’s not a bad album, (far from it, in fact) but surrounded by so many other incredible albums, it kind of falls flat. It was pretty great the first time through, but I think the true sign of a great album is how it holds up on repeat listens. This particular album just seems to lose its spark the third or fourth time through. It’s certainly enjoyable, but I just found myself enjoying it less and less with each re-listen. I would still recommend you give it a listen yourself, but it really isn’t my personal favorite. This is Fats Domino! by Fats Domino (1956) I honestly have no idea what I was thinking when I first reviewed this one. Of all my reviews so far, this is by far the one I regret the most. I freakin’ love this album, and it frankly boggles my mind that I could’ve been “indifferent” to this album at some point. The songs here are short and to the point. They’ve got great melodies, sung with amazing vocals, backed by an outstanding band. I don’t think there’s a single track on this album that I don’t love the crap out of, but “So Long,” “Honey Chile” and “Blue Monday” are definite highlights. This is Fats Domino! is a stong contender for my favorite of the book’s 50’s rock and roll albums (just outranked by The “Chirping” Crickets) and is a must-listen for anyone interested in the music of the decade. Ellington at Newport by Duke Ellington (1956) Duke Ellington’s performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival is truly legendary. Jazz fans still talk about it to this day. It was monumental to the point that it’s considered a historical album for music history, not to mention the high point of Duke Ellington’s entire decades-long career. I agree wholeheartedly with all of those sentiments, and while I would still place it around the middle on the rankings, I completely respect this record and all of the countless accolades it has received. “Diminuendo in Blue” is one of the greatest jazz tracks of all time, the trilogy of “Festival Junction,” “Blues to Be There” and “Newport Up” are excellent, and the concert’s closer “Skin Deep” is one of the best drum solos I’ve ever heard. These tracks alone make the album more than worthwhile, but sadly the remaining tracks I found to be simply forgettable. The aforementioned tracks more than make up for this, but there are simply too many “average” tracks for the album to be higher than the middle of the rankings. Other than that, this is an outstanding album, and is an indispensable part of jazz history. Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! by Frank Sinatra (1956) His previous album in the book, In the Wee Small Hours, is an absolute masterpiece. This album, while high in quality, doesn’t quite meet the same heights as its predecessor. Not at all, of course, because of its much more cheerful and happy tone. Far from it, in fact; joy can often be the most potent emotion art can conjure. I enjoy this album very much, but the collections of songs here don’t work as well as a cohesive whole. What made Wee Small Hours so great was that it felt much more like an album, with Swingin’ Lovers feeling more like a collection of singles. Amazing singles, but singles nonetheless. The former album was focused on mood, raw emotion, and atmosphere, while this one is more concerned with crafting quality, catchy pop tunes. Both of those are great in my opinion, but in terms of what makes a more memorable album, I believe the former works much more well. So, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! is a top-quality record, but is sadly just not as strong as his previous album. The “Chirping” Crickets by Buddy Holly and the Crickets (1957) Here it is, folks. I truly believe this to be the greatest rock and roll album of the 50’s. It is truly a testament to the strength of the songs on this album that, despite it being a miniscule twenty-five minutes in length, it would go on to massively influence the style and songwriting of decades of music to come. These tracks are concise and to the point. They’re all very short, with most being two-and-a-half minutes or less, and utilize very traditional pop song structure, but it works excellently here. The instruments are minimal: just guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. And what vocals! Holly’s voice is incredibly animated and expressive, performing each song with cheerfulness and vigor. The backing vocals are great too, complimenting the song with country-like singing and harmony. There isn’t a single weak track here, and before you know it, they’re over. You’re left wanting more, which truly is a shame, considering Buddy Holly only got one more album out before his untimely death in 1959, at the age of twenty-two. His contributions to the world of music were both small and massive, and he was (and still is) mourned by music experts and casual fans alike. The tragedy of his death, along with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, still feels fresh even today, almost sixty years later, but his contributions to music will always be remembered. The Atomic Mr. Basie by Count Basie (1957) This is a quality jazz album, and while it’s not my favorite out of all of them, I can still appreciate its value. The songs are catchy, the playing is great, and the energy is tangible. The fast songs are so pumped full of excitement and energy that it feels like the band is on the verge of exploding. The slow tracks are even better, with a cool, smooth and relaxing mood complimented perfectly by the improvisation and jazz melodies featured. The tracks are short (for jazz, that is) and yet feel so much longer than they are (in a good way). They just manage to say so much in a short amount of time that you forget that most of the tracks are only about three minutes in length. I would say that this is definitely a highly enjoyable album, and although it isn’t my favorite of the book’s 50’s jazz albums, it’s still worth your time. Brilliant Corners by Thelonious Monk (1957) Just listen to this album, and tell me this man isn’t a genius. This record features some of the tightest, most complex jazz tracks I’ve ever heard, and it’s just an all-around joy to experience. The opening title track just blows me away every time I hear it. Featuring such complex melodies and fast time-signature changes that the band thought it impossible to play upon first viewing, it’s almost difficult to take it all in on first listen. It’s an exhilarating ride from start to finish, and does a great job of showing what he and his band is capable of. “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are” follows the opening track up with thirteen minutes of near-perfect improvised jazz bliss. “Pannonica” is a definite highlight: listen to it and try not to just melt into your seat. It is the sound of pure, undiluted tranquility. I could easily fall asleep to it, and I mean that in the best possible way. “Bemsha Swing” closes out the album on a high note, with more of the usual masterful performances and improv. Overall, this might just be my favorite jazz album of the decade, along with the obvious choice, Kind of Blue. This is a criminally underrated gem of an album that every music lover should hear. Palo Congo by Sabu (1957) This one’s still one of my favorites. Featuring some of the best percussion work I’ve ever heard, Palo Congo is by far my favorite out of the three albums of Latin music featured in the book’s 50’s section. This album is simply unforgettable. Rhythm is what this album is all about. The drum section, featuring an array of types including conga and bongo drums, is unlike any I’ve ever heard. The rhythm flows effortlessly through these drums, creating a mesmerizing soup of sound that puts the listener into a trance with ease. The album’s opener, “El Cumbanchero,” is a brilliant frenzy of guitar, drums and vocals that hypnotizes the listener as much as it wills them to get up and move. The rest of the album continues the frenzy, with “Billumba-Palo Congo’s” call-and-response chanting and “Simba’s” primal, animalistic squawks and growls being particular highlights. This is an album unlike almost any other I’ve ever heard. It deserves much more attention than it gets, so I would highly reccomend you check it out. Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis (1957) I think I was way too harsh on this one at first. This is a much better jazz album than I gave it credit for. I still think it’s the weakest of Davis’ four albums in this book, but that’s not saying much considering it’s up against some of the greatest jazz albums of all time, namely, Kind of Blue, In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. It’s still quite good as a standalone album, featuring great improv and melody/harmony. It’s incredibly understated and subtle, and yet at the same time many of its tempos are upbeat and rather fast. These two seemingly contrasting elements actually work together very nicely, creating a unique atmosphere fitting the album’s title very well. It’s not the kind of album that you could really pick favorite tracks off of. It all seems to kind of blend together into one long experience. Oftentimes albums like this where no track seems to stick out just wind up being forgettable because of it, but with this one it suits it quite well. It’s nice to just sit back and relax to this album, but it’s just a little too fast and complex to fall asleep to. It’s got a truly unique sound and mood, and all sorts of subtleties that I completely missed out on the first time around. Kenya by Machito (1957) This album will leave you breathless. It’s explosive, chaotic, and loud, and god, do I love every last second of it. The opening track, “Wild Jungle,” has to be heard to be believed. It’s one of the most memorable album openings I’ve heard in a long time, and perfectly encapsulates what makes Machito so awesome in a single track. The title track, “Kenya,” is another highlight, not to mention the following song, “Oyeme,” which uses buildup brilliantly to create a song that doesn’t get agressive, but still sounds like it could explode at any second. “Conversation”and “Minor Rama” are also favorites, but picking favorites with this album is ultimately just futile, as pretty much every track can be argued to be the album’s best. If you want a little, or rather, a lot of excitement in your jazz, this is the album for you. Here’s Little Richard by Little Richard (1957) Although only my third favorite out of the 50’s rock and roll albums, this one’s still one of the most noteworthy albums of the decade. Certainly one of the most recognizable; finding someone who hasn’t heard “Tutti Frutti” would be a monumental undertaking. It’s an absolute cultural juggernaut of a song, and is quite possibly the most iconic rock and roll song of the 50’s, if not all time. While I don’t deny the importance it holds, it isn’t even my favorite track of the album: of the upbeat, energetic tracks, I much prefer “Ready Teddy” and “Long Tall Sally.” “Oh Why?” is a great change of pace from the rest of the album, being a slower, sadder track about Little Richard being “put on trial” for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s not a perfect album, with some of the songs sounding suspiciously similar, but they’re just so well-performed that that’s easy to forget. This album is without a doubt a high point in 50’s music that any music fan worth their salt should hear. Dance Mania by Tito Puente and His Orchestra (1958) Dance Mania is the sole proof needed to justify Tito’s title as the King of Latin Music. Rhythm, melody, vocals, instrumentals: this album nails them all. It takes the album’s opener, “El Cayuco,” all of three seconds to make you want, nay, need to get up and move, and every single track to follow maintains that energy completely. This is just one of those albums that fill you with joy without fail, no matter the circumstances. Feeling down? Puente and his Orchestra ain’t having any of that. Some highlights include the instrumentals “3-D Mambo” and “Hong Kong Mambo,” the aforementioned “El Cayuco,” and “Cuanto te Vea (Guáguanco).” This one is just great. Not many other ways to put it: it’s just great. Lady in Satin by Billie Holiday (1958) Alright, alright, I’m just going to say it. This is the greatest album of the decade. I would try and explain why or how, but I honestly don’t have words to describe this album. Nothing I can write can explain how truly, deeply haunting and emotional this record is. It’s a masterpiece, plain and simple. And masterpiece isn’t a word I like to just throw around: it’s a word that needs to be reserved and used with caution, lest it lose its potency. Lady in Satin, however, is in fact deserving of the title, and yet even then it seems to fail to pinpoint this record’s magic. There are some feelings, some emotions, that can’t be expressed through language. So I’m just going to stop trying and move on to the next one. Listen to it. Jack Takes the Floor by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (1958) My feelings on this album haven’t really altered: this is a fine folk record with great guitar playing and a Woody Guthrie feature. Need I really say more? At Mister Kelly’s by Sarah Vaughan (1958) It honestly makes me sad when albums turn out underwhelming. But, it pains me to say this, At Mister Kelly’s is just that. It’s not because the instrumentation is sparse (a lot of my favorite albums feature even less accompaniment, for instance Nick Drake’s Pink Moon or Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert). I just couldn’t enjoy this album no matter how hard I tried to. Hey, they can’t all be winners. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook by Ella Fitzgerald (1959) My feelings on this album are a tad mixed. On the one hand, it’s incredibly long, and of course with such a long track listing not all of the songs are going to be that great. But on the other, none of them are quite bad, and I understand why it’s as long as it is. This album isn’t quite intended to be listened to in one full sitting. It’s more of a huge collection of songs that you can listen to in any order you please. It’s not my favorite, but I still enjoy it. The Genius of Ray Charles by Ray Charles (1959) It sure ain’t no lie: the man’s a musical genius. This one’s got it all. Don’t like string ballads? Side One’s got all the catchy-as-hell upbeat big band tunes you could ask for. Lots of brass isn’t your cup of tea? Flip it on over to Side Two for half an album of soothing and passionate string sections. This album truly has something for everybody. If you come out of this record having not enjoyed yourself at least a little, you’re pretty much clinically dead inside. Ray Charles knows how to make music, and nowhere is it more evident than this aptly-titled masterwork. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis (1959) Again, my opinions on this one haven’t really shifted much. It’s an absolute classic, and one of the most essential albums of the 20th century. If you’ve never heard it, do yourself a favor. Best experienced with headphones, in a silent room with the lights off. There’s not much better. Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs by Marty Robbins (1959) This is a great country album, each track having a compelling story, great lyrics, and excellent guitar with Marty’s signature deep-voiced country croon. I believe this album is by far the better of the two country albums on the list so far, which is saying a lot, seeing as Tragic Songs of Life is already a pretty high standard to beat. If you’re a country fan, this album is pretty much required listening. Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959) And finally, closing out the 50’s, is the incredible jazz album that brought us the staple “Take Five.” Seeing as this is my most recent review, I don’t have much more I can really say about it, so check out the review for more info! All I can say is that this is a very good jazz album, and that the book closes out the decade with a bang. So those are all the albums I’ve reviewed so far. I’ll be updating the rankings soon, and you can look forward to my first review of the 60’s very soon! See you then. Next Up: Joan Baez by Joan Baez (1960) Album Review #23: Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959) December 30, 2016 December 30, 2016 bookcase Albums 30-40 Minutes, 50's Media, Album Review, Jazz, The Dave Brubeck Quartet The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five is the final album of the book’s 50’s section, being released in December of 1959, and oh boy, does it end the decade on a high note. This is an excellent jazz album, rivaling the likes of Brilliant Corners and even Kind of Blue. Featuring only four musicians and yet at times sounding like a full orchestra, this album is extravagant, and at the same time subtle, with expert musicianship shining through each and every second. I think it’s needless to say that I enjoyed this one greatly. The track that pretty much everyone knows this album for (and by extent, Brubeck’s entire oeuvre,) has to be “Take Five.” If you’ve never even heard of Dave Brubeck, you’ve probably heard this song at some point, possibly without even knowing it. It’s a great melody, but what I like the song even more for is the rhythmic, persistent piano that serves as a sort of grounding point for the rest of the band to do its thing. Funnily enough, the iconic saxophone melody that the song is famous for only appears at the beginning and very end of the piece, with the bulk of the song being an extended drum solo, accompanied by piano and bass. With such sparse instrumentation and such a (relatively) long running time, you’d think the song would tire itself out before it ends, but it doesn’t. Joe Morello, the percussionist, is so talented that he easily carries the majority of the song on his own. Although I love the song, I have to admit that it’s a wonder the song became a major hit, being over five minutes long and about %70 drum solo. Good on the public for digging this song so much. The Dave Brubeck Quartet. Image Source: theguardian.com But of course, “Take Five” isn’t the whole album. There are six other tracks that make up the record, and all of them are worth mentioning. My favorite of these is track number two, “Strange Meadow Lark.” It has an incredible introduction, with a little over two minutes worth of solo piano that I can only describe as “Gershwin meets Debussy.” Brubeck is truly talented with the piano, and it shines here more so than anywhere else on the album. The rest of the band is great as well, with the four instruments working together excellently to create a soothing, cool and highly relaxing mood for the remainder of the track’s seven minutes. More so than any other track (which is saying quite a lot), this one is simply a goldmine of pure, undiluted ear candy. Time Out is truly a top-tier jazz album. The playing is masterful, the melodies are memorable and the freestyles are flowing and effortless. The Dave Brubeck Quartet was one of the 50’s greatest jazz combos, and this album is their crowning achievement. Give this one a listen, it deserves it. Favorite Tracks: “Take Five,” “Strange Meadow Lark” Album Review #22: Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs by Marty Robbins (1959) December 6, 2016 December 6, 2016 bookcase Albums 30-40 Minutes, 50's Media, Album Review, Country, Folk, Marty Robbins I feel bad for people who don’t listen to country. The genre has such a stigma surrounding it for some reason, which confounds me, with the wealth of great country music that there is. Writing off an entire genre of anything is a terrible thing to do. My personal belief is that there’s great music to be found in every genre, so for all the country haters out there, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs by Marty Robbins is proof of that theorem. The title is accurate; every track is either a story-song about outlaws and shootouts, or a campfire folk song about the daily struggle. Marty Robbins has a good singing voice, and his band is a good accompaniment to his lyrics. He’s got a classic country croon, clean and almost never faltering on a tone. It’s simple, but it works. In fact, I’d say that that can describe the album as a whole: simple but good. The melodies are uncomplicated and difficult not to sing along to, and the instrumentation is minimal, with the only instrument other than guitar, bass and drums appearing on the album being a brief fiddle intro to “Cool Water.” He does more than well with what little he has to work with, making each and every track an engaging listen. Image source: Los Angeles Times While the music itself is great, the album’s true strongpoint is the lyrics. Marty Robbins himself only has a writing credit on four of the album’s twelve tracks, with the others being either covers of fellow country artists or traditional folk songs, but he still infuses both his own songs and his covers with equal love and attention. My favorite tracks still tend toward Robbins originals, however. “Big Iron” starts the album off on a high note, and “In the Valley” is soulful and moving, with the only negative I can come up with being that it’s too short, at only 1:48. “The Master’s Call” is the only one of the four I don’t like; the lyrics are good, but musically it’s almost identical to “Big Iron,” just in a different key. The best track of the album has to be “El Paso.” With great lyrics, excellent guitar playing, and the catchiest melody of the record, it was his biggest hit for good reason. It’s a truly classic song, and one every country fan should hear. If you don’t like country, that’s fine. Different strokes for different folks. Heck, I wrote possibly my most scathing review yet on Tragic Songs of Life by The Louvin Brothers, the first country album on this list. But that isn’t to say you should dismiss the entire genre. As I said before, there’s great music everywhere. If you dislike a certain genre, you just have to dig a little more for it. I’m almost certain you’ll find it somewhere. And if you dislike country, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs just might be the one to change your mind. Favorite Tracks: “El Paso,” “In the Valley,” “Big Iron,” “Cool Water” Least Favorite: “The Master’s Call” Next Up: Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959) Album Review #21: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis (1959) November 27, 2016 December 30, 2016 bookcase Albums 40-50 Minutes, 50's Media, Album Review, Jazz, Miles Davis This right here is a turning point, folks. Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is not only the highest selling jazz album of all time (currently at 4x Platinum according to the RIAA), it also had an incalculable influence on almost every other genre of music for decades to come. I’ve been a pretty big fan of this album for quite a while now, and while I still prefer his 1970 release Bitches Brew, it still stands as a hugely important masterpiece in its own right. With the help of a ridiculously star-studded cast of session musicians, including piano virtuoso Bill Evans and jazz legend John Coltrane, this set of five mostly-improvised jazz compositions becomes absolutely incomparable in performance, melody and sound. The record opens up with “So What,” containing one of the greatest introductions in music history. The piano and bass play off each other excellently, and the moment where the cymbal crashes and the song goes into full swing is just pure perfection. The following track, “Freddie Freeloader,” continues the great improvised playing and harmonies, but track three, “Blue in Green,” is just indescribable. Evans’ piano playing is at its peak in this track, and gives off a mournful, even otherworldly vibe. My only complaint is that it is the album’s shortest track, at only five minutes. Its a song I definitely wouldn’t mind listening to for longer. Photo from the Kind of Blue sessions. Source: NPR.com After “Blue in Green” comes the album’s lengthiest track, “All Blues.” This one’s probably my favorite out of the five. It may be long, but the great (as usual) performances, with repeating drum/high hat and bass that persists throughout, providing a sort of base for the trumpet, sax and piano to do their thing. It just keeps going for 11 straight minutes, and doesn’t wear out for even a second. It’s followed by the album’s closing track, “Flamenco Sketches.” An excellent send-off for one of music’s great masterpieces, it’s slow, morose and calming, and takes its time serenading the listener with latin-inspired melodies in some of the most smooth nine minutes of jazz ever put to record. If you haven’t listened to Kind of Blue yet, do it. Now. I mean it. Simply one of the finest jazz albums ever, it’s something everyone should experience at some point in their lives. Never once feeling flashy or over the top, it remains cool and subtle throughout, making a lasting impression without ever raising its voice. Do yourself a favor and listen to this one. Favorite Tracks: Uhh… Can I just say all of them? Next Up: Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs by Marty Robbins (1959) Album Review #20: The Genius of Ray Charles by Ray Charles (1959) November 26, 2016 December 30, 2016 bookcase Albums 30-40 Minutes, 50's Media, Album Review, Jazz, R&B, Ray Charles The Genius of Ray Charles is an interesting record. Split in half stylistically, with Side 1 containing six Big Band Jazz/R&B tunes and Side 2 six soulful string ballads, it tries (and succeeds) to accomplish a lot of different things. It takes a lot of musical skill to pull off something like this, but luckily for us Ray Charles possesses such a talent, tenfold. In my opinion, the highlight of the album has to be its opening track, “Let the Good Times Roll.” It’s almost stupidly catchy, and Ray’s vocals are excellent. In all honesty, it’s one of the best songs I’ve heard on the list so far. Also from Side 1, we have “Two Years of Torture” and “When Your Lover Has Gone.” While he saves all the outright ballads for Side 2, these two songs are still pumped full of the blues. His singing throughout the album is filled with emotion and passion, giving weight and meaning to each lyric he sings. Image Source: IMDb.com Side 2 displays a much different style of music from the first. Eschewing the sometimes-harsh, always-loud brass band in favor of a softer string section (plus oboe and backing vocals), for the album’s second half Ray offers the listener an excellent selection of heart-felt ballads. “Am I Blue?” is the best out of all of these, with “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” being a very close second. As with Side 1, his vocals are excellent, with great amounts of expression in each line. It may seem a bit egotistical for him to name his album The Genius of Ray Charles. Not so. This album more than justifies its grandiose title. With a perfect 50/50 balance of genres, with each half good enough to be an excellent EP on its own, this record is a true classic that any music lover should hear. Favorite Tracks: “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Two Years of Torture,” “When Your Lover Has Gone,” “Am I Blue?,” “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” Next Up: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis (1959) Album Review #19: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook by Ella Fitzgerald (1959) November 24, 2016 November 24, 2016 bookcase Albums 50's Media, Album Review, Ella Fitzgerald, Jazz, Over 80 Minutes, Pop Whew. I’ve gone through the book a few times, and I am almost certain that this album, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook, is the single longest album in the entire book. At just over three hours in length, it’s an absolute monster of a record (or rather, five records). It’s packed to the absolute bursting point with catchy pop tunes and Gershwin’s legendary instrumentation (arranged by Nelson Riddle), and it is simply an all-you-can-eat buffet for the ears. It starts off with about 13 minutes of instrumentals, entitled “Ambulatory Suite” and “The Preludes.” Gershwin’s composing and Riddle’s conducting really get a chance to shine here, with almost every second just emanating Americana. Ella’s singing comes in with “Sam and Delilah,” and her delivery is just great. She sings each line with personality and attitude, and just seems to perfectly encapsulate the era with style and swing. Image Source: history.com Normally I like to make a short list of my favorite tracks from each album. Well, that won’t be easy this time: there are 57 tracks here, and they’re all great. So a few songs that I enjoyed, pretty much arbitrarily chosen, are “The Real American Folk Song,” “Just Another Rhumba,” “By Strauss,” “Stiff Upper Lip,” “Love is Sweeping the Country,” and “Slap That Bass.” I honestly don’t think there’s a single track in this massive album that I didn’t enjoy to some extent. I’ve listened to the whole thing start to finish a couple times now, and each time is just as enjoyable as the first listen. I guess if there’s one negative criticism I have regarding this one, it’s that it is just too overstuffed. I’m not complaining, but I can definitely imagine it being tough to get through for other listeners. I don’t expect any of you to listen to all three hours of this thing. Even I find it to be best enjoyed when split up into smaller parts. But for those with the time and patience, Gershwin Songbook is a worthwhile listen, and a highly enjoyable one at that. Ella Fitzgerald is ridiculously talented, and this album showcases possibly the highlight of her catalog. So, give it a listen! You might just enjoy it. Favorite Tracks: “The Real American Folk Song,” “Just Another Rhumba,” “By Strauss,” “Stiff Upper Lip,” “Love is Sweeping the Country,” “Slap That Bass.” Next Up: The Genius of Ray Charles by Ray Charles (1959) Album Review #18: Sarah Vaughan At Mister Kelly’s by Sarah Vaughan (1958) November 20, 2016 bookcase Albums 50's Media, 70-80 Minutes, Album Review, Jazz, Sarah Vaughan The live album Sarah Vaughan At Mister Kelly’s sadly just left me underwhelmed. I find that the hardest album to write about isn’t the one that you hate, but the one that you simply don’t have strong opinions on. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it either. It had a couple songs that I enjoyed, but for the most part it just didn’t seem to speak to me. Sarah Vaughan has a great voice. If there’s one thing in particular that I enjoyed, it’s her singing. Her voice just doesn’t seem to have any flaws. She’s mastered the art of singing a completely unwavering, flawless tone. Her backing band is pretty good too; even though they’re only three people, they still manage to create a great mood with just a piano, bass and drums. My favorite track out of the 20 (I’m reviewing the re-release version, which includes the full, unabridged performance) is probably “Willow Weep for Me,” with a good melody, lyrics and piano throughout. In a particularly memorable moment, partway through the song, Vaughan makes a brief mistake and plays it off brilliantly, making the audience laugh a good amount. Some other good tracks include “Alone” and “Poor Butterfly.” Image source: Wikimedia Commons So, this album just didn’t work for me. It’s not bad, I just personally didn’t like it very much. Maybe it’s the minimalist backing band that doesn’t really hold up after 70 minutes, or maybe it just has the misfortune of having to follow up Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin. Either way, it really pains me to say that this album just didn’t do it for me. What did you think? Leave your opinions in the comments, I’d love to hear them! Favorite Tracks: “Willow Weep for Me,” “Alone,” “Poor Butterfly” Next Up: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook by Ella Fitzgerald (1959) Album Review #17: Jack Takes the Floor by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (1958) November 19, 2016 November 19, 2016 bookcase Albums 30-40 Minutes, 50's Media, Album Review, Country, Folk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott While Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is sadly pretty obscure among the general public, his influence among fellow musicians is massive. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Mick Jagger to Paul Mc-Freaking-Cartney has cited this guy as a major influence on their music (listen to “Rocky Raccoon” off The White Album and the influence of his “talking-blues” style is blatant). It’s not hard to see why. His guitar playing is excellent, his songs are catchy, and his stories are entertaining. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott truly is a folk musician only paralleled by Woody Guthrie himself. Image source: CMT.com Jack Takes the Floor is, to say it simply, one of the finest folk albums of all time. It feels like a relaxing afternoon on the back porch with grandpa and his guitar. Jack Elliott’s guitar playing is almost flawless, and his lyrics are engaging and sometimes even funny. Each of its 11 tracks (later 13, when it was reissued as Muleskinner with a couple bonus tracks) are memorable, but “Mule Skinner Blues,” “New York Town,” “Cocaine” and “Dink’s Song” are stand-outs. “New York Town” even has Woody Guthrie himself as a guest performer! “Cocaine’s” guitar is strangely sweet considering the song’s subject matter. “Dink’s Song” is just plain heartbreaking, sung from the point of view of a prisoner singing about his love outside of prison. “Mule Skinner Blues” is the longest song of the album, at over 5 minutes in length, and boasts some great guitar work and singing. Overall, the whole album is great, with wonderful playing and lyricism throughout. Jack Takes the Floor is one solid folk album. If you’ve got even a passing interest in the genre, or are looking for a good place to start, this is your record. With a set of songs like this, its no wonder an entire generation of musicians to follow were impacted by it. Give it a listen, will ya? Favorite Tracks: “Mule Skinner Blues,” “Cocaine,” “Dink’s Song,” “New York Town” Next Up: Sarah Vaughan At Mister Kelly’s by Sarah Vaughan (1958) Album Review #16: Lady in Satin by Billie Holiday (1958) November 18, 2016 bookcase Albums 30-40 Minutes, 50's Media, Album Review, Billie Holiday, Jazz, Pop Lady in Satin is truly a haunting record. One of the most raw, emotional and deeply personal musical recordings of all time, it still manages to leave listeners speechless over a half-century later. It was sadly the final album Billie Holiday would release during her lifetime, as she would die of liver cirrhosis brought on by alcoholism, just a year and a half later at the age of 44. Her voice is damaged and weak in this album, and while you would think that such a thing would detract from the music, in reality it’s exactly the opposite. She gives one of the most profound and emotional vocal performances I have ever heard in this record, singing every line with the entirety of her heart and soul. This album is truly unforgettable. I can’t help but make comparisons to a previous album on this list, In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra, released 1955. They are incredibly similar in instrumentation, mood and lyrical content, and while I prefer Sinatra’s album (it’s still #1 on my album rankings after 16 albums!), this album is still a masterpiece in its own right. They share three of the same songs, (namely, covers of “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” “Glad to Be Unhappy,” and “I’ll Be Around”) but despite the many similarities, they remain wildly different albums. Sinatra’s voice is unwavering and flawless, and Holiday’s voice is tattered and broken. Both singing styles compliment the music greatly, but in much different ways. Personally, I prefer Holiday’s delivery, as I find it conveys a whole world of emotion that Sinatra’s only hints at in comparison. Ray Ellis, the mastermind behind Lady in Satin’s brilliant instrumentation, was originally unhappy with her damaged-sounding vocals, but listening to the master tapes later in production, he heard it in a whole new light. He noted that her delivery and performance didn’t shine in opposition to her voice, but rather the two enhanced each other. I completely agree; she really knew how to sing a lyric, and her decades of musical experience shined through and brought this album from average to unforgettable. Photo of Billie Holiday, source: MTV.com My personal favorite of the album’s eleven tracks is “For Heaven’s Sake.” It’s got the usual great vocal delivery, but there’s just so much nuance and subtlety in the instrumentation, such as the brilliantly understated piano in the opening. I almost can’t even put my finger on just what makes this track so good. One of my favorite parts is this high-register background voice that shows up throughout the record (courtesy of Elise Bretton and Miriam Workman). It sounds almost theremin-like, and grants each track an otherworldly, ethereal vibe that just seems to speak to me on a deep, indescribable level. Holiday’s vocals and Ellis’ orchestra work together absolutely flawlessly, and together they create a borderline perfect atmosphere of both gloom and hope. This is a theme carried throughout the album; almost every track deals in doomed love and broken relationships, ruminating on the nature of love in the face of uncertainty and opposition. Some other highlights include her take on the staple “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” as well as the ultra-downer “You’ve Changed.” The album sure gives you a lot to think about, and is a highly emotional listening experience from start to finish. So in conclusion, Lady in Satin is a masterpiece, plain-and-simple. Billie Holiday delivers one of the best vocal performances I’ve ever heard on this album, and Ray Ellis’ instrumentation is worth the listen on its own. It’s an album I would recommend to any music lover, and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting about this one any time soon. Favorite Tracks: “For Heaven’s Sake,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” “You’ve Changed” Next Up: Jack Takes the Floor by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (1958)	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1768
__label__cc	0.681676	0.318324	I nostri fondi Blog finanziario Nordic FI Outlook 2020 will be a year we will all will remember for a very long time and it will enter the history books based on the wide-ranging effects of the pandemic on global economic and political developments. Long term effects of the pandemic is likely to be felt in a host of areas for many years to come, in the result of the US election, the massive increase in government debt around the world, the potential impact to world trade and global value chains and potentially the patterns in the way we, as individuals, work and travel, to name but a few. Credit: Erin McKenna/ Unsplash Blog sulla finanza Svein Aage Aanes Svein Aage Aanes joined DNB Asset Management in 1998. As Head of Fixed Income and FX, Svein Aage has accumulated close to 25 years’ experience as a Portfolio Manager. In 2000 he was assigned to head up the team. Before joining DNB Asset Management, Svein Aage was a senior economist at Den norske Bank. He began his career in 1991 as an Assistant Professor and researcher in economics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen. Svein Aage holds an MSc in Economics from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and he has completed a research stay at Harvard University. Svein Aage speaks English, German and Norwegian. Although the pandemic is still raging in many areas of the world, the recent developments on the vaccine front raises well-founded hopes that at least most of the industrialized world can return to something resembling (a new) normal during the course of 2021. This is the backdrop for these comments about the market outlook for Nordic fixed income for 2021. But first a look at the drama and developments of 2020 in the Nordic markets. Nordic credit markets 2020 2020 was an unprecedented year in the Nordic fixed income markets. A combination of factors led to the largest spread widening we have ever seen in the Nordics. This is in contrast to global spread developments where swift action from the major central banks prevented credit spreads from reaching the levels we saw during the financial crisis in 2008 (and in Europe well below the levels during the government debt crisis in 2011). US and European credit spreads: In contrast credit spreads in the Norwegian and Swedish credit markets went to wider levels than we saw during the financial crisis, and in Sweden we also saw 35 individual credit funds having to close for redemptions. Credit spreads of various maturities for Norwegian banks Source: DNB The main reason that the initial impact from the pandemic to credit markets was larger in the Nordics, was that, whereas the major central banks (The Fed, ECB) had the necessary tools sharpened and ready (mainly in the form of QE that also included corporate bonds), and acted swiftly to mitigate the effects in the bond markets, this was not the case in Norway and Sweden. Sweden did have a QE program up and running but this program did not include corporate bonds. Massive outflows from Swedish credit bond funds thus led to the market collapsing. In June, well after spreads had normalized, the Swedish central bank announced that they would start buying corporate bonds from September 2020. The program is quite small, 10 bn. SEK, but as the central bank states in the description of the program it is instigated to establish a presence in the credit market to be able to swiftly increase the program if necessary. In this way the Swedish central bank seeks to mitigate what was shown to be a weakness in the Swedish credit market in March. In Norway the problem was a different one. The outflow from credit funds was not that massive, but the unprecedented weakening of the NOK created a huge demand for cash to put up as security in currency hedging contracts, not least from the life insurance and pension sector which has most of their investments in foreign currency. To generate the necessary cash, investors tapped their liquid NOK money market and bond portfolios leading to a massive selling pressure in the market, resulting in a spread widening that was both larger and faster than anything witnessed during the financial crisis. This effect was seen throughout all credit qualities, but the resulting spread widening was naturally largest for high yield. NOK against EUR, USD and SEK Just as the Swedish central bank was unprepared for the specific problems in the Swedish market, the Norwegian central bank had not seen the link between the sharp weakening of the NOK and the functioning of the domestic credit market and they tried to solve the underlying problem by showering the banks with liquidity, to no avail. As March ground on Norges Bank started to realize where the problem was located and on March 20th they announced that they, for the first time since 1998, considered intervening in the FX market. We have since learned that they did intervene, buying relatively small amounts of NOK (3.6 bn. NOK) on Thursday 20th and Friday on March 21st. This was enough to stabilize the NOK and thereby also the credit market which turned around March 21st. Thus, it is relatively obvious to us that both the Swedish and the Norwegian central bank have gone through a learning process in 2020 and that they have prepared and adapted their toolboxes based on this learning. This makes us quite confident that the Nordic central banks will be better prepared for potential future situations, just like the fed and ECB turned out to be in 2020. Macroeconomic developments in the Nordics Just like in the rest of the world the pandemic has hit the Nordic economies quite hard. Measures to prevent contagion have been particularly difficult for service industries, leading to a fall in GDP and increased unemployment. However, the Nordic economies have been less affected by the pandemic than many European countries and even the US. Some of the underlying strengths in the Nordic region, such as strong public finances, well developed social security, and health systems and high levels of trust in the populations have helped ameliorate the effects of the pandemic. Thus GDP estimates for countries in the Nordics for 2020 and 2021 tend to be somewhat less bleak than for many other regions (except for China and parts of Asia). GDP Estimates So far we also see that when it comes to measures such as unemployment, retail sales, and house prices, the Nordic countries have performed well in relative terms. Accumulated gains/losses in retail sales 2020 Sources : SB1 Market/Macrobond The economic effects of the pandemic will clearly be felt well into 2021, both globally and in the Nordic region. The resurgence of virus cases both in the US and in Europe has also been felt in the Nordic countries. Just as elsewhere, this has led to the re-introduction of preventive measures limiting social contact and hampering economic activity. It now seems quite evident that in the absence of measures the contagion will run rampant, an observation that leads to the conclusion that we will either live in a start-stop world for still some time, or that we will find some combination of measures which keep contagion level. In either case, it now seems that we will have to live with some curbs on economic activity until a sufficient proportion of, at least the most vulnerable citizens have been vaccinated. This reality will most likely lead to a somewhat weaker than anticipated GDP development over the next couple of quarters, both in the US, in the Euro-area and in the Nordic countries. Luckily, the recent developments on the vaccine front, and in particular the indications that early vaccines will be highly effective, create a well-grounded hope that after a potentially difficult winter we can return to something resembling normal activity sooner than we feared. In our view, these two opposing dynamics in sum make the estimates for GDP growth from the Swedish and Norwegian central banks shown above quite reasonable. Given this backdrop, we think the outlook for the Nordic credit market is pretty decent. It is hard to argue that investment grade credit is cheap anywhere, as spreads have tightened to levels that we consider to be well inside a normal range. However, given that we think that the underlying theme for the world in general is recovery for 2021, and that the Nordic countries will be at the vanguard of the recovery, we still see potential in Nordic IG credit spreads. Not least because the 2020 crisis led the last remaining Nordic central bank with a positive central bank rate (Norges Bank) to cut to zero. With little outlook for central bank rate hikes or substantially higher interest rates over the next couple of years, we believe that credit spreads can grind tighter in the Nordics. When it comes to Nordic high yield, we definitely think there is still room for spread tightening in 2021. Again, based on the underlying recovery theme and also observing that the recovery for Nordic high yield spreads has been less pronounced than for investment grade, we expect 2021 to be a good year for Nordic high yield. Disclaimer: The information in this document is not binding. Statements in this document should not be understood as an offer, recommendation or solicitation to invest in or sell UCITS funds, hedge funds, securities or other products offered by DNB Asset Management or any other company within DNB Group or any other financial institution. All information reflects the current assessment of DNB Asset Management, which is subject to change without notice. DNB Asset Management does not guarantee the accuracy and completeness of the information. This information does not take into account the individual investment objectives, personal financial situation or specific requirements of an investor. DNB Asset Management does not accept any responsibility for losses incurred on investments made on the basis of this information. Our general terms and conditions can be found on our website www.dnbam.com. Visit: Dronning Eufemias gate 30, N-0191 Oslo Visit: 13, rue Goethe, L-1637 Luxembourg © Tutti i diritti riservati DNB Asset Management Informativa sulla privacy Condizioni d'utilizzo politica dei Cookie	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1769
__label__wiki	0.71306	0.71306	V. Name the main language families represented in Asia and Africa. VI. Say what languages the people of the following countries speak: Iran, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Ceylon, Myanmar, Japan, Thailand, Algeria, Iraq, Tibet, India, Morocco, Turkey, Ethiopia, the Lebanon, Libya, Laos, Nigeria, Cambodia, the Chinese People's Republic. General exercises I. A. Translate into Russian. B. Tell the text in English. The Thai language Thai (Siamese) is a Sino-Tibetan language. It is the state language of Thailand with approximately 46 million speakers. Like all Sino-Tibetan languages Thai is monosyllabic, i.e. consisting of one syllable words. Its system of writing is derived from Sanskrit and is very complicated. It has 44 consonants, 32 vowels and five tones, the latter being indicated above or below the written line. There is no gender or inflection. Possession is generally indicated by placing the possessor immediately after the thing possessed. The adjective, which is invariable, as all parts of speech, usually follows the noun. Verbs have no tense or mood, these ideas being conveyed by adverbs or adverbial expressions. The Malay language The Malay language is understood over a wider geographical extent in the Malay Archipelago than any other language. It is used in the whole of the Malay Peninsula, Indo-China (in some of the southern parts, along some coasts and in some river-valleys), Sumatra, Java (in considerable part), Borneo and in many other islands too numerous to mention. Whatever variations there may be in these regions, the Malay speakers master them in a short time. Some of the languages that bear other names are nearly akin to Malay. When the Malays became Mohammedans, in the XIII century, they adopted the Arabic alphabet with some modifications, and use it to this day, though there is an increasing amount of teaching and writing done with the Roman alphabet. The loan-words of Malay are chiefly from Sanskrit and Arabic. The Malay language is dissyllabic. Monosyllables are few. Words of more than two syllables are also rare. There is no conjugation or declension. Arabic which spreads across northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula is by far the most important of the Afro-Asiatic languages. The speakers of Arabic run into the number of 186 million. As the sacred language of Islam it influences hundreds of millions of those who profess the Mohammedan faith. Arabic is a flexional language. The main characteristic of it, typical of all the Semitic languages, is the word-root consisting of three consonants, with shifting vowels to carry accessory ideas, e.g. Arabic root K-T-B — write"; KATABA — "he has written"; KUTIBA — "it has been written"; KITABUN — "writing", "book"; KATIBUN — "writer", etc. The Arabic language has two genders, masculine and feminine, with inanimate objects distributed between them: there are three numbers, singular, plural and dual (the latter denotes two objects, and is especially used for things that occur in pairs, such as, hands, feet, etc). The verb is fully inflected with numerous separate masculine and feminine forms, especially in the third person. The definite article for all nouns is "al"; there is no indefinite article. The adjective follows the noun, and agrees with it in gender and number. The Arabic script may have four separate forms for each consonant, according to as it comes at the beginning, the middle or the end of a word, or is used by itself. Vowel-sounds are indicated by short oblique bars and hooks above or below the consonants, but are very frequently left out altogether, and the vowel-values are to be supplied by the reader. The Arabic script, with certain modifications, is used by a number of other languages, among them Hausa and Swahili of Central Africa; the Malay and Javanese of Indonesia, and the Urdu of India. The Turkish language The speakers of Turkish are relatively not so very numerous. It is the national tongue of Turkey's 70-80 million inhabitants, located mainly in Asia Minor, but also in the European part of Turkey and adjacent territories — Bulgaria and Greece. Turkish-linguistic minorities are to be found as far west as Albania. In the eastern sections of Turkey there are some Kurdish and Armenian speaking minorities. Some linguists group the Turkish language with Finnish and Hungarian. Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish form the three westernmost European spearheads of the great Ural-Altaic family of languages of northern and central Asia. All these languages have some interesting characteristics in common. In the matter of sounds the Turkish language, like the other languages of this family, has some measure of the so-called "vowel harmony". This means that the vowel sounds are divided into three classes: front, back and neutral. If the root of the word has a "back" vowel, added suffixes must also contain back vowels; if a "front" vowel appears in the root, the vowel of the suffix must be changed as to conform to it; the "neutral" vowels, where they exist, may work with either "front" or "back" vowels. This in turn means that practically all suffixes appear in double form. In grammatical structure Turkish agrees with other Ural-Altaic languages in rejecting the concept of gender, and in indicating noun and verb relations by the piling of a suffix upon suffix. Such grammar structure is called agglutinative. This means that the process of adding endings to a word-root, which appears in Indo-European, is carried on to a far greater degree, suffix upon suffix being attached to the root to carry a variety of meanings. For instance, Turkish "at" — "horse"; "at-im" — "my horse"; "at lar-im" — "my horses"; "sav"— a root carrying general meaning of "love"; "sav-mek"— "to love"; "sav-me-mek"— "not to love"; "sav-il-eme-mek" — "to be impossible to be loved". Turkish has no article, definite or indefinite. The stress of Turkish is usually on the last syllable of the word. Turkish formerly used a modified Arabic script, but in 1928, under Mustapha Kemal, the Arabic script was discarded in favour of Roman letters. II. Give a brief account of the language you study (location, language family and morphological group, grammar structure, vocabulary, the influence of other languages, script) using the words and expressions from the obligatory word list. Date: 2016-03-03; view: 955 Languages of the Middle and Far East \| On the history of the Urdu language	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1770
__label__cc	0.726851	0.273149	Cemeteries I Have Loved On October 28, 2013 By donnaansariIn UncategorizedLeave a comment In honor of Halloween being this week, I am devoting this post to all the cemeteries I have enjoyed exploring. And there have certainly been a lot of them! Being that I write vampire books, it’s no surprise that cemeteries are strongly featured in them. Unless you live in New York City, and specifically the borough of Queens, what you probably don’t know is that there are more cemeteries in Queens than there are in all the other boroughs combined. What this means is, if you live in Queens, you most likely live pretty close to a cemetery. I have many fond memories of visiting cemeteries–when I was growing up in Maspeth, Queens, my house was within a block of an entrance to the cemetery. Since my grandmother’s family was buried there, my grandma took me for walks in the graveyard quite often. Much in the way people in the suburbs would picnic in the park, my grandmother would pack us some sandwiches and we would go behind her parents’ grave and have lunch, while she told me stories about growing up in NYC in the early 1900s. When I was a little older, it was decided by my parents that it was too dangerous to ride my bike in the park, but the cemetery, with its wide paths and infrequent traffic, was fine. So understandably, cemeteries always had a pleasant connotation for me rather than a negative one. Below is a photo of some odd Queens magazine that features an ad for the cemetery that I used to live near as a child. Notice how they misspelled the word “cemetery” in their own ad. And for some reason, whenever I travel, I feel compelled to visit at least one local cemetery. In April 2005, my husband and I went to New Orleans for our honeymoon. We took the below photo at the Lafayette Cemetery No 1. In April 2010, we went to Paris to celebrate our fifth year anniversary. Our hotel was by the Père Lachaise Cemetery, where this photo was taken. Despite the fact that I was actually trying to be creepy, I was three months pregnant at the time and not feeling great, thus paler than usual. I have many more cemetery photos, but the above two are some of my favorites, taken in two of my favorite cities as well. Lastly, in news that is somewhat related to cemeteries, I am pleased to announce the release date for Cold Blood is November 17th! For more information, plus giveaways, excerpts, and the cover reveal, join this Facebook event ! Interview with P.T. Michelle, author of Brightest Kind of Darkness, and Giveaway! When destiny is on the line, will love be enough to light the way? In order to save Ethan, Nara gets pulled deeper into his dark world, where everything she thought she knew about Ethan and herself turns on its head. Ethan and Nara turn up the heat with bone-melting seduction and heart-rending moments, but surprising revelations, lies, treachery, betrayal, and unimaginable evil will challenge their relationship and their future together. As the stakes rise, encompassing more than just her relationship with Ethan, will Nara make the ultimate sacrifice? Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13504881-destiny?ac=1 DESTINY BUY LINKS Amazon: http://bit.ly/1bSlrMi B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/destiny-pt-michelle/1117135101?ean=2940148697626 Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/destiny/id725875082?mt=11 Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Destiny-Brightest-Kind-Darkness-Book/book-iLfX3a6PBkuGL7ZXdHg6BQ/page1.html?s=3x4tomSevEqq68CcE0yc6w&r=1 BRIGHTEST KIND OF DARKNESS BUY LINKS Amazon: http://bit.ly/GSnyBw B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/brightest-kind-of-darkness-ya-paranormal-romance-pt-michelle/1106016258?ean=2940044639706 Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/brightest-kind-darkness-ya/id460285698?mt=11 Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Brightest-Kind-of-Darkness-Book/book–eJ-rrY8zEaXzhh7ymMbvg/page1.html?s=SQWmrxpp-0CVMXCpeq-Fcg&r=4 P.T. Michelle is the author of the young adult series BRIGHTEST KIND OF DARKNESS. She keeps a spiral notepad with her at all times, even on her nightstand. When P.T. isn’t writing, she can usually be found reading or taking pictures of landscapes, sunsets and anything beautiful or odd in nature. As a writer, how do you come up with your ideas for stories? Writers by nature are very observant people. We absorb what we see, hear, smell and touch everyday, so everything inspires us from movies to music to people. One thing that has always inspired when forming a new story idea is I always ask myself the question, “What if….” and then I fill in the blank. 🙂 A story about a girl dreaming her entire next day (and ONLY her next day) the night before is unusual. How did you come up with the concept for Brightest Kind of Darkness? The idea behind the Brightest Kind of Darkness series started off as one of those “What if” questions. I ask myself, “What if a girl dreamed her entire next day?” Then I think through all the possible scenarios: How would that impact her? Would she act upon what she saw? And if not, why? What if she didn’t have a choice? And from there…the story starts flowing. Destiny is the 3rd book in the Brightest Kind of Darkness series. Did you know how many books it would be when you first wrote Brightest Kind of Darkness? I didn’t know how many books the series would be, but I definitely knew the story was far bigger than just a couple of books. I’m what you call a hybrid-pantser writer. A pantser is someone who sits down and just writes…no planning, no plotting involved. The story just flows out. My stories are intricately weaved, so I have to do a bit of planning before I start writing. I write a very high-level outline and give myself TONS of permission to veer off course as the story unfolds while I write. But at least the outline keeps me reminded of what my goals were for the story. When you have mystery elements like I do in the BKoD series, knowing where you’re going is pretty important. 🙂 So as the stories have unfolded, they took on a life of their own. And then I’ve had to plan each book as I go and also dovetail back into the previous books I’ve written in the series. Ravens feature dominantly in the BKoD series, which is definitely different from vampires, werewolves and the like we’ve seen in a lot of popular paranormal books. What made you choose to write about ravens? I’ve always been fascinated by ravens. The lore about them is so interesting. Ravens have been on many of my previous book covers and are mentioned in passing or are part of the storyline in past books. They just weren’t the main storyline. In Brightest Kind of Darkness, ravens finally take front and center. 🙂 How many books do you plan for the Brightest Kind of Darkness series? Right now the plan is four books. Depending on how the last book unfolds, there may be a spin off. I’m leaving the possibilities open. 🙂 Any thing else you’d like to add? I just wanted to shout out a huge THANK YOU the readers and bloggers who’ve supported the Brightest Kind of Darkness series from the beginning! Like the author’s Facebook page, and this post, for a chance to win a free copy of Destiny. One winner will be notified by November 1st! Interview with Helen Keeble, author of No Angel Rafael Angelos just got handed the greatest gift any teenage boy could ever dream of. Upon arriving at his new boarding school for senior year, he discovered that he is the ONLY male student. But what should have been a godsend isn’t exactly heaven on Earth. Raffi’s about to learn that St. Mary’s is actually a hub for demons-and that he was summoned to the school by someone expecting him to save the day. Raffi knows he’s no angel-but it’s pretty hard to deny that there’s some higher plan at work when he wakes up one morning to discover a glowing circle around his head. Helen Keeble’s debut novel, Fang Girl, has been praised for its pitch-perfect teen voice, and VOYA called it “refreshing and reminiscent of Louise Rennison’s Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series.” No Angel brings you angels and demons like you’ve never seen them-complete with the wry humor of Vladimir Tod, sinfully irreverent romance, and some hilariously demonic teenage dilemmas. 1. Describe your new book No Angel in a single Tweet. Boy thinks life at an all-girls school will be heavenly, but it’s hell on earth. And he’s the angel sent to fix things. Help! 2. Do we need to have read your first novel, Fang Girl, to enjoy No Angel? Nope, they’re entirely unrelated to each other. Well, apart from containing the same brand of humor! Even though No Angel isn’t a sequel to Fang Girl, I hope that readers who enjoyed the way I affectionately mocked vampires in my first book will get the same sorts of giggles from the way my new one makes fun of the whole ‘angel boyfriend’ subgenre of paranormal romance. 3. Is No Angel a stand-alone novel or the start of a series? It’s definitely a stand-alone novel. Not to give away any spoilers, but the plot is very much wrapped up at the end of the book. 4. Why did you decide to set No Angel at a boarding school? My dad went to various VERY traditional English boys’ boarding schools from the age of seven to eighteen, and although he doesn’t talk much about it, he’s told me a few horror stories. I’m fascinated by old-fashioned boarding schools as these little self-contained worlds, with their own history and culture, completely isolated from normal life. Due to Harry Potter, I think most of us now have a pretty romantic idea of boarding schools as a magical wonderland, but they could just as easily be (and often were) utter hell-holes. Bullying is bad enough, but when you can’t even get away from your tormentors at the end of the school day…? Scary! 5. Your vampires in Fang Girl have some unusual (for the paranormal genre) traits based on traditional Eastern European folklore. Have you done anything similar with the angels and demons in No Angel? Definitely! I had a lot of fun researching angels in early Christian traditions. I took a lot of inspiration from De coelesti hierarchy, a 5th Century text on angels that is utterly cracktastic to modern eyes. Let’s put it this way: When you think “angel”, do you think: a. A noble, handsome/beautiful protector with big white wings, glowing with pure, holy goodness b. Two massive bicycle wheels jammed crossways into each other, set on fire, and COVERED IN EYES … Yeah. Let’s just say that Rafael Angelos, the hero of No Angel, is not exactly happy about his newly discovered angelic tendencies… 6. Fun fact about No Angel? I guarantee it’s the only light, fluffy YA comedy you’ll ever read that includes higher-dimensional mathematics as a pivotal plot-point. (Don’t worry, there are no equations) 7. Would you rather be an angel or a vampire? Definitely an angel! I’ve always wanted to fly. I, uh, may have spent an entire year hooked on a computer game called Aion just because it let me play a character with beautiful big wings. blush Although I have to say I would prefer to be an angel from someone else’s book, not my own. The angels in No Angel are… not exactly eye-candy. 8. What are your favorite books, shows, or movies about angels and demons? For books, Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I’m also very fond of The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan. 9. Favorite funny movie or TV show? Galaxy Quest, which is a movie about a group of actors from a second-rate, long-cancelled TV science-fiction series (which is of course in NO WAY based on a real TV show cough Star Trek cough) who get abducted by real aliens, who have based their entire culture on the show. Or, as the aliens call it, “the historical documents”, as they believe it’s all real. Hijinks ensue! If you are at all aware of science fiction fan culture, Galaxy Quest is screamingly funny. The fact that I went to Star Trek conventions as a teenager, owned a lovingly-painted collection of Enterprise models, and once won a Halloween costume competition with my home-made Spock outfit, may go some way to explaining my deep and abiding love for this movie. (no, you can’t see pictures of me in my Spock costume) Website: http://www.helenkeeble.com/ Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4835790.Helen_Keeble Twitter: https://twitter.com/HelenKeeble Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorHelenKeeble No Angel excerpt In which Rafael Angelos — high school student, would-be Casanova, and unexpected angel – attempts to get to grips with his awesome new powers So I was, for want of a better word, an angel, possibly with a holy mission to protect the world from the forces of evil. Obviously there was one thing I had to do as soon as possible. The next morning I got up at the crack of dawn, liberated a helmet from the communal bike shed, and set off to learn how to fly. A half-hour hike found me a nice wide clearing in the woods, well away from the school buildings. With a last glance around to check for onlookers, I shrugged my wings out. Early morning mist scurried along the ground as I lofted them to full vertical extension, the glowing pinions reaching for the sky like outstretched hands. I crouched, looked up, and took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said softly, and swept my wings down. It was a good thing I’d worn a helmet. “Right,” I muttered to myself, spitting out dirt. “Less sideways, more up.” After another ten minutes of running, leaping, and rather unangelic swearing, I was still resolutely earthbound. I brushed the mud off my knees, scowling. Maybe what I needed was motivation. I’d certainly had plenty last night. Unfortunately, I didn’t think Faith would appreciate her own guardian angel pushing her out a window, not even in the interests of science. And I wasn’t quite confident enough in my wings to want to throw myself out of a window, either. I crouched down in a sprinter’s stance and squeezed my eyes. Just think of all the things I’d be able to do once I mastered flight. I’d be able to confirm my suspicions about the true threat to the school. I’d be able to save Faith if she fell again. I’d be able to sneak out in the evening and find the nearest pub- “Oh my God,” said a voice behind me. I leapt into the air in alarm — literally. A short mid-teens girl in a baggy cardigan and unflattering glasses stood frozen in the bracken, staring at up me with her mouth hanging open. “You’re… you’re an angel,” she said. As I was hovering six feet above her on glowing, slowly-beating wings, this did not seem like something I could deny. The rising sun highlighted the girl’s tear-tracked face and red eyes. She took a hesitant step forward, holding up a hand to shield herself from my light. “Who are you?” she breathed. With my head backlit by my incandescent feathers, she must not have been able to make out my features. If only I could get away quickly, she need never know my identity. “Yes, I am an angel,” I said in the deepest voice I could manage, while frantically trying to work out how to go up. I wobbled dangerously in the air. “Sent from Heaven to, uh…” “Smite the wicked?” the girl suggested hopefully. She sniffed, swiping her sleeve across her nose. “Because I can totally give you a list. Starting with that bitch Joanne.” “Er, no.” What the hell did angels talk about? Half-remembered bits of the few Christmas services my dad had forced me to attend drifted up out of my memory. “I come bearing Good News! For unto you a child shall be born!” The girl stared at me. She did not look like she considered this to be Glad Tidings. Prize (open internationally): A signed copy of No Angel – a Rafflecopter giveaway – CLICK HERE TO ENTER On October 8, 2013 October 8, 2013 By donnaansariIn Uncategorized1 Comment Interview with Epidiah Ravachol On October 2, 2013 By donnaansariIn Uncategorized2 Comments A few days ago, I found a PDF e-zine in my inbox titled Worlds Without Master. It’s a mix of short fantasy stories, role-playing games, and other cool stuff. I loved the idea and the e-zine, and am so excited that the Overeditor, Epidiah Ravachol, agreed to do an interview on my blog! 1. What prompted you to put together an e-zine? Was this your first? It is my first! I’m not a stranger to independent publishing, and I’ve wanted to publish a sword and sorcery periodical for some time now; but the idea was a bit daunting. So I kept thinking of it as the project I tackle after this next one. Then I was seeking an outlet for my own fiction and getting frustrated with the number of ezines that paid you in “free electronic copies.” I could get free electronic copies by emailing the stories to myself, if I wanted to. While venting this frustration on the Internet, I joked about making my own magazine, calling it Words Without Master, as a play on the title of a sword and sorcery game I had in the works called Swords Without Master. (Later I changed the name to Worlds Without Master, but I haven’t scrubbed the web clean of the original title yet.) The joke had some heat, and I realized I might have an audience. Then I discovered Patreon, which is an interesting take on this whole crowdsourcing business. It’s a subscription model where the patrons pledge to give a certain amount of money every time you release something, up to a maximum amount per month that they set. The patrons aren’t charged until you’ve delivered your product and as the creator you can see how much money you’ll make on the product when you do release it. This is exactly the model I was looking for. I would know exactly how much money I could spend on each issue ahead of time, which helped eliminate risk. And I didn’t have all the pressure of fulfilling a product people had already paid for. There were a few other pieces to the puzzle, but once I knew about Patreon, it was pretty much a forgone conclusion. 2. Why distribute as a PDF? Printing and shipping is too unpredictable. I have friends who had really successful Kickstarter campaigns fund and then, before they could ship their product out, the US Postal Service jacked up their prices. It was not a pleasant sight. So, in the interested of making this venture as risk-free as possible, I’m going to stick to electronic distribution. Right now, that means PDFs, because I’m most familiar with that format. In the future I hope to branch out into other formats, as long as they let me comfortably include the illustrations, comics and all the strange formatting that comes with role-playing games. 3. Your e-zine contains both fantasy stories, comics, role playing games. How do these things go together? The sword and sorcery branch of fantasy and comics have a storied history. They both were raised in the pulps, and before the eventual rise of the superhero, pulp genres like Westerns, detective stories, and sword and sorcery figured very prominently in the comic industry. I really wanted a comic strip for Worlds Without Master, but I thought that was something that could only happen in the far flung future. Something I would shoot for if the Patreon budget got really big. But then Bryant Paul Johnson, a gaming buddy and an accomplished artist, drew a frame of his comic and posted it online where he knew I’d see it. I seized the bait and I’m so happy with the results. Sword and sorcery and role-playing games kind of go hand-in-hand, and that might be a bit of a problem for me. In the back of the original AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, Gary Gygax published a now somewhat famous list of influential fiction known as Appendix N. Not all, but perhaps the majority of the titles listed in this appendix fall within the genre of sword and sorcery. And when gamer goes back and reads these titles, they find origins of so many of monsters, sorceries and concepts found in the game. The birth of D&D is the birth of the role-playing hobby, but it’s also the birth of a new genre of fantasy. One that is heavily influenced by D&D, as well as the fantasy role-playing and video games that have followed it. This genre is kissing cousins to sword and sorcery, but it’s not exactly sword and sorcery. And while I enjoy both genres, the D&D genre already has plenty of outlets. Sword and sorcery, in my opinion, could use another venue. I want Worlds Without Master to be that venue. So I’m drawing a hard line there, especially when it comes to the role-playing games I’m accepting. They’re under a little more scrutiny. Enter the Avenger, the role-playing game in the first issue, is a great example of a solidly sword and sorcery game. The list of places to visit in that game . . . I just want to grab my sword and leap into that world. 4. Artwork features prominently in your e-zine. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Last summer I had the opportunity to see an art exhibit on imaginative realism, which is a style of art that takes fantastic subjects and portrays them as real objects. Or just a fancy name fantasy illustrations. One of the things that impressed me about the exhibit was the power of a single image to light a fuse that would eventually make my head explode in implied narrative. This quality was always vital to my experience of the fantasy art. When I’m sifting through the used book stores looking for lost classics, I’m judging a lot of these books by their covers. And there are so many role-playing games I’ve played based on the strength of their illustrations alone. And don’t get me started on Iron Maiden album covers. So narrative is an important part of my art direction. I want the illustrations to present the viewers with a world they can’t help but step into and adventure in. I’m not as interested in seeing the characters in action as I am in implying the story around that action. And it helps me make the e-zine something that teenage Eppy would buy. That’s a dude who could be swayed by some fancy drawings. 5. As an editor, what do you look for when reading submissions? Can you share any tips for writers? I crave wonder in my stories. But this would be ridiculously useless advice if just said something vague like, “Make sure you deliver the wonder.” So let me instead point you to the more practical advice of a more experienced writer on the subject. Michael Moorcock said, as part of his instructions on how to write a novel in three to ten days, “You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you’ve got them there when you need them. . . [T]hey have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other.” My submission requirements ask for something a wee bit smaller than a novel, but this is grand practical advice for plugging wonder into your stories. I mean, when you read “City of Screaming Statues,” you were already picturing, and hearing, it in your head, weren’t you? What are these statues? How is that they scream? And why? As a reader I cannot pass over a detail like that not literally wonder about it. If a submission does that to me then I have to pause and take it seriously. Even if it doesn’t exactly meet my other submission requirements or if it’ll take a lot of editorial massaging, if it pulls me in like that, I have to consider publishing it. 6. As a writer, what authors have inspired you? Whoa boy. I’ll try my best to keep this list short by just naming the ones I can off the top of my head in no particular order: Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Robert Luis Stevenson, Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, Jack Vance, Charles R. Saunders, Harold Lamb, C.J. Cherryh, Leigh Brackett, Andrew Howard Jones, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Clark Ashton Smith. And, of course, the lyrical genius of the late Ronnie James Dio. 7. What else have you written? Most of my other work is in my role-playing games: Dread, Time & Temp, Vast & Starlit, and my proudest accomplishment, What Is a Roleplaying Game? which is a 463-word long role-playing game my mom used to teach my aunt about the hobby. But I do have a very short fable in The Lion and the Aardvark published by Stone Skin Press. 8. Do you ever edit your own work? I have editors and proofreaders for most of my stuff. Though I am embarrassed to say that, due to deadline constraints, a few of the peripheral parts of the first issue were not seen by anyone else before it was published, and there are a couple typos to be found. But most of them have been hunted down and eliminated. I really like the people I’ve worked with so far. I need their eyeballs, expertise, and opinions. Since I’ve got the final editorial say, it ends up being something of a dialog between our tastes and voices. And the end product seems better for it. 9. Where can we get a copy of your e-zine? You can buy the first issue for $3.99 using this PayPal link: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=3VUDUTN3VLXMW But more importantly, if you want to make sure you get future issues for only $2.99 each, you should join the Patron Horde: www.Patreon.com/Epidiah I say more importantly because, as I mentioned in my answer to the first question, Patreon lets me know how much money I have to work with for each issue. As this amount grows, so does the size and content of each issue. More sword and sorcery bang for your electronic buck, and all that. 10. Anything else you would like to add? If you dig sword and sorcery and you’re interested in submitting, here are my guidelines: www.dig1000holes.com/words/submissions/	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1773
__label__wiki	0.605204	0.605204	Douglas Ernst Blog Bare-knuckle commentary mixed with pop culture. About Douglas Ernst Invincible Iron Man #4: Mary Jane fans should pass Written by Douglas ErnstPosted on December 2, 2015 December 2, 2015 14 Comments Customers do not like it when businesses pull a bait-and-switch, which is why Marvel fans should be wary of purchasing Invincible Iron Man #4. The cover features Mary Jane posing with an Iron Man faceplate and a “Stark” employee ID badge. Sounds interesting, right? Wrong. Bendis’ fourth issue of IIM continues Stark’s hunt for Madam Masque and his investigation into why she is collecting mystical artifacts. Mary Jane does make an appearance in the book — she’s opening a new night club in Chicago — but anyone hoping for banter between she and Stark will be sorely disappointed. IIM #4 moves the story’s progression forward at a snail’s pace, although it does introduce “biotech ninjas” working for a new terrorist organization. Bendis’ incorporation of bio-hacking and trans-humanism into the book is a welcome surprise, and another example why his tales are a cut above other titles. As was mentioned in my review of The Amazing Spider-Man #3, Dan Slott’s schizophrenic handling of The Zodiac (Are readers supposed to take this threat seriously, or are these guys a big joke?), blunts readers’ excitement in terms of wanting to unravel the mystery. Bendis treats his terror network seriously — ipso facto, so does the reader. In short, if you’ve been reading Invincible Iron Man since the beginning, then the fourth installment is worth your time. If you are a Mary Jane fan who thought she would be featured prominently this month, then you should save yourself $4.00. Mary Jane may have a substantive role to play in Tony’s life going forward, but at this time Bendis is simply laying the creative groundwork for that to happen. Posted in The Kitchen Sink About the AuthorDouglas Ernst I'm a former Army guy who believes success comes through hard work, honesty, optimism, and perseverance. I believe seeing yourself as a victim creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believe in God. I'm a USC Trojan with an MA in Political Science from American University. Previous Entry Zack Snyder’s ‘nightmare’ sneak: Scowling Superman terrifies Next Entry Dan Slott uses terror attack to mock Christians, play partisan politics zariusii says: I expressed some concerns for MJ’s portrayal in this issue on comicvine and found many who usually agree with me on issues concerning the character disagreeing with me and finding it surprising I was worried…which, on reflection, I guess I was a bit too quick to judge. I must have been truly spoiled lately by not just MJ’s very tight and strong portrayals in RYV and the recent daily strip storylines, as well as the swift and immediate changes to characterizations in other All-New Marvel titles…I was a bit flummoxed to find MJ maintaining the same irritable traits she had been displaying since she was written out in 2014, and, worse, seems to have went back on her vow to stay put in her home city as per the end of Superior..but from the way the story is unfolding in those few pages she does appear, it does seem like a very good transition from one existing status quoe to another. MJ will be a part of Tony’s company because her nightclub will be destroyed and Tony will offer her a job out of guilt. I applaud my friends for maintaining a healthy “wait and see” approach. I can only advise other readers falling for the bait-and-switch the same. That aside, it was another very good issue. Douglas Ernst says: MJ will be a part of Tony’s company because her nightclub will be destroyed and Tony will offer her a job out of guilt. This makes no sense to me, even though you’re probably right. As a nightclub owner in the Marvel Universe — one who already had a club destroyed by super villains — my guess is that her new building would be insured for such a disaster. On top of that, if her passion is to be a club owner, then why would she take a job with Stark? Why wouldn’t Stark just cut her a check to rebuild if he felt guilty over the damage? I guess we’ll find out, but Bendis needs to be pretty darn creative to make this all work out. It’s possible MJ took a bit of a “Wrestlemania I gambit” on this first night for the club, putting every penny into the launch night to attract a large sum of people…including anything that insured her building. That would be pretty stupid, but, alas, it wouldn’t be the first time MJ has been dumbed down for the sake of the plot. That’s another thing that bugs me, MJ claims nightclub ownership was a “lifelong dream”, but we know her aspirations were always to be an actress be it in the movies or the stage. Since the Mephistoverse’s creation, she’s moved far away from her traditional roles just as Peter has moved away from his and neither ring true of either character. “It’s possible MJ took a bit of a “Wrestlemania I gambit” on this first night for the club, putting every penny into the launch night to attract a large sum of people…including anything that insured her building.” If you’re right (and you may very well be), then it will be disappointing for Marvel to bring Tony and MJ into each other’s orbit by robbing her of intelligence. I passed our conversation over to a guy on Comicvine called Animehunter and he had some other ideas about how to fit this all in. Here they are “Her clubs gets destroyed and although she would have insurance, it’s not not enough to rebuild plus her insurance premiums would increase, thereby making the business too expensive to run thereby making it no longer viable. The reputation of the club gets severely damaged to such an extent that it will no longer make a profit. so if you add those 2 plus, she has likely taken out a loan to start the club, if that is the case, then the bank might come along and as for their money back, which would me that all the insurance money would go to pay off the bank loan. She more than likely has insurance to cover damages, but the success any new night club is dependent on its opening night, what happened would constitute a failure of said opening night and I wouldn’t be surprised if she took out a loan to fund the opening of the club, in which case, the bank will more than likely ask for its money back, since they would have lost faith in the business, due to the reputation it would have gotten because of the incident, leaving her with nothing to fix the damage caused and even if she was able to, nobody would come to her club, fearing a repeat of something similar happening.” I’m sorry buddy, but all of this strains credulity and once more hinges on the idea that MJ would essentially jump into club ownership without the finances she needs to weather Marvel-type storms. Animehunter’s idea seems like a valiant attempt to defend an editorial decision by Bendis that has a high risk of being a bit cheesy. “The success any new night club is dependent on its opening night.” I’ve seen this said on television shows and, while it my sound like a good line, I think it’s in many ways a gross exaggeration. Is opening night important? Of course. Will it make a break a club? Probably not. There are so many factors affecting what makes a club a “good” club that saying opening night is the end-all-be-all seems absurd. What is the atmosphere like? Who was the opening night DJ? What are the bartenders like? Where is the club located? Who is on the VIP list? Are you telling me if MJ had a slew of Hollywood stars who regularly started showing up on the second night after a bad first night that the club would tank? I don’t think so. Thanks again for your counter-points Doug, it’s nice to get a very clear and consequentially-minded thought process to all of this…thinking in a character’s shoes about what precautions to take and what the expectations of a booming buisness are, and that a big gamble doesn’t necessarily mean instant failure…and how these things aren’t quite acknowledged because the plot demands we get from here to there is an irritable trait in concurrent comics. I now hope Bendis puts things together cohesively in a way that makes sense…it does seem cheesy and a little too basic, but then I think too simplisticly about the landscape these days and I’m not as worldly…I think that’s the problem with a lot of writers now…they don’t feel like they’re in the world long enough outside of summits and meetings and play about at their laptops googling the world. WebLurker says: “Since the Mephistoverse’s creation, she’s moved far away from her traditional roles just as Peter has moved away from his and neither ring true of either character.” Yeah, if Marvel wanted to make any major changes to the franchise’s status quo and characters, they missed the boat a good fifty years ago for most stuff, and brought in “One More Day” about twenty years too late. I’m no expert, but it seems like adding Venom was the last major change/addition to the franchise that has actually stuck and became a part of the overall mythology. I mean, if you look at the franchise as a whole, the mainstream “Spider-Man” comics — ostensibly the source material — have very little to do with what most people think of when they think of Spider-Man. I find it really interesting that the “Renew Your Vows” series, which was pretty much a continuation of the pre-“One More Day” iteration of the brand was not only practically universally well-received by the “Spider-Man fanbase (regardless of stance on “One More Day”), but it was also one of the top selling series in the “Secret Wars” line and regarded as one of the best parts of the whole enchilada. I’ve gathered that “Secret Wars” as a whole, is considered to be not bad, but nowhere near as great or important as Marvel hyped it up to be. On the other hand, RYV pretty consistently described along the lines of: “This is the best “Spider-Man” series in the lineup, and one of the best “Spider-Man” stories in recent times. Even if you’re not interested in “Secret Wars” itself, RYV is well-worth your time.” This would really suggest that the more traditional “Spider-Man” still has some juice left in the tank and was not only canceled prematurely, but really needs a revival soon. Regardless how the comics turn out, the cover is a nice portrait of MJ, even if it’s on the wrong book. i concur. RYV got high praise even from people not too satisfied with Slott’s work currently. Both Slott and Roger Stern actually hate the marriage and how MJ evolved over the years, yet both can write her and her relationship with Peter very well when prompted. RYV is not without it’s critics, and the ending is a bit weird and lazily put together (ending a life-and-death struggle by making the Regent laugh), but for five issues it reminds you of an easier time, and I sincerly hope that, outside of the mobile Unlimited game where you can play as Annie, it is not the end of that version of the Parkers. It should be noted that DC have recently launched a “Lois and Clark” title featuring the pre-Flashpoint versions of Superman and Lois raising their kids while inhabiting the New 52 universe, and it’s been confirmed the villain of RYV exists in the current Marvel universe post-secret wars, so maybe they have plans to revisit the RYV Parker family sometime next year, or, better still, in 2017, which will mark 30 years of Peter and MJ’s marriage. “RYV is not without it’s critics, and the ending is a bit weird and lazily put together (ending a life-and-death struggle by making the Regent laugh)…” I did think that the biggest weakness of the series was that the plot didn’t have much room to breathe, but, since the only comic book series I collect uses decompression, I wasn’t sure if I had a skewered perspective on what “normal” comic book pacing is. I actually didn’t think the ending was that bad. I’ll concede that having the big bad wipe out the most powerful superheroes and become king, only to be taken down by a family of three was not the best way to end the comic, but since Regent was powered down at the moment of his demise (most of the tanks he was using to siphon off the superpowers and the armor he needed to use them were destroyed), he wasn’t fighting at full force the way he was at the beginning when he took out the X-Men and the Avengers. Having him loose by laughing was not very well thought out, although I could buy that he thought he had the upper hand and got overconfident. Actually, my biggest complaint was that the story just seems to end abruptly. On the other hand, the visual bookending to the first issue, the clues planted for the Parkers’ future outside the scope of the story, and the fact that the story whole theme (can Peter balance his responsibilities to his family and his calling or are they mutually exclusive) was answered do make this somewhat forgivable . I’d be a little surprised if RYV came back, despite going on record that it’s sorely needed. Marvel could hop on the DC bandwagon and do a “Spider-Man” version of “Lois and Clark” (given that “Secret Wars 2015” was basically Marvel ripping off DC’s bad habit of rebooting their comics multiverse through an “in-universe” story that causes all of reality to be altered). However, they were advertising this as the “last Spider-Man story,” which leaves me wondering if the their intent was to tell us: “Hey, look, you want a married Spider-Man story? Sure, here. You have a world were Peter and MJ Parker have a happy ending. Now, could you please stop bugging us to bring back the 616 married Spider-Man, which was a mistake that broke the character in the first place?” The fact that the only real carryover so far is the Regent character (who was generally considered to be the weak link in the series, and doesn’t even work outside of the “Secret Wars”/RYV setting) doesn’t instill me with confidence that Marvel understands why RYV sold so well, much less how to properly use it going forward. The fact that RYV gleefully points out there’s a to be continued is the only real evidence that I can see for a possible continuation. While it did sell well and was well received (and Marvel has commissioned series, like “Silk” and “Spider-Gwen,” on far worse odds of success), I kind of get the impression that Marvel wants to completely reinvent themselves and seem to be working hard to eliminate anything that’s a throwback to the traditional versions of their properties. (As a side-effect, that means that the comics are going to be nothing like the movies, which are going to be the most likely place that new comic readers will be cultivated. I know that was my case. The reason I got into “Ultimate Spider-Man” was because it was just like the movies I’d seen. I also know I won’t read a modern “Spider-Man,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” or “Thor” comic despite liking those movies specifically because the comics are so vastly different. The reason I would read a superhero comic in the first place was to get more stories like there were on the big screen, not read stuff that was completely different.) However, I suppose at the end of the day, we should be grateful that RYV turned out to be a good graphic novel in and of itself, no matter what does or does not come after it. Even if Marvel doesn’t remember, we will, and that’s the important thing. Good points. The marriage remains active in the daily strips also…although that in itself is far from the ideal Spider-Man comic, given it’s wacky plots, but it’s still loads of fun. Yeah, the newspaper comics are hard to take seriously sometimes, but they do at least seem to be written by someone who has affection for that version of the characters. I think the strips are kind of underrated…the plots and occasional moments are silly, but the way the stories shift and swerve sometimes makes it fun to follow and it is no way boring or predictable like most mainstream comics because they’re a bit wacky. I’ve had loads more fun with it than the regular market these last few years. 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__label__wiki	0.699672	0.699672	Top 50 Animals with Long Noses Cool Rare Animals In my childhood, I adopted a puppy that changed my life and attitude towards animals—I have since become a lifelong animal lover. Star-Nosed Mole (Scientific Name: Condylura Cristata) Nosy Monkey or Proboscis Monkey (Scientific Name: Nasalis larvatus) The Nosey Pinocchio Tree Frog nationalgeographic Aardvark (Scientific Name: Orycteropus afer) Borzoi (Scientific Name: Canis Lupus Familiaris) Pachydermata Mother Nature has created beautiful animals on earth each with unique features to be used as defense organs based on their environments. Normally we believe that nose is used only for breathing and smelling but in the animal world, they are applied for much more. From feeler projections that locate food, devices for drinking and eating, grabbers, in addition to mating signs, the nose is a chief part of endurance for these 50 interesting but very weird creatures. Lets us now discuss the top 50 animals that are known for their long noses. 1. Star-Nosed Mole (Scientific Name: Condylura Cristata) Star nose mool common in eastern Canada as well as north-eastern United States spend most of their time digging tunnels underground. They utilize their long nose to seek worms as well as insects when it becomes dark. The look like a hybrid between a rat and an octopus, the star-nosed mole is an excellent contender for the designation of world's uncanniest -looking creature. It is also a deadly hunter due to its super-senses. 2. Nosy Monkey or Proboscis Monkey (Scientific Name: Nasalis larvatus) The Nosy monkey as its name suggests has an expressive nose, which can grow as long as 17 cm, especially in the males. A proboscis monkey requires his big snout to attract the female. It as well inflates his caution call when he recognizes a croc attempting to creep up on a walking female. 3. The Nosey Pinocchio Tree Frog So what is peculiar with the Pinocchio Tree Frog nose? Well as this spotted frog variety was merely exposed in 2008, you will is not quite a lot of info with regard to their structure or conduct. But their long and odd looking nose is flexible and most possibly enacts a massive part during the mating period. This minute frog will point their “Gonzo-like” snout up in the air to grab the attention of their ladies for matting and just as effortlessly this nose shrinks into the descending position when they are immobile. The noise functions as an intensification chamber that lets them make a louder call so as to be heard a long distance away for a small tree frog. These unique creatures are discovered in the Foja Mountains of Indonesia, which is basically an untouched land. 4. Aardvark (Scientific Name: Orycteropus afer) Aardvarks can be found all through Africa and towards the south of Sahara. They mean ‘earth pig’ in South Africa's Afrikaans language. A glance at the aardvark's body as well as its lengthy snout will remind you of the pig. On the nearer check, the aardvark looks like as if it has included the features of other animals too. It has ears like the rabbit and tail like that of a kangaroo-yet the aardvark is associated with no one of these animals. Aardvarks are also nocturnal in nature. They squander the hot African noon hibernated in cool below ground tunnels which they dig with their authoritative feet as well as claws that look like small spades. 5. Borzoi (Scientific Name: Canis Lupus Familiaris) The rich Borzoi depends on sight instead of scent when it is hunting, in spite of its lengthier muzzle. Borzoi pooch breed is used in Russia as coursing and chasing mutts. These dogs were chased in groups of three to follow rabbit, fox, and wolves. With his tall, lean body, long, contract head, and sleek coat, the Borzoi is the image of refinement and style. They later got to be well known as a buddy for royalty crosswise over mainland Europe. 6. Pachydermata It is really a wonder about the strange nose of pachyderms. This variety elephant’s trunk is as well the nose plus lip and supplementary hand. Gigantic Asian, as well as African elephants, utilize their trunks to control tiny objects, scratching their back, wipe their eyes, and chop down trees as well as drink. Pachydermata is an extinct order of mammals. Environment loss, deprivation, disintegration, unlawful killing, poaching, unlawful global trade in live wild-trapped animals, sightseer trade, human-animal disagreement etc are the reasons for these endangered species. Elephant Seals (Scientific Name: Mirounga) Black Rhinoceros (Scientific Name: Rhinocerotidae) Elephant Shrew, or Hopping Shrew (Scientific Name: Macroscelididae) Tapirs (Scientific Name: Tapirus) Long-Nosed Bandicoot (Scientific Name: Perameles) Elephant Nose Fish (Scientific Name: Gnathonemus petersii) 7. Elephant Seals (Scientific Name: Mirounga) Elephant seals are named as grown-up males have lengthy noses that look like an elephant's trunk. Males start building up this augmented nose, or proboscis, at sexual development (around three to five years), and it is completely developed by seven to nine years. Grown-up males may grow to more than 13 feet (4 m) long and weigh up to 4,500 pounds (2,000 kg). The females are much smaller at 10 feet (3 m) long and 1,500 pounds (600 kg). Just grown-up males have this swollen nose that permits them to create deafening shouts. These noses likewise help them to store water, avoid loss of body liquids amid the mating season when males, as a rule, leave the shoreline to discover sustenance and water. 8. Black Rhinoceros (Scientific Name: Rhinocerotidae) A grown-up black rhinoceros is 1.50-1.75 m (59-69 in) high at the shoulder and is 3.5-3.9 m (11-13 ft) long. A grown-up weighs from 850 to 1,600 kg (1,870 to 3,530 lb), outstandingly to 1,800 kg (4,000 lb), with the females being smaller than the males. An amazing nose rhino shaped from keratin, which includes offshoots horny epidermis - structures, for example, hair and nails. These fierce sorts of creatures live in Africa and Asia. In China, individuals chase rhinos for their horns, which are utilized as a part of conventional Chinese medicines. These animals are masters of scent with their long noses. 9. Elephant Shrew, or Hopping Shrew (Scientific Name: Macroscelididae) Elephant shrews, or hopping shrews, are little insectivorous well-evolved creatures local to Africa, having a place with the family Macroscelididae, in the order of Macroscelidea, whose conventional normal English name originates from a fancied likeness between their long noses and the trunk of an elephant, and an expected association with the shrews (family Soricidae) in the order Insectivora. In any case, elephant shrews are not characterized with the externally comparable genuine shrews, but rather are incidentally more firmly identified with elephants and their family inside the newly recognized Afrotheria. They should rather be called sengis (one sengi) a term that has been taken from the Bantu language of Africa. With their long noses, they search for their supper on the ground - insects and arachnids. 10. Tapirs (Scientific Name: Tapirus) Tapirs are observers, living in the backwoods of South Africa, Central and South-eastern America. They can twist their delicate adaptable noses in every direction looking for fruit as well as leaves. An exceptional attribute that tapir have is its plump prehensile nose that it employs to clutch leaves as well as use as a snorkel breather while swimming. Their hides are rough extreme however rationalized for simple moving in the backwoods. Tapirs are ‘seed dispersers.’ They eat seeds that are then scattered in their droppings which regenerate in the forests. 11. Long-Nosed Bandicoot (Scientific Name: Perameles) The Long-nosed Bandicoot is spread along the east shoreline of Australia. They were once extensive and common in Sydney; however, their range has been incredibly decreased and now is locally wiped out in numerous parts of its previous range. The Long-nosed Bandicoot is a nocturnal medium sized marsupial. This species is 31-43 cm long and weighs somewhere around 600 and 1100 grams. They have a short, thin tail as well as grey-brown fur. 12. Elephant Nose Fish (Scientific Name: Gnathonemus petersii) This elephant nose fish, which can grow almost to a length of 9 inches, is frequently found in the sloppy waters of Africa - where its long nose truly proves to be useful. Another bizarre certainty: the nose is really a chin, and it accompanies instruments that permit the fish to discover its way even when in the dark. Domestic Pig - Scientific Name: Sus scrofa domesticus 13. Domestic Pig (Scientific Name: Sus scrofa domesticus) Swine, hog and boar are other nicknames for the domestic pig (Sus domesticus). Also known simply as pig, this farm animal is well-loved for its meat and for being sociable. A common misconception is that it is among the dirtiest mammals because it loves playing and covering itself with mud. In reality, it is one of the cleanest. One of the most prominent features of the domestic pig is its snout, which is sometimes referred to as nose.The average size of this animal’s snout tends to differ from one breed to another. Nevertheless, the snouts of most domestic pigs share the same shape: a heart turned upside down. Aside from smelling, the pig uses its nose to get food, move items and dig the earth. Pigs in the ancient times were valued for their amazing ability to sense tubers and roots underneath the soil. As they dug the land though, they were treated more like a pest because of their tendency to damage the food they were supposed to find. Nowadays, they are raised either as a source of food or as a pet. You can also find them in most countries around the world. Bushpig - Scientific name: Potamochoerus larvatus 14. Bushpig (Scientific Name: Potamochoerus larvatus) The bushpig, or Potamochoerus larvatus, is a relative of the domestic pig that thrives in the wild. Just like its kin, the wild pig has an extensive snout that further looks longer because of its slender body. Its snout is also used for smelling, moving, lifting, digging and getting food.Unlike the domestic pig though, thebushpig’s snout tends to be darker and more muscular. Apart from its snout, a bushpig is easy to identify for its longer and coarser mane compared to that of a domestic pig.The former’s hair is also light-colored in contrast to its body color that ranges from reddish brown to dark brown.Additionally, it has sharp tusks that are relatively short. The savannas and forests in the eastern and southern African regions serve as the home to the majority of bushpigs today.Some of them are also present in Madagascar, presumably introduced in the said island country. Although they have leaner meat compared to that of domestic pigs, bushpigs are deemed as pests in some African countries because they tend to damage farming areas. Long-nosed Armadillo: Dasypus 15. Armadillo The Dasypus genus includes eight long-nosed and naked-tailed species of the armadillo family. Seven of the eight species are still existing up to this day while the other one-the beautiful armadillo-is already extinct. These long-nosed mammals are native to South American countries such asBrazil, Argentina, Peru, Paraguay and Venezuela. Many of them are also found in North and Central American states. Like the rest of the armadillo family, every species under the Dasypus genus has a greyish or brownish hard shell (carapace)on its back.On the other hand, small hairs cover the long-nosed armadillo's underside, neck and face. Dasypus species are good at swimming, jumping, climbing and digging. They make use of their sharp claws to get food and to dig burrows that serve as their homes. They are insectivorous, relying mostly on ants and termites fornutrients. When these bugs are not readily available, long-nosed armadillos consume small amphibians and reptiles. These mammals may not have good eyesightbut they have an excellent sense of smell that helps them in hunting food and detecting their enemies. South American Coati - Scientific Name: Nasua nasua 16. South American Coati (Scientific Name: Nasua nasua) The Nasua nasua species is a type of coati native to South American countries, earning it the nickname South American coati. It also belongs to the Procyonidae family,along with raccoons and kinkajous. In general, coatis are seen as smaller relatives of bears and this is evident in their German and Dutch names which are nasenbar and neusbeer, respectively. Both names literally mean nose-bear. Of all coatis, however, the South American native has the most extensive snout and a tail that is as long as its body. Such tail features multiple rings as well, prompting some to call it the ring-tailed coati. Fruits, bird eggs and small animals comprise the usual diet of a South American coati. Its claws and snout are useful in its search for food in trees and in crevices on the ground. Aside from being a source of food, trees also serve as this animal's home, playground and safe haven. It tends to climb as a way to escape from its predators consisting of jaguars, foxes, pet dogs and humans. On average, this coati species can live for 7 years in the wild. Long-beaked Echidna - Scientific Name: Zaglossus 17. Long-beaked Echidna (Scientific Name: Zaglossus) The Zaglossus bruijnii is a species of echidna that is more commonlycalledthe long-beaked echidna, long-nosed echidna and long-nosed spiny anteater.Although it looks like an anteater, this echidna species is not a true anteater. Ants are not even its main food. But that doesn't make the long-beaked echidna less special. In contrast to most mammals, the long-beaked echidna lays eggs. Its body is covered with spines and fur. One of the strangest things about this species is that it has spikes in its tongue to compensate for its lack of teeth. Its spiky tongue, along with its extensive and firm beak, is able to hook its favorite food which is the earthworm. While many refer to the echidna's snout as beak, some consider it a nose because of its ability to sense earthworms underneath the soil. The IUCN now considers the long-beaked echidna as critically endangered species due to a notable decrease in the species' population in the last 50 years. Hunting and habitat loss are the two major reasons for such decrease. Its ancestorsonce roamed and thrived in Western Australia but they became extinct therein. Most-if not all-of the existing long-beakedechidnas todayare living in Indonesia. 18. Luzon Forest Mouse (Scientific Name: Apomys Sacobianus) The Apomys sacobianus, also known as the long-nosed Luzon forest mouse, is a type of rodent that can only be found in the Philippines. Mt. Pinatubo, an active volcano located in Luzon, Philippines, serves as the home to a lot of the said rodent. However, it is presumed to be more widespread in the lower areas surrounding the volcano. Surprisingly, this rodent survived the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 as well as the quakes that happened before and after that. With the declaration of the said volcano as a protected area, habitat loss is not likely to threaten the existence of the long-nosed Luzon forest mouse. It remains under the least concern list of IUCN up to this day; it is not likely to go near the threatened list because researchers have yet to discover a major threat to its existence. Tropical dry forests are the natural habitat of the long-nosed Luzon forest mouse. Although it is not a good climber, it can live well in places with sparse vegetation owing to its adaptability and omnivorous nature. Long-Nosed Potoroo - Scientific Name: Potorous Tridactylus 19. Potoroo (Scientific Name: Potorous Tridactylus) Due to its grey-brown fur and long nose, the long-nosed potoroo is often mistaken as the long-nosed bandicoot. However, once it moves, it resembles a kangaroo with its two fore limbs placed near its chest and it tends to hop. After all, the long-nosed potoroo (Potorous tridactylus) is also a marsupial.Other notable features about this animal are its semi-prehensile tail, long claws and small body. Its average size only ranges from 13 to 15 inches. Like the kangaroos, koalas and other marsupials, the long-nosed potoroo is native to Australia. This species can survive in different environments such as open forests, rainforests, and coastal regions. Even though its home may overlap with other potoroos, it prefers a solitary life in general. It only meets other potoroos when it needs to mate. A long-nosed potoroo is not deemed as a pest, unlike its doppelgangers in the rat family. It mainly feeds on fungi, roots and insects. Owing to its fungus-rich diet, fungal spores are abundant in its droppings. These spores will soon spread and thrive in the roots of plants, helping the plants absorb more nutrients. Short-tailed Opossum (Scientific name: Monodelphis) 20. Short-tailed Opossum (Scientific name: Monodelphis) Monodelphis is a genus of opossums that mainlylive in South American countries like Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina. These are known to have long snouts. As noted by the famed explorer John Smith, an opossum has a head similar to a pig’s, tail like that of a rat, and size like that of acat. Compared to its fellow species under the Didelphidae family, a Monodelphis has a notably shorter tail, earning it the name short-tailed opossum. Due to its size though, it seems like a rodent at first glance instead of a typical opossum. A short-tailed opossum has a couple of wombs which is a common characteristic of marsupials. Although short, its tail is prehensile,which means it can use this organ to grasp or move things. Aside from its tail, its extensive snout is also noteworthy. There are over 20 known species of short-tailed opossum right now. The speciation is largely based on fur coloration. Of the 20+ species, the Monodelphis scalops species has one of the longest snouts. Greater Long-nosed Bat (Leptonycteris Nivalis) 21. Greater Long-nosed Bat (Scientific name: Leptonycteris Nivalis) The greater long-nosed bat is an endangered species of bat native to Mexico and the US.Also called the Mexican long-nosed bat, it is a part of the Phyllostomidae family, more commonly known as leaf-nosed bats.Open woodlands and desert scrub are the natural habitats of the said bat species. However, the long-nosed bat may also reside in sewers, abandoned buildings, hollow trees and mines. One commoncharacteristic of many leaf-nosed bat species is their tendency to rely mainly on nectar for food. Nectar from agave plants is the favorite meal of the greater long-nosed bat. When agaves are quite insufficient, it usually goes for cacti as an alternative. This nectarivorous bat has reduced teeth but has along tongue tipped with hair-like papillae. Due to the reduced teeth, it rarely eats fruits, insects and other food that require biting and chewing. Aside from its extraordinary shape, the long and leaf-shaped nose of theLeptonycteris nivalis is also deemed important in itsecholocation ability. This bat species tends to echolocate nasally which means that its nose’s structure can help modify and direct its calls. Mandrill (Mandrillus Sphinx) 22. Mandrill (Mandrillus Sphinx) Mandrill (Scientific name: Mandrillus sphinx) is currently the largest and most colorful monkey in the world. Its belly features white hairwhile its body is mostly covered in olive green to dark gray fur with black and yellow bands. Its anus and genital area are a mixture of red, blue, purple, pink and scarlet. However, the most noticeable part of the mandrill is its hairless face that looks like it underwent some makeup session. Its long nose is made more prominent with its red color extending from the area between its eyes down to its nostrils. The red nose is in between blue ridges as well. Additionally, it has yellow beard and red lips. In the wild, mandrills dwell in various forested areas such as tropical rainforests, rocky forests, gallery forests, flooded forests, and riparian forests. These monkeys are not picky when it comes to their food. As omnivores, their diet is made up of fruits, leaves, stems, mushrooms, snails, rats, birds, and frogs. In the Republic of Congo, the mandrill is now considered as a threatened species. Hunting for game meat and habitat loss due to deforestation are the two main threats against the species’ survival. Saiga Antelope (Saiga Tatarica) 23. Saiga Antelope (Scientific name: Saiga Tatarica) Saiga antelope, or simply saiga, is the common name of the critically endangered Saiga tatarica species. This species is native to Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Russia. Saigas were once abundant in China. However, the excessive hunt for their horns wiped out the entire population of the species therein. Since the ancient times, the saiga's horn has been sought as an ingredient to numerous traditional Oriental medicines. The saiga's horns are among their noteworthy features. Only the males develop them. These horns appear translucent, have a length ranging from 8 to 15 inches, and possess around 12 to 20 rings. However, the therapeutic properties of their horns are yet to be proven by scientific studies. While males are hunted down mainly for their horns, females are also sought for their meat and skin. A saiga's skin may be processed into suede and other products. The extensive and seemingly bloated nose of a saiga is another notable part of the said mammal. In addition to sniffing, its nose warms the cool air it inhales during the cold months. During the dry months, the nose has the ability to filter dust. Gharial - Gavialis gangeticus 24. Gharial (Scientific Name: Gavialis gangeticus) The Gavialis gangeticus, better known as the gharial, is one of the three species of crocodile native to the Indian subcontinent. Other names include gavial, fish-eating crocodile and long-nosed crocodile. From a population of 5,000 to 10,000 in the 1940s, the current population of this crocodile is less than 300, causing the IUCN to place the species under the critically endangered list. The remaining gharials in the wild are present in some river systems in India and Nepal. The gharial is not likely to feast on humans. Unlike its cousins, it has a long, narrow snout instead of the wide one. Such narrow snout is filled with a hundred pointed teeth that seem like needles. Its teeth are only utilized for catching fish. The crocodiledoesn't chew; it simply swallows its prey. This crocodile got its name from a pot made in India known as ghara. When a male gharial matures, it starts to develop a knob-like or pot-like nasal boss near the end of its narrow snout. The said nasal boss is deemed to be valuable in the male's attempt to woo a female. Long-nosed Snake - Rhinocheilus lecontei 25. Long-nosed Snake (Scientific Name: Rhinocheilus lecontei) The long-nosed snake or Rhinocheilus lecontei is a non-venomous species of snake that thrives in the grasslands ofArizona, Texas, New Mexico, Idaho, and California. The Rhinocheilus lecontei is further classified into four subspecies namely: Texas, Western, Mexican, and Isla Cerralvo long-nosed snakes. The length of an adult long-nosed snake depends on the subspecies but it usually ranges from 30 to 60 inches. Its body is covered in shiny, tricolor scales. This snake utilizes its lengthy snout to burrow. It stays underground most of the time and only goes out at night. It also builds an underground nest for its eggs. A female long-nosed snake can lay around 4 to 9 eggs at once. The eggs are bound to hatch around late summer to early autumn. Many exotic pet collectors are not too keen on getting a long-nosed snake even if this species is harmless. Unlike other pet snakes, the long-nosed one often rejects a diet rich in rodents. In the wild, it mostly consumes lizards and amphibians. Sometimes, it also preys on smaller snakes. Long-nosed Leopard Lizard - Gambelia wislizenii 26. Leopard Lizard (Scientific Name: Gambelia wislizenii) The Gambelia wislizenii is a lizard species belonging to the Iguanidae family. The species name, wislizenii, is derived from the last name of Frederick Adolph Wislizenus, the German-American surgeon who got the first specimen of the lizard. The Gambelia wislizenii is more popularly known as the long-nosed leopard lizard due to its lengthy nose and markings similar to those of a leopard. The long-nosed leopard lizard also possesses a large head, a short body and an extensive tail. Males have an average length of 4.8 inches. They are smaller than the females. Females can grow up to 5.8 inches. Regardless of sex, the long-nosed leopard lizard can change its colors like its cousins in the Iguanidae family. Reddish orange spots show up on the undersides of females when they are fertile. Males, on the other hand, have some pinkish or rusty coloration on their chest and throat during the breeding season. Except for their noses, the long-nosed leopard lizard and blunt-nosed leopard lizard look the same. The former remains under the least concern list while the latter is now regarded as endangered. Long-nosed Water Dragon - Gowidon longirostris 27. Water Dragon (Scientific Name: Gowidon longirostris) The long-nosed water dragon, also known as the long-snouted lashtail, is a species of agamid lizard endemic to Australia. Since its discovery in 1883, its exact genus has been debated several times. It became known as Lophognatus longirotis at the start. However, its inclusion in the Lophognatus genus was questioned. The species was then placed under other genera such as: Physignathus, Gemmatophora and Amphibolurus. In 1985, it was transferred to the Gowidon genus but was again returned to other genera. Presently, it is under the Gowidon genus. Despite their common name, the long-nosed water dragon doesn't dwell on and near bodies of water. It prefers an arid environment instead. It can swim but it tends to feel uncomfortable when submerged. When this lizard suddenly hits or runs across a hot surface, it raises its arms and waves. Locals refer to it as the long-nosed Ta Ta lizard for its tendency to wave. The long-nosed water dragon is one of the lizards sold under the exotic pet trade. It can survive longer in captivity. In the wild, it may not live long due to the presence of predators such as the rusty desert monitor lizard and the monk snake. Spiny Softshell Turtle - Apalone spinifera 28. Spiny Softshell Turtle (Scientific Name: Apalone spinifera) The spiny softshell turtle (Apalone spinifera)is among the largest freshwater turtles that are endemic toNorth America. This turtle is recognizable for its bumpy and leathery shell. Compared to other turtles, it also has a longer nose that is easy to distinguish.Its elongated nose and neck function like a snorkel when it is underwater. Not all turtles are slow as proven by the spiny softshell turtle. This species is one of the fastest swimmers in the Trionychidae family. It can be found on rivers and lakes in Canada, Mexico and the US. When it is not hunting underwater, it may be seen laying eggs on the shores or basking under the sun. Fish, insects and aquatic plants form part of its diet. Female spiny softshell turtles are notably larger than their male counterparts. The length of a female spiny softshell turtle ranges from 7 to 18 inches. On the other hand, the length of a male is only around 5 to 9 inches. Nonetheless, the tail of a male spiny softshell turtle is thicker and longer than that of a female. Sawfish - Pristidae 29. Sawfish (Scientific Name: Pristidae) The nose of a sawfish is not only long; it is also strange-looking. Sawfish, also known as Pristidae, is actually a family of rays that possesses saw-like nose extensions. Some of the species under the Pristidae family include: common sawfish, dwarf sawfish, narrowsnout sawfish, smalltooth sawfish and knifetooth sawfish. The sawfish's saw-like rostrum is a great help when it digs and searches for food. At first glance, it seems like it has sharp teeth at the sides of its rostrum. However, these protruding teeth are actually serrations. A sawfish rarely attacks people. It only does so when it is surprised or provoked. It makes use of its nose extension to attack its preys and to defend itself when the need arises. However, some fishermen and game-hunting enthusiasts take advantage of this calm sea creature. They hunt down different sawfish species for meat and for fun. As a result, all of the sawfish species are now deemed as either endangered or critically endangered. Habitat loss and predation are other factors that cause the reduction of sawfish population. Unicornfish - Naso 30. Unicornfish or Naso The unicornfish, also known as Naso, is named as such due to the horn-like structure on its forehead. The horn-like structure is actually a nose extension. However, not all unicornfish species have the said feature. Some of the species under the Naso genus are: bignose unicornfish, bulbnose unicornfish, humpback unicornfish, bluespine unicornfish,bluetail unicornfish, whitemargin unicornfish, spotted unicornfish, elongated unicornfish, sleek unicorn fish and elegant unicornfish. In some unicornfishes, their nose extensions look so bloated to the point that they are hardly seen as horn-like structures. Instead, they make the foreheads of unicornfishes seem bigger and swelling. The humpback unicornfish (Naso brachycentron) is among those species that possess a narrow nose extension. The spotted unicornfish (Naso brevirostris) and bluespine unicornfish (Naso unicornis) also have narrow nose extensions that stand out. Surprisingly, these two species have the shortest nose extensions among their kind. In fact, these two are also dubbed as short-nosed unicornfishes. Unicornfishes can be found in many seas in the Indo-Pacific region. In Hawaii and other Pacific states, these fishes are often sought as ingredients to several cuisines. Needlenose Gar - Lepisosteus osseus 31. Needlenose Gar (Scientific Name: Lepisosteus osseus) The Lepisosteus osseus species is better known by the monikers needlenose gar and longnose gar. In the past, this ray-finned species was present in the bodies of water in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Nowadays, the remaining needlenose gars can only be found in North and Central America. Small sea creatures are the typical prey of the needlenose gar. An adult gar may even consume its younger kind. Such predation is one of the factors triggering the decrease in the number of needlenose gars in the wild. However, the alteration of aquatic systems is the biggest factor leading to such decline. On average, the needlenose gar may live for 15 to 20 years. The male needlenose gar tends to mature when it is already two years old while its female counterpart only matures when it reaches six years of age. Additionally, the male is usually smaller and lighter than the female. The female needlenose gar can grow up to 6.5 feet long. 32. Darter (Scientific Name: Percina nasuta) The Percina nasuta, or longnose darter, is one of the smallest species of fish in the Percidae family. Its average length only ranges from 2 to 4 inches. Despite its small size, it stands out due to its colorful body. The short and slender body of the long-nose darter has 10 to 15 dark brown spots and bands against a yellowish-brown background. Its underside is creamy white. The longnose darter can only be found in the US. In general, the species is not yet endangered. However, it is deemed as an endangered one in the states of Oklahoma and Missouri. The number of longnose darters is decreasing in the said US states primarily due to the construction of reservoirs and other structures. Such construction led to habitat loss and water pollution. Because of its size, the longnose darter often ends up as the food to many predators living underwater. In contrast, small aquatic insects serve as the prey of the darter. Longnose Dace - Rhinichthys cataractae 33. Dace (Scientific Name: Rhinichthys cataractae) Of all the minnows native to the US, the longnose dace (Rhinichthys cataractae) is the most widely distributed. The genus name Rhinichthys entails long-snouted fish. This species can also be found in Mexico and Canada. It is a small fish with an average length of 100 to 170 mm. A young longnose dace, also known as fry, usually swims in quiet and shallow waters. After six weeks, it moves to unpolluted, swiftly flowing rivers and creeks.It tends to stay in deeper waters when summer hits. The longnose dace is far from being listed as an endangered species. However, studies suggest that the population of this fish in some places is declining. One reason is overfishing. The said minnow is often caught to serve as a baitfish. Water pollutionalso stresses this fish. Such manmade problem affects the reproduction of the longnose dace. Worse, the minnow may ingest trash or harmful chemicals, causing it to die at an early age. Tea-Leaf Trevally - Carangoides chrysophrys 34. Tea-Leaf Trevally (Scientific Name: Carangoides chrysophrys) The Carangoides chrysophrys species is known by many names. Its monikers include: tea-leaf trevally, longnose trevally, club-nosed trevally, dusky trevally and grunting trevally. It is a type of marine fish under the Carangidae family (also called the jack and trevally family). It can be found in subtropical and tropical waters in the western Pacific and Indian Oceans. This marine fish spends its time swimming in coastal waters and reefs alike. With a maximum weight of 4.35 kg and length of 28 inches, the tea-leaf trevally is a relatively large fish. However, it is not as large as other trevally species. Aside from its size, it also differs from other trevallies in terms of the number of fin rays and gill rakers. It possesses a scale-less breast and long snout as well. The tea-leaf trevally is a predator to other sea creatures. Mollusks, crustaceans and small fishes are part of its typical diet. For larger predatory fishes, however, the said trevally species serves as a good prey. Siberian Sturgeon - Acipenser baerii 35. Siberian Sturgeon (Scientific Name: Acipenser baerii) The Acipenser baerii is a species of sturgeon that is commonly found in Siberian river basins. This is also present in some river basins in China and Kazakhstan. It is more popularly known as theSiberian sturgeon in reference to its place of origin.On the other hand, the baerii in its scientific name is a form of homage to German-Russian naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer. This sturgeon is categorized under the Acipenseridae family. The Siberian sturgeon is further classified into two subspecies, namely: the common Siberian sturgeon (Acipenser baerii baerii) and the Baikal sturgeon (Acipenser baerii baicalensis). There used to be a third subspecies as well. However, the subspecies Acipenser baerii stenorrhynchus is deemed as similar to the common Siberian Sturgeon. Recent studies also suggest that the two widely accepted subspecies may actually be monotypic. Like other sturgeons, the Siberian sturgeon is a heavy fish. Its usual weight is 65 kg. The heaviest Siberian sturgeon caught had a weight of 210 kg. Longnose Batfish - Ogcocephalus corniger 36. Batfish (Scientific Name: Ogcocephalus corniger) The longnose batfish, also known as Ogcocephalus corniger, inhabits the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It can go as deep as 230 meters below sea level. It belongs to the family of anglerfish, better known as Ogcocephalidae. Anglerfish varieties are also referred to as seabats, handifishes and deep-sea batfishes. The longnose batfish looks like a small ray due to its flat triangular body. Its color ranges from yellow to purple. It also has whitish spots on its body. Two of its notable facial features are its rostral protuberance and reddish orange lips.Its total length can go up to 6 inches. The walking batfish is another nickname for the longnose batfish. Unlike other batfishes, it doesn't swim well. It creeps using its fins instead. When it gets hungry, it buries itself on the sea floor and wait for its prey. This batfish species is imported as a pet fish. Despite the demand, it remains widespread in numerous North and Central American states. Orange-spotted Filefish - Oxymonacanthus longirostris 37. Orange-spotted Filefish (Scientific Name: Oxymonacanthus longirostris) The orange-spotted filefish (Oxymonacanthus longirostris) is one of the two species under the Oxymonacanthus genus. This fish is known by other names such as: long-nosed filefish, beaked leatherjacket filefish, coral filefish and harlequin filefish. It is nicknamed coral filefish because it loves to inhabit inner reefs and lagoons that have rich coral growth. The filefish usually eats and swims with a partner or a group. Its main food is corals. Because of its tendency to eat corals, aquarists used to avoid adding the orange-spotted filefish in their respective aquariums. However, a new study suggests that the fish is not that damaging to a coral-stuffed aquarium. Feeding the filefish is the real challenge for aquarists. The fish doesn't eat anything but a certain species of corals. This filefish species is capable of changing its pattern and color to match its surroundings. It does so as a way to avoid predators. Normally, it has a blue body with orange spots. It also possesses translucent fins and tail. Longnose Hawkfish - Oxycirrhites typus 38. Hawkfish (Scientific Name: Oxycirrhites typus) The longnose hawkfish (Oxycirrhites typus) forms part of the aquarium trade. It used to be expensive, but these days, it is relatively cheap and easy to find. Aside from its affordability and availability, the longnose hawkfish is also well-loved for its high resistance against common fish diseases. That makes it a good pet for first-time aquarists. On the rare occasion that it gets sick, it can be treated with medications with few to no side effects. Additionally, the longnose hawkfish tends to be amiable to other fishes. Such trait is valuable for aquarists who want to have different fishes in their tanks. Even if it is just a bite-sized fish, the said hawkfish is not going to attack it. However, there are instances when it may become territorial. In general, hawkfishes are widespread in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The majority of the species inhabit shallow waters; only a few resides in deep waters. The longnose hawkfish belongs to the latter. 39. Cannibal Fish (Scientific Name: Alepisaurus ferox) Cannibal fish is one of the common names of the Alepisaurus ferox species. Its other names include longnose lancetfish and long-snouted lancetfish. The name cannibal fish is derived from its tendency to feed on its own kind. The genus name Alepisaurus, on the other hand, involve scaleless lizards. Some of the notable features of the cannibal fish include: an extensive body, a high dorsal fin, a long snout, a large mouth, and two sharp fangs. Like other lancetfishes, the long-snouted one is also a hermaphrodite. Fishermen don't usually target the cannibal fish. However, they often get it as a by-catch when they are getting tuna. Some fishermen even treat the fish as a pest because it often steals the bait intended for other fishes. Generally, lancetfishes have an average length of 2 m and weight of 9 kg. They are predatory fishes inhabiting all the oceans. They prefer deep waters instead of shallow ones. They can even go as deep as 1,800 m. Longnose Killifish - Fundulus similis 40. Killifish (Scientific Name: Fundulus similis) The Fundulus similis species, also called the longnose killifish, is commonly found in the western Atlantic Ocean. This freshwater fish can only grow up to 12 cm long. Using its long snout, it feeds on aquatic insects and worms.In addition to itsextended snout, it also has a rounded and elongated body. Its color varies from olive to silver with several dark stripes. A male longnose killifish usually has a hint of yellow on its gill and chin. A female, on the other hand, has a rounded and colorless dorsal fin. Unlike other killifishes, the longnose killifish is a high-maintenance aquarium fish. Its natural habitat is made up of tidal flats and it tends to stay therein all year round. Even long-time aquarists find it hard to set up and maintain an aquarium environment that is almost akin to that of a tidal flat. In terms of coloration, the longnose killifish is also far behind its fellow killifishes. Nevertheless, its peaceful nature makes it a worthy addition to an aquarium. Twig or Whiptail Catfish 41. Twig Catfish or Whiptail Catfish The Farlowella is a catfish genus native to Colombia and Venezuela. Species under this genus are called twig catfishes due to their twig-like appearance. Aside from that, most of the species, particularly the longnose twig catfish (Farlowella gracilis), have lengthy snouts. Many aquarists keep twig catfish because of the species' eye-catching appearance and its tendency to eat algae and decaying plant matter. Having the said fish helps in eliminating too much algae in the tank. It also clears the water by consuming the decaying plant matter.The twig catfish is well-loved for its ability to adapt easily. Once it is adapted to an aquarium setup, it rarely encounters diseases and it tends to live longer than its tankmates. There are over 30 species under the Farlowella genus right now. Among these species, only two are usually sold and kept in aquariums. These are Farlowella vittata and Farlowella acus. Other species, including the longnose twig catfish, can become territorial at some point. This makes them a bad addition to a shared aquarium. Golden Dogfish - Centroscymnus crepidater 42. Golden Dogfish (Scientific Name: Centroscymnus crepidater) Contrary to its name, the golden dogfish(Centroscymnus crepidater) is not actually a fish but is a species of shark common in subtropical seas in the southern hemisphere. Its natural habitat is usually around 270 to 2,080 deep. Itbelongs to the Somniosidae family, better known as the sleeper sharks.The sleeper sharks are deemed to be non-aggressive and slow swimmers. Longnose velvet dogfish, roughskin dogfish and deepwater dogfish are the other nicknames of the golden dogfish. This shark species is relatively small; its maximum length is only 130 cm. It also possesses a slender, blackish or brownish body. It lacks soft rays, but it has a couple of dorsal spines. Unlike other shark species, it doesn't have an anal fin. The golden dogfish harms its enemy using its sharp teeth. Its abrasive skin is also useful in dissuading its potential predators. When it is not eaten by predators or accidentally caught by fishermen, the longnose velvet dogfish can live for up to 54 years. 43. Narrownose Chimaera (Scientific Name: Harriotta raleighana) The narrownose chimaera (Harriotta raleighana), also dubbed as the bigspine spookfish and bentnose rabbitfish, is under the Rhinochimaeridae family. The said family of fishes is best known for their lengthy snouts and excessive cartilages. Compared to other chimaeras, the narrownose species has a thinner snout. It also has an extensive filamentous tail. The average length of the species varies from 1 to 1.5 m, with the females being larger than the males. Tropical and temperate seas with depths ranging from 200 to 2,600 m are the natural habitats of the narrownose chimaeras. To protect itself from predators, this chimaera species strikes its mildly venomous dorsal fin against its enemies. It uses its snout as a way to intimidate other species as well. Aside from being a line of defense, its snout is also useful when it looks for its own prey. Thanks to the several sensory nerve endings in its long and narrow snout, the narrownose chimaera finds it easy to look for small fish and other small sea creatures that will serve as its food. Emperor Fish - Lethrinus olivaceus 44. Emperor Fish (Scientific Name: Lethrinus olivaceus) The longface emperor fish (Lethrinus olivaceus), also called the long-nosed emperor fish, is a bony fish under the Lethrinidae family. This species is widely distributed in the West Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its average length ranges from 28 to 39 inches. In addition to its extensive snout, the longface emperor fish possesses a pair of large eyes that help it hunt at night. It is a predatory fish as evident in its diet made up of fishes, cephalopods and crustaceans. Adult longface emperor fishes prefer to live alone while young ones often go with oneanother.Aside from their fellows, they may also spend time with other lethrinid species such as the smalltooth emperor fish (Lethrinus microdon). Although it is still far from being extinct, some governments set fishing guidelines to protect the population of the longface emperor fish. There is a limit to the number of fish that a fisherman or a hobbyist can catch. The longface emperor fish must be of a certain size as well. Yellow Longnose Butterflyfish - Forcipiger flavissimus 45. Yellow Longnose Butterflyfish (Scientific Name: Forcipiger flavissimus) The Forcipiger flavissimus is a beautiful type of marine fish under the Chaetodontidae family. It is popularly known as the yellow longnose butterflyfish. One of the notable parts of this fish is its head. The upper half of its head is black, while the lower one is white. It also possesses a long and narrow nose. Aside from its head, its flat body is also noteworthy for its yellow coloration and leaf shape. The said butteflyfish species is abundant in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. With a maximum length of 22 cm, it is a fairly small fish. Such size makes it an ideal pet for aquarists. Its bright yellow coloration is an additional advantage. The yellow longnose butterflyfish is hard to predict at times. In its natural habitat, it may feed on soft and stony corals. In the wild, it uses its extended snout to poke in corals and crevices in search for small crustaceans. However, it rarely pays attention to corals in an aquarium. Common Sawshark - Pristiophorus cirratus 46. Common Sawshark (Scientific Name: Pristiophorus cirratus) The common sawshark (Pristiophorus cirratus) is not the same as the sawfish. Obviously, the sawshark is a shark while the sawfish is actually a kind of ray.Additionally, the side fins of the sawshark are not connected right next to its head. This is a shared trait among sharks. Nevertheless, the two species look similar due to their saw-like nose extensions. The saw-like protrusion on the face of the common sawshark is not only used to scare its enemies. The said extension also helps in detecting its prey, which is usually a small fish. Even if its prey buries itself on the sandy bottoms of the oceans, the highly sensitive nose extension will still be able to locate the prey. The sawshark makes use of the sharp teeth-like projections on its nose extention to stun its victim. Sawsharks, in general, are only common in certain seas. The habitat of longnose sawshark alone is limited to southern Australia. However, the overall population of sawsharks remains under the least concern list of IUCN. Longnose Catshark - Apristurus kampae 47. Catshark (Scientific Name: Apristurus kampae) The Apristurus kampae species is a type of catshark under the Scyliorhinidae family. It is also known as the longnose catshark due to its lengthy nose. A native to Mexico and the US, it is commonly found in the East and Central Pacific Ocean. Its natural habitat has depths ranging from 180 to 1,888 m.The longnose catshark is a relatively short shark with the males being larger than their female counterparts. The maximum length for males is 58 cm while females only grow up to 52 cm. Right now, the status of the longnose catshark's population remains unknown due to the insufficiency of significant data. Consequently, conservation programs about the said species are yet to be made. With the construction of more extensive deepwater fisheries, the longnose catshark may end up getting caught more easily than before. Its natural habitat gets further restricted as well. Despite the dangers humans impose, this catshark is deemed to be harmless to humans. Daggernose Shark - Isogomphodon oxyrhynchus 48. Daggernose Shark (Scientific Name: Isogomphodon oxyrhynchus) The Isogomphodon oxyrhynchus, better known as the daggernose shark, is a less known species of shark under the Carcharhinidae family.Like other requiem sharks, it migrates when the season changes and/or when the food supply around is not enough. However, it tends to avoid freshwaters. It prefers muddy waters instead. The daggernose shark is recognizable for its long, flat and sharp snout. Its eyes are way too small as well. It also has a pair of paddle-shaped fins on its sides. With a typical length of 1.5 m, this shark species is relatively small.Though small, it is aggressive when it hunts. Schooling fishes are its usual prey. In general, the daggernose shark doesn't harm humans. However, fisherfolks and hobbyists tend to get the said shark species as a by-catch. This man-made problem is seen as one of the major factors leading to the decline of the daggernose shark population. Another factor is that the reproduction processes of the shark tend to be slow. Longnose Spider Crab - Libinia dubia 49. Spider Crab (Scientific Name: Libinia dubia) The Libinia dubia species, commonly called the longnose spider crab, possesses an extensive, forked rostrum located between its two eyes.Such nose extension is connected to its circular shell (carapace). There isa total of 12 spines on its shell. The shell's average diameter ranges from 2.4 to 3.9 inches. The males tend to have bigger shells than their female counterparts. Short setae (Velcro-like features) cover the upper surface of the crab's carapace. As a way to hide itself from its enemies, a young longnose spider crab attaches organisms, seaweeds and other material to the setae on its shell. In contrast, an adult one may fight back instead. It makes use of its forked rostrum to intimidate other organisms. The longnose spider crab has ten thin legs. The two front legs, however, are more like pincers. Aside from attacking its enemies, this crab species also uses its front pair of legs to get food and lift things. Long-nosed Weevil - Rhinotia hemistictus 50. Weevil (Scientific Name: Rhinotia hemistictus) The Rhinotia hemistictus species has one of the most extensive noses among beetles. It is also referred to as the long-nosed weevil. Weevils, in general, have long snouts. They may be black, grey or reddish-brown as well. Around 60,000 weevil species belong to the Curculionoidea superfamily. However, not all members of the said superfamily are regarded as true weevils (part of the Curculionidae family). The long-nosed weevil is part of the Belidae family. A true weevil has a pair of elbowed antennae; the long-nosed weevil has straight ones. At an average size of 6 mm, a true weevil is smaller compared to the long-nosed weevil (average length is 2.5 cm). Like other beetles, the long-nosed weevil is often regarded as a pest.This type of beetle is commonly found in wooded lands in Australia but may go to nearby farmlands and neighborhoods. However, the long-nosed weevil and other members of the Belidae family are not usually after healthy plants. They mostly feed on drying or dying plants instead. Sam Eilish on April 26, 2020:	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1777
__label__wiki	0.687711	0.687711	Why Thomas Jefferson was a Hypocrite EnzoStudios Thomas Jefferson was without a doubt one of the most important figures in American history. He is best known for writing the declaration of independence. Nearly every elementary student in the nation knows his name. He was gifted in the fields of architecture, politics, law, and even science. For all of this to be possible, he must have been somewhat of an iconic figure, right? Right, but the fact that he was a hypocrite cannot be overlooked. Jefferson wrote about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, and claimed that “all men are created equal”, but held many slaves himself… (Declaration of Independence) Upon researching this topic further, I found an interesting perspective given by one writer. She says: “Taken out of context, portions of Jefferson's A View on the Rights of British America could be mistaken for excerpts of abolitionist literature. Jefferson writes, "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state." He also writes, "History has informed us that the bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible to the spirit of tyranny." Throughout the text, Jefferson repeatedly equates Britain's treatment of the colonies to a master's arbitrary oppression of slaves. Based on these strong statements, it seems that Jefferson would be staunch advocate of the physical and intellectual freedom of every person, regardless of creed, race, or religion.” In reality, however, it is widely known that Jefferson did own slaves, and thus contradicted himself, again adding more evidence to the hypocrite argument. In Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Slavery, he explains how blacks are equal to whites “by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination”, but this is where the quality ends. He then goes on to explain how they are inferior in the realm of winter survival. He later goes on to say, “For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him.” (Notes on Slavery) If Jefferson was in favor of emancipation, why did he own slaves himself? This question has yet to be answered. Some say that he owned slaves because of his infamous debt, while others say that he really had no plan for emancipation and was simply bluffing. In a letter from Benjamin Banneker in1791, Banneker writes “however variable we may be in society, or religion, however diversified in situation or color, we are all of the same family, and stand in the same relation to him.” In his reply, Jefferson says “Nobody wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men…” (Letters) In this scenario, it is almost as if Jefferson is siding with Banneker against the issue of slavery. But what about his slaves? It seems as if the last argument for the idea that Thomas Jefferson was an abolitionist lies in the fact that he had a child with one of his slaves. Although this fact proves that he did not see blacks aesthetically inferior, it still shows no real proof that he wanted the slaves to be free. In the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson says, “Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” (Rough Draft) The fact that there had been a call for abolition in the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence shows that Jefferson was bluffing. He knew that the southern states were going to strike his attempt down, and so he was quick to show his fellow delegates how righteous he was. Again, in a letter to John Holmes, Jefferson states that “I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach.” (Letter to John Holmes). In my personal opinion, Jefferson was a hypocrite. Saying that we should relieve ourselves from this burden, and calling for abolition, then turning your head and seeing slaves, the very burden about which you are writing makes you a hypocrite. If it does not, I do not know what would. Thomas Jefferson had a child with Sally Hemings for reasons unknown to us today. It is known that he had had a relationship with her, but the extent of this relationship was not known until recently. This fact adds even more fuel to the abolitionist fire, but it is still not reason enough to consider Thomas Jefferson a man of his word, or an abolitionist. Thomas Jefferson was a man commendable for many of reasons, but he was unsuccessful in using the opportunity to guide America into a new age, an age of freedom. If his reason for owning slaves was financial, or if he felt that blacks were inferior, we will never know. Most likely, all of these factors combined lead to his situation. Unfortunately for him, Jefferson failed to practice his belief in equality in freedom when it came to his slaves. Because of the inconsistency in the field of slavery, and his contradicting words and actions, Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite. Johna391 on July 20, 2014: My own wife and I fell over here by a poles apart trap forward also contemplated I'd personally restraint points unconscious. I like exactly what I envision i really am located absolutely charting you. Look forward to bddeagdkcbkk Jeffersonianism. on July 13, 2014: To the above poster, Sally Hemmings was his late Wife's half sister, not his Mothers half sister. With that said, people seem to think having a Child with Sally Hemmings is some evidence of Abolitionist sentiment. Well, how? It meants he had sex with her. I know we want ot look up to him as a Great Man and all but, just because he had a sexual relationship with his slave doesn't mean he had a Romantic Relationship with her. He exploited her for his own pleasure, like many Slavemaster did, and kept his own Children in slavery. Jefferson was really not someone I like, as he was a liar willing to tar anyone for his own ambitions. he tarred King George the Third, often with things that weren't' true, and even his Draft about the Kings support for slavery isn't True as King George was an abolitionist. he later tarred George Washington and John Adams to advance his own Political career. He was a Politician, and that's why he acted as he did. Norm Williams on February 09, 2011: Jefferson tells us in "Notes on Virginia" and other writings that he believed in strict segragation of the races. He deplored the possiblity of an "amalgum" which would be brought on through integration. This view perhaps does the most damage to Jefferson's character, for in the deepest regions of his nature he knew these words were false. He not only had intimate relations with his slave, Sally Hemmings--his mother's half sister--but produced mulatto children in direct opposition to his firmly stated beliefs. In his time, Jefferson was known to be both an ideologue and a prevaricator. In his "Anas" Jefferson tells of how he, while serving as Secretary of State, hired the nefarious Phillip Freneau, to work at a nominal position within the Department, and in his abundant spare time publish a newspaper devoted to undermining the Washington administration. He even brags of how some of these articles, personnally defaming the President, enraged the General, and yet the Secretary went on to praise the good service provided by Freneau in his endeavor to damage the President's reputation. He was, it seems, a rather mean-spirited and petty little man in addition to being a gifted writer and politician. See John Marshall's biography of Washington and other contemporary descriptions of his character. Charles Lee also wrote a short work devoted to Jefferson's slander of his relative, the great General Lee of the Revolutionary War. Truth on December 04, 2010: Thomas Jefferson did not believe that blacks were equal to whites in matters of reason or imagination, here is the full quote from the text. "Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation."(Notes On Slavery) Howard Schneider from Parsippany, New Jersey on November 13, 2010: I agree with you that Thomas Jefferson was hypocritical in the instances that you have mentioned. I do believe that he believed the things he was saying about slavery and was lying to himself. His lifestyle was hooked on slavery and all he could do was write anti-slavery platitudes. Jefferson also could have freed his slaves upon his or his children's deaths but didn't because he was heavily in debt due to profligate spending on Monticello. He also was cowardly in using newspaper surrogates such as James Callender to do his political mudslinging. This boomeranged on him when Callender was refused a position in Jefferson's government. Callender's poison pen was then aimed at Jefferson. Jefferson also condemned all of Alexander Hamilton's economic institutions but kept them as president because he found they worked efficiently and not corruptly. Finally he espoused strict constitutional constructionism and then went out and made the Louisiana Purchase deal. It was a great deal and the right thing to do but he never admitted the inconsistency. Jefferson was a complex man. I beleive his hypocrisies bring down his greatness several pegs but he is still impressive. 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__label__cc	0.737271	0.262729	Home»Hardware Esports Programs Don’t Need to Break the Budget to Thrive Colleges have plenty of flexibility to design programs that fit available resources. Joe McAllister Joe McAllister is a learning environment advisor at CDW•G. One often-cited reason for colleges’ reluctance to launch esports programs, despite the potential benefits in retention, recruitment and academics, is concern about cost. The multimillion-dollar arenas being built by some institutions are exciting, and are no doubt good for the sport, but they may give the impression that an esports program isn’t possible without a very high level of investment. Fortunately for aspiring teams, that isn’t the case. I’ve worked with colleges of all sizes seeking to develop programs of all stripes, and there isn’t one approach that works for everyone. The best way to design a program — and determine space and equipment needs — is to identify your primary goals and then to consider available resources to help you get there. MORE FROM EDTECH: Here’s what happens behind the scenes at esports competitions. College Esports Programs Can Fit Nearly Any Budget Demonstrating my point that esports costs can vary widely, I typically give colleges a wide ballpark of potential startup costs for a basic program with a 10- to 15-player team: $8,000 to $50,000. If that seems improbably broad, that’s because there really can be significant variation, often determined by the space, equipment and infrastructure a college already has (or doesn’t have) in place. In the next tier up, an esports program may be more focused on competition, emphasizing high-end gaming equipment. Or, it may have more of a campuswide focus, with a greater number of activities. Here, I typically ballpark a range of $50,000 to $300,000. And, finally, there’s the larger-scale implementation, typically featuring a new arena or an existing space reimagined as a place that can accommodate players, spectators and streaming. These also range widely. I’ve seen cases where the primary investment required was infrastructure, at a cost of around $80,000, all the way up to the multimillion-dollar facility at Full Sail University. One of the most high-profile esports programs, at Boise State University, expanded quickly with a new arena housed in the College of Innovation and Design’s Venture College. It boasts a professional-caliber broadcasting area; equipment for lighting, audio and graphics mixing; a stage; and a spectator area. MORE FROM EDTECH: Esports coaches share lessons learned on the path to building a new program. Consider Potential Future Expansions in Designing Today’s Space As another example of the way esports programs may differ, consider varsity teams (defined by the National Association of Collegiate eSports as those with a full-time director or coach) versus nonvarsity teams. The former is actually in the minority. In one recent tournament, approximately 625 colleges participated, only about 125 of which fielded varsity teams. A varsity distinction, by itself, doesn’t necessary speak to a program’s physical space or equipment. Some varsity teams practice in a spare room outfitted with a dozen computers; some club-level programs have a dedicated arena. All of this goes to show that colleges have a wonderful amount of freedom and flexibility in developing a program that achieves their intended goals within the limits of available resources. One factor that will determine the nature of the space are the games in which players intend to compete, since each requires a specific number of players. Generally, esports spaces have 11, 13 or 15 machines (the odd number lets one machine handle streaming to Twitch or other platforms). At $2,000 to $3,000 per station, including furniture, that’s the minimal setup required. Nice to have (but not mandatory) is an area where players can lounge and review plays together in a large-format display. Another factor to consider in planning a space is the future outlook for the program. Quite often, a college tests the waters with a modest investment, and then is pleased to see that demand skyrockets, or there’s enough player talent to field multiple teams. Furniture and gaming equipment are easy enough to relocate, but transferring networking to a larger space is more complicated. If you think an expansion is a possibility, take that into account when planning for back-end infrastructure. If you’re looking to start a program, I always recommend talking with others who have already gone down that road. While every program may be a bit unique, the esports community is full of people open and available to answering questions, sharing experiences and learning from each other. Visual Generation/Getty Images Plus 3 Ways to Add Value to Off-Campus Learning EDUCAUSE 2020: Hybrid Classroom Setups Built for the Future	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1780
__label__wiki	0.689124	0.689124	Open Rights Group "ORG" redirects here. For other uses, see ORG (disambiguation). This article relies too much on references to primary sources. Please improve this by adding secondary or tertiary sources. (July 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) The Open Rights Group (ORG) is a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms by campaigning on digital rights issues and by fostering a community of grassroots activists. It campaigns on numerous issues including mass surveillance, internet filtering and censorship, and intellectual property rights. Law, Advocacy, Digital Rights openrightsgroup.org 2 Work 4 Areas of interest 4.1 Access to knowledge 4.2 Free speech and censorship 4.3 Government and democracy 4.4 Privacy, surveillance and censorship 6 Advisory council and board of directors 7 ORGCON Open Rights Group poster The organisation was started by Danny O'Brien, Cory Doctorow, Ian Brown, Rufus Pollock, James Cronin, Stefan Magdalinski, Louise Ferguson and Suw Charman after a panel discussion at Open Tech 2005.[1] O'Brien created a pledge on PledgeBank, placed on 23 July 2005, with a deadline of 25 December 2005: "I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1,000 other people will too." The pledge reached 1000 people on 29 November 2005.[2][3] The Open Rights Group was launched at a "sell-out" meeting in Soho, London.[4][5] WorkEdit The group has made submissions to the All Party Internet Group (APIG) inquiry into digital rights management[6][7] and the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property.[8][9] The group was honoured in the 2008 Privacy International Big Brother Awards alongside No2ID, Liberty, Genewatch UK and others, as a recognition of their efforts to keep state and corporate mass surveillance at bay.[10] In 2010 the group worked with 38 Degrees[11] to oppose the introduction of the Digital Economy Act, which was passed in April 2010.[12] GoalsEdit To collaborate with other digital rights and related organisations. To nurture a community of campaigning volunteers, from grassroots activists to technical and legal experts. To preserve and extend traditional civil liberties in the digital world. To provide a media clearinghouse, connecting journalists with experts and activists. To raise awareness in the media of digital rights abuses. Areas of interestEdit Cory Doctorow talks at ORGCon 2012 about the UK Government's Communications Data Bill 2012 The organisation, though focused on the impact of digital technology on the liberty of UK citizens, operates with an apparently wide range of interests within that category. Its interests include:[13][14] Access to knowledgeEdit Free and open source software The public domain Digital Restrictions Management Software patents Free speech and censorshipEdit Internet filtering Right to parody s. 127 Communications Act 2003 Government and democracyEdit Electronic voting Freedom of information legislation Privacy, surveillance and censorshipEdit Automatic Vehicle Tracking Communications data retention NHS patients' medical database Police DNA Records ORG has a paid staff,[15] whose members include: Jim Killock (Executive Director) Javier Ruiz Diaz (Campaigner) Former staff include Suw Charman-Anderson and Becky Hogge, both Executive Directors, e-voting coordinator Jason Kitcat, campaigner Peter Bradwell, grassroots campaigner Katie Sutton and administrator Katerina Maniadaki.[16] The group's patron is Neil Gaiman.[17] As of February 2011 they have 22,000 supporters of which 1,400 are paying contributors[18] Advisory council and board of directorsEdit In addition to staff members and volunteers, there is an advisory panel of over thirty members, and a Board of Directors, which oversees the group's work, staff, fundraising and policy.[19] The current board members are: Owen Blacker James Cronin Azmina Dhrodia Tom de Grunwald Hannah Little Alec Muffett Christi Scarborough In January 2015, the Open Rights Group announced the formation of a Scottish Advisory Council which will be handling matters relating to Scottish digital rights and campaigns. The Advisory Council is made up of: Alex Stobbart Alistair Davidson Chris Yiu Marco Biagi Mark Leiser Michael Fourman Patrick Harvie MSP From the existing UK Advisory Council: Judith Rauhofer Keith Mitchell Lilian Edwards Wendy Grossman And from the Open Rights Group Board: Milena Popova One of the first projects is to raise awareness and opposition to the Scottish Identity Database. ORGCONEdit ORGCON was the first ever conference dedicated to digital rights in the UK,[20] marketed as "a crash course in digital rights". It was held for the first time in 2010 at City University in London and included keynote talks from Cory Doctorow, politicians and similar pressure groups including Liberty, NO2ID and Big Brother Watch. ORGCON has since been held in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2019 where the keynote was given by Edward Snowden. Campaign Against Censorship Censorship in the United Kingdom Open Genealogy Alliance ^ Open Tech 2005 schedule Archived 15 December 2005 at the Wayback Machine, 23 July 2005 ^ www.pledgebank.com/rights Archived 29 November 2005 at the Wayback Machine, 23 July 2005 – 25 December 2005 ^ Getting out more Archived 7 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Danny O'Brien's blog post floating the idea and advertising the pledge ^ ORG digital rights event update Archived 11 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Open Rights Group blog, 29 November 2005 ^ Invitation to attend ‘Digital Rights in the UK: Your Rights, Your Issues’ Archived 11 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Open Rights Group blog, 16 November 2005 ^ MPs in digital downloads warning, BBC News Online, 4 June 2006 ^ ORG submission to the APIG inquiry into DRM, Open Rights Group wiki, 3 January 2006 ^ Chancellor announces intellectual property review Archived 4 December 2005 at the Wayback Machine, HM Treasury press release, 2 December 2005 ^ ORG submission to the Gowers Review, Open Rights Group wiki, 30 May 2006 ^ Big Brother Awards UK 2008, 12 December 2008 ^ "Controversial UK anti-piracy law finally passed". BBC. 5 April 2010. Retrieved 25 September 2010. ^ "Controversial UK anti-piracy law finally passed". Telecoms Europe. Retrieved 9 April 2010. [permanent dead link] ^ ORG issues and interests Archived 9 June 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Open Rights Group website, last visited 30 May 2008 ^ Digital rights issues Archived 5 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Open Rights Group website, last visited 30 May 2008 ^ "Open Rights Group Staff". Open Rights Group. Retrieved 13 July 2010. ^ "Open Rights Group Former Staff". Open Rights Group. Archived from the original on 21 June 2011. Retrieved 13 July 2010. ^ "Open Rights Group Patron". Open Rights Group. Retrieved 13 July 2010. ^ Hargreaves Review of IP and Growth Archived 15 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine "Open Rights Group", 22 February 2011 ^ "Open Rights Group Board". Open Rights Group. Retrieved 17 January 2020. ^ "ORGCon: London, July 24 – book now!". BoingBoing. 16 June 2010. Retrieved 13 July 2010. 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__label__wiki	0.89366	0.89366	Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Alleine, Richard ←Alleine, Joseph Alleine, Richard by Alexander Balloch Grosart Alleine, William→ 605326Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 01 — Alleine, Richard1885 ALLEINE, RICHARD (1611–1681), author of ‘Vindiciæ Pietatis,’ ‘Heaven Opened,’ ‘The World Conquered,’ ‘Instructions about Heart-work,’ and other practical books, was son of a clergyman of his own name, who was rector of Ditcheat, Somerset, for upwards of half a century. He was born at Ditcheat in 1611. His first education was under his father's eye. He then proceeded, in his sixteenth year, to the university, being entered at St. Alban's Hall, Oxford. He was elected a commoner in 1627. He there took his degree of B.A., and then transferred himself to New Inn, and remained there until he passed M.A. Having completed a distinguished academic course, he was ordained, and became ‘assistant’ to his venerable father. In March 1641 he succeeded the many-sided Richard Bernard, B.D., as rector of Batcombe (Somerset). He sided with the puritans by subscribing the ‘Testimony of the Ministers in Somersetshire to the Truth of Jesus Christ’—a calm and statesman-like paper—and the ‘Solemn League and Covenant.’ In 1654 he and his father were appointed assistants to the commissioners of the parliament for ‘ejecting scandalous ministers.’ For twenty years Alleine remained at Batcombe, and was idolised by his parishioners. At the Restoration he showed a willingness to acquiesce in the government, being of the old-fashioned type of believer in monarchy, if not in any and every monarch; but the Act of Uniformity came, and he felt compelled by loyalty to conscience to cast in his lot with the ‘ejected.’ Because of the Five Mile Act, which hindered him opening his mouth at Batcombe, he removed to Frome Selwood, and preached there and in the neighbourhood semi-privately until his death on 22 Dec. 1681. As one proof of many of the regard in which he was held, it is to be recorded that the Rev. Richard Jenkins, M.A., vicar of Frome Selwood, preached his funeral sermon, and therein gave ‘full and fair testimony to his piety, meekness, and moderation.’ Even Anthony à Wood was constrained to admit, in the very act of sneering at the preacher, that Jenkins ‘was the better judge, from his long acquaintance with him and frequent visits to him in his last sickness.’ Alleine's works are distinguished more for their searching spiritual force than for display of intellectual ability. His ‘Vindiciæ Pietatis’ was refused license by Sheldon, and was published, as other nonconformist books had to be if published at all, without it. It was rapidly bought up, and ‘did much to mend this bad world.’ Roger Norton, the royal printer, caused a large portion of the first edition to be seized, on the ground of its not being licensed, and to be sent to the royal kitchen. But glancing over its pages he was arrested by what he read, and on second thoughts it seemed to him a sin that a book so holy and so saleable should be killed. He therefore bought back the sheets, says Calamy, for an old song, bound them, and sold them in his own shop. This in turn was complained of, and the shrewd publisher had to beg pardon on his knees at the council-table. The remaining copies were further sentenced to be ‘bisked’ or rubbed over with an inky brush, and sent back to the palace kitchen for lighting fires. Even in the palace there must have been worthy traitors, for ‘bisked’ copies occasionally turn up still. The ‘Vindiciæ Pietatis, or a Vindication of Godliness … together with several Directions for a Godly Life,’ by R. A., was printed in 1663, and again in 1664, dedicated ‘to the inhabitants of B. in the county of S.’ The ‘Godly Man's Portion’ was also published in 1663, and joined to the former as a second part. ‘Heaven opened … being the third part’ of the ‘Vindiciæ,’ appeared in 1666 (and apparently as a separate work in 1665). ‘The World conquered, being the fourth part,’ appeared in 1668. These were collected as Alleine's Works in 1671. Alleine also published ‘Godly Fear,’ a collection of sermons, in 1664; a ‘Rebuke to Backsliders,’ 1677 and 1684; a ‘Companion for Prayer,’ 1680; ‘Instructions about Heart-work,’ 1681, 1684. [Calamy and Palmer's Nonconformists' Memorial, iii. 167; Biog. Brit. i. 143; Wood's Athenæ (Bliss), iv. 13; Scobell's Collections, pt. ii. p. 342; Dr. Williams' MSS.; Article in Encyc. Britannica by the present author, partly reproduced by permission of Messrs. A. & C. Black.] A. B. G. Retrieved from "https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Alleine,_Richard&oldid=10762541"	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1785
__label__cc	0.560007	0.439993	Keyword: Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin Prime Minister begins official visit to Norway Friday, May 24, 2019 10:02 Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc arrived in Oslo on late May 23 (local time), starting his official trip to the country at the invitation of his Norwegian counterpart Erna Solberg. PM wraps up Russia visit Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc was active in Russia before wrapping up his official visit to Russia on May 23 (local time). PM meets Russian State Duma Chairman Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc met with Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin on May 23 as part of his ongoing visit to Russia. Vietnamese Embassy in Russia hosts Tet banquet The Vietnamese Embassy in Russia held a diplomatic banquet to welcome Lunar New Year (Tet) in Moscow on January 30. State Duma Chairman wraps up official visit to Vietnam Tuesday, December 25, 2018 09:46 Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin concluded his two-day official visit to Vietnam on December 24. Parliamentary cooperation – important pillar of Vietnam-Russia ties The top legislators of Vietnam and Russia have agreed that the parliamentary cooperation is one of the important pillars of the partnership between Vietnam and Russia. Vietnam treasures partnership with Russia: top leader The Vietnamese Party, State and people always attach importance to consolidating and developing the comprehensive strategic partnership with Russia, said General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee and President Nguyen Phu Trong. PM: Vietnam, Russia hold potential to boost trade, investment ties Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc highlighted cooperation opportunities for Vietnam and Russia to boost trade and investment ties at a reception in Hanoi on December 24 for Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin. Prime Minister receives Chairman of Russia’s State Duma Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on December 24 hosted a reception for Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin, Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation in Hanoi. Russia’s State Duma Chairman starts official visit to Vietnam Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin arrived in Hanoi on December 23 to begin his two-day official visit to Vietnam at the invitation of National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan. Chairman of Russia’s State Duma to visit Vietnam Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin will pay an official visit to Vietnam from December 23-24. World leaders congratulate Vietnam on 73rd National Day Sunday, September 02, 2018 16:02 Leaders of many countries have sent congratulations to their Vietnamese counterparts on the 73rd National Day of Vietnam (September 2, 1945).	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1787
__label__wiki	0.757694	0.757694	Dinosaur intelligence Skeletal cast of an unnamed Alaskan troodontid species. Troodontids had some of the highest non-avian encephalization quotients, meaning they were behaviourally advanced and had keen senses.[1] Dinosaur intelligence has been a point of contention for paleontologists. Non-avian dinosaurs were once regarded as being unintelligent animals but have largely been appraised more generously since the dinosaur renaissance. This newfound optimism for dinosaur intelligence has led to highly exaggerated portrayals in pop-cultural works like Jurassic Park. Paleontologists now regard dinosaurs as being very intelligent for reptiles, but generally not as smart as their avian descendants. Some have speculated that if the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event had not occurred, the more intelligent forms of small theropods might have eventually evolved human-like levels of intelligence. Popular misconceptions of dinosaur neurology include the concept of a second brain in the pelvis of stegosaurs and sauropods. 1 Dinosaur brain volume and encephalization quotient 2 Theropod brains 2.1 Allosaurus fragilis 2.2 Carcharodontosaurus saharicus 2.3 Tyrannosaurus 2.4 Troodontidae 2.5 Archaeopteryx 2.6 Limosa gypsorum 4 "Two brains" myth 5 Speculations of anthropomorphic sapient dinosaurs 5.1 Toyota (1977) 5.2 Sagan (1977) 5.3 Jerison (1978) 5.4 Russell (1982) Dinosaur brain volume and encephalization quotient[edit] Traditional comparisons of brain volume to body mass in dinosaurs use the endocast as a proxy for brain volume.[2] However, the brain of the modern reptile genus Sphenodon fills only about half of its endocranial volume.[3] Some paleontologists used this fifty percent estimate in their estimates of dinosaur brain volume.[2] Other workers have observed that details on the endocranial surface indicates that some fossil reptiles had brains that occupied a much larger portion of the endocranium.[4] Hans Larsson notes that the transition from reptiles to birds prevents using a set ratio from being a valid approach to estimating the volume of the endocranium occupied by a dinosaur's brain.[4] Theropod brains[edit] This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (March 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) In a 2001 study of a Carcharodontosaurus saharicus endocast (here, a mold of skull interior), Hans C. E. Larsson found that both C. saharicus and Allosaurus had a ratio of cerebrum to brain volume that lay within the 95% confidence limits of non-avian reptiles.[5] By contrast, Tyrannosaurus lies just outside it in the direction of a more avian proportion.[5] Since tyrannosaurs are relatively basal coelurosaurs, this is evidence that the advent of the Coelurosauria marks the beginning of trend in theropod brain enlargement.[5] Allosaurus fragilis[edit] The brain of Allosaurus fragilis resembled that of the related form Carcharodontosaurus saharicus.[6] The shape resembles that of the modern day crocodile. Carcharodontosaurus saharicus[edit] Carcharodontosaurus saharicus skull. In 2001, Hans C. E. Larsson published a description of the endocranium of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus.[7] Starting from the portion of the brain closest to the tip of the animal's snout is the forebrain, which is followed by the midbrain. Larsson found that the midbrain was angled downwards at 45 degrees towards the rear of the animal. This is followed by the hind brain, which was roughly parallel to the forebrain and itself forms a roughly 40 degree angle with the midbrain.[8] Overall, the brain of C. saharicus would have been similar to that of a related dinosaur, Allosaurus fragilis.[6] Larsson also examined the size ratio between the cerebrum of Carcharodontosaurus and the rest of the brain, finding that this ratio in C. saharicus was more like that of a traditional reptile than a bird.[5] Tyrannosaurus[edit] Tyrannosaurus lies just outside the 95% confidence limits of the nonavian reptile ratio of cerebrum volume to whole brain volume in the direction of a more avian proportion.[5] This is in contrast to Carcharodontosaurus saharicus and Allosaurus fragilis, which lie firmly within the reptilian range.[5] Troodontidae[edit] Latenivenatrix skull, previously assigned to Stenchyosaurus or Troodon Certain[clarification needed] genera in Troodontidae's cerebrum-to-brain-volume ratio was 31.5% to 63% of the way from a nonavian reptile proportion to a truly avian one.[9] Archaeopteryx[edit] Archaeopteryx had a cerebrum-to-brain-volume ratio 78% of the way to modern birds.[10] Limosa gypsorum[edit] One discrepancy is the ratio possessed by the Eocene bird Limosa gypsorum, which was only 63% of the modern bird ratio.[11] However, this may be explainable if the endocast was distorted, as it had been previously depicted in the past by Deschaseaux, who is described by Larsson as portraying the endocast "slightly anteroposteriorly sheared and laterally compressed."[10] Birds[edit] Kea are known for their intelligence and curiosity, both vital traits for survival in the harsh mountain environment that is their home. Kea can solve logical puzzles, such as pushing and pulling things in a certain order to get to food, and will work together to achieve a certain objective. Bird intelligence deals with the definition of intelligence and its measurement as it applies to birds. Traditionally, birds have been considered inferior in intelligence to mammals, and derogatory terms such as bird brains have been used colloquially in some cultures. The difficulty of defining or measuring intelligence in non-human animals makes the subject difficult for scientific study. Anatomically, a bird has a relatively large brain compared to its head size. The visual and auditory senses are well developed in most species, while the tactile and olfactory senses are well realized only in a few groups. Birds communicate using visual signals as well as through the use of calls and song. The testing of intelligence is therefore based on studying the responses to sensory stimuli. "Two brains" myth[edit] Brain cavity of S. stenops marked with red Soon after describing Stegosaurus, Othniel Charles Marsh noted a large canal in the hip region of the spinal cord, which could have accommodated a structure up to 20 times larger than the famously small brain. This has led to the famous idea that dinosaurs like Stegosaurus had a "second brain" in the tail, which may have been responsible for controlling reflexes in the rear portion of the body. It has also been suggested that this "brain" might have given a Stegosaurus a temporary boost when it was under threat from predators.[12] In reality, the cavity is likely analogous to the glycogen body present in modern birds. Othniel Charles Marsh noticed that Camarasaurus also had a canal over it's vertebrae that enlarged into a space that could have been a space for second brain. But scientists proved Marsh wrong, and Camarasaurus did not have a second, much larger brain in the hip region.[13] Speculations of anthropomorphic sapient dinosaurs[edit] Toyota (1977)[edit] Aritsune Toyota (豊田有恒), a Japanese science fiction writer was one of the earliest proposers of the idea of sapient dinosaurs.[14] Toyota was intrigued by the theory of the "Warm-blooded Deinonychus" (John Ostrom, 1964) and developed the idea that some kinds of dinosaurs would have evolved to acquire intelligence. He referred to The Hot-blooded Dinosaurs (Desmond, Adrian J., 1975, Rosemarie Buckman, Oxfordshire) and constructed a theoretical model of what they might have been like.[15] He first published his ideas as science fiction in the novel Kako no kageri (『過去の翳』, A shadow of the past) in 1977. In the story he described them as reptilian humanoids who use bone tools for hunting, speak a primitive language, and build a rudimentary society. The creature was supposed to have evolved from a dinosaur similar to Dromaeosaurus. A year later, Toyota received advice from Japanese zoologist Tatsuo Saneyoshi (實吉達郎), and began striving for more zoological authenticity on details. He then authored Zoku jikanhō keikaku (『続・時間砲計画』, Prospectus　for the spatiotemporal　cannon part 2). He continued to study theropoda, and serialized his novel as Dainosaurusu sakusen (『ダイノサウルス作戦』, The plan of the dinosaurs) in 1979. Sagan (1977)[edit] In his 1977 book, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, author Carl Sagan speculated about the related genus Saurornithoides evolving into ever more intelligent forms in the absence of any extinction event. In a world dominated by Saurornithoides, Sagan mused, arithmetic would be Base 8 rather than Base 10. Jerison (1978)[edit] American psychologist Harry Jerison suggested the possibility of sapient dinosaurs. In 1978, he gave a presentation titled "Smart dinosaurs and comparative psychology", at a meeting of the American Psychological Association. According to his speech, Dromiceiomimus could have evolved into a highly intelligent species like human beings.[15] Russell (1982)[edit] A model of the hypothetical Dinosauroid, Dinosaur Museum, Dorchester In 1982, Dale Russell, curator of vertebrate fossils at the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa, conjectured a possible evolutionary path that might have been taken by the dinosaur group Troodontidae had they not perished in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, suggesting that it could have evolved into intelligent beings similar in body plan to humans. Over geologic time, Russell noted that there had been a steady increase in the encephalization quotient or EQ (the relative brain weight when compared to other species with the same body weight) among the dinosaurs.[16] Russell had discovered the first Troodontid skull, and noted that, while its EQ was low compared to humans, it was six times higher than that of other dinosaurs. If the trend in Troodontid evolution had continued to the present, its brain case could by now measure 1,100 cm3; comparable to that of a human. Troodontids had semi-manipulative fingers, able to grasp and hold objects to a certain degree, and binocular vision.[17] Russell proposed that this "dinosauroid", like most dinosaurs of the troodontid family, would have had large eyes and three fingers on each hand, one of which would have been partially opposed. As with most modern reptiles (and birds), he conceived of its genitalia as internal. Russell speculated that it would have required a navel, as a placenta aids the development of a large brain case. However, it would not have possessed mammary glands, and would have fed its young, as birds do, on regurgitated food. He speculated that its language would have sounded somewhat like bird song.[17][18] Russell's thought experiment has been met with criticism from other paleontologists since the 1980s, many of whom point out that his Dinosauroid is overly anthropomorphic. Gregory S. Paul (1988) and Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., consider it "suspiciously human" (Paul, 1988) and Darren Naish has argued that a large-brained, highly intelligent troodontid would retain a more standard theropod body plan, with a horizontal posture and long tail, and would probably manipulate objects with the snout and feet in the manner of a bird, rather than with human-like "hands".[18] Dinosaurs portal Bird intelligence Dinosaur behavior Dinosaur senses Dinosapien ^ Junchang Lü; Li Xu; Yongqing Liu; Xingliao Zhang; Songhai Jia; Qiang Ji (2010). "A new troodontid (Theropoda: Troodontidae) from the Late Cretaceous of central China, and the radiationAsiantroodontids" (PDF). Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. 55 (3): 381–388. doi:10.4202/app.2009.0047. ^ a b "Allometric Comparison," Larsson (2001). Page 25. ^ "Allometric Comparison," Larsson (2001). Pages 25-26. ^ a b c d e f "Allometric Comparison," Larsson (2001). Page 29. ^ a b "Description," Larsson (2001). Page 20. ^ "Abstract," Larsson (2001). Page 19. ^ "Description," Larsson (2001). Pages 20-21. ^ Considered a Numenius species in "Allometric Comparison," Larsson (2001). Page 30. ^ Fastovsky DE, Weishampel DB (2005). "Stegosauria: Hot Plates". In Fastovsky DE, Weishampel DB (eds.). The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs (2nd Edition). Cambridge University Press. pp. 107–30. ISBN 0-521-81172-4. ^ "The Double Dinosaur Brain Myth". Smithsonian Magazine. August 2, 2012. ^ Saneyoshi, Tatsuo (2006). Hontō ni ita fushigina ikimono: Jinrui to dōbutsu no sosentachi [Unaccountable creatures that really existed: The ancestors of human and other animals] (in Japanese). Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūjo. pp. 41–48. ISBN 978-4-569-65442-3. ^ a b Kaneko, Ryūichi (1997). Shin kyōryū densetsu : Saiko kyōryū eoraputoru kara kyōryū jinrui made kyōryūgaku no saisentan [New dinosaur book: The front-lines of dinosaurology, from Eoraptor as the earliest dinosaur to Sapient dinosaurs] (in Japanese). Tokyo: Hayakawashobō. pp. 204–206. ISBN 978-4-15-050211-9. ^ "Cosmos: Smartosarus". Archived from the original on September 17, 2009. ^ a b Russell, D. A.; Séguin, R. (1982). "Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauroid". Syllogeus. 37: 1–43. ^ a b Naish, D. (2006). Dinosauroids Revisited Darren Naish: Tetrapod Zoology, April 23, 2011. Larsson, H.C.E. 2001. Endocranial anatomy of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus (Theropoda: Allosauroidea) and its implications for theropod brain evolution. pp. 19–33. In: Mesozoic Vertebrate Life. Ed.s Tanke, D. H., Carpenter, K., Skrepnick, M. W. Indiana University Press. "Brains and intelligence" at Enchanted Learning. Article "The Brief History of Dinosauroids" by Vladimír Socha (in Czech) Animal cognition Animal consciousness Animal language Cognitive bias in animals Cognitive ethology Comparative cognition Emotion in animals Observational learning Tool use by animals Vocal learning Pain in amphibians Pain in animals Pain in cephalopods Pain in crustaceans Pain in fish Pain in invertebrates Relation to brain Brain size Brain-to-body mass ratio Encephalization quotient Neuroscience and intelligence Number of neurons Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dinosaur_intelligence&oldid=992787575" Dinosaur paleobiology Animal intelligence CS1 Japanese-language sources (ja) Wikipedia articles that are too technical from March 2014 All articles that are too technical Wikipedia articles needing clarification from February 2020	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1788
__label__cc	0.510251	0.489749	Narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury (Redirected from Narcissistic rage) Narcissistic rage is a psychological construct that describes a reaction to narcissistic injury, which is conceptualized as a perceived threat to a narcissist's self-esteem or self-worth. Narcissistic injury (or narcissistic scar) is a phrase used by Sigmund Freud in the 1920s; narcissistic wound and narcissistic blow are further, almost interchangeable terms.[1] The term narcissistic rage was coined by Heinz Kohut in 1972. The model underlying the construct suggests that narcissistic injury occurs when a narcissist feels that their hidden, "true self" has been revealed. This may be the case when the narcissist experiences a "fall from grace", such as when their hidden behaviors or motivations are revealed, or when their importance is brought into question. Narcissistic injury is a cause of distress and can lead to dysregulation of behaviors as in narcissistic rage. Narcissistic rage occurs on a continuum, which may range from instances of aloofness and expressions of mild irritation or annoyance to serious outbursts, including violent attacks and murder.[2] Narcissistic rage reactions are not limited to personality disorders and may be also seen in catatonic, paranoid delusion and depressive episodes.[2] It has also been suggested that narcissists have two layers of rage. The first layer of rage can be thought of as a constant anger (towards someone else), with the second layer being a self-aimed wrath. 1 Freud and narcissist blows 2 Further psychoanalytic developments 3 Kohut and self psychology 4 Perfectionism 5 In therapy 6 Criticism Freud and narcissist blows[edit] In his 1914 case study of the "Wolfman", Freud identified the cause of the subject's adult neurosis as the moment when "he was forced to realise that his gonorrheal infection constituted a serious injury to his body. The blow to his narcissism was too much for him and he went to pieces".[3] A few years later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, looking at the inevitable setbacks of childhood sexuality, Freud maintained that "loss of love and failure leave behind them a permanent injury to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar ... reflecting the full extent to which he has been 'scorned'".[4] Further psychoanalytic developments[edit] Freud's concept of what in his last book he called "early injuries to the self (injuries to narcissism)"[5] was subsequently extended by a wide variety of psychoanalysts. Karl Abraham saw the key to adult depressions in the childhood experience of a blow to narcissism through the loss of narcissistic supply.[6] Otto Fenichel confirmed the importance of narcissistic injury in depressives[7] and expanded such analyses to include borderline personalities.[8] Edmund Bergler emphasized the importance of infantile omnipotence in narcissism,[9] and the rage that follows any blow to that sense of narcissistic omnipotence;[10] Annie Reich stressed how a feeling of shame-fuelled rage, when a blow to narcissism exposed the gap between one's ego ideal and mundane reality;[11] while Lacanians linked Freud on the narcissistic wound to Lacan on the narcissistic mirror stage.[12] Finally, object relations theory highlights rage against early environmental failures that left patients feeling bad about themselves when childhood omnipotence was too abruptly challenged.[13] Kohut and self psychology[edit] Heinz Kohut explored a wide range of rage experiences in his seminal article "Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage" (1972).[14] He considered narcissistic rage as one major form among many, contrasting it especially with mature aggression.[15] Because the very structure of the self itself is weakened in the narcissist, their rage cannot flower into real assertiveness;[16] and they are left instead prone to oversensitivity to perceived or imagined narcissistic injuries resulting in narcissistic rage.[17] For Kohut, narcissistic rage is related to narcissists' need for total control of their environment, including "the need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means".[18] It is an attempt by the narcissist to turn from a passive sense of victimization to an active role in giving pain to others, while at the same time attempting to rebuild their own (actually false) sense of self-worth. It may also involve self-protection and preservation, with rage serving to restore a sense of safety and power by destroying that which had threatened the narcissist.[18] Alternatively, according to Kohut, rages can be seen as a result of the shame at being faced with failure.[19] Narcissistic rage is the uncontrollable and unexpected anger that results from a narcissistic injury – a threat to a narcissist's self-esteem or worth. Rage comes in many forms, but all pertain to the same important thing: revenge. Narcissistic rages are based on fear and will endure even after the threat is gone.[20] To the narcissist, the rage is directed towards the person that they feel has slighted them; to other people, the rage is incoherent and unjust. This rage impairs their cognition, therefore impairing their judgment. During the rage they are prone to shouting, fact distortion and making groundless accusations.[21] In his book The Analysis of the Self, Kohut explains that expressions caused by a sense of things not going the expected way blossom into rages, and narcissists may even search for conflict to find a way to alleviate their pain or suffering.[22] He also noted how psychoanalytic treatment might itself be experienced by a patient as an unbearable narcissistic injury.[22] Perfectionism[edit] Narcissists are often pseudo-perfectionists and create situations in which they are the center of attention. The narcissist's attempts at being seen as perfect are necessary for their grandiose self-image. If a perceived state of perfection is not reached, it can lead to guilt, shame, anger or anxiety because the subject believes that they will lose the admiration and love of other people if they are imperfect.[23] Behind such perfectionism, self psychology would see earlier traumatic injuries to the grandiose self.[24] In therapy[edit] Adam Phillips has argued that, contrary to what common sense might expect, therapeutic cure involves the patient being encouraged to re-experience "a terrible narcissistic wound" – the child's experience of exclusion by the parental alliance – in order to come to terms with, and learn again, the diminishing loss of omnipotence entailed by the basic "facts of life".[25] Criticism[edit] Wide dissemination of Kohut's concepts may at times have led to their trivialization. Neville Symington points out that "You will often hear people say, 'Oh, I'm very narcissistic,' or, 'It was a wound to my narcissism.' Such comments are not a true recognition of the condition; they are throw-away lines. Really to recognise narcissism in oneself is profoundly distressing and often associated with denial."[26] Narcissistic abuse Narcissistic decompensation Narcissistic defences Narcissistic mortification Narcissistic withdrawal Rage (emotion) ^ Akhtar, Salman (2009). Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London, England: Karnac Books. p. 182. ISBN 9781780493039. ^ a b Malmquist, Carl P. (2006). Homicide: A Psychiatric Perspective. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. pp. 181–82. ISBN 1-58562-204-4. ^ Freud, Sigmund (1988). Richards, Angela (ed.). Case Histories II. London, England: Penguin UK. p. 340. ISBN 978-0140137996. ^ Freud, Sigmund (1991) [1915]. On Metapsychology. London, England: Penguin UK. p. 291. ISBN 978-0140138016. ^ Freud, Sigmund (1939). Moses and Monotheism. New York City: Knopf Doubleday. p. 120. ISBN 978-1578989379. ^ Fenichel, Otto (1946). The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. Abingdon, England: Routledge. p. 404. ISBN 978-1134617647. ^ Fenichel, p. 405 ^ Cooper, Arnold M. (2006). "The Narcissistic-Masochistic Character". In Cooper, Arnold M. (ed.). Contemporary Psychoanalysis in America. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Publishing. p. 116. ISBN 1-58562-232-X. ^ Bergler, Edmund (1970). Halliday, Jon; Fuller, Peter (eds.). The Psychology of Gambling. London, England: International Universities Press. pp. 176, 182. ISBN 978-0823655700. ^ O'Connell, Mark (2013). John Banville's Narcissistic Fictions. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 115. ISBN 978-1349348343. ^ Murray, Timothy; Smith, Alan K. (1998). Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early Modern Culture. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. p. xiv. ISBN 978-0816629602. ^ Casement, Patrick (1996). Further Learning from the Patient. Abingdon, England: Routledge. pp. 86, 131–32. ISBN 978-0415823937. ^ Paul H. Ornstein, in Cooper ed., p. 451 ^ Ornstein, in Cooper ed., pp. 451–52 ^ Cooper, "Introduction", Cooper, ed., p. xxxiv ^ Carlson, Jon; Sperry, Len; Helm, Katherine, eds. (1998). The Disordered Couple. Abingdon, England: Routledge. p. 218. ISBN 978-1138578586. ^ a b Ronningstam, Elsa (2005). Identifying and understanding the narcissistic personality. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 86–87. ISBN 0-19-514873-8. Archived from the original on 2020-05-27. ^ Kohut, Heinz (1972). Thoughts on narcissism and narcissistic rage. In The search for the self. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press. pp. 615–58. Vol. 2. ^ Golomb, Elan (1992). Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in their Struggle for Self. New York City: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-688-14071-8. ^ Thomas, David (2010). Narcissism: Behind the Mask. Leicester, England: The Book Guild Ltd. ISBN 978-1846245060. ^ a b Kohut, Heinz (1971). The analysis of the self: A systematic approach to the psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders. St. Paul, Minnesota: Perspectives Press. p. 95. ISBN 978-0226450124. ^ Sorotzkin, Benzion (April 18, 2006). "The Quest for Perfection: Avoiding Guilt or avoiding shame?". Psychology Today. New York City: Sussex Publishers. Archived from the original on March 9, 2008. ^ Arnold M. Cooper, "Introduction" in Arnold M. Cooper ed., Contemporary Psychoanalysis in America (2006) p. xxxiv ^ Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (1998) pp. 99–110 ^ Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London 2003) p. 10 Cooper J & Maxwell N. Narcissistic Wounds: Clinical Perspectives (1995) Levin JD. Slings and Arrows: Narcissistic Injury and Its Treatment (1995) Horowitz MJ & Arthur RJ. "Narcissistic Rage in Leaders: the Intersection of Individual Dynamics and Group Process". International Journal of Social Psychiatry. 1988 Summer; 34(2) pp. 135–41 Terman DM. "Aggression and Narcissistic Rage: A Clinical Elaboration". Annual of Psychoanalysis. 3:239–55 (1975) Panos Aloupis, "Narcissistic Injury" Agnès Oppenheimer, "Narcissistic Rage" Flying monkeys Malignant Egocentrism Empathy (lack of) Entitlement (exaggerated sense of) Grandiosity Magical thinking Manipulative Narcissistic elation Self-righteousness Shamelessness Superficial charm Superiority complex True self and false self Idealization and devaluation Don Juanism My way or the highway Counterdependency Dark triad Ego ideal "Egomania" (film) Empire-building God complex History of narcissism Messiah complex Narcissism of small differences Narcissistic parent Narcissistic Personality Inventory Narcissus (mythology) On Narcissism Sam Vaknin Self-serving bias Spoiled child The Culture of Narcissism Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Narcissistic_rage_and_narcissistic_injury&oldid=992726585" Psychoanalytic terminology Object relations theory	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1789
__label__wiki	0.577693	0.577693	Attingham Offerings for 2020 Posted in opportunities by Editor on December 21, 2019 Francis Wheatley, The Earl of Aldborough Reviewing Volunteers at Belan House, County Kildare, 1782 (later changes ca.1787 and extended ca.1810), oil on canvas, 155 × 265 cm (National Trust, Waddesdon Manor, bequeathed by James de Rothschild, 1957). Next year’s Attingham offerings: The Attingham Study Programme: The Historic House in Ireland, 3–11 June 2020 Applications due by 27 January 2020 This intensive nine-day study programme will examine the Irish country house and its wider estate, in the context of its changing ownership and presentation. Some visits will focus on houses with original decorative schemes and collections, allowing members to study the unique features of Irish design, while others will look at houses as the setting for outdoor and leisure pursuits. The programme’s first base will be the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at the University of Maynooth, from where it is planned to visit Carton House and Castletown House, both significant Palladian villas, whose interior decoration was conceived by the Lennox sisters; the latter complemented by a series of rare estate buildings and monuments. We will also explore the Casino at Marino, Newbridge House, and Leixlip Castle, Co. Kildare, bought by the Hon. Desmond Guinness in 1958, and from where the Irish Georgian Society was founded. The course will travel south to Cork through Waterford via Monksgrange House in Co. Wexford, where Irish Arts and Crafts furniture was made in the 1920s and which has a delightful ‘Lutyenesque’ garden. There will also be a short visit to the Dunbrody Famine Ship at New Ross which carried thousands of emigrants to North America in the 1840s. From Cork the Neo-Classical interiors at Fota House will be explored, as well as the romantic waterside retreat of Bantry House on the south-west coast. We also plan to visit Curraghmore, home of the Marquess of Waterford, whose ancestors arrived in 1170, and Lismore Castle, the seat of the Devonshires in Ireland. The study programme will be directed by Elizabeth Jamieson and will include visits to other privately-owned houses as well those listed. It will be supported by a series of lectures and seminars delivered by expert speakers. The course will start and finish in the historic city of Dublin. 69th Attingham Summer School, 2–19 July 2020 The 69th Attingham Summer School, an 18-day residential course directed by David Adshead and Tessa Wild, will visit country houses in Sussex, Oxfordshire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, and Norfolk. From West Dean, our first base, we will study, among other houses and gardens: the complex overlays of Arundel Castle, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Norfolk; Petworth House, where the patronage of great British artists such as Turner and Flaxman enrich its Baroque interiors; Uppark, a Grand Tour house; Standen, an Arts and Crafts reinterpretation of the country house. In the Midlands a series of related houses will be examined: Hardwick Hall, unique among Elizabethan houses for its survival of late 16th-century decoration and contents; Bolsover Castle, a Jacobean masque setting frozen in stone; and Chatsworth, where the collections and gardens of the Dukes of Devonshire span more than four centuries. Other highlights include the superb collections and landscaped gardens at Boughton House, ‘the English Versailles’; Calke Abbey, with its left ‘as found’ interiors; and the crisp neo-Classical Kedleston Hall. Based in Norwich, the final part of the course will explore the estates and collections of Norfolk, a coastal county of rich contrasts and exceptional houses. Our itinerary will include Blickling, the fine Jacobean house of Sir Henry Hobart and later of the Earls of Buckingham, renowned for its Long Gallery and superb book collection; Felbrigg Hall, a 17th-century house with important Grand Tour collections and mid 18th-century interiors by James Paine; Houghton Hall, the great Palladian country seat of Sir Robert Walpole the first ‘Prime Minister’, with its unrivaled work by William Kent; and Sheringham Park, a favorite work of Humphry Repton, for which he produced one of his famous Red Books. Throughout the course, lectures, seminars, and discussions will be held on all aspects of the country house including conservation and restoration, display and interpretation. Several private houses and collections will also be visited. Royal Collection Studies, 6–15 September 2020 Applications due by 7 February 2020 Directed by Rebecca Lyons and run on behalf of Royal Collection Trust, this strenuous 10-day course is based near Windsor and will visit royal palaces in and around London with specialist tutors (many from the Royal Collection Trust) and study the patronage and collecting of the Royal Family. From College Library to Country House, 14–18 September 2020 Applications due by 12 February 2020 From College Library to Country House is conceived from the perspective of the British aristocracy and gentry whose education centered upon preparing to run the country estate, including house and collections, and will argue for the importance of the library and the book collection in this process. This intensive residential course is based in the exceptional surroundings of Clare College in the center of the University of Cambridge. Directed by Andrew Moore, the programme focuses upon a series of iconic libraries including those at Houghton Hall and Holkham Hall. French Eighteenth-Century Studies at the Wallace Collection, 5–9 October 2020 Directed by Helen Jacobsen, this 5-day non-residential program aims to foster a deeper knowledge and understanding of French 18th-century fine and decorative art. Based at the Wallace Collection with one full study day at Waddesdon Manor this course is intended primarily to aid professional development with object-based study. The Wallace’s History of Collecting Seminars, 2020 Posted in lectures (to attend) by Editor on December 21, 2019 Next year at The Wallace: History of Collecting Seminars The Wallace Collection, London, 2020 The History of Collecting seminar series was established as part of the Wallace Collection’s commitment to the research and study of the history of collections and collecting, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Paris and London. The seminars are free, no bookings required; each begins at 5.30pm. To join the History of Collecting mailing list and receive updates on the future programme, please email your interest to collection@wallacecollection.org. Camilla Pietrabissa (Associate Lecturer, Bocconi University, Milan), From Nature: Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the Taste for Landscape Paintings under Louis XV Monday, 24 February Errol Manners (Dealer in Historic Ceramics), The Mystery of Redwares in Princely Collections Monday, 30 March Janet M. Brooke (Independent Scholar, Montreal), The Gilded Age in Canada: Reconstructing the Life and Afterlife of the Sir William Van Horne Collection Monday, 27 April Ellinoor Bergvelt (Guest Researcher University of Amsterdam / Research Fellow, Dulwich Picture Gallery), The Dutch King Willem II (1792–1849) as Collector and Source of Some Important Pictures in the Wallace Collection Arthur Bijl (Assistant Curator of Ottoman, Middle Eastern and Asian Arms and Armour, The Wallace Collection), Marvels in Lucknow: ‘Ajab and Asaf al-Dawla’s Collection of Curiosities Monday, 29 June Krystle Attard Trevisan (PhD Candidate, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London), The ‘Primo Costo’ Inventory of Count Saverio Marchese (1757–1833): Mapping the Print Market in Malta and its European Connections Monday, 27 July Sara Ayres (Independent Scholar, London), Descriptions of Collections and Their Display at the Stuart Court in 1669 in a Manuscript Account of Prince George of Denmark’s Grand Tour, 1668–1670 Heike Zech (Head of Decorative Arts before 1800 and History of Craft, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg), Germanic and Gentle? The Foundation and Early Collections of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg Monday, 26 October Valérie M. C. Bajou (Chief Curator, Versailles Palace), The Paintings by Horace Vernet in Louis-Philippe’s Private Collection: Commission, Purpose, Display, and Destination Monday, 30 November Helen Jacobsen (Senior Curator, The Wallace Collection), Creating a Market: Dealers, Auctioneers, and the Passion for Riesener Furniture, 1800–1882	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1790
__label__cc	0.529272	0.470728	Elderly Woman Lives Happily with 117 Cats in One Room Society » Real life stories There are precedents in the Moscow region when people were evicted from residential high rises because of the extreme number of pets they had in their apartments. Last year, a 57-year old woman was evicted from her apartment in Jubileyny city of the Moscow region where she lived with her 20 dogs. The Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper wrote about an incident where for over 10 years the residents of building 45 at Shpilevskaya Street in Moscow have been trying to evict their neighbor and her 117 cats. Svetlana, a single retired woman residing in a studio on the 13th floor began bringing stray animals to her apartment 12 years ago. A few years ago, the residents of the building wrote a group complaint. When the woman opened the door, her neighbors counted 60 cats and dogs. The court ruled that all animals were to be sent to shelters. The residents won the first battle, but that was not the end of the story. Within a short period of time, the retiree collected a new army of stray animals and now shares her apartment with 117 cats. This is a record number. According to a correspondent of Komsomolskaya Pravda, the stench in the building hallway was unbearable. The woman does not let anyone into her apartment. However, she agreed to talk to the journalist. She is convinced that she is doing a good thing. There is no place to step in the studio and the ammonia smell hurts your eyes. The woman herself does not seem to be uncomfortable. However, the journalist said that the animals did not look well taken care of. Many of them had mats in their hair, their eyes had puss in them, they looked exhausted and some did not get up. The woman does not let them go outside as she believes that she has “no moral right to throw them out.” The same situation is unfolding in building 8 on Laso Street in Perovo, the Moscow region. There are 17 animals living in a studio apartment that cause the neighbors much trouble. The owners of the apartment, a mother and her son, are registered with a psychiatric institution. The apartment has no power because the owners do not pay energy bills, and the windows are covered with plywood instead of glass. The neighbors are collecting signatures for complaint letters to the police department, city government and psychiatric institution, but to no avail. Now, when the building has its own managing company, there is hope that the family will be evicted. However, it takes time to solve the problem. Before the officials can gain access to the apartment, the owner must receive three warnings. This takes almost two months. Then a special committee accompanied by a policeman will compile an act of inappropriate condition of the apartment. Only then can they file a claim with the court. Animal protectors are also against such unauthorized shelters. They are usually organized by single, unhealthy, and poor people. They do it to keep themselves busy, but animals suffer. There were incidents when neighbors were able to evict the residents who have shelters in their apartment through court orders. However, these cases are rare. Most of the time high risers’ residents have to put up with their degenerated neighbors.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1792
__label__cc	0.729272	0.270728	Theses - Engineering Systems Division Engineering Systems - Master's degree Building a national technology and innovation infrastructure for an aging society Lau, Jasmin Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Technology and Policy Program. Joseph F. Coughlin. This thesis focuses on the potential of strategic technology innovation and implementation in sustaining an aging society, and examines the need for a comprehensive national technology and innovation infrastructure in the U.S., capable of supporting the development and use of technologies by the aging population and their caregivers. The pervasiveness of population aging makes it a primary concern for nations around the world today. As the inadequacies of existing resources become apparent, policy makers .are now turning to technology and innovation to cope with the changing demographics. 'Technological innovations to accommodate the elderly have existed since centuries ago, and they been useful in extending the human capability beyond perceived limitations of aging. However, new technologies developed with the same objectives are not widely adopted and accepted by the aging population today. The thesis is divided into two complementary sections. (cont.) The first examines three hypotheses for the slow penetration rates of new technologies for aging: 1) Useful, affordable and usable technologies are unavailable, 2) Professional carers that can play a catalytic role between technological innovation and implementation are not technologically educated and prepared to incorporate the technologies into elderly care, and 3) The dynamics of policy formation and agenda setting are not conducive to the design and implementation of "technology for aging" policies. The second section consists of two comparative studies to highlight the gaps within the existing "technologies for aging" industry infrastructure. A study of the domestic automobile and mobile telecommunications industry provides a national perspective, whereas a study of eleven industrialized nations engaged in technological innovations for the elderly provides an international perspective. The research shows that useful, affordable and usable technologies are available, but their diffusion is hindered by inadequate human capital development and an unconducive policy formation and agenda setting climate. (cont.) The comparative studies further illuminate existing infrastructure gaps and also provide useful frameworks to facilitate the bridging of these gaps. By facilitating the development of a robust "technology for aging" infrastructure, policy makers can help to ensure that the U.S. is ready to meet the challenges of an aging population. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2006. Technology and Policy Program. Technology and Policy - Master's degree	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1794
__label__cc	0.703998	0.296002	Lena Harper Trott Theatre Scrapbooks Lena Harper Trott (1883-1964) graduated from the University of Denver in 1907. She married Alfred Blake Trott, the president of Daniels & Fisher Company, and they had a daughter, Frances Harper Trott. This collection contains two scrapbooks. The first covers the Tabor Theatre, the Broadway Theatre and Elitch Theatre from 1898-1910. The second covers theatres in Denver, New York and Chicago from 1909-1913. Trott, Lena Harper (Person) Lena Harper Trott was an alumna of the University of Denver, graduating in 1907. She was married to Alfred Blake Trott, and they had a daughter, Frances Harper Trott. Mr. Trott was the president of Daniels & Fisher Company in Denver where he had risen from being a stock boy. In connection with his duties as president, Trott and his wife traveled extensively in Europe. Theatrical scrapbooks of programs, pictures, stage-scenes: The first covers the years 1901-1910 and the Broadway, Elitch's, Tabor, Theatres in Denver and the Hippodrome, Wash. D.C. as well as the Gamma Phi Beta play Feb. 1907 for DU Seniors. The second scrapbook covers 1909-1913 and theatres in New York, Chicago and Denver. The Scrapbooks are arranged chronologically in one series. Albums (Books) Lena Harper Trott Theatre Scrapbooks, M275. Special Collections and Archives. Lena Harper Trott Theatre Scrapbooks, M275. Special Collections and Archives. https://duarchives.coalliance.org/repositories/2/resources/746 Accessed January 16, 2021.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1797
__label__wiki	0.547204	0.547204	The Door to Hell: Inside Turkmenistan’s Ever-Burning Gas Crater The Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan, also known as the Door to Hell or Gates of Hell, is a natural gas field collapsed into a cavern located in Derweze, Turkmenistan. Geologists intentionally set it on fire to prevent the spread of methane gas and it is thought to have been burning continuously since 1971. Apparently, it wasn’t a very wise move. This amazing hi-res panorama photo was made from three 17mm shots stitched together and allow a rare glimpse into the burning crater. Image credit: Tormod Sandtorv (click image to enlarge) The name “Door to Hell” was given by the locals, and it’s not hard to see why. The giant sinkhole is an incredible 69 metres wide, 30 metres deep, and is constantly in flames. Details on the origin of the sinkhole are sketchy, but it is understood that Soviet geologists initially came across the site in 1971 and believed it was rich in oil. But shortly after they began drilling, the crater collapsed and began emitting noxious gases. In an attempt to minimise the dangers of the gas, they set it alight with the expectation it would burn itself out in a matter of days. But the calculations have proved to be way off, and the crater has been burning continuously for 49 years. The Turkmen government hopes that the crater will become a popular tourist attraction. The surrounding area is also popular for wild desert camping. Hi-res photo of the Darvaza gas crater and the surrounding area, including where the tents usually are pitched, a couple of hundred meters away to the south of the crater. Image credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen In November 2013, explorer and storm chaser George Kourounis, on an expedition funded partly by National Geographic, set out to be the first person to plumb the depths of the crater. At the bottom he collected soil samples, hoping to learn whether life can survive in such harsh conditions—and perhaps shedding light on whether life could survive similar conditions elsewhere in the universe. Here’s a short video of his descent: The Door to Hell has now been burning non-stop for almost half a decade, and geologists still have no idea how much longer it will burn for. It might die out tomorrow, or it might burn for another 100 years, nobody really knows. Here Are the World’s Oldest Clothes and They Still Look Beautiful Today Scientists Have Just Discovered a New State Of Matter: Liquid Glass Adorable Dwarf Giraffes Spotted in the Wild for the First Time	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1800
__label__wiki	0.867873	0.867873	American fighter takes on German champ in Chessboxing 10/14/2007 – David “Double D” Depto and “Anti Terror” Frank Stoldt will meet for the World Championship in Chessboxing. Six rounds of speed chess and five rounds of boxing will take place alternatingly. In a maximum of eleven rounds, the decision will come either through K.O. or check mate. The match takes place on November 3rd 2007 in Berlin, Germany. Press announcement. The Sniper is a universal opening framework which can be played against all main first white moves - 1.e4, 1.d4, 1.c4, 1.f4 and 1.Nf3. Black plays 1…g6, 2…Bg7 and 3…c5 against practically anything! Number One Fighting Sport Meets Number One Thinking Sport German Champion Fights American for the World Championship in Chessboxing for the First Time On Saturday, November 3, 2007, David “DOUBLE D” Depto and “ANTI TERROR” Frank Stoldt will meet in Berlin. The fight for the world light heavyweight title will take place in the storage area of Tape, one of the most popular clubs in the city. In Chessboxing, two different worlds from the sports universe meet which push their athletes to the limit, mentally as well as physically. Six rounds of speed chess and five rounds of boxing will take place alternatingly. In a maximum of eleven rounds, the decision will come either through K.O. or check mate. For the first time in the history of this young sport, an American will challenge Europe’s best chessboxer for the world championship on November 3, 2007: Coming from San Francisco, David “DOUBLE D” Depto is 30 years old, weighs 85 kilograms (187.4 pounds) and has fought in 30 boxing matches. His chess Elo rating is 1850. Professionally, the trained economist with an IQ of 140 is a manager of a large concern in the pharmaceutical industry. “ANTI TERROR” Frank Stoldt comes from Berlin, is 36 years old and weighs 84.5 kilograms (186.3 pounds). He has previously fought in 25 boxing matches and was the kickboxing champion of Berlin. He has been an active chessboxer since 2005 and has a chess Elo rating of 2000. He is a police officer and is currently training police forces in Kosovo on behalf of the United Nations. He completed his boxing training in the truly authentic atmosphere of an Albanian boxing club. Zoran Mijatovic vs 'Anti Terror' Frank Stoldt in April 2006 After former boxing heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis outed himself as a huge fan of Chessboxing, the WCBO, the World Chess Boxing Organization has continued to grow in international popularity and has attracted a large number of new athletes. This new sport is finding especially strong interest in the USA and Russia. The WCBO is preparing for its first international tour in 2008. WCBO, Martina Lülsdorf +49 (0)30. 275 82 597 +49 (0)179. 5263049 luelsdorf (at) wcbo.org With friendly support from: Senator Entertainment AG, BKB Ben Lee, DGT Projects, New Thinking, Roomdivision The chessboxing evening begins at 8:00 p.m. with two undercard fights. The first undercard fight will take place at the middle weight division: The reigning Prenzlauer Berg champion of the Berlin club cbcberlin, Sebastian Bauersfeld, 23 years old, 74 kg (163,1 pounds), with an Elo rating of 1750, will take on Jan Mielke, the champion of Cologne, 34 years old, 70 kg (154,3 pounds), with an Elo rating of 1600. In the second fight at the light heavyweight division, Berliner Sascha Wandkowski, 28 years old and 79 kg (174,2 pounds), with an Elo rating of 1850, will take on Marc Breuer from Cologne, 35 years old, 81 kg (178,6 pounds), with an Elo rating of 1972. The evening will be rounded out with a music and show program which the WCBO will create with its partner from the Berlin label and radio station Motor.de. As a special highlight, a sound score especially composed for chessboxing by top producer JunkieXL will be premiered. JXL is known for his number 1 hit remix of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” which was used for an advertising campaign for the 2002 Soccer World Cup. He also produced for Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Sepultura. Playboy Germany did a many-page article and blurbed the story on its title Both the Russian and the Bulgarian editions of Maxim carried major stories Location: Tape, Heidestraße 14, Berlin, Germany 15 € for standing room 30 € for a seat in the third row 40 € for the second row 60 € for the first row 120 € for the first row and champagne Official Chessboxing web site Chess Boxing: the Tokyo Fight (ChessBase) Chess Boxing World Championship (ChessBase) Chessboxing on ESPN, Playboy and Maxim (ChessBase)	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1808
__label__cc	0.580519	0.419481	tag: Mark Taimanov - Page 1 50th anniversary of the Interzonal in Palma de Mallorca 11/10/2020 – Yesterday, November 9, was the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Interzonal Tournament played in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The best players in the world participated, including four giants of the chess world hailing from the Soviet Union: Vasily Smyslov, Efim Geller, Mark Taimanov and Lev Polugaevsky. \| Photo: Chessy Publishing House More... Comments 11 Riddle solved: Fischer was winning! 5/20/2020 – The endgame of the fourth game of the famous Fischer-Taimanov candidates match Vancouver 1971 left an intriguing puzzle. Was the adjourned position already lost or was Taimanov's 42th move, played after the adjournment session, a decisive mistake? We asked our readers to help settle the historical debate. And they helped our endgame expert GM Karsten Müller to settle the question. More... Comments 2 The old riddle of Fischer vs Taimanov 5/13/2020 – The endgame of the fourth game of the famous candidates match Vancouver 1971 is very instructive. But one question has remained puzzling. Was the adjourned position already lost or was Taimanov's 42nd move a decisive mistake? Once again we invite you to debate this question with leading endgame experts, including our own GM Karsten Müller. With the help of chess engines you can win the analytical duels and show them where history needs to be corrected. In Memoriam Mark Taimanov (1926-2016) 11/28/2016 – Today, Mark Taimanov died at the age of 90 in his hometown St. Petersburg. The Russian Grandmaster was one of the greatest personalities in the history of chess and a man with many talents. After being a filmstar when still a child he later formed a famous piano duo with his first wife, and was one of the world's best chessplayers though he lost his most famous match 0-6 against Bobby Fischer. Obituary... Mark Taimanov celebrates 90th birthday 2/7/2016 – As a child Mark Taimanov was a film star and later he was one of the best chessplayers of his time. He was also a celebrated concert pianist, giving concerts all over the world. With his fourth wife he founded and runs a chess school in St. Petersburg. Today, 7th February 2016, Taimanov celebrates his 90th birthday. Dagobert Kohlmeyer talked to the multi-talent. Going strong at 85 – Mark Taimanov's birthday 2/16/2011 – For decades he was one of the world's top grandmasters. Mark Evgenievich Taimanov, who last week turned 85, has led a very full life, as a child actor, concert pianist and as a proud father (having children 57 years apart!). For his birthday this extraordinary personality gave a number of interviews and with them a unique insight into contemporary chess and his personal life. More... Comments My life with chess and music 5/23/2002 – "It is not easy to describe in a few sentences careers than span over seventy years," says Mark Taimanov. But nonetheless he tries and gives us a unique insight into a life that took him from movie actor to concert pianist to world-class chess player. Taimanov is an exceptional storyteller, and you can read all about his life (and listen to his music) in this wonderful interview by Joel Lautier.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1809
__label__wiki	0.595888	0.595888	A Solid Foundation for Reform Published in The Catholic Thing on May 23, 2019 By Stephen P. White The motu proprio released earlier this month by Pope Francis – Vos estis lux mundi– is not everything the Church in the United States could have hoped for, but it is a good deal more than many expected. And it’s a great lunge forward for the Church globally, much of which still lags far behind the Church in the United States when it comes to the handling of allegations of clerical sexual abuse. The Church now has universal norms for handling allegations of misconduct by bishops, including not just sexual abuse but the mishandling and cover-up of abuse allegations. It expands the definition of “vulnerable adult” to include the abuse of power and coercion by religious superiors. It puts in place mandatory reporting requirements for all clergy, protections for those who report abuse, and a prohibition on the imposition of silence on those who would report abuse. A great deal of the document’s effectiveness will depend on its implementation. And as Fr. Murray and others have pointed out, there are gaps and imprecisions that will need filling and clarification. And as we’ve seen all too clearly, just because something is reported to Rome is no assurance that it will be dealt with swiftly or with even a modicum of transparency.Still, to have this degree of reform in place, or at least on the books, less than a year after the McCarrick scandal broke, is no small feat. One concern about Vos estis is the limited role it envisions for lay review in cases of episcopal malfeasance. Vos estis adopts a version of the so-called “Metropolitan model,” whereby allegations against a bishop go to the metropolitan in that ecclesiastical province. If allegations are against the metropolitan himself, they are to be handled by the senior suffragan. If bishops investigating bishops doesn’t fill you with confidence, you’re not alone. Vos estis allows for lay involvement in such investigations but does not require it. Next month’s meeting of the USCCB in Baltimore will be an opportunity for the American bishops to build on the framework laid out in Vos estis. They can start by beefing up the amount of lay involvement in the review of allegations against bishops. Another aspect of Vos estis that is worth keeping an eye on is the mandatory reporting requirement. Vos estis mandates that every cleric, including bishops, who has even a “well-founded reason to believe” that abuse has occurred, must report that abuse. This includes abuse of “vulnerable adults” under the new broader definition (think seminarians). The reporting requirement even extends to instances in which a cleric has interfered with or avoided – by omission or commission – civil or canonical investigations into abuse allegations. There’s no way to know how scrupulously this mandatory reporting will be enforced. And the motu proprio doesn’t lay out the penalties for failing to report. But the upshot is that every instance of abuse, and every episcopal failure to handle abuse allegations and investigations properly, must now be reported. For years, and especially since last summer’s revelations about Theodore McCarrick, Catholics have wanted to know: Who knew what and when? No one knows how many instances of abuse, or mishandling of abuse cases, have gone unreported over the decades. Maybe the new motu proprio will lead to a trickle of new reports. But there’s also a chance that Vos estis has just opened the ecclesiastical floodgates. The priest who remembers creepy shenanigans from formation staff in his seminary days but never reported it? Now he’s required to report. The priest who worked in the chancery and was pretty sure his bishop was moving abusive priests to keep them out of trouble with the law? He’s obliged to report. The bishop who had reason to believe his brother bishop was taking advantage of seminarians? The priest who knows his bishop was turning a blind eye? The religious brother who was sexually harassed? All these are required to report. Of course, lay men and women aren’t under the same requirement to report, but they’re free to do so. The motu proprio’s insistence on protections for those who report and its prohibition on imposed silence on those who might otherwise report could turn a stream of new reports into a torrent. Maybe I’m being too cynical about the number of skeletons in the closet of the Catholic Church in this country. Maybe I’m not cynical enough about the reticence of clergy to report old incidents that may not even directly involve them just because some new motu proprio says that have to. Maybe. But I think chanceries can expect a busy summer. If the chanceries are going to be busy, I expect Rome is going to be inundated. Not only can they expect a slew of new cases, Vos estis has the Curia on deadline. When a report against a bishop comes to Rome, the dicastery assigned the case has thirty days to respond with instructions on how to proceed. The Metropolitan (or senior suffragan) investigating a case has ninety days to investigate, and must send monthly reports to Rome during the investigation. Here in the United States, much of the infrastructure for handling these cases and investigations already exists. That’s simply not the case in many parts of the world. If Americans are likely to want our bishops to push full-speed ahead and be as aggressive as possible in enforcing Vos estis, the enforcement and implementation of the motu proprio in other parts of the world will be much more difficult – either because of cultural resistance to the reforms, or because of simple lack of resources and personnel. A year after the McCarrick scandal broke, Vos estis has put the Church on much surer footing for addressing the abuse crisis. And if it’s not everything the Church in this country needs, it does lay a solid foundation for the work that needs to be done by our own bishops. In June, in Baltimore, we’ll see if they’re up to the task. The ball is in their court. © 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. Stephen P. White is a fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. Hard Lessons of the McCarrick Affair Three Models of Priestly Goodness Always see the latest from Stephen P. White and other EPPC Scholars. 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__label__cc	0.732219	0.267781	Why do women come to Islam: The Purest Faith [Part 2] My friend and I are converts to Islam and have seen it all… women who convert to please boyfriends or husbands, girls who are forced to convert in order to be able to marry the men they love, women who convert because they feel lonely, those who convert to marry a rich guy from the Arabian Gulf, and those few converts that come to Islam for its message and its teachings. Some of us challenge many main-stream ideologies and look for alternative interpretations while trying to make the revelation alive and relevant to today’s world. Unfortunately, this is not always welcomed in conservative Muslim circles. My friend and I have a dream of making our ummah alive and its women empowered; however, until now, we find that the main problem for women’s abuse and lack of empowerment are themselves. Many women, including Western converts, get from Islam only what people tell them Islam is. They hardly learn by themselves, and they meet in the mosque just to reaffirm their second-class citizen status. However, recently we saw what I consider the purest faith in Islam. The embodiment of this faith is a 16-year-old girl, who converted to Islam at age 14. The simple girl, who walks around accompanied by her Catholic mom, is an example of strong faith and modern beliefs. This young lady did not come to Islam for a man and did not see in it a marriage proposal and lots of money. This girl knew, in the moment she listened “Allah,” that she belonged. What is more surprising, still, is her mother. The Catholic mother has seen all these changes in her daughter and has adapted to them. She took her to convert; she takes her to Islamic lectures and bought her a praying mat when she converted. While the mother remains a Christian, she told us that she was happy for her daughter and she explained that people shouldn’t mess with anybody’s faith even if it is your child’s. Unlikely as it sounds, I saw in this woman a true Islamic behaviour and in her daughter an incandescent faith. Religion in Islam cannot be compulsory; however, nowadays we listen to the Muslim leaders saying that it is our duty to spread Dawa (equivalent to evangelization) around the world and make the entire American continent Islamic. Besides, it is still surprising how much do mainstream Muslims criticize Christians and Jews. Many of them truly believe that they are sinners. That’s actually all I could think of when I met this Christian mother who took her own daughter into Islam. In a sense, I felt ashamed for meeting them in a lecture, where the lecturer lady clearly expressed that Christians and Jews did not follow Allah’s revelation and she accused them of making them up stuff in their sacred books. Regardless, the mother sits quietly and listens. She considers that it is important for her daughter to listen and learn about these things even if she does not believe them. She truly thinks that this is the right thing for her daughter. While many Muslims take the essentialist approach, and usually claim that people come to Islam because it has the TRUTH, who knows what the TRUTH is? Even among Muslims there are so many different Truths! Allah did not reveal every single piece of the truth for Allah left us to discover the pieces of the puzzle. This young Muslim girl won’t ever be an essentialist Muslim because she will find that the person behind her strength is not a Muslim and does not think that Islam has the TRUTH but only part of it. Many Muslim converts wish they had such an understanding mother or father, but our fears are always pushed down by mainstream Muslims who say that we are doing the right thing regardless of what our families think; thus, many new Muslims turn their back to their families and merge into the Muslim community. Nevertheless, I wonder, what would those mainstream Muslims do if their children came and told them, I believe that Jesus is God’s son or I believe in the Torah? Well, many of them, following Shari’ah, would stone their own children to death for converting to other faith. That’s why I find the young lady’s mother reaction so stunning. Her attitude gives the highest example of a true Islamic reaction. If you cannot make your children follow your religion, support them and enhance their faith in whatever religion they choose.Help your child be the best Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, etc. that she or he can be. Furthermore, keeping family ties is extremely important from an Islamic perspective. There are few things that Islam values more than the family, that’s why it encourages healthy relationships with parents and relatives. Contrary to many people, this mother did not push her daughter away. And contrary to many converts, this girl does not see in her mother an ‘unbeliever.’ The principles of tolerance, knowledge, support, solidarity and love are extremely important in Islam. It is a shame that sometimes we value other things more. While this young girl has come to a community that is like a sweet & sour soup, for all the shades of Islam that can be tasted on it, she will find some of the most powerful features of Islam in her own mother, who has chosen to hold to the strongest principles of Christianity and combine them with the most important features of Islam to provide her daughter with the ‘right’ way. As for the young lady, coming to Islam is a tough decision; but she has managed to continue with it and make it her own. Her decision was probably more based on an Ideal Islam than on a cultural Islam. Therefore, she has truly found what my friend and I found in Islam: a world of possibilities and a road to a better world. While we struggle to find our place in the community and to fight essentialist conservative views, we are sure that we have a mission in Islam. It is not something we choose or something that we even knew we had, but that comes by itself. That’s why the girl said: “I listened Allah’s name and I knew I had heard that before and I felt that I belonged.” That was her own spiritual trip and her mom became the road. Posted in: Converts, Religion, The Divine \| Tagged: Catholic, convert, Daughter, Islam, Mother Polygamy: women’s edge in Islam Because we must reject Bill 94 in Canada 3 thoughts on “Why do women come to Islam: The Purest Faith [Part 2]” I speak to my mother about Islam. She is a Mormon or Latter-day Saint. She doesn’t want to hear it and as long as I am away from her she is okay with me having my religion. I will always tell her stuff about Islam no matter what. I have faith in Allah and that is all that matters to me. Not how others view me as a Muslimah but how I feel Allah views me as a Muslimah. aerandiera says: Dear sister: that’s why I found this case so touching! So many of us have the same issues as you. I think this girl is truly blessed. And you are blessed as well for being strong in your beliefs and focusing on Allah. LouisaBalata says: Great blog, great articles … this one appeals to me especially because I am one of the rare lucky converts in the same case as this girl. My mother didn’t do as much as going with me to the mosque, but my conversion didn’t change anything about the strong relationship we have. But I indeed meet lots of muslim people telling me christians and jews are worth nothing, so how can you tell them that without the tacit support of your christian mother you would never had become muslim ? Louise ( France ).	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1813
__label__wiki	0.589953	0.589953	Tag: HIPAA DOL and IRS Extend Certain Timeframes for Employee Benefit Plans, Participants, and Beneficiaries Affected by the COVID-19 Outbreak On May 4, 2020, the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA, which is part of the U.S. Department of Labor) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued joint guidance extending certain timeframes otherwise applicable to group health plans, disability and other welfare plans, pension plans, and their participants and beneficiaries under ERISA and the Code. This guidance will require Plan Sponsors to temporarily revise their administrative practices and their form notices used in connection with COBRA, HIPAA’s Special Enrollment rights, and ERISA Claim Procedures. HIPAA requires group health plans to provide special enrollment rights for certain people upon the loss of eligibility for other coverage, or upon the addition of a dependents due to birth, adoption, etc. Generally, group health plans must allow such individuals to enroll in the group health plan if they are otherwise eligible and if enrollment is requested within 30 days of the occurrence of the event. COBRA permits qualified beneficiaries who lose coverage under a group health plan to elect continuation health coverage. COBRA generally provides a qualified beneficiary a period of at least 60 days to elect COBRA continuation coverage under a group health plan. Plans are required to allow payment of premiums in monthly installments, and plans cannot require payment of premiums before 45 days after the day of the initial COBRA election. COBRA continuation coverage may be terminated for failure to pay premiums timely. Under the COBRA rules, a premium is considered paid timely if it is made not later than 30 days after the first day of the period for which payment is being made. Notice requirements prescribe time periods for employers to notify the plan of certain qualifying events and for individuals to notify the plan of certain qualifying events or a determination of disability. Notice requirements also prescribe a time period for plans to notify qualified beneficiaries of their rights to elect COBRA continuation coverage. ERISA requires plans to establish and maintain reasonable claims procedures and imposes additional rights and obligations with respect to internal claims and appeals and external review for non-grandfathered group health plans. II. Temporary Extensions Under the Guidance All of the foregoing provisions include timing requirements for certain acts in connection with employee benefit plans, some of which have been temporarily modified by the new guidance. These changes, and the implications for Plan Sponsors, are summarized below. A. Relief for Plan Participants, Beneficiaries, Qualified Beneficiaries, and Claimants Subject to a one year statutory duration limitation, all group health plans, disability and other employee welfare benefit plans, and employee pension benefit plans subject to ERISA or the Code must disregard the period from March 1, 2020 until sixty (60) days after the announced end of the National Emergency (the “Outbreak Period”) for all plan participants, beneficiaries, qualified beneficiaries, or claimants wherever located in determining the following periods and dates— (1) The 30-day period (or 60-day period, if applicable) to request special enrollment under ERISA section 701(f) and Code section 9801(f) Implications for employers: Work with your third-party administrator and insurance carriers to ensure the extended special enrollment period is implemented for the duration of the Outbreak Period, which could require retroactive coverage as far back as March 1. Determine whether and how to communicate the extension to employees. (2) The 60-day election period for COBRA continuation coverage under ERISA section 605 and Code section 4980B(f)(5) (3) The date for making COBRA premium payments pursuant to ERISA section 602(2)(C) and (3) and Code section 4980B(f)(2)(B)(iii) and (C) (4) The date for individuals to notify the plan of a qualifying event or determination of disability under ERISA section 606(a)(3) and Code section 4980B(f)(6)(C) This exacerbates the adverse selection issue inherent in COBRA because Plans may have to provide retroactive coverage for many months. The problem is made worse by the fact that, even though qualified beneficiaries theoretically have to pay for the retroactive coverage, if they elect COBRA right after the qualifying event, they do not have to pay until after the Outbreak Period ends. This means a qualified beneficiary could elect COBRA and receive the coverage) and then subsequently decide not to pay for it. Plan Sponsors and insurers will then have the option of retroactively terminating the coverage and trying to adjust the claims already paid. Work with your third-party administrator and insurance carriers to ensure they have implemented the extended COBRA periods. Either temporarily revise your COBRA notices and forms or ensure a temporary cover is added to all COBRA communications as necessary to inform employees and qualified beneficiaries of the extended timeframes. (5) The date within which individuals may file a benefit claim under the plan’s claims procedure pursuant to 29 CFR 2560.503-1 (6) The date within which claimants may file an appeal of an adverse benefit determination under the plan’s claims procedure pursuant to 29 CFR 2560.503-1(h) Work with your third-party administrator and insurance carriers to ensure they have implemented the extended claims periods. Either temporarily revise your claims notices and forms or ensure a temporary cover is added to all claims communications as necessary to inform employees and qualified beneficiaries of the extended timeframes. This will impact health flexible spending accounts (“FSAs”) and health reimbursement arrangements (“HRAs”) that have run-out periods that extended beyond March 1, 2020. Because the Outbreak Period began on March 1, 2020, any health FSAs and HRAs that have March or April deadlines for submitting prior-year expenses for reimbursement, will need to extend the deadline until 60 days after the Outbreak Period ends to submit expenses for reimbursement for the 2019 plan year. (7) The date within which claimants may file a request for an external review after receipt of an adverse benefit determination or final internal adverse benefit determination pursuant to 29 CFR 2590.715-2719(d)(2)(i) and 26 CFR 54.9815-2719(d)(2)(i), and (8) The date within which a claimant may file information to perfect a request for external review upon a finding that the request was not complete pursuant to 29 CFR 2590.715-2719(d)(2)(ii) and 26 CFR 54.9815-2719(d)(2)(ii) Work with your third-party administrator and insurance carriers to ensure they have implemented the extended claim review periods. B. Relief for Group Health Plans With respect to group health plans, and their sponsors and administrators, the Outbreak Period shall be disregarded when determining the date for providing a COBRA election notice under ERISA section 606(c) and Code section 4980B(f)(6)(D). Implication for Employers: Plan administrators are not required to provide the COBRA election notice during the Outbreak Period. As a practical matter, however, plan administrators likely will want to timely provide election notices to encourage qualified beneficiaries to timely elect and pay for COBRA coverage. Author Erwin KratzPosted on May 16, 2020 Categories Coronavirus, ERISA, Health Benefits, Pension Benefits, Qualified Plans, Welfare BenefisTags Claims procedures, COBRA, HIPAA EEOC Wellness Regulations Sent to EEOC For Review (AARP v US EEOC) The United States District Court for the District of DC has concluded in the case of AARP v. United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that the EEOC’s final wellness regulations are arbitrary and capricious, and has therefore sent them back to the EEOC for review. The regulations address the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) on employer-sponsored wellness programs. The Plaintiff in the case, the AARP, argued that permitting incentives of up to 30% of the cost of coverage is an unreasonable interpretation of the term “voluntary” because the incentive is too high to give employees a meaningful choice whether to participate in programs requiring disclosure of ADA-protected information. It further argued that the EEOC’s reversal of its prior position on the meaning of “voluntary”, which precluded incentives, was unsupported, inadequately explained, and thus, arbitrary and capricious. The court ruled that the EEOC has not justified its conclusion that the 30% incentive level is a reasonable interpretation of voluntariness. Rejecting the EEOC’s argument that 30% is appropriate because it harmonizes the EEOC regulations with HIPAA as amended by the ACA, the court explained that HIPAA’s 30% incentive cap is not intended to serve as an interpretation of the term “voluntary” since voluntariness of participation is not an issue under HIPAA. Moreover, the court pointed out, the EEOC regulations are inconsistent with the HIPAA regulations in other respects. For instance, the EEOC regulations extend the 30% cap to participatory wellness programs to which the HIPAA cap does not apply. While holding that the EEOC made its decision arbitrarily, the court did not vacate the regulations, noting that they have been applicable for eight months. Instead, the court remanded the regulations to the EEOC for reconsideration. For now, the EEOC’s final wellness regulations will remain in effect, pending the EEOC’s review of the regulations. Wellness programs are regulated in part by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as amended by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as well as by HIPAA’s implementing regulations. HIPAA prevents health plans and insurers from discriminating on the basis of “any health status related factor,” but allows covered entities to offer “premium discounts or rebates” on a plan participant’s copayments or deductibles in return for that individual’s compliance with a wellness program. A “reward” or incentive may include a discount on insurance costs or a penalty that increases the plan participant’s costs because of non-participation in the wellness program. See 26 C.F.R. § 54.9802-1(f)(1)(i). The ACA’s amendments to HIPAA, and the accompanying implementing regulations, allow plans and insurers to offer incentives of up to 30% of the cost of coverage in exchange for an employee’s participation in a health-contingent wellness program, a kind of wellness program in which the reward is based on an insured individual’s satisfaction of a particular health-related factor. See Incentives for Nondiscriminatory Wellness Programs in Group Health Plans (“the 2013 HIPAA regulations” or “2013 HIPAA rule”), 78 Fed. Reg. 33,158, 33,180. Neither the ACA nor the 2013 HIPAA regulations impose a cap on incentives that may be offered in connection with participatory wellness programs, which are programs that do not condition receipt of the incentive on satisfaction of a health factor. Id. at 33,167. However, because employer-sponsored wellness programs often involve the collection of sensitive medical information from employees, including information about disabilities or genetic information, these programs often implicate the ADA and GINA as well. As both the ADA and GINA are administered by EEOC, this brings wellness programs within EEOC’s purview. The ADA prohibits employers from requiring medical examinations or inquiring whether an individual has a disability unless the inquiry is both job-related and “consistent with business necessity.” 42 U.S.C. § 12112(d)(4)(A). But the ADA makes some allowances for wellness programs: it provides that an employer may conduct medical examinations and collect employee medical history as part of an “employee health program,” as long as the employee’s participation in the program is “voluntary”. Id. § 12112(d)(4)(B). The term “voluntary” is not defined in the statute. Similarly, GINA prohibits employers from requesting, requiring, or purchasing “genetic information” from employees or their family members. The definition of genetic information includes an individual’s genetic tests, the genetic tests of family members such as children and spouses, and the manifestation of a disease or disorder of a family member. Like the ADA, GINA contains an exception that permits employers to collect this information as part of a wellness program, as long as the employee’s provision of the information is voluntary. Again, the meaning of “voluntary” is not defined in the statute. Thus, while HIPAA and its implementing regulations expressly permit the use of incentives in wellness programs, uncertainty existed as to whether the “voluntary” provisions of the ADA and GINA permit the use of incentives in those wellness programs that implicate ADA- or GINA-protected information. The EEOC previously took the position that in order for a wellness program to be “voluntary,” employers could not condition the receipt of incentives on the employee’s disclosure of ADA- or GINA-protected information. However, in 2016 the EEOC promulgated new rules reversing this position. Those are the rules at issue in this case. The new ADA rule provides that the use of a penalty or incentive of up to 30% of the cost of self-only coverage will not render “involuntary” a wellness program that seeks the disclosure of ADA-protected information. See ADA Rule, 81 Fed. Reg. at 31,133–34. Likewise, the new GINA rule permits employers to offer incentives of up to 30% of the cost of self-only coverage for disclosure of information, pursuant to a wellness program, about a spouses’s manifestation of disease or disorder, which, as noted above, falls within the definition of the employee’s “genetic information” under GINA.2 See GINA Rule, 81 Fed. Reg. at 31,144. Unlike the 2013 HIPAA regulations, which place caps on incentives only in health-contingent wellness programs, the incentive limits in the new GINA and ADA rules apply both to participatory and health-contingent wellness programs. Author Erwin KratzPosted on August 26, 2017 September 18, 2017 Categories ERISA, Health, Welfare BenefisTags ADA, EEOC, HIPAA, Supreme Court, wellness programs HHS Announces Two More Significant HIPAA Privacy and Security Settlements The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has announced two more significant settlements in cases of alleged violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) involving electronic protected health information (ePHI). These settlements highlight the need for HIPAA covered entities and their business associates to: Conduct an accurate and thorough assessment of the potential risks and vulnerabilities to all of their ePHI; Implement policies and procedures and facility access controls to limit physical access to their electronic information systems; Implement physical safeguards for all workstations that access ePHI to restrict access to authorized users; Assign a unique user name and/or number for identifying and tracking user identity in information systems containing ePHI; Reasonably safeguard laptops with unencrypted ePHI (or better yet, secure all ePHI); Implement policies and procedures to prevent, detect, contain, and correct security violations; and Obtain satisfactory assurances in the form of a written business associate contract from their business associates that they will appropriately safeguard all ePHI in their possession. In addition, if it has been more than a few years since you conducted a security and privacy assessment and adopted privacy and security policies and procedures under HIPAA, you should be working on updating that assessment and the resulting policies and procedures. As in many areas, making a good faith effort at compliance is half the job. In the first case, Advocate Health Care Network (Advocate) agreed to a settlement with OCR for multiple potential HIPAA violations involving ePHI pursuant to which Advocate agreed to pay a $5.55 million settlement and adopt a corrective action plan. This significant settlement, the largest to-date against a single entity, is a result of the extent and duration of the alleged noncompliance (dating back to the inception of the Security Rule in some instances), the involvement of the State Attorney General in a corresponding investigation, and the large number of individuals whose information was affected by Advocate, one of the largest health systems in the country. OCR began its investigation in 2013, when Advocate submitted three breach notification reports pertaining to separate and distinct incidents involving its subsidiary, Advocate Medical Group (“AMG”). The combined breaches affected the ePHI of approximately 4 million individuals. The ePHI included demographic information, clinical information, health insurance information, patient names, addresses, credit card numbers and their expiration dates, and dates of birth. OCR’s investigations into these incidents revealed that Advocate failed to: Conduct an accurate and thorough assessment of the potential risks and vulnerabilities to all of its ePHI; Implement policies and procedures and facility access controls to limit physical access to the electronic information systems housed within a large data support center; Obtain satisfactory assurances in the form of a written business associate contract that its business associate would appropriately safeguard all ePHI in its possession; and Reasonably safeguard an unencrypted laptop when left in an unlocked vehicle overnight. Read the Advocate Health Care Network resolution agreement and corrective action plan. In the second case, the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) agreed to settle multiple alleged violations of HIPAA. OCR’s investigation of UMMC was triggered by a breach of unsecured ePHI affecting approximately 10,000 individuals. During the investigation, OCR determined that UMMC was aware of risks and vulnerabilities to its systems as far back as April 2005, yet no significant risk management activity occurred until after the breach, due largely to organizational deficiencies and insufficient institutional oversight. UMMC will pay a resolution amount of $2,750,000 and adopt a corrective action plan to help assure future compliance with HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules. On March 21, 2013, OCR was notified of a breach after UMMC’s privacy officer discovered that a password-protected laptop was missing from UMMC’s Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU). UMMC’s investigation concluded that it had likely been stolen by a visitor to the MICU who had inquired about borrowing one of the laptops. OCR’s investigation revealed that ePHI stored on a UMMC network drive was vulnerable to unauthorized access via UMMC’s wireless network because users could access an active directory containing 67,000 files after entering a generic username and password. The directory included 328 files containing the ePHI of an estimated 10,000 patients dating back to 2008. Further, OCR’s investigation revealed that UMMC failed to: implement its policies and procedures to prevent, detect, contain, and correct security violations; assign a unique user name and/or number for identifying and tracking user identity in information systems containing ePHI; and notify each individual whose unsecured ePHI was reasonably believed to have been accessed, acquired, used, or disclosed as a result of the breach. University of Mississippi is the state’s sole public academic health science center with education and research functions. In addition it provides patient care in four specialized hospitals on the Jackson campus and at clinics throughout Jackson and the state. Its designated health care component, UMMC, includes University Hospital, the site of the breach in this case, located on the main UMMC campus in Jackson. Read the University of Mississippi resolution agreement and corrective action plan. Author Erwin KratzPosted on August 15, 2016 Categories Health, Welfare BenefisTags ERISA, health benefits, HIPAA Significant Changes Proposed for Form 5500 On July 21, 2016 the Department of Labor (DOL), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) published proposed rules that would make significant revisions to the Form 5500 Annual Return/Report as of the 2019 filing year. DOL explains in a Fact Sheet that the proposed form revisions and the DOL’s related implementing regulations are intended to address changes in applicable law and in the employee benefit plan and financial markets, and to accommodate shifts in the data the DOL, IRS and PBGC need for their enforcement priorities, policy analysis, rulemaking, compliance assistance, and educational activities. The major proposed changes are summarized below: Retirement Plan Changes– The new Form 5500 will request more information about participant accounts, contributions, and distributions. It will also ask about plan design features, including whether the plan uses a safe harbor or SIMPLE design and whether it includes a Roth feature. The form will also ask about investment education and investment advice features, default investments, rollovers used for business start-ups (ROBS), leased employees, and pre-approved plan designs. Schedule R will include new questions about participation rates, matching contributions, and nondiscrimination. Group Health Plan Changes– The most significant change for health plans is that all ERISA group health plans, including small plans that are currently exempt from filing, will be required to file a Form 5500. The new filing requirement includes a new Schedule J (Group Health Plan Information), which will list the types of health benefits provided, the plan’s funding method (self insured or fully insured), information about participant and employer contributions, information about COBRA coverage, whether the plan is grandfathered under health care reform, and whether it includes a high deductible health plan, HRA, or health FSA. In addition, most filings (except those for small fully insured plans) would have to provide financial and claims information, disclose stop-loss carriers, third party administrators and other plan service providers, and provide details regarding compliance with HIPAA, GINA, health care reform and other compliance issues. Other Changes– The proposed changes affect many of the existing Form 5500 schedules, including: Schedule C would be revised to coordinate with the service provider fee disclosure rules. Schedule C would be required from some small plans currently exempt from filing it. Schedule H would be expanded to include questions on fee disclosures, annual fair market valuations, designated investment alternatives, investment managers, plan terminations, asset transfers, administrative expenses and uncashed participant checks. Schedule I would be eliminated. Small plans that currently file Schedule I would generally need to file Schedule H. Effective Date– The new Form 5500 is expected to be required as of the 2019 plan year filings. Proposed Rule Making Form 5500 Changes Author Erwin KratzPosted on August 2, 2016 August 9, 2016 Categories Affordable Care Act, Defined Benefit Plans, Defined Contribution Plans, Health, Qualified PlansTags COBRA, Department of Labor, ERISA, Form 5500, health benefits, HIPAA, IRS, PBGC OCR Launches Phase 2 of HIPAA Audit Program As a part of its continued efforts to assess compliance with the HIPAA Privacy, Security and Breach Notification Rules, the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has begun its next phase of audits of covered entities and their business associates. In its 2016 Phase 2 HIPAA Audit Program, OCR will review the policies and procedures adopted and employed by covered entities and their business associates to meet selected standards and implementation specifications of the Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules. These audits will primarily be desk audits, although some on-site audits will be conducted. The 2016 audit process begins with verification of an entity’s address and contact information. An email is being sent to covered entities and business associates requesting that contact information be provided to OCR in a timely manner. OCR will then transmit a pre-audit questionnaire to gather data about the size, type, and operations of potential auditees; this data will be used with other information to create potential audit subject pools. The OCR’s detailed audit protcol is available here. If an entity does not respond to OCR’s request to verify its contact information or pre-audit questionnaire, OCR will use publically available information about the entity to create its audit subject pool. Therefore an entity that does not respond to OCR may still be selected for an audit or subject to a compliance review. To learn more about OCR’s Phase 2 Audit program, click on one of the links below: When Will the Next Round of Audits Commence? Who Will Be Audited? On What Basis Will Auditees Be Selected? How Will the Selection Process Work? How Will the Audit Program Work? What if an Entity Doesn’t Respond to OCR’s Requests for Information? What is the General Timeline for an Audit? What Happens After an Audit? How Will Consumers Be Affected? Will Audits Differ Depending on the Size and Type of Participants? Will Auditors Look at State-Specific Privacy and Security Rules in Addition to HIPAA’s Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules? Who is Responsible for Paying the On-Site Auditors? Author Erwin KratzPosted on April 2, 2016 April 22, 2016 Categories Health, Health Benefits, Welfare BenefisTags ERISA, health benefits, HHS, HIPAA	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1814
__label__wiki	0.856114	0.856114	In Pictures: The ‘Anarchy In The U.K. Tour’ of 1976, the infamous tour that never really toured Jack Whatley· March 14, 2019 ‘The Anarchy Tour’ of 1976, one of the most famous tours in rock ‘n’ roll history, almost never happened. The historical tour in question featured some of punk’s forefathers in fury, The Clash, Johnny Thunder and The Heartbreakers and The Damned, but there was one band on everyone’s lips: the Sex Pistols. Documented here in Ray Stevenson’s candid images, the tour would go down in history, not for a run of pogoing good times but because it was overshadowed by a certain Bill Grundy show and a few four letter words. In 1976 the band at the tip of everyone’s tongue was the Sex Pistols, led by a snarling and confrontational Johnny Rotten the band had released their single ‘Anarchy In The U.K.’ to a hungry London crowd to critical acclaim. The single was proving popular when Malcolm McClaren, the band’s manager and husband of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, found a spot for them on TV show Today with the host Bill Grundy. Steve Jones: “You dirty sod. You dirty old man.” Bill Grundy: “Well keep going, chief, keep going. Go on. You’ve got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.” Jones: “You dirty bastard.” Grundy: “Go on, again.” Jones: “You dirty fucker.” Grundy: “What a clever boy.” Jones: “What a fucking rotter” – Today TV show, December 1 1976 The words would rock through Little England and shock a generation to its core, and in turn, introduce punk to the masses. Malcolm McClaren was quoted as responding simply “Fucking hell, the band have just sworn on live TV.” With a tour on the way, I’m sure he saw headlines and dollar signs. The band, and some of the founders of the London punk scene The Clash, The Damned and New York’s Johnny Thunder and The Heartbreakers, would pile into their plush new bus and go on a filthy and furious tour across the UK. What transpired after that, however, was not all it cracked up to be, and the mega-tour on the road to ‘Nowhere’ turned into a series of cancellations and scared local councils. Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten, 1976 University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich saw the first show of the tour on 3rd December 1976. “A Punk-Rock Evening” on the bill, the tickets cost £1.25 in advance and £1.50 on the door. But like so many others, the gig would never start, as vice-chancellor Dr Frank Thistlethwaite would be the first of many to ban the concert “on the grounds of protecting the safety and security of persons and property.” In fact, only three of the scheduled gigs saw the bands hit the stage, with four of them later rescheduled with the tour finally beginning at Leeds Polytechnic on 6th December. Further dates at Manchester’s Electric Circus (9th and 19th December), Caerphilly’s Castle Cinema (14th December), Cleethorpes’ Winter Gardens (20th December) and Plymouth’s Woods Centre (21st and 22nd December) would make up the ‘full-scale’ tour. The pulled shows would see the band spend more time waiting in hotels than playing their music. But still, the band’s fight against censorship and the ironic fever it created by banning them sent waves among the youth of Britain and meant that it remained a seminal moment in musical history. Anarchy Tour bus. Dec 1976, Malcolm McLaren and The Sex Pistols. Paul Simonon, Goodman, Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. Anarchy Tour. Dec 1976 “We were getting used to the idea of spending long periods in our rooms, drinking beer, watching TV and reading about ourselves in the papers… Everybody thinks the Anarchy Tour was Hey! Hey! Hey! but it wasn’t. The main thing I remember is the boredom. We didn’t know what the fuck was going on.” -Glen Matlock Ray Stevenson was there to catch all the moments of pent up energy and perfect posturing. His images show one of the most talked about bands in the country as they straddle the rocket of fame and fortune. Backed by some of punk’s leading lights, the candid images show so much of the explosion of one of music’s most important scenes. [MORE] –Remembering When The Sex Pistols Debuted On Top Of The Pops In 1977 Johnny Rotten and Nils Stevenson, whose older brother Ray Stevenson took these photos. Nils would go on to managed Siouxsie and the Banshees. Mick Jones with Debbie Juvenile and Tracey. Anarchy Tour, Britain – 1976 Johnny Thunders, 1976 Sex Pistols – Johnny Rotten, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock, Anarchy Tour. ‘No publicity’. 1976 Malcolm McClaren, 1976 Steve Jones and Johnny Rotten The Anarchy Tour The Damned, 1976 Sex Pistols and The Clash – Johnny Rotten (left), Paul Simonon, Joe Strummer (right), Mick Jones (front) Anarchy Tour bus. Dec 1976 Anarchy Tour, L-R. Keith Paul, Jo Faul, Johnny Thunders, Ray Stevenson, Nils Stevenson, Walter Lure, Paul Cook, Leeds. Dec 1976 Johnny Rotten, 1976	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1815
__label__wiki	0.639238	0.639238	EXCLUSIVE: The Rolling Stones Are "Ready For Anything" As They Prepare For The 'No Filter' US Tour Mick and Keith reveal their 'No Filter' tour prep "I've got to be ready for anything going into the rehearsal" Mick Jagger explains in our exclusive new interview. The Rolling Stones frontman is prepping the iconic groups latest trek across the United States, with the No Filter US Tour kicking off in 2019. In the video above, Jagger talks about the work he will put in and the steps he takes to keep up his iconic stage presence. The band will play thirteen stadiums around the country, stopping in some cities for the first time in over a decade. Mick and company recently wrapped the European leg of the tour in July. Related: Win a Trip to Meet & See The Rolling Stones! As Mick gets in singing shape, Keith Richards is busy deciding which guitars to bring along for the ride. The legendary guitarist has over a thousand, but tells us how many he actually needs on stage. He also explains why he currently has more guitars than vices. The No Filter US Tour also takes place fifty-five years after The Rolling Stones first tour of America. Since those shows in 1964, the Stones have become one of the biggest bands on any planet, selling over 200-million records, playing some of the top-grossing tours in history, and being an unmovable and undeniable force in the history of music. The band has also recently released a restored and remastered film and soundtrack from their 1994 Voodoo Lounge Tour. Tickets for the No Filter US Tour go on-sale on Friday November 30th at 10 AM, and will be available at RollingStones.com and Ticketmaster.com. You can see the full list of dates below. We have your chance to meet The Rolling Stones, for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Be a part of the No Filter Tour and Stones history. Find all of the details here. 4/20/2019 - MIAMI, FL - HARD ROCK STADIUM 4/24/2019 - JACKSONVILLE, FL - TIAA BANK FIELD 4/28/2019 - HOUSTON, TX - NRG STADIUM 5/07/2019 - GLENDALE, AZ - STATE FARM STADIUM 5/11/2019 - PASADENA, CA - THE ROSE BOWL 5/18/2019 - SANTA CLARA, CA - LEVI'S STADIUM 5/22/2019 - SEATTLE, WA - CENTURYLINK FIELD 5/26/2019 - DENVER, CO - BRONCOS STADIUM AT MILE HIGH 5/31/2019 - WASHINGTON D.C. - FEDEX FIELD 6/04/2019 - PHILADELPHIA, PA - LINCOLN FINANCIAL FIELD 6/08/2019 - FOXBORO, MA - GILLETTE STADIUM 6/13/2019 - E.RUTHERFORD, NJ - METLIFE STADIUM 6/21/2019 - CHICAGO, IL - SOLDIER FIELD Mick Jagger. Keith Richards	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1820
__label__cc	0.612344	0.387656	Estudios Económicos is a scientific peer reviewed journal published on behalf of the Center for Economic Studies at El Colegio de México. Founded in 1986, Estudios Económicos is now well established as one of the leading economics journals in Latin America. The journal publishes empirical and theoretical research in all areas of economics, and particularly welcomes studies focused on Mexico and Latin America. The journal’s audience is not only comprised of academic institutions, but also includes central banks, government departments, and international organizations. Estudios Económicos publishes articles in both English and Spanish and enforces a rigorous double-blind peer review process and anti-plagiarism policy. There are two issues per year, published in both open access electronic and print versions. The journal invites submissions of full-length articles and shorter notes. The journal does not publish book reviews. Occasionally, the journal publishes special issues on selected topics of interest. Estudios Económicos is an open access journal. There are no submission fees and no publication fees or article processing charges. The journal is listed in a number of international indexes and directories, including Cengage, Dialnet, Econlit, Hispanic American Periodicals Index, JSTOR, Latindex, Redalyc, Redib, and Repec, among others. 70-vol. 35, no. 2, july-december, 2020 An econometric assessment of the official historical estimates for the state-level economic activity indicators of Mexico Francisco Corona, Jesús López-Pérez PDF (Spanish) DOI : https://doi.org/10.24201/ee.v35i2.401 Nowcasting Mexico's quarterly GDP using factor models and bridge equations Oscar de J. Gálvez-Soriano Exposure to globalization and regional convergence in Mexico Vicente German-Soto, Reyna E. Rodríguez Pérez, Alexandra G. Gallegos Morales Rural-urban migration and informality in the metropolitan areas of Mexico. A short-term estimation Jaime Lara, Marla Cruz Yedra, Diana V. Moyeda López, Adriana Prats Molina, José A. Téllez Muñoz Saturation levels of mobile telecommunications markets and optimal termination rates Daniel Ventosa-Santaulària, Alexander Elbittar, Pedro Matías, Carlos Aguilar Huerta	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1822
__label__wiki	0.739559	0.739559	Universal Studios Singapore to Grand Open 28 May 2011 Posted on April 19, 2011 (October 21, 2020) Universal Studios Singapore has announced that it will celebrate its Grand Opening on Saturday, 28 May 2011. The activities launch with a movie-themed Grand Opening ceremony at the signature 21-metre tall arch entrance of Universal Studios Singapore. An action-packed stunt show will aim to thrill the crowd and set the stage for a grand procession of the park’s biggest resident stars – Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Betty Boop, Woody Woodpecker, The Scorpion King, Shrek, Princess Fiona and the heroes from Madagascar – with many more surprises and happenings yet to be announced. Universal Studios Singapore welcomed more than two million guests in its nine months of soft opening in 2010, and has already hosted hundreds of thousands more so far this year, as the rides, shows, guest experiences and daily park operations have been honed and readied for this official Grand Opening day. 21 rides and shows are featured within Universal Studios Singapore showcasing world-popular themes such as Jurassic Park Rapids Adventure, Shrek 4-D Adventure, Revenge of the Mummy, and Battlestar Galactica. And the action and entertainment opportunities for USS guests continue to grow with the soon-to-be-announced premiere of the world’s first Madagascar-themed ride, Madagascar: A Crate Adventure. Yet another blockbuster ride is scheduled for later this year, the much-anticipated Transformers attraction, based on the popular box-office-hit movie series. Universal Studios Singapore is located within one of Singapore’s first integrated resorts, Resorts World Sentosa. Lodging is only steps away, with four hotels (and two more coming soon), each with a uniquely different theme. Also available for guest enjoyment is FestiveWalk, the perfect venue for dining and shopping while experiencing the Asian debut of some of the world’s top brands. Mr Dennis Gilbert, RWS’ Senior Vice President of Attractions, said, “The Grand Opening celebrations will bring to Singapore a slice of the Hollywood glitz and action, in the same way that Universal Studios Singapore brought Universal’s famous Ride The Movies experience here. On the Grand Opening day, the park will be exuberant with energy, setting the stage for many more exciting times to come in the future.” Source>>>	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1825
__label__wiki	0.623755	0.623755	A Clash of Prey The Bengal Tiger is a denizen of Southeast Asia. A full sized specimen may grow to ten feet, as measured from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail, and weigh anywhere between 400 and 600 pounds. Always a danger to the local population, past Vietnamese have attempted to poison, capture, and kill the animal. Today, the Vietnamese government protects the Bengal Tiger; wildlife experts estimate that about 3,000 of these animals roam the jungles of the Northern Highlands of Quang Tri, Thua Thien, Quang Nam, Quang Tin, and Quang Ngai provinces in what was once the Republic of Vietnam. Tigers are territorial, with some males prowling 200 square miles of jungle, grassland, swamp, or a combination of these. Its mainstay includes deer, wild pigs, buffalo, domesticated cattle, and unfortunate human beings. Hunting its prey, the Bengal Tiger is absolutely quiet, and when within striking distance, it strikes suddenly and powerfully. The goal is to immobilize its prey as quickly as possible. It will do this by pouncing on the hapless animal, pin it down, and using its powerful jaws, rip out the throat. A Bengal Tiger can drag a prey weighing several hundred pounds 1,500 feet to hide the dead animal in bushes or tall grass. When the violence of war came to South Vietnam in 1965, the animals living in the Northern Highlands began looking around for some place a bit quieter—somewhere less lethal, away from American artillery and Marines, who were also looking for a prey of their own choosing. This left the Bengal Tiger with a reduced menu; now they only had a few deer to eat, and humans. Some of these wore the uniform of the United States Marine Corps. There are several accounts of unhappy contact between the famed Bengal Tiger in Vietnam and Marines operating within in I Corps Tactical Zone (I CTZ) (spoken as “One Corps”). I have read that some people discount these anecdotes as “sea stories,” which given the inclination of Marines to tell tall tales, might be easy to accept —were it not for first hand testimony and press reports that validate such attacks. We know tigers made several attacks. We know of two Marines killed and partially consumed by Bengal Tigers: Private First Class Frank Baldino (1968), and Sergeant Robert C. Phleger (1970). Marine Corps legend Colonel John C. Ripley (now deceased) confirmed one account in his story Tiger Tales (1967). Colonel Ripley wrote: One of the greater difficulties on an ambush is trying to keep your mind occupied in order to pass the time. Hours drag by almost painfully. The sentry on duty can at least walk his post. In the trenches and bunkers one can move around, talk to the Marines in the next fighting hole, take a five minute relief for a head call or coffee, and best of all; move, turn, stand up, scratch, etc. None of this is possible in an ambush, at least theoretically. The entire ambush must lay very still, quietly anticipating imminent enemy contact. What the FUCK was that? The ambush froze. Often when it’s raining, the noise intensifies. It’s easy to suspect movement when in fact there is none. But this time was real —every man new it. A loud guttural growl —could that be possible? — and definite movement. Corporal Schwirian’s jaws tightened and his nostrils flared. His heart raced so that he could actually feel it against the ground. Slowly, pulling his knees up under him he moved his body into a slow crouch. His right hand grasped his weapon, still on the ground. Shifting his weight to his left leg he prepared to bring his weapon into a firing position. The source of the growl made a sudden leap! God in heaven! No one was fast enough to fire. Whatever it was it had Schwirian screaming. The machine gunner jerked his gun around trying to bring it to bear but this thing and Schwirian were locked together in a desperate blur. It’s a Tiger! The big cat had pounced out of the darkness and grasped Schwirian in its jaws. One paw was standing on the Marine’s hand, which held his weapon, pinning both to the ground. The other paw was on Schwirian’s left shoulder, forcing him backwards and more erect, while the beast chewed on his right arm and shoulder literally tearing off great chunks of flesh. In what had to be the luckiest punch of any fight; certainly in this brutal fight for his life, the terrified young Marine threw a left cross into the muzzle of the tiger with his free hand. The blow hurt enough to cause the animal to release its grip. Corporal Schwirian fell at that spot while the tiger lurched backward momentarily. It was the instant the squad needed; the Marines simultaneously opened fire. The beast recoiled then simply disappeared. The entire drama had taken seconds. The indescribable terror experienced by the squad left them shocked and drained. Their squad leader laid moaning and kicking where he had been dropped. Doc was first to move. He was at once beside Schwirian trying to calm him and examine him, both nearly impossible tasks under the circumstances. Two Marines helped him while others formed a security perimeter. Their position now obviously compromised. They felt certain the enemy action would soon follow. The corpsman’s trained hands moved quickly and expertly around the torn clothing and flesh. He could see nothing, but it didn’t matter. He knew this Marine was in serious trouble. It was easy to distinguish blood from rain dampness. The shock effect had to be massive and easily as great a threat to life as the loss of blood. Ripping open his unit 1, the medical kit which together with its corpsmen made them responsible for the continued lives of thousand of Marines. Doc found what he was looking for – morphine. He decided to sedate the Marine taking the risk that shock could be overcome. Stopping the bleeding with direct pressure, he then applied his largest battle dressing hoping to cover the wound. It would take two. His next move was one of absolute genius. It had undoubtedly never been taught in field medical school, nor did he learn it from any of the old hands. He had only been with the company a month. Taking still another battle dressing, he carefully wrapped the wounded Marine’s head, pulling it to the side opposite his shattered arm and shoulder. In this manner, Corporal Schwirian would not be able to view the extent of the wound, either deliberately or inadvertently. In the company CP the radio operator was immediately allotted to trouble. Someone had keyed a radio handset as if they didn’t know what they were doing. Then there came a pause, followed by a scuffing noise, and finally,” Lima, this is Lima Alpha 3, we have to come in.” He didn’t believe what he had heard. It couldn’t possibly be the ambush, they would never break silence for such a ridiculous transmission, and even if they were in fact in trouble there was a specific code and procedure to follow. Not only that, but he didn’t recognize the voice. He called the company commander and quickly described the incident, offering his opinion that whatever was happening it was… serious. The CO immediately tried to raise the ambush. “Lima Alpha 3 this is Lima 6, if your situation is all secure click your handset twice.”‘ No answer. The CO repeated his transmission. Suddenly there was this response: ” Lima 6, this is Alpha 3, sir we’re in trouble and have to return; can’t explain; request permission to move; we have a wolf (wounded in action).” The CO was stunned and silent. He immediately recognized the voice as that of the corpsman. “Roger Alpha 3, return at once; understand there are no friendlies, repeat, no friendlies, between yourself and us. Any movement is enemy.” Facing the grim reality of what lay ahead the squad galvanized into action. Doc, having done all that he could, took Corporal Schwirian around the waist and pulled him erect. Another Marine grabbed his free arm. With their casualty in tow, the squad formed a patrol and started the long trip to the outpost. Each man took his position without speaking. The only noise was the shuffling and occasional moaning as the corpsman attempted to keep Corporal Schwirian on his feet moving. When the battalion received the preliminary report that an ambush was in trouble, they immediately requested more information. The company commander could only report the scant bit he had received in the only transmission from the ambush. He did indicate that the ambush had at least one casualty; probably serious, possibly emergency, which would require evacuation. More information would follow when available. On the outpost, the senior company corpsman made what preparations he could. He collected all blood volume expander, feeling certain this would be needed. Battle dressings, swabs, etc., were in abundance at the Company CP and laid out in preparation. Sometime after midnight, the rain slackened, then stopped. It was replaced with thick ground fog, which obscured vision even more than rain. In the second platoon area, Marines were on bunker tops. It was through that part of the perimeter that the road entered the outpost, and the ambush was expected to arrive at that point. In the same area the engineering platoon, located right beside the road, strained to see or hear any movement on the other side of the protective wire. Nearly three hours after the first report from the ambush, Marines in the line thought they heard movement. The commander 2nd platoon came into the CP to report just as the radio sounded. “Lima this is Alpha 3; we’re outside the wire; request permission to come in.” Struggling to get the wounded, Marine into the bunker the corpsman winced at what light from the lantern illuminated. For the first time he actually saw the extent of the wounds. He wasn’t prepared. No one was. He gasped with the others at the incredible sight of torn flesh, claw marks, and an amazingly clean bite, which had removed nearly the entire bicep. A final report now went to the battalion with all the detail and the request for an emergency med-vac. IT was painfully obvious that this Marine would need medical attention immediately. “What’s the problem Lima?” asked battalion. Trying to impart the seriousness of the wounds and what had actually happened over a radio was difficult. “It appears that Alpha 3 was attacked by a tiger,” ‘ the CO responded. A pause indicated certain disbelief at battalion. “We need an emergency medevac” the CO continued. After some deliberation battalion indicated that a medevac would not be possible before first light. Bad weather, distance, and other factors argued against it. “This man must get out tonight” the CO insisted. Finally, the battalion consented to an attempt to move the casualty back to the Rockpile by road, from whence he could be further evacuated to Dong Ha by either road or air. The only vehicles available at the outpost were engineer equipment and two Ontos. With a dump truck for an ambulance and the Ontos as security, along with a rifle squad, the small convoy made a reckless dash for the Rockpile. They moved along the same road Corporal Schwirian had rumbled down the previous day expecting a rest from enemy action. The story could end here, but it doesn’t. Corporal Schwirian made it out, first to Delta Med at Dong Ha, then to USS Repose and finally to Philadelphia Naval Hospital. Lima Company would hear from him again. A Readers Digest article mentioned his ordeal. Then a few months later more casualties from his company ended up in his same ward at Philadelphia. They wrote back the welcome news that he was much improved and regaining the use of his arm. As already noted, Corporal Schwirian wasn’t the only Tiger Tale. An article in Stars & Stripes dated 22 December 1968 records another attack. Quang Tri —A man-eating tiger was killed by members of a small Marine patrol when the 400 pound cat attacked a 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion Marine in the northwestern corner of South Vietnam. The Marine who was attacked is listed in satisfactory condition at a military hospital at Quang Tri. Identification is being withheld pending notification of his next of kin. The six man recon team was on an observation mission near Fire Support Base Alpine, six miles east of the Laotian border in Quang Tri Province when it encountered the tiger. The team had completed its mission and was waiting to be heli-lifted from the area when the incident occurred. Bad weather conditions had prevented immediate pick up and the team had posted a two-man radio watch while the others settled down to sleep. The tiger struck silently and swiftly. “Suddenly, I heard somebody scream,” said PFC Thomas E. Shainline (Gilbertsville, PA) “and then somebody was yelling, ‘It’s a tiger, it’s a tiger.” PFC Roy Regan (Nacogdoches, Texas), who had been sleeping next to the attacked Marine recalled, “I jumped up and saw the tiger on my partner. All I could think about was to get the tiger away from him. I jumped at the tiger and the cat jerked his head and jumped into a bomb crater 10 yards away, still holding his prey.” The Marines quickly followed the tiger to the bomb crater and opened fire on the attacking beast. They could not be sure which one of them actually killed the tiger, since they all fired at it. Once hit, the tiger released his prey and the attacked Marine staggered out of the crater. “He looked dazed and asked what had happened,” recalled PFC Maurice M. Howell (Richmond, KY). The injured Marine was given first aid treatment and a medical evacuation helicopter was called. In minutes, a Marine CH46 helicopter arrived to pick-up the injured Marine, the rest of the team and the now dead tiger. The injured Marine was rushed to the 3rd Medical Battalion hospital at Quant Tri suffering from lacerations and bites on the neck. The tiger, measuring nine feet from head to tail was transported to the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion headquarters. The incident took place about 10 miles south of the demilitarized zone near the spot where a young Marine was slain by a man-eating tiger on November 12. Military authorities had sent out a Marine contingent and two professional South Vietnamese tiger hunters three weeks ago to find the killer tiger and three others believed are in the area, but the hunt failed. For the Americans fighting in Vietnam, there were bigger things than VC in the bush. Posted on 10/31/2014 10/16/2014 Categories Vietnam War/Era9 Comments on A Clash of Prey A book by Bing West To some, the Vietnam War was a chance for medals, promotions, and even perhaps, one day someone would pin a star on their shoulder. To most, serving in Vietnam was their duty —a patriotic chore to serve their country. Along the way, a student of the Vietnam War will find countless demonstrations of raw courage and heroism: servicemen of all of our Armed Forces, giving of themselves for a greater purpose. Of course, nearly sixty thousand of our young men gave the ultimate sacrifice. Many more gave up their limbs, or suffered debilitating wounds —and from a psychological perspective, everyone left a part of themselves in Vietnam, including a squad of Marines assigned to protect the Vietnamese people living in a small coastal village, then named Binh Nghia, two kilometers south of Chu Lai. This is a remarkable story told to us by former Marine Captain Francis J. “Bing” West, who later served as an assistant to the Secretary of Defense, and in the Reagan Administration as an Under-secretary of Defense. When Bing West returned to Binh Nghia 37 years later, he found an extraordinary thing: many of the villagers from 1966-1967 had died —particularly those who served alongside the Marines; some married and moved away from the village —and yet in spite of this, everyone living in the village in 2003 could recount stories about “their American Marines,” or, Thủy quân lục chiến Mỹ You see, over the years, the villagers passed down the stories of what happened in Binh Nghia to their children, then they told the stories to their children. Everyone knew what happened, and as Mr. West walked through the village in 2003, one old farmer came to him and asked, “Tell me Dai U’y where is Sergeant Mac? Do you know Bill … Marines number one, what happened to Monty? What happened to Frill (Phil)?” Not far away Mr. Bing found a marker resting between two palm trees, and on it a small inscription to the Marines who had built their well and shrine in 1967. Herein lies the true pain of the Vietnam War. Young Americans went to Vietnam to fight a vicious and resourceful enemy. A few of these people ended up protecting a few thousand residents of a small village along the coast in Quang Ngai province. Most of the Marines cherished these simple people so much that they ended up dying for them. In return, the villagers ended up adopting these Marines; they remember their sacrifices even today. If only the American people had loved these Marines as much. The Village is a worthwhile book, on many different levels. Posted on 10/24/2014 10/23/2014 Categories Vietnam War/Era8 Comments on The Village The Code Talkers, Part II The landing on Okinawa may have been a cakewalk, but Japanese resistance stiffened as the Marines located and then assaulted the Japanese main force. The strategy here would be the same as it was on the islands of Saipan, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima —kill as many Americans as possible; weaken their resolve to invade the home islands. The American advance came to a halt and one Marine, thinking back to the Navajo ceremony on Pavuvu, asked a Navajo what he thought about his prayers now. The Navajo replied, “This is completely different. We only prayed for help during the landings.” Over time, Navajo Code Talkers served with all six Marine Corps divisions in the Pacific. They also served with Raider and Parachute Battalions. Praise for their work became lavish and endless as they participated in every major assault … from the Solomon Islands campaigns to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Major Howard Conner, who served as the 5th Marine Division Signals Officer, reported that Navajo code directed the entire landing at Iwo Jima. “During the two days that followed the initial landing, I had six Navajo radio nets working around the clock. They sent and received over 800 messages without a single error. Were it not for the Navajo Code Talkers, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” The Navajo Code Talkers were among the first to receive the news in August 1945 that Emperor Hirohito had urged the Japanese people to “endure the unendurable.” The war was over. Atomic weapons employed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had perhaps saved as many as one million additional American lives. In all, 421 Navajos had completed wartime training at Camp Pendleton’s code talker school; most of these served in combat. Following Japan’s official surrender ceremony on 2 September 1945, several code talkers volunteered for duty with U.S. occupation forces in Japan. Others served with the Marines in China. Wilson Henry Price remained in the Marine Corps for thirty years, finally retiring in 1972. As the Navajo Marines returned to their homes, tribal rites were performed. These were combinations of purification ceremonies, thanksgiving, mother’s tearful prayers, and askance for protection of the son’s return from harmful or toxic influences. Surprisingly, the Navajo exhibited little evidence of serious psychological problems or combat fatigue. In spite of this, life proved difficult after years away from home. Many of the Navajo missed the excitement of Marine Corps combat service, but most realized that they must go forward. Many returned to school to finish high school, others enrolled in colleges and universities under the GI Bill. Ted Draper remained on occupational duty in Japan. During off-duty hours, he studied Japanese and learned it so well that he eventually served as an interpreter. Draper eventually returned home to become a language teacher. He said, “When I was going to boarding school before the war, the government old us not to speak Navajo. But during the war, they wanted us to speak it. One day, if I return to the reservation safely, I want to become a Navajo language teacher and educate young Navajos.” Jobs back home were scarce. Many banks refused to make GI loans, even to honorably discharged veterans because many of the Navajo held land parcels on the reservation in trust, with no proof of title. Many Navajo felt this was a shameful way to treat men who had served their country in combat —and they were right. Almost 25 years passed before the 4th Marine Division honored Navajo Code Talkers at its 1969 annual reunion. Each Code Talker received an especially minted medallion. Why did it take so long to recognize these men? It was because the government did not declassify the Code Talker Operation until 1968. The Navajo Code Talkers hardly ever spoke of it until then. These fine men were true American heroes, without exception. Sadly, we have come to the end of this especially glorious history: the last of the original code talkers was Chester Nez, who passed away in June 2014, aged 93. As previously mentioned, there were more than 400 Navajo Code Talkers in the Marine Corps … I would like to mention a couple here with my deepest respect and admiration: Paul Begay Johnson Housewood Jimmy Kelly King, Sr. Paul Kinlahcheeny Leo Kirk Willie Notah Tom Singer Alfred Tsosie Harry Tsosie Howard Tsosie Each of these Marines gave all they had to give for the United States of America. After the end of World War II, a Japanese general admitted that not even the most highly skilled Japanese cryptographers were able to decipher the Marine messages. After he was told that it was a code based on an Native American language, he said, “Thank you; that is a puzzle I thought would never be solved.” You may also wish to view two excellent videos here and here. I have this one additional note. I want to offer my deepest respects also to another fine American (now 95 years old), the father of Koji Kanemoto who served in the US Army as an interpreter with the Military Intelligence Service. Posted on 10/17/2014 10/11/2014 Categories World War II4 Comments on The Code Talkers, Part II The Code Talkers, Part I Young Philip Johnston loved the Navajo culture; it was the environment within which he grew up as a child of missionary parents. By age five, Philip knew the Navajo language well enough to serve as a translator, and by age nine, when most boys that age were riding their bicycles and trading baseball cards, he had served as the official translator of a Navajo delegation sent to the nation’s capital to negotiate expanded rights for the Navajo Indians. In time, however, Philip Johnston would grow into manhood and when his country entered World War I, he would leave the Southwest to enlist and serve in the war to end all wars. After the war, Philip earned a degree in civil engineering at the University of Southern California and when war came once more to America’s shores on 7 December 1941, Johnston was hard at work as an engineer for the city of Los Angeles. Communications within the Armed Forces has always been a complex issue, but after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, as American forces began to gather themselves for a major push into the Pacific Ocean area, commanders were suddenly confronted with an even more complex issue. Japanese cryptographers were proving themselves amazingly adept at breaking top-secret military codes almost as rapidly as communications specialists devised newer, more complicated procedures. Many of the Japanese code breakers had been educated in the United States where they had learned to speak English and had become familiar with American colloquialisms, including slang terms and profanity. In effect, the Japanese became aware of American battle plans almost as soon as senior commanders issued warning orders to subordinate commands. There appeared no workable solution to a problem that was costing American lives. On the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Philip Johnston was 49 years old —well beyond the age of military service. His experience in World War I, however, prompted him to approach the Marines with a plan to help his country win its war against the Japanese. Philip Johnston knew that the Navajo language had no alphabet or written record, and he knew it was nearly impossible to learn this language if you were not immersed in it from a young age. This knowledge prompted Johnston to approach Marine Corps authorities in San Diego. He was sure that in adopting the Navajo language for communications, the American forces could deny valuable information to the Japanese. At first, the Marine hierarchy had serious doubts about Johnston’s ideas. The use of American Indians in communicating over radio and telegraph had been a successful strategy during World War I, but senior Marine officers also knew that following the war, Germans had visited the United States with a keen interest in the Choctaw and Comanche languages. Most military planners assumed that the Germans would share these insights with the Third Reich. Philip Johnston persisted, however. He knew the Navajo language; he knew it was unique among the Native American nations. Johnston’s persistence paid off when the Marine Corps finally agreed to a series of demonstrations at Camp Elliott, just outside San Diego, California. At the conclusion of the trial run, everyone agreed that the results had been quite impressive. The Navajo clearly demonstrated that a Navajo Indian could take messages from a variety of sources in English, translate them and transmit them in Navajo, and then convert them back into English on the receiving end. Marines were so impressed with these demonstrations that they lobbied for the recruitment and training of 200 Navajo Indians for service as Marine Corps Code Talkers. Initially, the Marine Corps approved up to 30 men for training; by the end of the war, more than 400 Navajo would work in the program. As with any recruit, the Navajo would first have to demonstrate that he had what it takes to serve successfully as a United States Marine. He would learn to be a combat Marine. He would learn to deal with harsh environments, and in this particular aspect, the Navajo were “naturals.” According to one Navajo Code Talker, their greatest fear was the amphibious landing —but once ashore, Navajo quickly assimilated the natural setting. The Marine Corps did impose certain restrictions on Navajo recruitment, however: a code talker had to have completed a tenth-grade education; they had to speak passable English; and they had to agree to keep their occupations secret, even from their families. The reason for this was that the Navajo Marine was in constant danger from a myriad of sources —including other Marines. In order to keep Caucasian Marines from shooting them, because they looked “Asian,” it was necessary to assign Caucasian Marines to guard them. Senior Marine Corps Signals Intelligence officers warned the Code Talkers, “We will not allow you to become prisoners of the Japanese.” Code Talkers proved highly successful during the campaign for Guadalcanal. Commanding the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal was Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and subsequently appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps. With first hand knowledge of the worth of the Code Talkers, Vandegrift ordered the expansion of the program. By August 1943, 191 Navajo were serving as Marine Corps Code Talkers [1]. Helping to train these code talkers in California was Staff Sergeant Philip Johnston —who may have been the oldest staff sergeant in the entire Armed Forces. With increased numbers of Code Talkers, the Marines began to include Navajo radiomen in every operation at the battalion and regimental levels, but their usefulness came at a price: two died during the New Britain campaign, three on Bougainville. Eventually, more than 400 Navajo served as Code Talkers; thirteen of these killed in action. The ingenuity, strength, scouting ability, and tracking capability stood the Navajo Marines in good stead in the South Pacific. They were used to Spartan living conditions and the hardships of island warfare seemed almost inconsequential to them. Although initially used at the company and battalion level, Navajo Marines became indispensable as their reputations expanded to regiments and divisions, but the Marines learned to guard these assets well, especially when fighting alongside Army units. To many soldiers, the Navajo looked “Japanese.” More than a few code talkers “almost” became casualties due to friendly fire. Several Navajo were “captured” and taken in for interrogation, only to be released back to their units and, I suppose, their minders handed a case of red ass for allowing the Navajo to get away from them. On the eve of the First Marine Division’s departure for the island of Okinawa, which planners expected would be the bloodiest landing of the Pacific War up to this point, the Navajos performed a sacred ceremonial dance that invoked their deities’ blessings and protection for themselves and their fellow Americans; they prayed that their enemies’ resistance might prove weak and ineffectual. We are talking about Marines here, so some of the white Marine observers of this ceremony scoffed at the whole idea. When war correspondent Ernie Pyle reported the story afterward, he noted that the landings on Okinawa beach had proved much easier than expected and he even noted that several of the Navajos were quick to point this out to the skeptics in their units —in typical Marine fashion, I suppose. Crisp salute to: Koji Kanemoto [1] Subsequently, the U. S. Army also employed Native Americans as code talkers, primarily from the Choctaw and Comanche nations. These assets were employed in the European Theater, but never employed in the Pacific War. Posted on 10/10/2014 10/04/2014 Categories World War II8 Comments on The Code Talkers, Part I A Marine Platoon at War Francis J. “Bing” West served in the U. S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer during the Vietnam War. He served with a Combined Action Platoon, spending 485 days in a remote village, and he served as a member of the Marine Force Reconnaissance Team that helped to develop and implement Stingray operations —small unit attacks behind enemy lines. He subsequently served as an under-Secretary of Defense in the administration of Ronald Regan (international Security) with expertise in matters involving El Salvador, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, South Korea, and Japan. In my opinion, Mr. West has presented his readers with an exceptional book; it is one I would recommend to every single American who still loves their country (noting that many no longer do). What leaps out at you from almost every page is the cost of making poor choices in national leadership from inside the voting booth. It is hard to imagine a president nonchalant about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. It is difficult to imagine a clueless Secretary of Defense about an appropriate strategy inside a war zone. It numbs the mind to learn that while our troops are dying and losing their limbs, three, and four-star generals endeavor to implement a progressive theory designed to save the Taliban from himself. Throughout this period of political malfeasance, the Marines of the 3rd Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines (3K/3/5) distinguished themselves in lethal combat, both as individuals, and as members of this nation’s finest fighting force. Most of the Third platoon survived; they excelled in defeating a determined enemy —not because of Defense Department leadership, but in spite of it. I believe that this book is mandatory reading among those of us who still love America; it teaches us that there are consequences to the decisions we make at the voting booth. It teaches us that elections can have dire consequences. I rate this book FIVE stars. Posted on 10/03/2014 09/29/2014 Categories Afghani War4 Comments on A Marine Platoon at War	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1826
__label__wiki	0.719333	0.719333	Wooden Shjips, “V.” May 25th 2018 by Jon Pruett At the time, dropping the needle on a Wooden Shjips song like 2006’s “Shrinking Moon for You” was to be reminded that the best and most effective rock and roll is usually the most simple—and if it’s an especially lysergic form of rock, it’s best if the feedback and repetition are dialed all the way up. That early nine-minute blast of guitar, Bo-Diddley-meets-Silver-Apples beat, roaring thunderclouds of feedback, and faded lyrics made you wonder if Wooden Shjips really had a vocalist or if that was just another echoing texture floating out of the headphones. Twelve years and five albums later (not to mention those albums from founder/songwriter Ripley Johnson’s other band, Moon Duo) and the Shjips are still deep in that psych headspace—but on V. they’ve expanded, creating trance-like music with classic-rock roots and more wide-open vistas. Previous albums like West and Back to Land willfully embraced a warmer production sound, shedding the skeletal darkness found on some of their early records. But really, as V. defiantly proves, Wooden Shjips aren’t looking for reinvention—they are still chasing grace through repetition; they simply have a broader palette to work with this time. “Eclipse” launches right away into that Shjips beat—minimal, driving, endless—soon accented with guitar, feedback, and vocals that make Spacemen 3 sound like The Decemberists; there are just hints of syllables and words hidden behind layers of sound (including a pretty fantastic saxophone odyssey). There is something amazing—but not quite wholly satisfying—about this world that the band has created: a rock and roll fantasy camp where you can take the best parts of the ’60s psychedelic underworld and fuse them with the punk minimalism of Suicide and the reverb-heavy indie dream pop of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Case in point: “Staring at the Sun” is like the Jesus and Mary Chain covering Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” Album closer “Ride On” is one of those rare Wooden Shjips songs (à la Back to Land’s “Everybody Knows”) where you can detect some kind of melancholic elegy underneath the oft-inflexible, spaced-to-the-gills rock road they travel down. LISTEN: Moon Duo Announces New Album, Share Raw Single, “Animal”	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1827
__label__wiki	0.680061	0.680061	First published: 29 April 2014 Within the political framework of the European Union (EU), there has been long standing recognition that the on-going exclusion of Roma represents a key challenge for human rights, justice and social inclusion agendas. By introducing a requirement for Member States to produce National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS), the European Commission hopes that Member States will work in partnership with the EU and key stakeholders to achieve inclusion objectives in respect of housing, health, education and employment. The form and content of the United Kingdom’s (UK) NRIS submission has been criticised in a number of key areas; notably its ‘migrant blind’ approach (Craig, 2011; 2013). This article draws on recent research undertaken by the authors (Brown, Martin and Scullion, 2013), which aimed to estimate the size of the recently arrived Roma population in the UK and document some of the local level responses as a result of this migration. It provides an overview of the context giving rise to the research, and how previous population estimates have been attempted, both across the EU and in the UK. The paper considers whether conventional methodologies can be fit for purpose when attempting to assess the population size of a transnational and highly mobile ethnic group, or whether more experimental approaches might yield a fresh approach. More specifically, it examines the strengths and weaknesses of adopting a place typology approach (Lupton et al., 2011). Finally the paper looks at the publication of research about Roma populations in a highly politicised arena in the wake of ongoing national and international attention on Roma. The social exclusion faced by members of Roma communities living in European Union (EU) Member States has been widely acknowledged (see Amnesty International, 2011; Bartlett, Benini and Gordon, 2011; Brown, Dwyer and Scullion, 2013). Although funding and policy instruments aimed at Roma inclusion have been available for a number of years, the European Commission has argued that there has often been an implementation gap at the national, regional and local levels (Reding, 2012). The main reasons cited for the limited effectiveness of existing mechanisms are a lack of political will, a lack of strong partnerships and coordination mechanisms, but also an unwillingness to acknowledge the needs of Roma as an issue (European Commission, 2010). In 2011, the European Commission called on all Member States to prepare, or adapt, strategic documents to meet four key EU Roma integration goals: access to education, employment, healthcare and housing (European Commission, 2011). This acknowledged that progress on Roma integration had not been satisfactory and explicitly requested that states develop comprehensive strategies (referred to as National Roma Integration Strategies or NRIS) which included ‘targeted actions and sufficient funding (national, EU and other) to deliver’ on the goals (European Commission, 2011: 4). Later in 2011, all 27 Member States agreed to a set of conclusions that endorsed the EU Framework for coordinating national Roma strategies. As detailed by the Open Society Foundations (2011: 2): The Conclusions commit member-states to “improve the implementation and strengthen the effectiveness of EU funds”, and make better use of technical assistance. They are much bolder on inclusion of Roma in decision-making processes than the Framework and have a strong focus on Roma empowerment through participation in policy debate and implementation. EPSCO invited the Commission “to pursue rigorous monitoring of the implementation of Council Directive 2000/43/EC”, arguably the EU’s most powerful instrument for combating discrimination based on ethnic origin. EPSCO also highlighted the need to intensify the fight against trafficking of Roma and to guarantee the legal rights of Roma victims of trafficking. The approach of the United Kingdom Responsibility for producing the UK NRIS was assumed by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). In an explanatory Memorandum to the Parliamentary European Scrutiny Committee, the Minister of State outlined the UK’s position. This Memorandum stated that the EU Framework contained no new proposals for legislation and is intended to ‘complement and reinforce the EU’s equality legislation by creating a political commitment to address the specific needs of Roma in the four integration goal areas’ (cited in the European Scrutiny Committee, Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011). Furthermore, the Minister asserted that: The Government’s priorities therefore are to ensure that the Conclusions, which will be adopted by 19th May EPSCO encourage those Member States with large, and often seriously disadvantaged Roma populations to take effective action; whilst at the same time not ceding any new powers or competence to the Commission and without accepting additional requirements above what the UK is in any case already doing, such as by ensuring sufficient flexibility around what constitutes national strategy, not imposing unhelpful targets, nor accepting burdensome reporting obligations on those, like the UK, with relatively few Roma citizens [emphasis added] (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011). The conclusions of the Committee restate that the apparent size of the Roma population in each Member State determines both the extent of the challenge they face and the nature of their response: It [EU Framework] also recognises that, whilst Roma constitute Europe’s largest minority, the size of the Roma community as a percentage of the total population in each Member State varies significantly, and that the scale of the challenges which Member States face, as well as their starting points for tackling Roma exclusion, are likely to differ in magnitude (European Scrutiny Committee -Twenty-Eighth Report Documents considered by the Committee on 11 May 2011, 7 DCLG (32664) Integration of Roma, publicly available online at the following link: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmeuleg/428-xxvi/42809.htm Prior to this, a cross departmental Ministerial Working Group had been established with the task of reviewing the evidence on inequalities experienced by UK Gypsies and Travellers but which also attempted to include issues relating to Central and Eastern European (CEE) Roma, although they featured only minimally (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012). Indeed, with the exception of issues around education there was no other mention relating to migrant Roma in the UK. At the same time, the European Social Fund allocated at least 20 per cent of a €74billion budget (2014 – 2020) to addressing social inclusion, thus providing significant resource implications for areas which invest in recently arrived disadvantaged populations. However, the lack of a specific and comprehensive NRIS, and particularly a lack of an official estimate by the Government of the number of Roma people who had moved to the UK, was seen by a number of local authorities and community based organisations as a major barrier to gaining high level recognition as to the impact this migration was having at a local level. A number of local authorities and organisations working in the field deemed that there was a clear policy imperative to enumerate the population of CEE Roma residing in the UK in order to overcome the deep social exclusion faced by members of those communities. As Craig (2011: ii) comments: There is therefore a pressing political and policy agenda to be carried through in the UK, starting from programmes of data collection and monitoring which makes the Roma ‘visible’ as a significant minority in the UK context, and which addresses severe disadvantage across the welfare spectrum. Such sentiments are shared by Open Society Foundations (2013: 1) who argue for the need to measure population sizes to ensure adequate resource allocations for the amelioration of social divisions: The ofﬁcial invisibility of Roma people negatively affects public funding that could help Roma communities with healthcare, education, employment, and housing. This invisibility also undermines the potential for Roma political participation and Roma-led social change. Counting ‘hard to count’ populations The importance of counting populations has long been recognised, particularly in relation to assisting the planning and delivery of infrastructure and the allocation of resources (Hillygus et al., 2006). However, it is recognised for some groups such endeavours are punctuated by complexity. The UK Census, for example, is used for calculating the resources required in relation to health, social services, housing, transport, etc. However, as Finney and Simpson (2009) reflected in their review of how the ‘ethnic group question’ came into being within the UK’s decennial population census, ‘counting’ people who belong to certain ‘ethnic groups’ can be controversial. The White Paper issued to prepare for the 1981 Census stated that, reliable information about members of ethnic groups living in the UK was required: In order to help in carrying out their responsibilities under the Race Relations Act, and in developing effective social policies, the Government and local authorities need to know how the family structure, housing, education, employment and unemployment of the ethnic minorities compare with the conditions in the population as a whole (cited in Finney and Simpson, 2009: 32). However, this led to concerns by Black organisations, as well as organisations who informed the broader statistical community (ibid), about whether this data would be used pejoratively in an atmosphere of far right politics, racist policing and repatriation. However, the question was included in the 1981 Census and has remained a feature ever since. It is now generally considered that the measurement of ethnicity, size and composition, provides a rich source of data for furthering understandings of social differences. Indeed, other attempts to quantify those people belonging to other categories (for example forced labour migrants) argue that attempting to enumerate the issue is essential to inform policy makers and other stakeholders, as well as enabling assessment of progress and impact of specific policy (International Labour Office (ILO), 2012: 7). For Gypsies and Travellers in the UK, the lack of data regarding the size of the population has been a feature until quite recently. While the commissioning of Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Needs Assessments (GTAAs) has gone someway to enumerate the population (see Niner and Brown, 2011), it was hoped that a more ‘comprehensive’ approach was being undertaken as a result of the subcategory of ‘Gypsy or Irish Traveller’ being included in the 2011 Census in the UK for the first time. Despite this inclusion, however, the 58,000 people who self-ascribed as Gypsy or Irish Traveller is still seen as a significant undercount. Such alleged understatement of the population is attributed to the lack of trust by potential respondents in official ‘counting’ processes coupled with low levels of literacy, awareness, and the failure of the Office for National Statistics to engage marginalised sections of the communities (Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, 2013). It is recognised, however, that some populations are harder to count than others, and these undercounted populations are ‘disproportionately ethnic and racial minorities’ (Hillygus et al., 2006: 1). For example, the ILO (2012) focused on enumerating the issue of forced labour, while Sigona and Hughes (2012), in a study on ‘irregular’ migrants, provide a ‘tentative’ estimate as to the population size, whilst acknowledging the various attempts that have been deployed previously and the limitations of the source data. Furthermore, recent research from the Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2014) illustrated the difficulty of accurately estimating the population of migrants entering the UK over the 2001-2011 period. Counting Roma There are widely acknowledged complexities and sensitivities around ‘counting’ Gypsies, Travellers and Roma. Long standing exclusion, the fear of, and actual experiences of discrimination (see Clark, 1998; Clark and Greenfields, 2006) have added to this challenging undertaking. Complexity is increased where frequent mobility is an issue (Scullion and Brown, 2013) alongside data collection instruments often recording nationality rather than ethnicity. A number of recent European studies focussing on particular Member States have attempted to estimate Roma populations using direct sampling of populations (see European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2009). In both the EU-MIDIS and the Roma Pilot survey (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014) a random route and focused enumeration sampling methodology was used. This entailed identifying areas within Member States where Roma were living in higher than average density based on urban/rural distributions (Personal correspondence with FRA team, 2013). However, in order to identify such areas, country specific solutions were adopted. In practice this meant for those countries where ethnicity was collected in the national population census this information was used. In other countries, where the Census did not allow for ethnicity, proxies such as first language were used. Consequently, the construction of sampling frames depended on the information available on the national level, taking into consideration only areas where Roma lived in such concentration that the sampling method would work reasonably well. Whenever possible, the density of Roma in the area compared to the national average was the preferred criterion. At a European level, the difficulties surrounding the estimation of the Roma population can also be seen in relation to the National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS) submitted by Member States, which contained estimates of the number of Roma in each respective country. For example, even countries such as the Czech Republic, with an enduring Roma population and a Census category of Roma, indicated that overall estimates tend to be the product of “expert estimates”, rather than comprehensive statistical returns (Minister for Human Rights, 2009). However, for many EU Member States it is noted that the difficulties of ‘counting’ Roma, and the limitations of the data, has not prevented estimates being incorporated into policy documents such as the NRIS. Previous estimates of the UK Roma population Within the UK, there have been three notable estimates of the size of the migrant Roma population (European Dialogue, 2009; Equality, 2011; Craig, 2011). Firstly, in 2009, European Dialogue carried out a mapping exercise, involving a survey to local authorities, as well as interviews and focus groups with Roma and statutory and non-statutory practitioners in areas with significant Roma populations (European Dialogue, 2009). Out of a total of 151 local authorities, 103 provided a return (a 68 per cent response rate). Almost half of responding authorities stated there was no or almost no Roma in their area. Statistical data from the 53 local authorities who indicated they did record Roma, suggested a population in England of 24,104, mainly derived from School Census figures (which exclude adults). The interviews and focus groups however, indicated much higher numbers in many locations, raising “serious concerns about accuracy of the data provided” by local authorities (ibid: 35). Consequently, the authors proposed an overall minimum population of 49,204 Roma in England, tempered by significant caveats about the underlying information. The same report took an estimate generated from members of the migrant Roma population who participated in the study and asserted that a possible population figure living in the UK could be 111,022 individuals. Furthermore, drawing on responses from Roma participants, who were asked to count the number of acquaintances, friends and family members who had migrated to the UK, a further potential estimate of between 400,000 – 1 million was asserted. Equality (2011: 23) asserts that the ‘best estimate’ of the Roma population living in the UK at that time was around 500,000. It is not clear from which data this estimate was arrived at; however, a description of this population (in terms of location, country of origin and demographic make-up) draws heavily from the European Dialogue (2009) report. Finally, Craig (2011) produced a Peer Review of the UK’s NRIS submission, reporting that ‘National estimates of the size of the UK Roma vary widely from about 100,000 to one million’ (p. ii). While he noted the disparity of estimates, he attempted a calculation based on migration trends and an average of the existing estimates – a population in the region of 300,000 individuals: Taking the mean of a number of estimates of Roma in the EU as 11 million, and the mean number who have arrived in the UK since 1993 as 300,000, the proportion of those moving to the UK is around 2.6%, a significantly higher proportion. If there are 300,000 Roma in the UK, they would constitute about 0.5% of the total UK population… (Craig, 2011: 29) What is clear is that previous estimates of Roma populations – whether based on analysis of existing large scale datasets, obtained from community based studies, or simply based on a number of assumptions – pose methodological issues. However, this does not suggest that such attempts should not be made or that they are not useful indicators in order to understand the nature and magnitude of the policy and service delivery effort required. However, given the various shortcomings of previous approaches to estimate the size of the Roma population, a more experimental but pragmatic approach might be appropriate. The research approach The investigation of population size in this research was only one aspect of a larger project aiming to fill significant gaps in the knowledge base in relation to migrant Roma in the UK. A self-completion questionnaire was sent out to all local authorities in the UK and. respondents were invited to provide information on a variety of issues including: an estimation of the local migrant Roma population (drawing on official data or informal sources); key issues arising with regards to their work with migrant Roma; their local authority strategy in responding to migrant Roma communities; and local initiatives and projects in place in their area. Due to the imperative to provide as comprehensive a population estimate as possible we required the response rate to be as high as possible. In partnership with an advisory group for the research – which consisted of local authorities and third sector representatives – it was decided that all local authorities would be assured of anonymity in order for them to feel comfortable that they could draw on a variety of sources (formal and informal) without fear of being singled out by local and national pressures with regards to the size of the migrant Roma population in their area. The return of these questionnaires was vigorously pursued by the research team with every local authority receiving multiple email reminders and, for the vast majority, a phone call to encourage a reply. After exhausting this approach, a sample of responding local authorities was then followed up via semi-structured interviews and their estimates, amongst other issues, checked via local NGOs. Out of 406 questionnaires issued, 151 returns were received (37 per cent response rate). By nation these were as follows: England (326 sent/119 returned) 37 per cent response rate Scotland (32 sent/8 returned) 25 per cent response rate Wales (22 sent/11 returned) 50 per cent response rate Northern Ireland (26 sent/13 returned) 50 per cent response rate. While the returns only covered 37 per cent of UK local authorities, those authorities that did provide data represented just under half of the total UK population (30 million people out of 63.7 million people in 2012, ONS Annual Mid-year Population Estimates, 2012). However, it was clear that only partial coverage of the UK had been achieved. Within the 151 returns, 100 did not provide numerical estimates for their respective area. Responding local authorities that provided estimates often stated that their data was anecdotal, gathered from front line workers, or based on figures from Children’s Services. Responses providing context to the estimates given bore strong similarities to the comments received by European Dialogue (2009) and Equality (2011). Additional questions in the questionnaire aimed to provide a greater understanding as to how local authorities had derived their responses; for example, their working arrangements (e.g. data and intelligence sharing practices) with other agencies. The comments received to these questions played a part in determining the methodology precisely because they made it clear that statistical data was unavailable, patchy or not reliable. For example, a number of respondents made reference to the fact that data relating to ethnicity was not always collected. Although arguably the responses to this survey were more comprehensive than previous similar attempts, the paucity of hard data available to local authorities who responded to the survey posed the same problem faced by previous studies. This meant that no simple aggregation of numbers was possible, but it also ruled out statistical calculations based on a sample due to potential skewing arising from those authorities which responded. It was clear that if a national estimate of the size of the Roma community was to be made, an appropriate methodology could not aim for statistical accuracy but produce indicators of the types of places Roma were likely to be found and an approximate sense of scale. The population estimate methodology adopted The intrinsic problems in ‘counting’ UK Roma as a migrant, ‘sub-ethnic’ and marginalised group, combined with the limited number of estimates we received meant that no simple aggregation of numbers was possible. It was recognised that the methodology selected was experimental in this particular field and not without risk, but the authors were clear that any estimate was not an end point in itself; rather, an attempt to indicate where migrant Roma populations were likely to be found and some perspective on their scale (Brown, Martin and Scullion, 2013). The adequacy and accuracy of such an approach could then be ‘tested’ further in the field. In order to achieve this place typology modelling work was applied. Lupton et al (2011: 5) describe place typologies as tools which provide users with the ‘capacity to identify groups of places that are similar to one another…which have similar conditions and outcomes although they are not geographically proximate’. They list four different models, ranging from the simple – a ranking of order based on a single variable such as the amount of social housing in a discrete area– to the complex, which aim to develop a classification on the basis of often very detailed characteristics covering fundamentally different categories: conceptual (e.g. ethnicity, socio-economic), infrastructural e.g. (housing, transport links), as well as physical (size and location). These groups of places are often recognised administrative divisions such as local authority, ward or Lower Super Output Area (LSOA) and tools all offer one or more ‘standardised variables’ or ‘base variables’, offering greater or lesser complexity as required. Examples of this include the MOSAIC tool, developed by Experian plc, now widely used by local authorities, and the CIPFA (The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) ‘Nearest Neighbours system’. Given the multiplicity of factors which affect the movement and settlement of migrant Roma populations, as well as the diversity of local authorities in the UK, a decision was made to adopt a complex model, namely the CIPFA Nearest Neighbours model. This model has been used in a range of applications, but most notably by the Audit Commission to benchmark individual local authorities’ progress against similar locations during the first decade of the 21st century when every area was required to choose performance targets from a central list of indicators to form Local Area Agreements (LAAs). The most valuable reason for the choice was that ‘nearest neighbour models start with a single place and find the most similar places to it’ (Lupton et al., 2011: 13). As such, it does not require total data coverage; rather a sample can be used, which was appropriate given the response rate. Nearest Neighbours allows the user to choose single ‘base’ area (Local Authority A) and ask the software to assess how similar this area is to other local authorities on a maximum of 27 variables. The 27 variables include fluid issues such as the age breakdown of a local area, but also more fixed variables such as the size of the local authority area, for example. What was also valuable was that the 27 includes variables whose definition is fairly stable over time such as gender or ethnicity (even if the numbers of ethnic minorities increased or declined). The degree of difference is the variance from the base local authority on a scale of 0-1. This means the nearest may vary only 0.001 from the base using the index of variables, while the furthest may be 0.999. CIPFA calculates the nearest 15, but with different cut off points. Users can also compare the base to either authorities of exactly the same administrative type or a mix (metropolitans, London boroughs, unitary authorities) or all authorities including rural districts. In relation to Brown, Martin and Scullion (2013) the following methodology was applied: The individual estimates supplied in survey returns (51 authorities) were taken at face value and were termed ‘primary’ estimates. All the 51 authorities who had provided primary estimates were entered into the Nearest Neighbours software in turn and the 15 statistically closest comparisons generated using all 27 variables, to give as close a match as possible. Those 15 could include one or more of the other 50 authorities which had provided their own estimates. The working hypothesis was that if any of the comparisons had NOT returned an estimate to the research team, because they displayed a similar typology, they might be expected to have similar sized Roma population and could be assigned a ‘working’ population of the same size. These were termed ‘secondary’ estimates. Having primary estimates in the base and among the other 14 allowed for some refinement to the secondary estimates by taking an average of all the primary estimates among the comparisons (including the base), rather than just adopting that of the base alone. All UK authorities were entered into the Nearest Neighbours tool in turn. They would then generate their own comparators, among which could be authorities with primary estimates, but could also include the secondary estimates generated during Stage 2. In this instance an average of both would be taken. However, secondary estimates could not be used on their own unless they themselves had been produced from at least five primary estimates to ensure the estimate was not more than two removes from a primary. In each case the base authority was compared to similar types of authority e.g. rural districts with other rural districts. Throughout this approach there were instances where the base had no primary and the ‘Nearest Neighbours’ modelling generated no primary or secondary estimates. Where this occurred it was decided an estimate could not be produced to any degree of certainty, so a population of 0 was assigned. Table 1: Application of method example Table 1 provides an illustration as to how this approach was applied. Based on an anonymised contrived example the base authority was a large urban metropolitan borough in the Yorkshire and Humber region. A primary estimate was received of 2,000 individuals. When the ‘nearest neighbour’ authority was calculated, (in Local Authority A’s case it was compared with other metropolitan areas, London boroughs and unitary authorities in England – Scotland, Wales and NI having different systems of local government), 9 of the top 15 had also provided primary estimates (in bold), while the remainder had already generated secondary estimates reasonably comparable in number. The assumption was that similar ‘types’ of places could be reasonably expected to have similarly sized Roma populations. This was replicated for each authority throughout the exercise. Using this technique a large number of secondary estimates were generated and by adding together primary and secondary estimates an overall aggregate figure across England of the UK of 193,297 was produced. It was not possible to replicate this approach in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland due to the low number of local authorities in those nations; as such estimates obtained directly from the survey of authorities were used. Combining the estimate for England with those primary figures received from Scotland (3,030 individuals), Wales (878 individuals) and Northern Ireland (500 individuals) provided an estimated migrant Roma population size of 197,705 individuals for the UK. Using this approach to estimate the Roma population is experimental but given the lack of adequate or reliable data on migrant Roma that exists at local and national level, a new approach was justified, and perhaps unavoidable. While this approach has not been commonly applied to assessing the size of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller populations, it is legitimately used to measure a wide range of socio-economic patterns, including the settlement of ethnic minority populations. As the authors acknowledged (see Brown, Martin and Scullion, 2013: 74-76) this approach was not without risk. The primary issue was whether it was possible to establish any empirical connection between patterns of settlement by migrant Roma and the measurable datasets in the ‘Nearest Neighbours’ tool. Simply put, are local authorities sharing very similar characteristics across the 27 indicators likely to display similarity in their Roma populations? If so, what is the basis for this? Is there evidence that Roma tend to reside in similar numbers in similar types of local authority? This type of problem is not unique. As Harris (2013: 2282) suggests in relation to schooling, it is well known that free school meal eligibility is a poor proxy for measuring low family income as well as poverty, deprivation, or social exclusion in general, but despite such evident shortcomings it is the only measure currently used within state-funded schools and continues to operate as an indicator. More importantly, Harris notes that whilst there are valid criticisms of continuing to use such proxies, it does not automatically imply that indices are no longer useful or that it is inevitable that other methods, such as “locally focused case studies represent a superior approach” (ibid, 2285). But in one sense, advocates of alternative methods miss the point: …we would readily agree that more idiographic and often qualitative case studies…offer important insights about what…choice actually means to people ‘on the ground’ and how they act. (Harris, 2013: 2286) Although indices, as Harris (2013: 2287) states operate essentially as averages, they: …emerge as the sum of their parts and can be used to identify interesting localised cases for further study…in any case, we do not want to create a competition between different methodological approaches. Instead, we simply note that judicious use of index values can motivate precisely that sort of work (i.e. more in depth qualitative work) We acknowledge that there is a question whether the 51 estimates provided by local authorities were robust enough to be used as the baseline from which other comparisons were made, but – as yet – more effective alternative methods are rarely offered when attempting to gauge the size of communities outside traditional monitoring systems. Although a national figure is proposed, we stress its provisionality (see Brown, Martin and Scullion, 2013). An emerging outcome from this approach is the potential development of a place based model which could indicate the type of places Roma could be expected, using approximate evidence (including front line workers knowledge) from which more detailed, local studies can be undertaken. The authors invite others to take up this opportunity. Conclusion: entering a politicised arena Roma from across Central and Eastern Europe have been moving more easily across the borders of Member States since the expansion of the EU in 2004. Although synchronous with the general wide scale economic migration of citizens from the ‘accession’ countries from that time on, in part, Roma migration has occurred because countries of origin have not ameliorated the long standing exclusion of Roma communities or have even exacerbated such marginalisation, as liberalisation of markets and return of long suppressed ethnic hostility has exposed Roma to further discrimination. As events throughout 2013 demonstrated (e.g. the case of ‘Maria’ in Greece, various television programmes, and the media attention on the Page Hall area of Sheffield) Roma continue to be a significantly politicised minority across Europe and the UK. Upon publication, our research generated interest and debate from a range of different parties, including local authorities, Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), NGOs, academics, politicians and the media. Increasingly, there has been a move towards the need for research to have a ‘practical pay-off’ (e.g. its direct contribution to policy making or practice), ‘this being the other side of the requirement that policy-making and practice should be research or evidence based’ (Hammersley, 2003: 327). In order for practical pay-offs to occur, dissemination of research is essential. However, dissemination is sometimes followed by ‘distortion’, particularly in relation to media representation (see Hammersley, 2003, for example for a discussion of media representation of research on educational attainment of minority ethnic children). A number of commentators have already highlighted examples of negative media representations in relation to migration more broadly (King and Wood, 2002), and particular groups of migrants – for example refugees and asylum seekers (Kaye, 2002) and Roma (Erjavec, 2001). Additionally, it is argued that there has been a change in journalist culture with an increasing commitment to entertainment (ICAR, 2012) or ‘infotainment’, which is described by Greenslade (2005: 10) as a ‘subtle combination’ of information and entertainment. As Greenslade (ibid: 21) suggests, contemporary media has become ‘more hysterical’, but also the stories are more repetitive in nature. Indeed, he refers to a persistent theme in the Express newspaper during 2004/2005 around a supposed ‘influx’ of Roma. It is not the purpose of this paper to look at the evolution of the media, or the historic relationship between media representation and ‘moral panics’, as these interesting discussions can be found elsewhere (see for example, Cohen and Young, 1973; Mai, 2002; Greenslade, 2005). However, it is important to note that a media focus on Roma is not a new phenomenon. More importantly, the response to the findings from this research need to be seen within the wider context of the debates around the UK’s role in Europe, immigration, and ethnic diversity more broadly, which have been a consistent feature of political, public and academic debate. Returning to one of the core reasons for this research, namely the perceived inadequacy of the UK National Roma Integration Strategy (NRIS) and the need to highlight the challenges faced by local authorities, Roma populations and destination communities, the commentary by Fekete (2013) and the presence of a parliamentary Early Day Motion1 on the issue of Roma inclusion are encouraging. Such statements and support for positive action on the inclusion of Roma in the UK provides hope that the marginalisation and discrimination, from which many Roma are fleeing, may be not be a defining feature of their lives in the UK. 1 Early Day Motion 788 ‘Roma Migrant ‘Communities. * Correspondence Address: Philip Brown, Sustainable Housing & Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU), University of Salford, M5 4WT. Email: p.brown@salford.ac.uk Amnesty International (2011) Briefing: human rights on the margins, Roma in Europe. London: Amnesty International. Bartlett, W., Benini, R. and Gordon, C. (2011) Measures to promote the situation of Roma citizens in the European Union. Report for the European Parliament. Brussels: Directorate-General for Internal Policies, Policy Department C Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs. Brown, P., Dwyer, P. and Scullion, L. (2013) The Limits of Inclusion? Exploring the views of Roma and non Roma in six European Union Member States. Salford: University of Salford. Brown, P., Martin, P. and Scullion, L. (2013) Migrant Roma in the United Kingdom: Population size and experiences of local authorities and partners. Salford: The University of Salford. Clark, C. (1998) Counting Backwards: the Roma ‘numbers game’ in Central and Eastern Europe. Radical Statistics, 68, 4. Clark, C. and Greenfields, M. (2006) Here to Stay: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Cohen, S. and Young, J. (1973) (eds) The manufacture of news: social problems, deviance and the mass media. London: Constable. Craig, G. (2011) The Roma: A Study of National Policies. Brussels: European Commission. Available online at: http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/spru/research/pdf/EURoma.pdf (Accessed 06/03/2014). Craig, G. (2013) Assessing the implementation of National Roma Integration Strategies: Ad hoc request. EU Network of Independent Experts on Social Inclusion: York Workshops. Department for Communities and Local Government (2011) Commission Communication: An EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020. Available online at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmeuleg/428-xxvi/42809.htm (Accessed 10/03/2014). Department for Communities and Local Government (2012) Progress report by the ministerial working group on tackling inequalities experienced by Gypsies and Travellers. London: HMSO. Equality (2011) From Segregation to inclusion. Roma pupils in the United Kingdom, a pilot research project. Available online at: http://equality.uk.com/Education_files/From%20segregation%20to%20integration_1.pdf (Accessed 10/03/2014) Erjavec, K. (2001) Media Representation of the Discrimination against the Roma in Eastern Europe: The Case of Slovenia. Discourse & Society, 12, 6, 699-727. CrossRef link European Commission (2010) Roma in Europe: The Implementation of EU Instruments and Policies for Roma Inclusion – Progress Report 2008-2010. Commission Staff Working Document. Brussels: European Commission. Available online at http://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=4823&langId=en (Accessed 13/04/14). European Commission (2011) An EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020. Communication from the commission to the European Parliament, The Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. Brussels. European Dialogue (2009) The movement of Roma from new EU Member States: A mapping survey of A2 and A8 Roma in England, report for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). Available online at http://equality.uk.com/Resources_files/movement_of_roma.pdf (Accessed 10/03/2014) European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2009) EU-MIDIS Technical Report: Methodology, Sampling and Fieldwork. Available online at http://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/eu-midis_technical_report.pdf (Accessed 10/03/2014) European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2014) Roma Pilot Survey – Technical Report: Methodology, Sampling and Fieldwork. Available online at http://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2014/roma-pilot-survey-technical-report-methodology-sampling-and-fieldwork (Accessed 10/03/2014) Fekete, L. (2013) A review of the Migrant Roma in the UK research report. Institute of Race Relations. Available at http://www.irr.org.uk/news/no-going-back-for-the-roma/ (Accessed 24/02/2014). Finney, N. and Simpson, L. (2009) ‘Sleepwalking to segregation’?: challenging myths about race and migration. Bristol: Policy Press. Greenslade, R. (2005) Seeking Scapegoats: The coverage of asylum in the UK press. Asylum and Migration Working Paper 5. London: Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Hammersley, M. (2003) Media Representation of Research: The case of a review of ethnic minority education. British Educational Research Journal, 29, 3, 327-343. CrossRef link Harris, R. (2013) Are indices still useful for measuring socioeconomic segregation in UK schools? A response to Watts. Environment and Planning A, 45, 2281–2289. CrossRef link Hillygus, S., Nie, N., Prewitt, K. and Pals, H. (2006) The Hard Count: The Political and Social Challenges of Census Mobilization. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ICAR (2012) Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Media, ICAR Briefing, February 2012. Available online at http://www.icar.org.uk/Asylum_Seekers_and_Media_Briefing_ICAR.pdf (Accessed 25/02/2014). International Labour Office (ILO) (2012) Hard to see, harder to count: Survey guidelines to estimate forced labour of adults and children. Geneva: International Labour Office. Irish Traveller Movement in Britain (2013) Gypsy and Traveller population in England and the 2011 Census. London: Irish Traveller Movement in Britain. Available at http://irishtraveller.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Gypsy-and-Traveller-population-in-England-policy-report.pdf Accessed 07/03/2014. Kaye, R. (2002) ‘Blaming the victim’: an analysis of press representation of refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, In: R. King N. Wood (2002) (eds) Media and Migration: Constructions of Mobility and Difference. London: Routledge, pp. 53-70. King, R. and Wood, N. (2002) (eds) Media and Migration: Constructions of Mobility and Difference. London: Routledge. Lupton, R., Tunstall, R., Fenton, A. and Harris, R. (2011) Using and developing place typologies for policy purposes. London: DCLG. Mai, N. (2002) Myths and moral panics: Italian identity and the media representation of Albanian immigration, In: R. D. Grillo and J. C. Pratt (eds) The Politics of Recognising Difference: Multiculturalism Italian Style. Research in migration and ethnic relations series. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 77-94. Minister for Human Rights (2009) Roma Integration Concept for 2010-2013. Available online at http://ec.europa.eu/justice/discrimination/files/roma_czech_republic_strategy_en.pdf (Accessed 14/04/2014). Niner, P. and Brown, P. (2011) The evidence base for Gypsy and Traveller site planning: a story of complexity and tension. Evidence & Policy, 7, 3, 359-77. CrossRef link ONS (2014) Quality of Long-Term International Migration Estimates from 2001 to 2011. Available online at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/method-quality/specific/population-and-migration/international-migration-methodology/quality-of-long-term-international-migration-estimates-from-2001-to-2011—full-report.pdf (Accessed 14/04/014). Open Society Foundations (2011) EU Policies for Roma Inclusion. Policy Assessment. Available online at http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/2011-07%2520EU%2520Roma%2520Inclusion%2520Policies%2520final.pdf (Accessed 07/03/2014). Open Society Foundations (2013) Roma Census Success. Factsheet. Available online at http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/fact-sheets/roma-census-success (Accessed 06/03/2014). Reding, V. (2012) The Commission’s Communication on “National Roma Integration Strategies: a first step in the implementation of the EU Framework. Speech/12/379. Available online at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-12-379_en.htm (Accessed 10/04/2014). Scullion, L. and Brown, P. (2013) ‘What’s working?’: Promoting the inclusion of Roma in and through education. Salford: The University of Salford. Sigona, N. and Hughes, V. (2012) No way out, no way in: Irregular migrant children and families in the UK. Oxford: COMPAS. Related tags: Ethnicity and Race and Migration, Housing and Planning, place typology, population estimates, Research article, Roma Editorial: Special Issue - 'Roma Integration in the UK' Book review - Remaking Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: Women’s Movements, Gender and Diversity Jacqueline Baxter Book review - Evaluation for the real world: The impact of evidence in policy making Elanor Warwick	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1834
__label__cc	0.739322	0.260678	Donald R. Van Der Pol Donald Ray Van Der Pol, age 90 of Monroe, went home to be with his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, on Thursday, December 31, 2020 at The Cottages in Pella. A private family service will be held on Tuesday. Burial will take place at Silent City Cemetery. An open visitation will take place on Monday, January 4, 2021, from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. at Coburn Funeral Home in Monroe. The family will not be present during visitation. Memorials may be directed to the First Baptist Church, Monroe Ambulance or Wesley Life Hospice. Condolences may be left for the family at www.coburnfuneralhomes.com The son of Christopher and Tena (Roorda) Van Der Pol, Donald was born on July 26, 1930, at his parents home in rural Monroe. He graduated from Monroe High School in 1949. On May 26, 1951, he was united in marriage to Darlene Van Wyngarden at her parents home. Donald served in the United States Air Force from January 1951 - December 1954. Donald farmed on the family farm and following retirement he worked as a courier for Pella Regional Health Center. He was an active member of First Baptist Church in Monroe, teaching Sunday School, serving on church boards, working as janitor and serving as a Deacon. Donald also served on the Monroe School Board for 12 years. Donald was a world class Rook player. He enjoyed traveling to Branson with family and friends to enjoy the music shows and relax while camping. Those left to honor his memory include his wife, Darlene; three daughters, Darla Linn (David) Whatling, Denice Rae (Rich) Clucas, and Delana Renee (Shawn) Barr; 13 grandchildren, six great grandchildren, and a brother, Laurel (Nancy) Van Der Pol. Preceding Donald in death were his parents, a son Lynn Ray Van Der Pol, a brother, Harold Van Der Pol and a sister, Ada Keuning. Livestream service link: https://vimeo.com/497381544 Jim and Charlene Brown wrote on Jan 5, 2021: "Darlene, we were so sorry to hear about Donald's going to be with the Lord and we are praying for comfort for all of you during this time of deep sorrow. I have many happy memories of visiting in your home with my family, having fun with Darla, Denice, and Delana while you and Donald would play Rook with my dad and mom! I loved your date pudding, which I always hoped you would make! Your friendship to our family all these years is something I will always be thankful for and fondly remember. With our deepest sympathy and prayers, Jim and Charlene Brown" Galyn & Tami Nook wrote on Jan 5, 2021: "Thinking of you and missing you. Was always great to visit with you and seeing you. You will be greatly missed. Family reunions will not be the same. We will see you again some day Uncle Donald. " Tom & Arlene Whatling wrote on Jan 4, 2021: " Thinking of you and praising the Lord that Donald is with his Lord and Savior.Prayers and Hugs and all our love. Tom & Arlene Whatling " Cheryl Keuning wrote on Jan 4, 2021: "Keith and I will miss our visits and time spent with Don. We enjoyed sharing stories and laughter with Darlene and Don. He always had a smile on his face. Our thoughts and prayers are with Darlene and family. Keith and Cheryl Keuning" JoAnn Hasselman wrote on Jan 4, 2021: "So sorry for your loss! Thinking of you all. JoAnn Hasselman" Bart huetter wrote on Jan 4, 2021: "Darlene sympathy and prayers for you and your family." "Darlene with sympathy and prayers for you and your family." Lucille Groenendyk wrote on Jan 3, 2021: "I didn?t know Don or Darlene until I met them at Vriendschaap Village. I was invited to their Bible class. I grew to love the class and them. My sympathy to Darlene and family. He will be missed." Cindy Stowers wrote on Jan 3, 2021: "Have peace and rest in the fact that he is with Jesus now. ? Cindy Stowers " Cindy Vandenburg wrote on Jan 3, 2021: "To the entire family, you are in my thoughts and prayers during this time! I really enjoyed all the times I was around Donald! He made me laugh and I think I did the same for him. I know his faith was strong and he is spending the new year with Jesus. Hugs to all!" Becky Thomason Danilson wrote on Jan 3, 2021: "Darla I'm so sorry. Know I'm thinking of you and your family. Hugs to you." Jan Miller wrote on Jan 2, 2021: "To Donald's family, I am so sorry for your loss. May God comfort you as you share special memories of his life. "We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord." II Corinthians 5:8 Love from Jan (Cowman) Miller"	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1837
__label__wiki	0.772886	0.772886	Amy S. Rindahl, of Sheboygan, died Thursday, January 7, 2021, at Aurora Sheboygan Memorial Hospital. She was 47 years old. She was born on April 13, 1973, in Antigo, a daughter of Marty and Gail (Bostwick) Rindahl. Amy enjoyed spending time with her friends and loved meeting new people. Her desire to meet new people and see new places kept her on the go. She enjoyed traveling, including riding the city bus. She is survived by two brothers; two sisters; many aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. She was preceded in death by her parents; a brother; grandparents, Ray and Grace Bostwick; and uncles. A funeral service will be held on Wednesday, January 13, 2021, at 12 p.m. at Bradley Funeral Home with Reverend Charles Hoffmann officiating. Burial will take place in Lily Cemetery. Visitation will be Wednesday from 10 a.m. until the time of service at the funeral home. Peggy Tomski wrote on Jan 11, 2021: "I worked at Antigo High School when Amy was a student. She was always so positive and smiling. RIP. " "It was a pleasure working with Amy when she was in high school. She was such a happy smiling teenager. RIP. Peggy Tomski " Emily Elliott- Low wrote on Jan 11, 2021: "I remember Amy from high school and mrs. Albright?s class. She was such a sweet girl, always smiling. Condolences to her family. " Tammy Smith wrote on Jan 9, 2021: "I had the privilege of working with Amy. What a pleasure she was. Always happy, never complaining, accepted whatever job she was given with a smile on her face with much appreciation. We could all learn from her attitude and determination. I am so glad that I was given the honor of knowing her. RIP Amy You deserve it. Great job!" Jeanne Peters wrote on Jan 8, 2021: "Amy was a former student of mine at West Elementary. She was always a happy and smiling youngster. Sorry to hear of her death. Prayers to family and friends. Mrs. Peters"	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1838
__label__cc	0.738791	0.261209	Durabulb: ‘Unbreakable’ LED Survives 100-Foot Fall & More Throw it off the top of a building or down some stairs, or carry it in a bag without padding, and the Durabulb will take the licking keep on ticking (or lighting, as it were). The lightweight LED uses 80% less energy than conventional bulbs and its rugged design means it also requires a lot less packaging, saving on space and materials for shipping that would wind up in a landfill. The flexible, shatter-proof design is thanks to a bouncy polycarbonate plastic shell. It was tested by throwing it 100 feet and attempting to smash it with a tennis racket. It was also mailed without a box through the US postal service and worked on the other end. The bulbs can last up to 10,000 hours. “Lighting Science is committed to creating products that promote sustainability and low carbon economies,” said Pete Rumsey, Executive Vice President of Business Development for Lighting Science. “By choosing the lightweight Durabulb instead of other LED bulbs, Americans have the opportunity to reduce the CO2 emissions associated with LED lights by 20,000 tons a year. That’s the equivalent of driving a car across the United States 16,213 times.” See more in Home & Personal or under Gadgets. December, 2016.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1839
__label__cc	0.729088	0.270912	Franchise BIZ Directory Top Franchises in Europe Top Franchises in The United States Top Franchises in Australia German Doner Kebab Franchise Franchise History Revenue Estimates How to Apply for German Doner Kebab Franchise ? It is a fast food retail chain that specializes in the exceptional preparation of kebabs. It was created by Kadir Nurman in Germany in 1989 to offer a wide variety of unique and healthy kebabs. It began to franchise in 2013 in Dubai and from that moment it had rapid growth, settling in Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Oman, Bahrain, Switzerland and several other countries. It opened its first franchise in the United Kingdom in 2014 and later, in 2019, in the United States and Canada. Year Business Began: 1989. Franchising Since: 2013. Headquarters: Berlin, Germany. Estimated Number of Units: More than 60. Number of Employees: Not provided It has grown tremendously by establishing more than 60 stores in Europe and the Middle East. It has estimated sales of more than € 2.2 million per day and € 3.5 billion per year. Its goal is to become the largest brand of kebabs in the world by opening more than 1,500 stores worldwide in the next ten years. The costs will depend on the size of the place (between 1,300 and 1,500 square feet), kitchen size (400 square feet), stock, equipment, seats (over 40) and more. The estimated investment ranges from $ 320k to $ 450k, and the company requires the franchisee to have liquid capital of $ 250,000. In addition to the above, the franchise fee is $ 25,000. Depending on the size of the store, the number of seats and number of employees per day, a weekly income of $ 19,290 is estimated. The German Doner Kebab team will help you throughout the training process so you can adequately manage your franchise. They will offer you advice about site selection, store design, staff treatment, advertising, marketing, and social media campaigns. They will provide you with all the tools so you can attract as many customers as possible. To inquire about the franchise, you must fill out the form at https://www.germandonerkebab.com/german-doner-kebab-gdk-fast-food-franchise-opportunity, or you can also write to ben@germandonerkebab.com. Ale-Hop Franchise SPAR Franchise EweMove Franchise Greggs Franchise Categories Europe, Franchises, G, Germany Tags Doner Kebab Franchise, Europe, Franchise, German Doner Kebab, German Doner Kebab Franchise, Germany © Franchise BIZ Directory 2021	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1843
__label__wiki	0.552411	0.552411	Notes from the US: Anti-Semitism enshrined in law World, Feb 17th In perhaps Trump’s more startling act of discrimination yet, it was announced recently that it will now be legal for adoption agencies to refuse to help same sex couples and potential parents where one or both partners are Jewish. This is officially an extension of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which in 2014 made it legal for corporations to deny certain types of health coverage according to their owners’ religious beliefs. The Supreme Court set this recent precedent when Miracle Hill Ministries, a Christian foster care agency in South Carolina, refused to work with many applicants who did not share its beliefs. In this case: a Jewish woman eager to mentor children in foster care. This now means that Anti-Semitism is now officially the policy of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. DoI really have to? The US Department of the Interior (DoI) is the rough equivalent of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK. It has a responsibility, a duty, to respond to inquiries made (usually by members of the public) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The DoI recently announced, however, that – in a move obviously seen by many as a reduction in transparency – it now wishes to ignore any FOIA request which it decides are too difficult to bother with. It says that – after a relatively short period for public consultation by which it is not bound – ‘The bureau will not honor a request that requires an unreasonably burdensome search or requires the bureau to locate, review, redact, or arrange for inspection of a vast quantity of material.’ Kentucky abortion ban Although previous such attempts to outlaw abortion have been reversed by federal courts, state lawmakers in Kentucky has introduced a bill which would effectively outlaw abortions – even when foetal anomaly can be shown, and in cases of rape or incest. Kentucky already has only one abortion provider left for the entire state. Although the oppressing élite’s family members may not be fair game for criticism, a development announced in the middle of last month shows the environment of hate and intolerance in which they operate: Second Lady (the wife of Vice President Mike Pence – he who would be top dog if and when Trump is impeached) Karen Pence is to return to teaching art at a school where employees are obliged actively to oppose LGBT lifestyles. The school in Springfield, (Virginia), prevents teachers from engaging in or condoning ‘homosexual or lesbian sexual activity’ and ‘transgender identity’. Shutdown and out The first [ed. ???] government shutdown triggered by Trump was selective: in mid-January the Department of the Interior thought nothing of recalling dozens of furloughed federal employees to assist the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management in Trump’s wrecking of the local environment as he grows ever more determined to expand offshore oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans. Furthermore, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell actually introduced a bill (The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (S.109)) permanently to restrict any federal funds going to abortion care. The legislation would also have prevented abortion care in federally funded medical facilities – even those sanctioned by their subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Unambivalently flouting the law, the Trump administration announced late last month that it is about to begin forcing legitimate asylum seekers (back) into Mexico as their cases are processed in the United States. Court challenges followed on the heels of this announcement, which is effective immediately. Lies, damn lies and statistics Government reports are often fairly accurate and so contradict policy. This has been particularly true, of course, since Trump took office. In January of this year (2019), however, Trump appeared to have the best of both worlds. Not long into the new year the Department of ‘Justice’ (DoJ) actually admitted that it had made significant errors in the way in which – one year earlier, in January 2018 – it had published a report attempting to link terrorism and immigration. In fact the two greatest threats to civil society in the United States have long been established – and widely acknowledged by all but the least well informed – as climate change and white supremacist violence. When asked to retract or edit the report, ‘Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States’ (which was released to support Trump’s travel ban of March 2017 which barred entry to citizens from six majority Muslim countries), the DoJ refused. The report wrongly conflates arrests with convictions; it misrepresents the timespan it covers; and it misleadingly counts people charged with non-terrorist related offences. Hailing the k-k-King In mid-January Steve King took his seat in Congress, not long after causing fresh outrage by his white supremacist views. the Iowa Republican commented to the New York Times that he didn’t feel that such terms as ‘White nationalist’ and ‘white supremacist’ were offensive. Declining to condemn this when asked, Trump chose instead to send a blatantly racist tweet about Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Senator who had announced her potential candidacy for president in 2020 a fortnight earlier. He is fixated on Warren’s Native American heritage. Making fun of an advertisement streamed from her own home, Trump jibed: “If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash!” The same day he quoted a blatantly white nationalist column written by Pat Buchanan: “The United States, as we have known it, is going to cease to exist… The more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual America becomes — the less it looks like Ronald Reagan’s America — the more dependably Democratic it will become. The Democratic Party is hostile to white men, because the smaller the share of the US population that white men become, the sooner that Democrats inherit the national estate.” Hating being called hateful As Trump himself sponsors more and more acts of petty reprisal, the right-wing and anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) took out a lawsuit of dubious merit in January against the venerable Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). CIS wants to have itself removed from the SPLC’s highly trusted and respected list of hate groups. The Alabama-based SPLC defines a hate group as an organisation whose activities or statements ‘attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.’ The CIS seeks to reduce immigration (to the United States). MLK shame The day set aside to commemorate the life and achievements of Martin Luther King fell on 21st January this year. Three things happened that weekend indicative of the state of racial bigotry. First, a judge in Arizona handed down guilty verdicts to four activists from the humanitarian group No More Deaths who had left water and food in the fierce Sonoran Desert for refugees and migrants travelling to the US as guest-workers. The helpers could serve six months in prison. Catherine Gaffney from No More Deaths said, “This verdict challenges not only No More Deaths volunteers, but people of conscience throughout the country. If giving water to someone dying of thirst is illegal, what humanity is left in the law of this country?” Then, as if to corroborate Gaffney’s sentiment, Trump and Pence stayed all of two minutes when they visited the MLK memorial in Washington. To conclude, Trump implicitly endorsed the action of a group of Catholic high school students from Kentucky wearing red ‘Make America Great Again’ hats who had taunted Omaha elder Nathan Phillips by denying the validity of press coverage censuring those responsible for the confrontation. A day later he invited the students (by then the objects of criticism for their actions from a wide spectrum of opinion) to the White House! Over 30,000 teachers in the US’s second-largest school district (equivalent to the LEA in the UK), Los Angeles, struck for nearly a week last month for higher wages and more support in the classrooms as the District’s management refused to use its nearly $2 billion (£1.6bn) reserves. The deal which was eventually reached includes a 6% rise for teachers and a gradual decrease over an (unspecified) number of years in class size. Action involving educators in Colorado begun not long afterwards. Meanwhile, Monsanto’s toxic glyphosate has been found in above 70% of those breakfast cereals containing oats which are served to school children across the country. At the start of this year California became the first state in the United States to make it illegal for pet shops to sell rabbits, dogs and cats which have been bred for profit – in ‘kitten factories’ and ‘puppy mills’. Under the new law (AB 485) such outlets must now turn to animal shelters and rescue agencies in what animal rights groups have acknowledged is a good first step to save more lives. Whether the law will be adequately enforced, though, is as much in doubt as whether the $500 (£400) fine which those who do not obey the law face is a deterrent. The same law – actually enacted over a year ago, in late 2017 – also requires shops to keep records of the origins of each animal sold. Wheeler in spin Last month Trump named Andrew Wheeler as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency following the resignation of Scott Pruitt last year amid multiple financial and ethics scandals. A former lobbyist for the coal industry, Wheeler has also regularly been associated with right-wing conspiracy accounts on social media endorsed racist posts about the Obamas. Trump’s constant destruction of the environment comes as no surprise: assuming that his comments about climate change were a silly attempt to ‘troll’ the media, rather an irresponsible act in itself, his action at the same time not to regulate two toxic chemicals (PFOA and PFOS) linked to kidney and testicular cancer is a potential disaster. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act PFOA and PFOS will remain unregulated and the utilities which provide water in the United States will face no federal requirements for testing for and removing the chemicals from drinking water supplies. The young aren’t impressed As anarchists we may not get too excited about the kind of action and liberal thinking which many progressives espouse when restricted to parliamentary, legislative and ‘democratic’ contexts. Yet some encouragement can perhaps be taken from a new survey published by the Pew Research Center last month which shows that the so-called Generation Z (comprising those young people between the ages of 13 and 21) could be even more progressive than the slightly older ‘millennials’. An understandable 70% of those polled disapprove of Trump, 54% attribute global warming in part to human activity, and 50% are concerned that society is too intolerant of those who don’t identify as women or men. Louis Further Louis FurtherNotes from the US	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1844
__label__wiki	0.974607	0.974607	Zedd Releases "The Middle" Remix EP Zedd, Maren Morris, and Grey’s “The Middle” is arguably one of, if not the song of the summer, and now it has an official remix pack! Niall Horan Performs “Seeing Blind” Acoustic With Maren Morris Niall Horan has released a new video of an acoustic performance for his track, "Seeing Blind." WATCH: Maren Morris & Zedd Perform "The Middle" on 'The Ellen Show' Zedd , Maren Morris , and Grey released "The Middle" back in January, however, the song continues to top the charts. WATCH: Maren Morris and Zedd Give First Live Performance Of "The Middle" Together The country star and DJ performed their No. 1 hit, "The Middle," for their very first time together live. LISTEN: The Incredible Two-Part Tribute Album to Elton John Was Just Released Both parts of the two-part tribute album to Elton John and his longtime songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, were released today (April 6).	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1845
__label__cc	0.734004	0.265996	Languedoc wine A weekend in La Clape – Part 1 December 10, 2015 December 10, 2015 / Geordie Clarke / 1 Comment I had an inkling something was up as we crept through the Friday afternoon rush on the northern outskirts of Montpellier. But it wasn’t until we were stuck in the narrow Roman streets of Béziers that my suspicions were confirmed. I had fallen victim to a fat-finger error when programming my SatNav. So it goes that what should have been a one-hour drive to Narbonne from Montpellier–Méditerranée Airport became a two-and-a-half-hour mission through the Languedoc’s most frustrating and congested roads. There are surprisingly few alternative routes available when you’re stuck in a traffic jam in the French countryside. Credit to my passenger, who, despite having to endure my complaints about a suspiciously faulty SatNav, maintained optimism that we would reach our destination prior to our grandchildren graduating from university. The destination, Chateau l’Hospitalet in La Clape, is the seat of Gerard Bertrand’s wine business and we were headed there for its annual vine pruning celebration. Most of us approach the task of pruning anything in the garden with a degree of reluctance, keen to avoid it in the hope that someone else will do the job for them. But for the vignerons of France, especially those in the Languedoc, vine pruning is just as important as making the wine itself, so it is important to honour the labour that goes into it. It is also a great excuse for a party. As the website for Gerard Bertrand says: Vine pruning is without a doubt the most difficult task of winegrowers. This meticulous work represents the beginning of the vine life cycle and every winter the wine growers are working to give birth to what will be the fruit of a whole year’s work. It is with these excessive temperatures that on our vines, the wine growers accomplish 15 million pruning movements with infinite precision influencing the next harvest as much as the vine for the rest of its life. It was for this reason that we were headed to Gerard Bertrand’s vineyard for a celebration that included outdoor activities, a wine tasting and a gala dinner. All we had to do was get there. But first we had to endure a drive fraught with calamity. First the wrong route on the SatNav. Then an attempt to deviate from the ill-fated route to find the toll highway only to second-guess my judgement and turn back. And finally when presented with the last opportunity to pull onto the autoroute à péage we found ourselves whizzing by in a blur of confusion and ineptitude. It’s amazing what crosses the mind when you’re stuck in a line of traffic in the centre of Béziers. None of it will do anything to get you to your destination any faster. Even when the only option is to keep pressing on, the mind wills you to give up. To pull to the side of the road and throw the SatNav into the River Orb. To get out of the car and lob obscenities at the traffic that is impeding your journey. It’s not as though I have no sense of direction. Some would say I can read a map and remember a route better than most. And it’s not as though I haven’t driven this route in the past. In fact, I’m well-acquainted with the roads between Montpellier and Narbonne. But I’m also a man of a certain age and, therefore, I’m predisposed to errors not only of the navigational variety but also of the male brain. Get in rental car. Turn key. Pull out of parking lot. Immediately and with blind confidence turn the wrong direction or willingly follow the wrong route on a SatNav. In the end, we made it. But only with enough time to check in at reception and race up to our room for a wardrobe change before heading straight to the restaurant for drinks and dinner. The real work would take place the following morning in the form of a masterclass tasting of Gerard Bertrand’s latest vintages. That will have to wait for next time.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1848
__label__wiki	0.895944	0.895944	Pakistan's Top Court Bars Ex-PM From Leading Party By Radio Mashaal Nawaz Sharif (file photo) Pakistan's top court has ruled that a person disqualified for public office cannot serve as head of a political party, paving the way for the removal of ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from chairing the country's ruling party. The Supreme Court's February 21 ruling requires that Sharif's name be removed as president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and declares that all recent decisions made by him as the head of the party are null and void. The decision was in response to petitions from opposition parties who challenged a legislative amendment pushed through parliament by PML-N lawmakers allowing Sharif to remain at the helm of the party despite being banned from holding public office. Sharif was dismissed from office by the Supreme Court in July 2017 for allegedly concealing assets abroad and other corruption allegations. He denies any wrongdoing. Allies of the three-time prime minister, who was toppled in a military coup in 1999, have called the proceedings a political vendetta and suggested the powerful Pakistani Army might be behind it. Reacting to the Supreme Court's latest ruling, Talal Chaudhry, a PML-N lawmaker and deputy interior minister, said that the decision will "bring no change." "Sharif cannot be pulled out of the people's heart through court decisions," he also said. Fawad Chaudhry, spokesman for the Tehrik-e Insaf opposition party, called the ruling "historic," saying it will strengthen democracy in the country. The PML-N holds a majority in the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, and has hopes of winning control of the Senate in elections due on March 3. However, the court's decision could throw the vote into disarray, with opposition figures and constitutional experts saying the ruling invalidates candidates who were nominated by Sharif. With reporting by dpa, AFP, AP, and Reuters Radio Mashaal Radio Mashaal is a public-service broadcaster providing a powerful alternative to extremist propaganda in Pakistan's remote tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1852
__label__wiki	0.822018	0.822018	Loop Hero Will Keep You Coming Around For More No Mere Harpoon, Olija is a Frenzied Start to the New Year The Medium Shows Large Amounts of Potential Doom Eternal Arrives on Nintendo Switch with Plenty of Compromises Destiny 2’s Next-Gen Experience is the Shot in the Arm the Game Needs Sega’s Puzzle-Matching Mash-Up Gets Even Better in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 How Ambitious Heists can Elevate Fast and Furious Crossroads By Sam Spyrison on July 16, 2020 Since the franchise’s inception nearly twenty years ago, the high stakes of competitive drag racing has always played a key role in pushing forward the narrative that holds the Fast and Furious films together. The more recent movies have seen Dom Toretto and his crew entering into the world of heists and espionage, however, as they take their vehicular abilities across international waters and pursue high-value targets or people with dangerous agendas. As a result of this shift in tone, the latest attempt at a video game adaptation for Fast and Furious has also put a large focus on missions that emphasize teamwork and completing objectives at high speeds over simply crossing the finish line first. With Fast and Furious Crossroads, Slightly Mad Studios has a unique opportunity to embrace the chaotic car action and large-scale set pieces that have come to define the more recent films and there are several ways to smartly implement these elements within the core gameplay. Unique Roles The execution of any heist can only be as good as the crew behind it, with each member bringing their own skill to the table that makes them a crucial part of the team. The main cast of the Fast and Furious films are no different and Crossroads plans on bringing several members (and their respective actors) from the movies, including Dom, Letty and Roman, alongside a couple of new additions that will all be playable. Although it’s unclear if the player will have any say in who comes along for each mission, each direction on the d-pad will serve as a quick way to swap between each driver and their respective vehicle. In addition to the different handling styles of each car, one can hope that the unique aspects also extend to the person behind their wheel and their talents such as hacking or different weapons, offering a greater sense of variety in how players can tackle a given objective. Meaningful Upgrades As players progress through the campaign of Fast and Furious Crossroads, it seems reasonable to expect a steady flow of upgrades to match the increasing challenge of upcoming missions. On top of the traditional racing game upgrades for your vehicles such as improved acceleration and turbo, these improvements will likely expand to each character’s abilities and gadgets, with the official website mentioning the likes of EMP pulses and caltrops. This option to enhance your character does little to separate it from so many other titles, but having the player’s chances of completing the mission be centered around these upgrades can go a long way towards helping the game stand out. A key component of memorable heists is the lack of a guarantee that everything will go according to plan despite the amount of preparation beforehand, so attempting to ensure that objectives still feel challenging even with all these upgrades will be an important balance to maintain as the campaign moves forward. Conditional Rewards At the end of every high stakes heist is a grand reward that makes all of those risks potentially worth it and Fast and Furious Crossroads should embrace that to the fullest. Reducing the gains from completing a mission to a binary yes/no outcome based on success or failure seems like a wasted opportunity, missing out on the appeal and depth that comes with doing heists. Instead, Slightly Mad Studios should draw inspiration from the Payday series and a few of the stronger missions from Grand Theft Auto V, and make the rewards more conditional based on a variety of factors, such as the crew that comes along and their respective vehicles and gadgets. This constant sense of striving for perfection could add plenty of replayability to not only the campaign, but the multiplayer component of the game as well, which has yet to be shown or detailed up to this point. If Fast and Furious Crossroads can capitalize on elements of these key fundamentals, then the final game could expand its audience beyond fans of the films and exemplify a strong licensed title when it launches on August 7 for PS4, Xbox One and PC. ← Remnant: From the Ashes Getting A Complete Edition Review: Razer Huntsman Mini Mechanical Keyboard →	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1859
__label__wiki	0.511909	0.511909	The Brexit negotiations have started and a lot is at stake. According to a FTI Consulting study business leaders in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain are rather optimistic about Brexit’s consequences. Surprised? Some highlights Just under 90% of the 2,500 senior executives of large companies surveyed by the firm expect stable or rising turnover in the first year following the UK’s departure from the EU in March 2019. Three-quarters of them want clarifications before June 2018, a crucial deadline for planning “irreversible changes” in company’s strategy. Two-thirds of British businesses believe that the United Kingdom will keep free of customs duties for goods, 59% that free circulation will remain in place and 52% that the European Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) will keep its authority. Not so optimist after all Businesses are a little less optimistic about the future of the British “financial passport”: 71% of British financial companies think it will be maintained, but only 59% in Germany, 56% in Spain and 51% in France. A strategic path ahead The EU and the UK began their discussion in February on a transitional period of about 20 months. Both sides hope to complete this part of the negotiations by March, before talking about the future relationship, especially commercial. The United Kingdom has already announced its intention to leave the single market and the Customs Union after Brexit. The EU has made indivisible respect for the four freedoms of movement (goods and services, people, capital) one of its subjects of concern. The survey and the source The survey was conducted on the internet between 4 and 19 December 2017, and collected 2,568 responses from senior officials in large companies in the United Kingdom (642), Germany (632), France (646) and Spain. (648). Source: Capital Some questions for debate At the end of the day, what will change for companies? Would this change the balance of power in the EU? Is there a visa to travel or work in the UK? What consequences for students? Will English remain the working language of the EU if the UK comes out? What would become of EU-funded programs in the UK? Would the subsidies stop? What free trade agreement could the United Kingdom negotiate? By Hildete Vodopives, on February 13, 2018 at 11:27 am, under Uncategorized. No Comments « Making a home sustainable: the HouseZero project for ultra-healthy, flexible, comfortable indoors Career negotiations for women »	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1860
__label__wiki	0.837061	0.837061	Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon Sites & Stories Bright Angel cabins Bright Angel Lodge Buckey O’Neill cabin CCC rim walls/structures El Tovar Grand Canyon Cemetery Grand Canyon Railway depot Kolb Studio Hopi House Lookout Studio Mule Corral Red Horse Station Thunderbird Lodge Verkamps Fire tower at Bright Angel Point Grand Canyon Lodge Uncle Dee Woolley’s cabin Wylie Way Camps Rim Viewpoints Bright Angel Point Desert View Watchtower Grandview Point Hermit’s Rest Hopi Point Hualapai Indian Visitor Center Mather Point Moran Point Pima Point Powell Point Point Imperial Point Sublime Yaki Point Yavapai Observation Station Rim to River and Inner Canyon Trails Boucher-Dripping Springs Trail Bright Angel Trail Indian Garden Clear Creek Trail Grandview Trail Hermit Trail Hualapai Trail New Hance Trail North Kaibab Trail South Bass Trail South Kaibab Trail Tanner Trail Thunder River Trail Tonto Trail Colorado River Corridor Lees Ferry Bridge Canyon Marble Canyon Little Colorado River 1956 airline crash Unkar Delta Hance Rapid and Canyon Black Bridge Silver Bridge Phantom Ranch Hyde river tragedy Crystal Rapid Kanab Creek Havasu Creek Lava Falls Separation Rapid Beyond Park Boundaries BLM’s Arizona Strip Glen Canyon Dam Havasupai Reservation Hopi Reservation Hualapai Reservation Kaibab National Forest Kaibab Paiute Reservation Navajo Reservation Canyon History Who Owns the Grand Canyon? Running the River Logging, Mining, and Ranching Last Chance Mine Orphan Mine Humans at Grand Canyon Native Cultures Hualapai White Mountain Apache Tusayan Ruin and Museum Yavapai Apache Celebration of Art Re-Photography Travelin’ Trunks Elementary Lessons Why National Parks? Student Created Grand Canyon Folders What is Grand About Grand Canyon? Grand Canyon’s Human Timeline Native Americans at Grand Canyon Early Artifacts of Grand Canyon Peoples Growth of Grand Canyon Tourism Architect Mary Jane Colter and Grand Canyon Artists and Grand Canyon Secondary Lessons Art of Grand Canyon Damming Controversy Indian New Deal Map and Art Progressive Era Civil Rights Era The Corps at the Canyon Digital Photographs Digital Postcards Curt Teich Detroit Publishing Co. Fred Harvey Photo: Paul Hirt “Though only two hundred and seventeen miles long, [the Grand Canyon] expresses within that distance more than any one human mind yet has been able to comprehend or interpret to the world. Famous word-masters have attempted it, great canvas and colormasters have tried it, but all alike have failed…They know they cannot describe it, but they proceed to exhaust their vocabularies in talking about it, and in trying to make clear to others what they saw and felt.” George Wharton James, 1910 Although words alone are inadequate to express the Grand Canyon experience, many writers have nevertheless sought to capture its essence and meaning in narrative, poetry, and song lyrics. This slide show provides a sample. Searching for words Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado traversed the modern American Southwest searching for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. A side exploration led by García López de Cárdenas that bumped into the Grand Canyon did not consider it very noteworthy, though later it would become the source for many literary works. Map: National Park Service In 1540 a group of bedraggled men led by Captain García López de Cárdenas, part of the exploratory party led north from Mexico by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to seek out the legendary Seven Cities of Gold, became the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon. Cárdenas and his men spent several days on the Canyon rim trying to find a path down to the Colorado River. What grandiose and poetic language did Cárdenas use to describe this unusual and awe-inspiring landscape that has inspired generations of writers since? Well, in fact—he used none. A feature that today is considered one of the seven wonders of the natural world was mentioned only in passing by two subordinate members of the expedition. Stephen Pyne in his book How the Canyon Became Grand argues that the culture of visitors to the Grand Canyon determines what makes the greatest impression on them, and this affects how they describe the Canyon to others, whether in writing, art, or photography. Cárdenas, looking for golden cities, saw the Canyon as little more than a wasteland and obstacle. Since that time, however, as different cultures with different values and viewpoints have interacted with the Grand Canyon, many authors have been inspired to expend a great deal of poetry and prose trying to describe its colors, its forms, its allure, its mystery, and its meaning. In fact, with thousands of books written about it, the Grand Canyon has both shaped and been shaped by trends in American literature. Though the Canyon may have offered little in the way of extractable economic resources, it has provided a wealth of source material for authors and artists for over 150 years. Centuries passed from the time of Cárdenas’s explorations until Euro-Americans began exploring the Canyon. In the meantime, Europeans and Euro-Americans developed an interest in travelogues and reports of expeditions in this age of exploration. As a result, future visitors to the canyon would see it and write about it from a different cultural perspective. As Stephen Pyne states, “from 1869 to 1882 it went from the status of a legendary giant suck to the subject of two classic works of American letters” (Pyne 1998: 38). These two works are Joseph Ives’ Report Upon the Colorado River of the West and John Wesley Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. “Running a Rapid” engraving circa 1873 by R.A. Muller to illustrate Powell’s second Colorado River Expedition. These illustrations, and Powell’s writing, depicted the expedition as an adventure rather than a scientific mission. Photo: GRCA #17262 A lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Ives led the Colorado Exploring Expedition through the West in 1857-58. The group included a physician-naturalist, an artist, and a cartographer, all of whom contributed to the report of their travels published in 1861 with prose colored by the Romantic Movement in literature, which emphasized the aesthetic appreciation of nature and exaggerated emotionalism. Ives’ description of the Canyon relied heavily on comparisons with Egyptian landscapes of pyramids and obelisks; since only a handful of Europeans had seen the Canyon or anything like it before, there was little else that he could have compared it to that would have made sense to his audience. Despite his vivid descriptions of the landscape, in the end, Ives concluded that the area was “altogether valueless” and predicted that his party would be the last Euro-Americans to ever visit the Grand Canyon. As he stated in his report, “It can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed” (James 1910: 219). John Wesley Powell’s report of his journey was a bit different. In 1869 and again in 1871 he led an expedition of men in boats down the Colorado River, beginning at Green River, Utah and ending at the Grand Wash Cliffs at the western end of the Grand Canyon. His journal of the expedition was first published in 1872 as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. It was a journey into a great blank spot on the map of America: “We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not” (Powell 1961: 274). Powell’s published journal described the terrain, geology, vegetation, Native American inhabitants, dangerous rapids, and the trials and tribulations of the men on the expedition. Though it was intended as a scientific report, it was written as an adventure tale, thus showing the influence of both the beginnings of a late-19th century scientific revolution and Romanticism. This action-packed book allowed readers to vicariously experience true-life escapades, and even today readers are enthralled by Powell’s accounts of the Canyon and his journey through it. As Stephen Pyne states, “His personal narrative created the classic expression of the view from the river, the words by which his generation appreciated its revelation, the images by which tourists throughout the twentieth century have understood it” (Pyne 1998: 57-58). William Henry Holmes provided the illustrations for Clarence Dutton’s Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District. Like Dutton’s writing, Holmes’s artwork helped combine science and aesthetics through his precision and details as well as his appreciation of the Canyon’s beauty. Photo: Sheet XV – Panorama from Point Sublime by William Henry Holmes. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. “The Grand Cañon of the Colorado is a great innovation in modern ideas of scenery, and in our conceptions of the grandeur, beauty, and power of nature. As with all great innovations it is not to be comprehended in a day or a week, nor even in a month. It must be dwelt upon and studied, and the study must comprise the slow acquisition of the meaning and spirit of that marvelous scenery which characterizes the Plateau Country, and of which the great chasm is the superlative manifestation.” – Clarence Dutton, 1882 One of the most comprehensive literary works about the Grand Canyon appeared just a few years later. In 1882 Clarence Dutton published his Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, a book that combined geology, cartography, painting, photography, literature, and philosophy to create a masterpiece of late 19th century scientific, cultural and artistic studies of the Grand Canyon. While Powell told the story of the Canyon as experienced from the Colorado River, Dutton told his story of the Grand Canyon from the rim. Because most visitors only see the Grand Canyon from the rim, Dutton’s descriptions resonated for tourists through the next century. He framed his work as an epic geologic history, combining his skills at writing with his enthusiasm for science, in the process making the science of the Canyon accessible while also bringing a new artistic appreciation to it. The Grand Canyon made a broader contribution to American literature most noticeably around the turn of the twentieth century, when travel writing became popular. By the late 1880s, tourists had begun visiting the Canyon, and writings about it consequently became more popular, in both senses of the word. At this time, the area was still hard to reach, so the trip to the Canyon was almost as interesting as the Canyon itself, giving visitors a sense of discovery that often comes through in their writings. Prose in this late Victorian/early Modernist era is known for its overt emotional and embellished style, and the Grand Canyon was a site where travel writers could indulge their passion for flowery language to a high degree. These descriptions in turn encouraged more visitors and writers to experience the Canyon and offer their own literary expressions. For example, in 1897 two young sisters from Brooklyn, New York, Amelia and Josephine Hollenback, traveled throughout the Southwest, taking pictures, keeping diaries, and writing letters home describing their journey, the people they met, and the places they saw. They arrived at the Grand Canyon via an all-day bumpy, dusty stagecoach ride from Flagstaff. Amelia Hollenback quickly grew to love the Canyon, writing that “…night after night the colors changed to new beauty and the Canon grew from an awful forbidding realm of another planet to a kind of protecting presence, grander and more beautiful but no longer oppressive. Sometimes I think that a person might feel safer here than in any other place on earth. It seems too calm, too great for any of the harms and bothers that vex the outside world to live near the shining of its walls” (Cook 2002). “There are many-colored rock fragments strewed around, and wild flowers and cacti, sage brush and queer twisted cedars and pinons grow all about. Perhaps if you stood on those rocks just ahead you might see better which way to go. You try it,–and then you see IT! As if half the world had fallen away before your feet, and after that you are no longer on the same old earth.” – Amelia Hollenback, 1897 “Here, indeed, is the idea of the pagoda architecture, of the terrace architecture, of the bizarre constructions which rise with projecting buttresses, rows of pillars, recesses, battlements, esplanades, and low walls, hanging gardens, and truncated pinnacles” – Charles Dudley Warner, 1891 One of the premier travel writers of the late 19th century was Charles Dudley Warner, who became the first noted author to publicize the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination when he wrote “The Heart of the Desert” in 1891. Warner described in depth the colors of the rocks, and compared the landforms to “Oriental” buildings, stating that “here, indeed, is the idea of the pagoda architecture, of the terrace architecture, of the bizarre constructions which rise with projecting buttresses, rows of pillars, recesses, battlements, esplanades, and low walls, hanging gardens, and truncated pinnacles” (Schullery 1981: 43). George Wharton James would expand on this foundation by publishing two books, In and Around the Grand Canyon (1900) and The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It (1910), making him one of the more famous figures in Grand Canyon literature. To gather information for his books James had traveled along a great deal of the Canyon, from Cataract (or Havasu) Canyon and W.W. Bass’s camp on the western edge to Lee’s Ferry in the east, over a period of 10 years. Unlike previous works, these were written primarily for people who were planning to visit the Canyon to see it with their own eyes. In the first, he gives a history of the Canyon and describes its many trails. In the latter book he gives readers descriptions of different areas of the Grand Canyon from El Tovar to Grandview Trail and offers advice on how to best spend their time. He includes information about the larger Grand Canyon region and how to see it as well, including quite a bit of information on local Native American tribes. “I have seen strong men fall upon their knees. I have seen women, driven up to the rim unexpectedly, lean away from the Canyon, the whole countenance an index of the terror felt within, gasp for breath, and though almost paralyzed by their dread of the indescribable abyss, refuse either to close their eyes or turn them away from it.” – George Wharton James, 1910 (at left in photo) Photo: NAU.PH.96.3.23.8. Lauzon Family Collection. Cline Library, NAU. “For surely it was not our world, this stupendous, adorable vision. Not for human needs was it fashioned, but for the abode of gods. It made a coward of me; I shrank and shut my eyes, and felt crushed and beaten under the intolerable burden of the flesh. For humanity intruded here.” – Harriet Monroe, 1899 The variety of viewpoints and approaches to writing about the Canyon at this time expanded into many different genres. Poet-essayist Harriet Monroe of Chicago in 1899 wrote about the Canyon from a Victorian woman’s perspective. She describes in somewhat histrionic language her feelings of not being strong enough to see what awaited her at the rim of the Canyon, and of the sensation that she was standing at the edge of the world when at the rim. However, she passionately called for the Canyon’s preservation, even arguing that in the future tourists should be prohibited since she believed that humanity only intruded there. Famed early environmentalist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, wrote eloquently about the Grand Canyon’s “wild, primeval beauty and power” in a 1902 article entitled “Our Grand Canyon.” He was especially enamored of color and light and prone to ecstatic expressions when confronting such sublime spectacles as a Canyon sunset: “But the colors, the living, rejoicing colors, chanting morning and evening to heaven! Whose brush or pencil, however lovingly inspired, can give us these? And if paint is of no effect, what hope lies in pen-work? Only this: some may be incited by it to go and see for themselves” (Schullery 1981: 73). Art historians and critics such as John Charles Van Dyke similarly believed that the canyon could never adequately be captured by pen or brush: “The great chasm cannot be successfully exploited commercially or artistically. It cannot be ploughed or plotted or poeticized or painted. It is too big for one to do more than creep along the rim and wonder over it. Perhaps that is not cause for lamentation. Some things should be beyond us – aspired to but never attained.” (Van Dyke 1920: 218). Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Hamlin Garland in 1902 wrote an essay about two phases of the Canyon, one during the day and the other at nighttime. He penned from the bottom of the Canyon: “It is worth while to spend a night alone among these prodigious peaks and listen to the voice of the Colorado as it roars with ever-increasing power, like some imperious nocturnal animal—a dragon with a lion’s throat. As the shadows deepen in the lower deeps, beginning to wash like the flood of a spectral purple sea the gray-green mesas of the lower levels, then the river’s voice swells till it seems to fill the whole enormous canyon—savage, solemn, and persistent.” He concludes at the end of his essay about the Canyon, “I began to understand that it had a thousand differing moods, and that no one can know it for what it is who has not lived with it every day of the year…The traveler who goes out to the edge and peers into the great abyss sees but one phase out of hundreds” (Garland 1902: 61-62). “In the supreme flaming glory of sunset the whole canyon is transfigured, as if all the life and light of centuries of sunshine stored up and condensed in the rocks was now being poured forth as from one glorious fountain, flooding both earth and sky.” – John Muir, 1902 Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist John T. McCutcheon provided illustrations for Cobb’s “Roughing It De Luxe.” This illustration of the Grand Canyon is explained by the caption “Because a man has a soul is no reason he shouldn’t have an appetite.” Taking a different tone than most authors describing the Grand Canyon, along the lines of Mark Twain, Irvin Cobb, a humorist for the Saturday Evening Post, recorded his observations about the canyon and his fellow tourists in a comic piece called “Roughing It De Luxe.” As Cobb drolly wrote, “It is generally conceded that the Grand Canon of Arizona beggars description. I shall therefore endeavor to refrain from doing so. I realize this is going to be a considerable contract. Nearly everybody, on taking a first look at the Grand Canon, comes right out and admits its wonders are absolutely indescribable—and then proceeds to write anywhere from two thousand to fifty thousand words, giving the full details. Speaking personally, I wish to say that I do not know anybody who has yet succeeded in getting away with the job” (Cobb 1913: 15). Ellsworth Kolb and his brother Emery, who ran a photography studio at the Grand Canyon from 1902 to 1976, traveled the entire length of the Colorado River in 1911. They filmed a motion picture of their exploits, and Ellsworth later wrote a widely-distributed photograph-heavy book about the experience titled Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico. The introduction to the book was written by Owen Wister, who is largely credited with inventing the cowboy-western genre with his novel The Virginian. Impressions of the canyon and river as experienced during rafting or boating trips down the Colorado River have increasingly become a source of inspiration for literary works about the Grand Canyon, such as Kathleen Ryan’s Writing Down the River, Patricia McCairen’s Canyon Solitude: A Woman’s Solo River Journey Through the Grand Canyon, or Welch, Conley, and Dimock’s Doing the Thing: The Brief, Brilliant Whitewater Career of Buzz Holmstrom. The mystery and grand scope of the Canyon inspired writers to concoct fictional stories as well. For example, in 1910 James Paul Kelly produced Prince Izon: A Romance of the Grand Canyon. The preface describes the Canyon as dangerous yet mysterious and alluring, depicting it as an alien or hellish landscape that is also somehow like paradise. In the story, an archeology professor, his niece, and her friend discover ancient Aztec cities in an unexplored side canyon, presided over by the ancestor of Montezuma, the eponymous Prince Izon. The Grand Canyon is merely a backdrop to the tale of melodramatic romance and adventure. Ellsworth Kolb wrote a book about his experience traveling down the Colorado River with his brother in 1911 that sparked the imagination of future generations of river runners. This photo from that book shows how they had to carefully pack everything, including their cameras and motion picture film equipment, to guard against water damage. Photo: NAU.PH.568.3434. Kolb Brothers Collection. Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Many other works of fiction contain references to the Grand Canyon. For instance, American folk hero Paul Bunyan is supposed to have created the Grand Canyon when he dragged his axe behind him. Western writer Zane Grey’s experiences at the Grand Canyon inspired him to mention the landscape in several of his works, including Roping Lions in Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon has also been the setting for several recent Harlequin romances written by women authors such as Anne Marie Duquette, Patricia Chandler, and Ann Collins. As a reflection of modern times, a 2007 novel by Gary Hansen tells the fictional story of a government employee hunting down an environmental terrorist in a plot that takes readers from Lake Powell through the Grand Canyon to the mouth of the Colorado River in Mexico. Burros were commonly used at the Grand Canyon at the turn of the century to haul people and goods. One such burro provided the inspiration for Marguerite Henry’s popular children’s book Brighty of the Grand Canyon. Photo: NAU.PH.90.15.15. F.H. Maude Collection. Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Not only has the Grand Canyon influenced American literature, but literature has even had a tangible effect on NPS policies at the Grand Canyon. In 1953 Marguerite Henry wrote the Newberry Award-winning children’s book Brighty of the Grand Canyon, a story about an independent-minded burro’s life at the Grand Canyon around the turn of the century. Brighty befriends miners, park rangers, and campers in his adventures, and at the same time delights in the natural beauty of the Canyon. Disney later adapted the book into a movie. Around this time, there was a growing crisis at the Canyon as a large population of feral burros, the progeny of miners’ burros that had escaped or been left behind when the prospectors moved on, began devastating native plants, polluting water sources, and driving away indigenous animals. Marguerite Henry’s book romanticized burros and led to a public outcry against the practice of shooting feral burros despite the problems they were causing, an outcry to which the NPS acquiesced. Joseph Wood Krutch’s 1958 work Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays is a more recent yet still romantic look at the natural history of the Canyon. Later turned into a successful television documentary, it helped mark a new generation of environmentalist writers including Wallace Stegner in a tradition reaching back to the likes of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. In fact, just a few years prior Stegner published Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, a book that would soon become a classic work of biography, history, and western literature. Though focusing on Powell, it also once again drew popular attention to the Grand Canyon by providing an entertaining narrative of how the Canyon had been explored, named, and enmeshed in American culture. Krutch’s sentimental look at the Grand Canyon encouraged readers to see it as a wilderness with the capacity to reinvigorate the human spirit. Both Krutch and Stegner argued in their works for the preservation of this landscape, or more specifically, protection from rapacious development that was characteristic of the post-WWII period. Naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch in Arizona. Photo: Time/Life, Inc. “The river carries us swiftly into the Granite Gorge. Like a tunnel of love, there are no shores or beaches in here. The burnished and river-sculptured rocks rise sheer from the water’s edge, cutting off all view of the higher cliffs, all of the outer and upper world but a winding column of blue sky. We glide along as in a gigantic millstream.” – Edward Abbey, 1977 Photo: Yolonda Youngs This theme spoke to many in the early environmental movement, and influenced subsequent authors in their writings about the Grand Canyon area, particularly Edward Abbey, the author of the provocative 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Abbey took a raft trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in the 1970s and kept a journal, portions of which were published in his 1977 book The Hidden Canyon: A River Journey. Krutch and Abbey tended to portray the landscape as a pure wilderness, dismissing the long history of Native American and Euro-American settlement in the area. For example, Krutch states that “Despite all these living things so obviously at home here, there is absolutely no sign from which I would be able to deduce that any man besides myself had ever been here or, for that matter, that he had ever existed at all” (Krutch 1958: 9). Literature about surrounding Native American tribes has existed for decades, though most were told from a Euro-American perspective. For example, Flora Gregg Iliff wrote about her experiences as a teacher on the Hualapai and Havasupai reservations at the turn of the twentieth century in her book People of the Blue Water: A Record of Life Among the Walapai and Havasupai Indians. Though the title implies that it is a book about the tribes, most of the book tells of the culture clashes she experienced solely from her Euro-American cultural point of view. A more balanced interpretation came with anthropologist Stephen Hirst’s 1976 book, recently re-released under the new title I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People, which gives a comprehensive history of the tribe and their connection to the Grand Canyon. More recently, some Native Americans, such as Havasupais Juan Sinyella and Rex Tilousi, have had their own essays that describe their tribe’s traditions and history appear in journals. Reports and essays outlining the relationship of Native Americans to the Grand Canyon and recounting their stories about the chasm are also beginning to appear more frequently. For example, T.J. Ferguson compiled a report, with the help of Hopi elders, entitled Öngtupqa niqw Pisisvayu (Salt Canyon and the Colorado River): The Hopi People and the Grand Canyon. This report, published by the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, detailed the Hopi ethnohistory of the Canyon. The Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department produced a similar report entitled Bits’íís Ninéézi (The River of Neverending Life); Navajo history and cultural resources of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, as did the Southern Paiute tribe under the title Piapaxa ‘Uipi’ (Big River Canyon). Today, there are thousands of books, poems, essays, reports, and other literature available for readers of all levels that describe many different aspects of nature, culture, and history at the Grand Canyon. It is likely that people will continue attempting to convey the Grand Canyon experience in words, yet no one will ever truly capture it completely, since the way we describe the Grand Canyon is a reflection of our own language, times, surroundings, interests, biases, hopes, dreams and realities. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Carl Sandburg put it: “Each man sees himself in the Grand Canyon” (Sandburg 2003: 434). “I have heard rumors of visitors who were disappointed. The same people will be disappointed at the Day of Judgment. In fact, the Grand Canyon is a sort of landscape Day of Judgment. It is not a show place, a beauty spot, but a revelation.” – J.B. Priestly Yet, as much as the Grand Canyon experience is individualistic, reflecting the unique perspective of each visitor, it is also collective. The Grand Canyon is a cultural landscape shaped and interpreted by a nation seeking to express its identity and values. What the Grand Canyon has been and has become reflects what the United States of America has been and become. In a nation consummately committed to material advancement, to having and consuming, to the desires of the present moment, national parks and preserves express a broader ethic, a commitment to protect sources of great national and cultural significance. As Joseph Wood Krutch remarked half a century ago about the Grand Canyon: “The generation now living may very well be that which will make the irrevocable decision whether or not America will continue to be for centuries to come the one great nation which had the foresight to preserve an important part of its heritage. If we do not preserve it, then we shall have diminished by just that much the unique privilege of being an American” (Krutch 1958: 276). Time has shown that America is not unique in its desire to preserve its natural heritage, although it set many important precedents and remains a leader in the global nature protection movement. Time likewise has shown that rather than a single moment of truth and consequences, our human relationship with nature at the Grand Canyon constantly evolves. We make and re-make our built and preserved landscapes continuously. The Grand Canyon reveals anew for every generation the complex relationship between nature and culture. And each generation will have its own literary voices to reflect upon that relationship. For a searchable database of the over 34,000 works that reference the Grand Canyon, visit the bibliography housed at the Grand Canyon Association’s website: http://www.grandcanyon.org/bibliography.asp. Written By Sarah Bohl Gerke and Paul Hirt Anderson, Michael, ed. A Gathering of Grand Canyon Historians. Proceedings of the Inaugural Grand Canyon History Symposium, January 2002. GCA, 2005. Cobb, Irvin S. Roughing It De Luxe. Philadelphia: The Curtis Publishing Company, 1913. Condie, LeRoy. White Horse: A Story of the Grand Canyon. Santa Fe: Division of Indian Education, New Mexico State Department of Education, 1980. Cook, Mary J. Straw, ed. Immortal Summer: A Victorian Woman’s Travels in the Southwest. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2002. Dutton, Clarence. Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Ferguson, T.J. Öngtupqa niqw Pisisvayu (Salt Canyon and the Colorado River); the Hopi People and the Grand Canyon. Final ethnohistoric report for the Hopi Glen Canyon Environmental Studies Project. Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, 1998. Garland, Hamlin. “The Grand Canyon at Night,” in The Grand Canyon of Arizona: Being a Book of Words from Many Pens, About the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona. Passenger Department of the Santa Fe, 1902. Henry, Marguerite. Brighty of the Grand Canyon. Rand McNally, 1953. Hirst, Stephen. I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People. Grand Canyon Association, 2007. Iliff, Flora Gregg. People of the Blue Water: My Adventures Among the Walapai and Havasupai Indians. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954. Ives, Joseph Christmas. Report Upon the Colorado River of the West. Anne Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, 2006. James, George Wharton. In and Around the Grand Canyon. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1900. James, George Wharton. The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1910. Kelly, James Paul. Prince Izon: A Romance of the Grand Canyon. Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Co, 1910. Kolb, Ellsworth. Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico. Grand Canyon Association, 2007. Krutch, Joseph Wood. The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays. New York: William Sloan Associates, 1958. Powell, John Wesley. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. New York: Dover, 1961. Pyne, Stephen J. How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Roberts, Alexa, Richard M. Begay, Klara B. Kelley, Alfred W. Yazzie, and John R. Thomas. Bits’íís Ninéézi (The River of Neverending Life); Navajo history and cultural resources of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. Window Rock, AZ: Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department, 1995. Sandburg, Carl. The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003. Schullery, Paul. The Grand Canyon: Early Impressions. Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1981. Sinyella, Juan. “Havasupai Traditions.” Southwest Folklore 1 (Spring 1977): 35-52. Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Penguin: 1992. Stoffle, Richard W.; David B. Halmo, Michael Evans, and Diane Austin. Piapaxa ‘Uipi (Big River Canyon). Tucson: Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, University of Arizona, 1994. Tilousi, Rex. “Hav’suw Ba’aja: Guardians of the Grand Canyon—Past, Present, and Future.” Wicazo Sa Review 9(2)(Autumn 1993): 62-69. Van Dyke, John Charles. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado: Recurrent Studies in Impressions and Appearances. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. Geology Rim Trail https://grcahistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/10-GEOLOGY-RIM-TRAIL.mp3 Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon © 2021. All Rights Reserved.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1861
__label__wiki	0.671717	0.671717	Jovita Carranza begins as SBA’s 26th Administrator January 23, 2020 By Andrew Smith On January 14, 2020, Jovita Carranza began serving as the 26th Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration. The President nominated Administrator Carranza to lead the SBA while she was serving as the 44th Treasurer of the United States and the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate confirmed her with overwhelmingly bipartisan support on December 19, 2019, and January 7, 2020, respectively. Administrator Carranza, an Illinois native, becomes the highest-ranking Latina in the federal government with this Cabinet-level position. “I want to thank the President for his confidence in me to be an advocate in the Cabinet for our country’s 30 million small businesses, and I want to express my sincere gratitude to the U.S. Senate for confirming me in a bipartisan fashion,” Administrator Carranza said. “I look forward to helping elevate female entrepreneurs and our military veterans, expanding access to SBA resources among entrepreneurs in disadvantaged communities, and continuing to prioritize disaster relief.” “I would like to thank former Administrator Linda McMahon for her leadership at the SBA, and the dedicated professionals at the Agency during this transition,” she continued. Continue reading at: SBA website Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: Jovita Carranza, SBA, U.S. Small Business Administration	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1868
__label__wiki	0.521477	0.521477	Hiking Maine’s Baxter State Park, by Greg Westrich September 28, 2019 September 17, 2020 Undercover HikerLeave a comment The digital age in hiking has brought us “apps,” which can be concealed in a phone, show us where we are, how far we have gone, and can describe and map hikes. But these technological wonders have their limitations, particularly in a wild place like Baxter State Park, where cell service is available only intermittently (if at all), and only from the highest elevations. There is also something incongruous about getting away and outdoors, only to stare at a tiny screen. Enter Hiking Maine’s Baxter State Park by Greg Westrich (FalconGuides, 2017), an outstanding roadmap to Maine’s favorite wilderness playground, combining the analog permanence and durability of a book, and the accessible map and photo layout of an online guide. Westrich’s book begins with an introduction and instructions on using the guide. Following a “Before You Hit The Trail” summary of Baxter State Park’s history, geology, wildlife, seasons, and rules, Westrich describes thirty-seven unique day hikes, numbered roughly from north (Horse Mountain) to south (Roaring Brook Nature Trail) within the park, and three suggested backpacking trip itineraries, ranging from three to four days in duration. Each hike begins with a short section called “The Run Down,” describing the essential characteristics of the hike at a glance, as well as its difficulty on a scale of Easy to Very Strenuous. Physical directions and precise GPS location of the trailhead are included, as are individual trail maps and excellent photos. Westrich describes points of interest, locations for views, and trail-specific features, like water sources, or places to rent canoes. The genius of this guide is the layout. Readers can flip through the guide, or use the numbered overview map in the beginning to find a hike based on its location in the park. Hikes close in proximity in the park are correspondingly adjacent in the book, allowing the reader to string together their own hikes, like we did for Grassy Pond, Daicey Pond Loop, and Niagara Falls. Another entry point is the “Trail Finder” towards the back of the book, breaking down the best hikes for swimming, views, waterfalls, blueberries, geology, families, wildlife, history, and canoeing. These categories make for quick suggestions and ideas, and further broaden the appeal of this guidebook. The subtitle of the book is “A Guide to the Park’s Greatest Hiking Adventures Including Mount Katahdin,” which cleverly (and rightfully) positions the park’s centerpiece as only one of the many places to explore. Fear not, the legendary routes to Katahdin’s Baxter Peak via the Hunt Trail, Abol Trail, and The Knife Edge each receive their own detailed entries in this guide, which make the book worth owning all by themselves. But it is impossible to peruse this book without feeling the urge to spend more time in Baxter State Park, seeking out the lesser-known hikes that Westrich so aptly describes. Baxter State Park, Book ReviewsFalcon Guides, Greg Westrich, Hiking Maine's Baxter State Park Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova by Ty Gagne January 11, 2019 May 24, 2020 Undercover Hiker2 Comments Managing risk in the outdoors, particularly that of winter in the White Mountains, requires learning hard lessons. Focusing on one tragedy can have its pitfalls, but Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova by Ty Gagne (TMC Books, 2017) is respectful of that tragedy, avoids sensationalism, and expands in scope to use the narrative as a guideline for the analysis of risk. Gagne’s book follows the ill-fated attempt of the Northern Presidential traverse by thirty-two year-old Kate Matrosova in February 2015, and the ensuing rescue and ultimately, recovery operation. Gagne presents a scrupulously researched narrative and timeline of events, which is interspersed with maps, drawings, and analysis. The level of detail is astounding, and simultaneously gives the reader a bird’s-eye view of the unfolding drama along with granular details about the people on the ground. We see Matrosova’s movements in comparison to other hiking groups in the White Mountains on the same day, and what the would-be rescuers were thinking, feeling, even eating. To his credit, Gagne keeps the reader hoping for a different outcome for Matrosova throughout the book, even though the ending is already known. All this detail leads to the central question of the book: if someone this fit and prepared lost her life, what measures can be taken to ensure one’s own safety? Gagne addresses Matrosova’s planned route: In establishing bailout points and packing cell and satellite phones, a GPS device, a map, and a personal locator beacon, Matrosova is acknowledging the existence of risk on the traverse. She has established a risk management plan. But given her inexperience in the White Mountains, is her plan comprehensive enough to address the multitude of exposures that exist there, especially in winter? After explaining the steps to an effective risk management plan, Gagne goes on: A key to all this is timing. Even with a well-developed risk management strategy and the ability to implement it effectively, Matrosova will have to decide if and when to trigger alterations to her original plan. In the end, it will be the timing of her decisions that will make all the difference. Gagne describes this timing, including the rapidly worsening weather, and subsequent warnings issued by the Mount Washington Observatory after Matrosova had already embarked on her hike. As Matrosova slowly falls behind her self-imposed timeline, her challenges become more and more complex, and Gagne explores the biases that may have factored into her decision-making. Whatever the reason, these decisions found her exhausted, frostbitten, and facing “an impenetrable wall of wind,” on Mt. Adams, “80-plus-mph headwinds,” that caused her to turn back, at a point that was too late to save her own life. In the background of this heartbreaking human drama, Gagne illustrates the science of survival, with details regarding the functioning of the locator beacon, the progression of hypothermia, the record-setting extreme weather, and tactics and techniques of Search And Rescue (SAR) personnel. Gagne fittingly ends the book with an account of his own February 2016 anniversary hike to where Matrosova’s body was eventually found, guided by her GPS track, and by one of her would-be rescuers. The conditions are different, far milder, and Gagne and his companion are together, well-prepared and equipped, but the ghost of loss still lingers on the periphery: “As I turn my back to the col and make my way down, I say my goodbyes to Kate.” Book Reviews, White MountainsLast Climb of Kate Matrosova, Ty Gagne, Where You'll Find Me Up: A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure, by Patricia Ellis Herr December 27, 2018 May 24, 2020 Undercover Hiker3 Comments Connecting kids with nature is a simple matter of allowing that inevitable relationship to happen. The difficult part is deciding what boundaries to set, letting go, and helping children deal with the unexpected challenges they may encounter. How to do that? One path is described in Up – A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure, by Patricia Ellis Herr (Broadway Paperbacks, 2012) , the story of Patricia Ellis Herr and her daughters Alex and Sage, and the quest of her older daughter Alex, then five, to summit all forty-eight of New Hampshire’s peaks over four thousand feet before Alex turned seven. Herr begins the book with an anecdote about a failed attempt to summit Mt. Tom, thwarted by a lightning storm. This story sets the tone for the book: the weather forced Herr to make tough calls, and to explain her rationale for those decisions and the results to her daughters, including the realization that things can happen for which it can be impossible to prepare. Also, there was chocolate at the end. The idea to bag all of New Hampshire’s four thousand footers was born following another hike, this one of Mount Tecumseh in April 2008, when Herr and her daughters eventually turned back, unprepared for the deep snow at higher elevations. Herr then researched the appropriate hiking gear and preparation, and they returned to summit Tecumseh that June, unknowingly beginning Alex’s quest. During the peakbagging journey, they encounter unexpected obstacles, including the fear of “stranger danger,” the preconceived notions of other hikers regarding women and young children, and an aggressive spruce grouse. Herr turns these challenges into teachable moments, and Alex quickly gains confidence, and even makes some converts. Alex is clearly a unique child, and uses a fountain of energy to power up and down the mountains in the beginning. Herr brings Alex back to earth, however, with a lesson from Alex and Sage’s father, Hugh, who relates the story to the girls of how he lost his legs on Mount Washington in the winter of 1982. A rescuer was killed by an avalanche while looking for Hugh and his climbing partner, a mental burden still carried by Hugh. The story has the desired effect, and Alex learns to be more careful, and respect the danger inherent in the White Mountains. This comes in handy during the ensuing months, as Herr and Alex hike through the winter and spring seasons, and learn, “Real hikers know when to continue and when to turn back.” By the time the family, by this time accompanied by well-wishers, summits peak number forty-eight, Mount Moosilauke, in August 2009, they have accomplished much more than the physical challenge. Herr and her daughters have had conversations along the way wrestling with existential questions, mortality, motherhood, gender roles, and societal expectations: What matters now is that they know, from experience, that they can accomplish something big, something huge. What matters is that, for the rest of their lives, both my daughters understand that to reach a goal, they must put one foot in front of the other and persevere. They know that they must expect and prepare for challenges. They know to ignore the naysayers and, instead, to have faith in themselves and their abilities to learn what they need to know. Above all else, they know that little does not mean weak, that girls are indeed strong, and that practically anything is possible. This winning book, punctuated by mountaintop photos and small, sweet moments, shares a family’s triumph, and illuminates the lessons inherent in nature, waiting there to be elucidated by a mindful parent. Book Reviews, White MountainsPatricia Ellis Herr, Up Appalachian Odyssey: A 28-Year Hike on America’s Trail, by Jeffrey H. Ryan November 10, 2018 May 24, 2020 Undercover Hiker2 Comments I first heard of Jeffrey H. Ryan’s book Appalachian Odyssey: A 28-Year Hike on America’s Trail, (Down East Books, 2016) at an engaging February 2017 talk Ryan gave at Frontier Cafe Cinema and Gallery in Brunswick, Maine, complete with a slide show of photographs from his almost thirty-year journey in sections of the Appalachian Trail (AT). The timing was perfect – in the teeth of the Maine winter, I saw again the possibilities of getting on the trail. Ryan, having thru-hiked the Pacific Coast Trail (PCT) in the early 1980’s, began his Appalachian odyssey with a hike of Mount Katahdin with eight friends, including eventual AT companion Wayne Cyr, in September 1985. Hikes on the AT in Vermont and Massachusetts followed, and Ryan realized that he was completing the AT in sections, beginning a twenty-eight year quest to finally complete the 2,181 miles of the trail. Ryan’s book breaks up this journey with Cyr into twenty-four chapters, including photographs, maps, gear lists, and salient historical facts about the AT and its surroundings. The anecdotes and (often self-deprecating) trail stories are excellent, and my personal favorite was the saga of a hungry Vermont porcupine, and the havoc it wreaked on the underside of Ryan’s parked vehicle, punctuated by the instructive note entitled, “Why Porcupines Love Working on Cars.” Ryan concludes the chapter describing his unexpected porcupine encounter with an understanding: Because it’s the unexpected that fills life with excitement, joy and gratitude. When you let go of your expectations and allow journeys to unfold before you, you discover they are filled with wonder – clouds screaming past the moon, climbs to summits with vistas beyond belief, hoards of black flies that send you into the tent, porcupines that eat vehicles and strangers that give you a lift to the hardware store just when you need it most, I wouldn’t trade one bit of it – not even the black flies, the forced vacation or the $900 repair bill – for a more predictable and less fulfilling walk through life. Throughout the book, we continue to see this theme resonate, and readers of the right age can nod, and remember not being able to reach people by cell phone, or puzzling over a map, prior to the advent of GPS and Google Maps. The appeal of returning to a new section of the trail each year for Ryan seems to include this passage back to a world of limited priorities, of perspective, of strictly the essential. While many trail journals are immersive, and discuss the alternate thru-hiker universe, Ryan’s is different, as he also explores the physical and emotional challenges of getting on and off the trail in sections over the years. The physical effects of residual stress from work and travel, the betrayals of aging and benefits of maturity, and even the changes in technology on the trail over time are currents running through this book. In following Ryan and Cyr through the years and miles, it’s impossible not to start seeing it through their eyes and pick up the trail shorthand they use. “First flat spot” to a hiking partner is a three-word utterance that says all that needs to be said about exhaustion, and the need to pitch a tent and call it a day. Ryan’s inner “drill sergeant” is the alternately self-motivating and abusive internal voice that drives him up and down hills when his reserves of energy are gone. A brief encounter with a solo thru-hiker at the Sawmill Overlook in Virginia who admits to having the “Virginia Blues” causes Ryan to re-evaluate the mental load being carried by himself and Cyr on the trail. The Virginia Blues are the result of a formerly ambitious thru-hiker’s realization during a 550 mile section across Virginia of the realities of the length and deprivations of the trail, a two thousand mile endeavor with a 75% dropout rate. Ryan’s thoughts on the Virginia Blues are an unmistakable metaphor for the trials of middle age, the broader trails we all walk alone and together, and the societal supports we all need. These times of exhaustion and doubt, however, are like the low points in the rolling “sawtooth” terrain Ryan crosses in his section-hiking journey – left in shadow by peaks bathed in sunshine, unexpected kindnesses from strangers, hot meals, and special places inaccessible except by the AT. Ryan conveys tricks of the trade in breathing, arranging gear, and staying in the game mentally, and says this about continually moving forward: But my greatest source of strength was the reason I was out here in the first place. From the beginning, I have felt that it is a privilege to walk through some of the most fascinating and inspiring places on earth. It is something that makes me feel more complete and connected to nature than any activity I can imagine. Trying to do it for as long as I can is the greatest gift I can give myself. Yes, there are tough days. There are also many more glorious ones – just like life in general. And experiencing them out here helps keep things in perspective when I return to the man-made universe of projects, deadlines and the like. Every person who punches a clock can understand Ryan’s realization that “my greatest challenge in getting to the trail wasn’t the travel, it was carving out the two week chunk of time I would need to make the trip happen.” But Appalachian Odyssey shows a blueprint for finding a balance between the things we must do, and those we dream of doing. Appalachian Trail, Book ReviewsAppalachian Odyssey: A 28-Year Hike on America's Trail, Jeffrey H. Ryan Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border, by Porter Fox September 5, 2018 May 24, 2020 Undercover Hiker1 Comment In an age of technology and enlightenment, physical borders remain enigmatically relevant. While information and intellectual property pass by on hidden virtual pathways, we are confronted daily with news of aggressive border incursions, walls, migration and separation. Porter Fox’s book Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border (W.W. Norton and Company) navigates these troubled waters in a modern pilgrimage along the U.S.-Canadian border from Maine to Washington State. Fox’s adventurous journey along the border (which splits both man-made and natural features, and has constantly been re-drawn and argued by the U.S. and Canada) was conceived during a 2014 lunch with Fox, his editor, and his agent, and brought to life “three years and four thousand miles later” by canoe, freighter, car, and foot. The fourth dimension of this journey is the history of tribal peoples and European exploration, which Fox weaves skillfully alongside his own narrative. Fox divides the journey into five parts from east to west: the Dawnland, the Sweet-Water Seas, Boundary Waters, Seven Fires, and the Medicine Line. Not by accident, the origin of most of these names is drawn from the native populations who are omnipresent in the narrative, their proximity to the border a fateful combination of ancestry and displacement. Fox finds commonality in all the populations banding the U.S.- Canadian border: social and personality traits mandated by the climate, economy, and the very nature of the stark world between two countries which these “northlanders” straddle. These commonalities include “[e]thnic communities with centuries-old histories, small towns that modern America skipped over, forgotten industries and Old World professions that rely on hands, not machines.” The saga of these northlanders is not the only origin story: the birth of many things, from the U.S. Coast Guard to Thousand Island Dressing, is hidden within these pages. Fox takes the best approach in a travel book, making himself an observer, rather than an actor, and documenting the stories of those he encounters. This is not navel-gazing, this is journalism. Fox’s own story only emerges during brief memories of his own northland origins in Maine, or in humorous or poignant interactions with people along the way. Fox also refrains from preaching or taking sides – any reasonable person can make their own conclusions regarding the effects of global warming, incompetent border management, marginalization of native peoples, or over-fishing and deforestation, making a diatribe superfluous. Fox observes: It looked like night. The sky and land were dark. Flames blazed above tall, cylindrical smokestacks, casting orange light on the ship. The waterfront was barricaded by dunes of iron ore pellets and coal. It was nine in the morning. The water was oily green. I looked through the porthole in my cabin and saw a truck pour molten slag into a ditch. A bright-orange splash flew into the water and incinerated a duck swimming by. Thus continues Fox’s story of his journey from the Saint Lambert Lock in Montreal up the Saint Lawrence Seaway through the Great Lakes (Ontario, Erie, Huron, Superior) to Thunder Bay, Ontario on the Algoma Equinox, a 740-foot freighter, reading like the opening of a post-apocalyptic version of Ben E. King’s Stand by Me. It is in this excellent section on The Sweet-Water Seas that Fox truly hits his stride, capturing the chaotic, spooky world of the Equinox and its crew, as well as the unforeseen benefit of only traveling ten miles an hour. Fox writes beautifully, carefully, and sympathetically about the people and places along this route, interspersing modern vignettes with the movements of glaciers, floods, Champlain, La Salle, and inexorable commerce. The book is full of these interactive moments that capture so much. Fox visits the Boundary Waters of Minnesota with Paul and Sue, legendary guides and explorers, watching Sue swing a canoe onto her shoulders for portage, “like putting on a sweater, except the sweater was a sixteen-foot Kevlar hull.” In North Dakota, Fox visits the Standing Rock protest camp of the Sioux Nation, against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and in Idaho, interviews a militia leader, who gives him “the kind of cheery welcome you’d expect from a car salesman.” An otherwise-mundane guided tour (“The tour group itself was a thing of antiquity. I was the only one under the age of eighty. The comb-over on the man beside me was a work of art.”) of the Glacier Park Lodge in Browning, Montana yields an unexpected insight when the tour guide shows Fox and the group a large-format black-and-white photograph shot in the late 1800s: The image was of two Blackfeet riders on a grassy knoll. Behind them were a forest and a few high peaks. Their hair was braided. The one in the front wore deerskins; the one behind wore blankets. Mist covered a valley at the foot of the mountains. There was no sun – just a dark line between earth and sky. Amid the cedars, buffalo skulls, and antique china, the photo was indeed the only object in the lodge of extraordinary value. It was a split second in time from a lost world. “I like showing people this last,” the guide said. “I like them to know that we weren’t the first people to live here.” By the time the journey ends, on a coastal Lummi tribal reservation at the western end of the border in Washington state, the reader has skillfully been transported stride-by-stride with Fox through the past, and across the northland. In his introduction, Fox explains that he wanted to visit the northland again before it changed for good. The borderlands seem to change more slowly than the center, giving us a glimpse into the past. In these margins, we see the cost of progress, and the stark natural beauty of the land that was, giving us pause about the right way forward. Book ReviewsNorthland, northland porter fox review, Porter Fox AMC Maine Mountain Guide, 11th Edition, Compiled and Edited by Carey Michael Kish August 31, 2018 May 24, 2020 Undercover Hiker5 Comments The hardest part about replacing my earlier (10th) edition of the AMC Maine Mountain Guide, 11th Edition (Appalachian Mountain Club Books), compiled and edited by Carey Michael Kish, was carefully transferring all of my handwritten notes and highlighter marks. The smashed mosquitoes and coffee stains I will have to replace as I go. Kish recently posted an article on Maine Today regarding the new edition. As referred to many times on this blog, this indispensable book has been the starting point for countless adventures over the last couple years. According to the back jacket of the new AMC Maine Mountain Guide, this new 11th edition features 175 new trails, 50 new mountains, and 17 additional in-text maps, “capturing Maine’s booming trail building and expansion during the past five years.” Additionally, the existing trails include more details and updates, including more than 450 trail revisions. In his Foreword, Carey Kish relates his hiking history, with the interestingly prescient detail that Kish bought his first Maine Mountain Guide in 1976. The Acknowledgements section shows the true breadth and depth of the book, with tips of the cap to AMC staff, Maine state departments, and a long list of names from “Maine’s incredible community of land trusts, conservation organizations, environmental agencies, trail clubs, trail advocates, outdoor recreation groups, and other good friends of Maine trails.” And it really must take a village to compile this book. The introduction includes helpful information and advice for hikers specific to Maine, including descriptions of Maine geography and geology, climate, vegetation, animals, and trail etiquette. For map and GPS nerds, the section on Maps and Navigation (at the tail end of “How To Use This Book” is packed with reference books and maps to use as companions to the guide, with a short segment on LiDAR data, and how it has been used to correct the summit height of peaks. There is even a sample packing list (you are going to want those convertible pants), and a common-sense primer on backcountry hazards. So what changed? The first Section is on Maine’s showpiece, Baxter State Park and Katahdin, and the new layout is apparent. The Suggested Hikes, which were previously at the end of each Section, are now at the beginning, in order from least difficult to most. The Trail Descriptions of the sixteen trails to the six major summits of Katahdin are now each prefaced with a table showing distance, elevation gain, and projected time to allow yourself. These information-age upgrades haven’t changed the narrative, however, or characterizations such as that of the Knife Edge: “The dizzying height, sheer cliffs, and extreme exposure combine to make this one of the most spectacular mountain trails in the eastern United States.” This descriptive prose, fortified with weather warnings, sources of water, and historical notes on the trails, is the continuing magic of this guide. The Sections of Maine have been broadened from ten to twelve, with stand-alone sections for Mahoosuc Range and Grafton Notch (Section 5), and White Mountain National Forest and Evans Notch (Section 6). It really is an expansion, and I skipped to some recent hikes I’d done to see the differences. I noticed subtle edits in the Downeast hikes I’d done recently, and updated road names added to trailhead directions. Viewing the Southwestern Maine portion (Section 8), I noticed six brand new in-text maps in that section alone, with popular trails Bradbury Mountain State Park, Douglas Mtn. Preserve, Bald Pate Preserve, Burnt Meadow Mtn., Mt. Cutler, and Mt. Agamenticus all getting their own cartography. New trails also debut, like the 47-mile Hills to Sea trail through eastern Waldo County from Unity to Belfast, which was opened to the public in 2016. The book ends with Appendices listing alphabetical contacts for the trails and lands listed in the guide, from the Appalachian Mountain Club to the Woodstock Conservation Commission, and checklists for New England 4,000 footers and New England 100 Highest. And in the back of the book are two pull-out map sheets, containing a total of six large-scale trail maps of Baxter State Park, Maine Woods, Bigelow Range, Camden Hills, Eastern Mount Desert Island, and Mahoosuc Range-Evans Notch. The 11th Edition of the AMC Maine Mountain Guide has been completely revised and updated while maintaining its essential character, an impressive achievement. This is truly the hiking handbook for the state of Maine, and a must-have for outdoor explorers of all levels. Book ReviewsAppalachian Mountain Club, Carey Michael Kish, Maine Mountain Guide Maine Hikes Off the Beaten Path: 35 Trails Waiting to be Discovered, by Aislinn Sarnacki When I first looked through the 35 trails listed in Aislinn Sarnacki’s book Maine Hikes Off the Beaten Path: 35 Trails Waiting to be Discovered, (Down East Books, 2018) I remembered how much in Maine is left to be hiked, a realization which is both humbling and encouraging. Sarnacki, the outdoor columnist for the Bangor Daily News, has assembled an eclectic, formidable line-up of trails spanning the Pine Tree State. Her introduction to the book spells out her goal in writing this book, starting with her journey into hiking, detailing a mixed experience ascending Katahdin at age sixteen, when she was “far from hooked on the activity.” Sarnacki discusses how hiking subsequently got her through tough times, culminating in an undergraduate thesis on the positive ways it can affect a person’s holistic health, and a job at the Bangor Daily News writing Outdoors features. Sarnacki explains the changing map of trails in Maine, and her navigation of information provided by state parks, land trusts and other non-profit organizations to find these trails (did you know there are more than 40 other peaks besides Katahdin in Baxter State Park? I didn’t). Sarnacki continues the introduction with a wonderful explanation of the value of Leave No Trace, with a description of Abol Pond during a Leave No Trace trainer course, and the change in enjoyment of natural beauty with the observation of the policy, versus without. She then provides helpful sections entitled Staying Safe While Hiking (all good tips – “Spoil Your Feet” and the limited use of helpful technology in particular) and At War With Ticks (common-sense strategies for dealing with an emerging problem). The 35 hikes described by Sarnacki are spread across the state, bracketed by Wells Barren Preserve in in the south, Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge to the east, Scopan Mountain near Presque Isle to the north, and Aziscohos Mountain in Lincoln Plantation to the west (man, I hope I got that right). Each includes a detailed description, detailing the Difficulty, Dogs (permitted or no?), any Cost or fee, Access (accessible overnight? four seasons?), Wheelchair accessibility, Hunting, Restrooms, How to get to the trailhead, and precise GPS coordinates. Each trail has a clear, accurate map (take a photo of the map with your cellphone if you don’t feel like carrying the book with you on a hike), and excellent photos that give you an idea of the trail’s surroundings and vista points. Sarnacki describes the plants and animals to be encountered, gemstones and rocks, trail markings (or lack thereof), interpretive signs, and everything in between. To the extent there are land trusts, a town office, or other caretakers of the trail, Sarnacki provides web addresses and telephone numbers for more information, and personal notes with helpful anecdotes for the area or the trail. These detailed vignettes brought back the best part of talking about hiking and trails, the part that is mostly lost in the technical focus of apps and guidebooks: word-of-mouth referrals for hidden outdoor gems, and personal stories about these special places. It is these connections that keep us coming back, and Sarnacki’s writing does an excellent job of capturing that idea. Having just come back from the Grand Lake Stream area, where we enjoyed the Baxter Outdoors New England Trail Series Downeast Lakes 5-Miler, I particularly liked Hike 25, the Little Mayberry Cove Trail, managed by the Downeast Lakes Land Trust (I agree with Sarnacki that the tiny silver and blue trail signs are aesthetically pleasing), and the photos capturing the changing light along the trails. Reading through this book, I found myself continually reaching for my Maine Gazetteer to look at the hikes, and running through road trips in my head. As a result, this new book is already dog-eared and bookmarked with ideas, which is the mark of a truly adventurous guide. As Sarnacki concluded in her introduction, I was inspired “to get out there, off the beaten path.” Book ReviewsAislinn Sarnacki, Maine Hikes Off The Beaten Path Book Review – Hike It Forward: Hiking the Appalachian Trail: Strong, Safe, and in the Spirit, by David Rough March 24, 2018 May 24, 2020 Undercover Hiker1 Comment Thru-hikers can have many different reasons to attempt the Appalachian Trail (AT), whether it be the fulfillment of a dream, a personal challenge, or any number of life events, and in Hike It Forward: Hiking the Appalachian Trail Strong, Safe and in the Spirit, (self-published, 2015) David Rough recounts his successful 2014 thru-hike from Georgia to Maine, as part of an “unavoidable call” and an effort to improve tuition assistance at the Christian school system in Ohio of which he was Academic Dean at the time. Rough blogged about his hike in the Hike It Forward blog. Rough (trail name: Rowdy) details his preparations for the hike, and how these preparations stood up to the 2,186 mile test, including gear and clothing. In addition, Rough’s book includes three bonus features: Trail Preparation, Trail Journal, and a State-by-State guide. A bibliography includes everything from A Walk in The Woods to The Lord of the Rings. Rough breaks down AT lingo, most importantly explaining the HYOH concept: Hike Your Own Hike, respecting the different goals, motivations, and methods of other hikers. Rough also converts the “trail magic” concept to “trail blessings,” which reflects Rough’s Christian faith. Most of the blessings involve food, which is central to the thoughts and well-being of thru-hikers. The book reveals a daily life on the trail containing surprises, nasty falls, and unexpected acts of kindness. These vignettes range from uplifting conversations with other thru-hikers, most of them referenced by trail name, to lighthearted musings on moose encounters, to an incident with a peeping tom at a hostel. These stories illustrate lessons learned by Rough, and his trail journal provides a sense of scale regarding the sheer mileage of a thru-hike, and its effect on his mood. Additionally, Rough is careful to credit his wife and sister, and the many others who supported his hike, showing that while an AT hike is inherently a solitary endeavor, the added motivation and encouragement to see it through can be the difference between success and failure. Rough also discusses the challenges faced in adjusting to normal life again after his AT experience, and how small things like shoes, being inside, and changing his diet caused stress, and how Rough dealt with this, and how reconnecting with friends from the AT cushioned some of the loss felt upon leaving the trail. Rough concludes: The Appalachian Trail is forever etched into my life. God allowed me to experience a path that few have walked. My hike was so uniquely mine and the spiritual journey so personally embraced me that words cannot describe its intimacy. A one hundred and fifty-two day walk incorporates 3,648 hours of experiences and people and blessing and adversity and adventure. To capture it in a book, to recall it in words, to reflect it in pictures, or even to fully understand it myself seems to evade my abilities. Overall, Rough’s narrative effectively describes his initial romantic view of the trail being replaced by hardship, but then re-forged, one step at a time, hiking his own hike, into an appreciation of the trail as it is. Appalachian Trail, Book Reviews, Multi-Day HikesDavid Rough, Hike It Forward Book Review: On Trails: An Exploration, by Robert Moor March 8, 2018 May 24, 2020 Undercover Hiker2 Comments The combination of a March Nor’easter and a good book given to me by a friend convinced me that winter was a good time to add a Book Review section to the Hiking In Maine blog. On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor (Simon and Schuster, 2016) is a perfect first entry in that section, as the book blends a description of the practical realities of hiking with the deeper and more existential reasons for these exertions. The book opens with a prologue containing Moor’s description of his 2009 thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail (trail name: Spaceman), and how he came to be there. It also quickly reaches the questions raised by this journey: As hundreds – and then thousands – of miles of trails passed beneath my eyes, I began to ponder the meaning of this endless scrawl. Who created it? Why does it exist? Why, moreover does any trail? And so, Moor dives deep, not just into his own Appalachian Trail experience, but into the history of the Appalachian Trail, and the origin of all trails, those created by humans and others: pre-historic organism, slugs, ants, caterpillars, elephants. In-depth scientific and psychological explorations are punctuated by colorful, whimsical vignettes from Moor’s life, including an amusing stint as a shepherd assisting a Navajo couple in Arizona. These stories help to anchor the larger themes of the book, including the complicated relationships between man and wilderness, and the American rediscovery of this concept. In describing the forests of New England, Moor says, “Walking through them- wolf trees, walls, and all – one starts to realize that the only thing more beautiful than an ancient wilderness is a new one.” Moor skillfully interweaves insights like this one with his section hike of the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire alongside Gilliam Jackson, a Cherokee man, and the other hikers along the way. A trip to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco to scout routes for the International Appalachian Trail (IAT) ends the main section of the book, and again, Moor blends explorations of the concept of the trail with humorous and poignant anecdotes of his interactions with the people involved, from planners in Maine and Iceland, to guides, to a prickly Moroccan dog owner. Moor brings the book to a close with a superb epilogue, in which he connects the trails he has described with the paths taken in life, illustrated by the parallel lives of Han-shan, an ancient Chinese poet, and M.J. Eberhart, AKA Nimblewill Nomad, a legendary modern hiker who has given away most of his possessions, and makes observations on why we hike: One of the chief pleasures of the trail is that it is a rigidly bounded experience. Every morning, the hiker’s options are reduced to two: walk or quit. Once that decision is made, all the others (when to eat, where to sleep) begin to fall into place. For children of the Land of Opportunity – beset on all sides by what the psychologist Barry Schwartz has called “the paradox of choice” – the newfound freedom from choices comes as an enormous relief. Moor’s book has the character of a journal entry that expanded and took on a life of its own, supported by anecdotes, science, and literature. In the hands of a less capable writer, this concept could sprawl endlessly and without direction, but here it flows brilliantly. Moor’s book is truly a meditative exploration, as the sub-title indicates, and its composition is as excellent as Moor’s insightful prose. Where he could create trite axioms or smug conclusions, Moor acts instead as a skilled guide, allowing the journey to create a deep question, and leaving the final destination to the reader. Book ReviewsOn Trails, Robert Moor	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1870
__label__wiki	0.589208	0.589208	Helping Students Explore Heritage Article from JewishNews For Judy and Nathan Laufer, supporting Jewish causes is part of their DNA. As the children of Holocaust survivors who were assisted by their Jewish communities, they know firsthand how a helping hand can make a difference. The Laufers met and married in Montreal and then moved to Phoenix in the mid-1980s, where Nathan had already set up a medical practice. Judy, who was born in Budapest and grew up in Montreal, worked as a kindergarten teacher and eventually became President of the Boards of Solomon Schechter School and King David School, where their son, Andrew, was in the first class. She became actively involved in the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix and served as the chairperson for B’nai Tzedek Youth Philanthropy Program and for FIDF Phoenix. Recently, she joined the Arizona board of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Together, the Laufers have co-chaired many Jewish events, including the 2015 Phoenix AIPAC dinner and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tribute dinner. In addition to supporting Jewish Arizonans on Campus (JAC) since its inception in 2008, they also support Jewish National Fund, Friends of the IDF, ASU Chabad and several Valley synagogues. Nathan, a cardiologist, currently serves as President of the Arizona Medical Association and is the past President of the MAricopa County Medical Society as well as the Phoenix Board of the American Heart Association. While judy remains busy volunteering in the Jewish community, she also runs Little Egg Publishing Co., a company she founded to publish children’s books. She is the author of “Where Did Papa Go?” and “Last Night I Had a Laughmare”. On Feb. 29, JAC will honor the Laufers for their support. In light of this honor, Jewish News asked them four questions: what is your connection to JAC? We have supported the JAC event for many years and we believe in the work that they do. We appreciate all the time and effort that JAC puts in to connect Jewish youth to Judaism and to each other. The Laufer Family Scholarship is being established to provide the opportunity for Jewish students to explore their heritage. Making the journey to see their Eastern European roots should create a richer understanding of their Jewish history. We hope this experience will solidify their Jewish identity and help them understand the need for the Jewish State of Israel. What does the Phoenix Jewish community mean to you? We have supported the Phoenix Jewish community since we arrived 30 years ago. We feel incredibly lucky and fortunate to be able to support others. We are both children of Holocaust survivors and their Jewish community helped our families when they left Europe. It is an honor and a privilege for us to be able to give back. How did you meet each other? We both came from Montreal, Canada. Montreal has a very cohesive Jewish community and we knew each other through groups of frinds. We re-met through mutual friends several years later when neither of us was attached. we knew almost immediately that this was “beshert!“. How and where would you spend free time? In our favorite place, Coronado, California. It would be reading, walking, biking or visiting with friends at the clubhouse. We also love to travel to new places, made even more special when our son, Andrew, joins us. Who: Jewish Arizonans on Campus What: Comedy Night featuring comedian Dan Naturman and honoring Dr. Nathan and Judy Laufer When: 6:30PM reception; 7:30 performance, Monday, Feb 29 Where: Hilton Scottsdale Resort & Villas, 6333 N. Scottsdale Rd. Cost: $54; $25 students Register: 480-390-6173; events@myjac.org or myjac.org Lawsuits over this medical device company’s filters converge in Phoenix Changing Healthcare Marketplace Dr. Adam Brodsky 2016 Maricopa Medical Society President Happy Nurse Practitioner’s Week!	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1873
__label__wiki	0.55718	0.55718	Tag Archives: Dr Walter R. Roberts Tags: #AceHistory2Research ( 31 ), #AH2RN2014 ( 36 ), Dr Walter R. Roberts, New York ( 3 ), US ( 2 ), VOA, Voice of America (VOA), Washington ` Voice of America and the Voice of the People Since 1941 One Person and his Recollections ‘ #AceHistory2Research – UNITED STATED – April 14 – On a grey day between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and Christmas 1941, while a research assistant at the Harvard Law School, I was walking across Harvard Yard and was stopped by Professor William Langer, a professor of German History, who asked me: “Walter, you know German, don’t you”? I answered in the affirmative. “We need people like you”, he continued. “Would you like to work for the US Government”? I answered in the affirmative again. “OK, you will hear from us”, he said, and we both went on our way. Early in the New Year 1942, I received a letter from the Coordinator of Information (COI) inviting me to come to Washington. Meanwhile, I heard that Professor Langer had signed up with U. S. intelligence. So I assumed that my interview in Washington would relate to a possible job in intelligence. I remember taking the overnight train from Boston to Washington and seeing a number of people there but was told at the end of the day that a possible job would be in New York. The man I was supposed to see there was Edd Johnson. An appointment was arranged for the following day at 270 Madison Avenue. It had become clear to me that the agency I was dealing with (COI) had both intelligence and information functions with the former apparently concentrated in Washington, while the latter were directed from New York. Edd Johnson, who headed the Research and Analysis section, came across as a stern, no nonsense man who got to the point immediately stating that the COI was in the process of preparing broadcasts in German, and that it was essential for the writers to know the propaganda climate to which they would be broadcasting. Could I reconstruct the weekly internal propaganda directive of the German Ministry of Propaganda, he asked. I answered that I probably could, provided I had the necessary material, i.e. the most recent German newspapers and transcripts of German internal radio broadcasts. I recalled that while still living in Europe, I used to listen to a weekly broadcast by Hans Fritzsche (one of Dr. Goebbels’ senior assistants) who seemed to read the weekly propaganda directive directly to the German people every Friday evening. I wondered whether Fritzsche was still on the air. Johnson said that he would try to assemble the necessary material by asking the American Legation in Bern, Switzerland, to provide it. He told me that he would be in touch with me when the newspapers and radio transcripts arrived. I returned to my job at Harvard. Within a couple of weeks, I was asked to come back to New York. All the material was there, including the weekly newspaper Das Reich that, in its editorial, practically duplicated the weekly broadcasts of Hans Fritzsche. In the next few hours, I tried to reconstruct, on the basis of the material received, the latest weekly directive that Goebbels and company had written, which was designed to keep the morale of the German people at its highest possible level. Edd Johnson read it and asked me to come with him to see James Warburg, who he said, was in charge of policy. At the end of the meeting, I was told that they would let me know in a few days whether I would be offered a job. The Dean of the Harvard Law School knew of my visits to Washington and New York. When the offer from the COI came, I suggested that I spend a day or two a week in New York and move there after the Harvard semester was over. Harvard found this arrangement acceptable, as did COI, which, in any event, needed some additional time to clear me for a civil service position, in that I was still an alien at that time. Once on the job, I realized that foreign information work was a new activity for the United States Government. I also became aware that the vital wherewithal was lacking – the U. S. Government did not own a single short wave transmitter. Read More of: Dr. Walter R. Roberts started his government career with the Voice of America. He retired from the government after serving as Associate Director of the U.S. Information Agency. President George H. W. Bush appointed and President Bill Clinton reappointed him as member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. He is the author of Tito, Mihailovic and the Allies, 1941-1945 and numerous articles on foreign policy. http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2009/1012/fsl/roberts_voice.html #ah2rn2014, #dr-walter-r-roberts, #new-york, #us, #voa, #voice-of-america-voa, #washington	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1875
__label__cc	0.748872	0.251128	New history books (February 2012 edition) Posted in Asian, Books, Russian by Alex L. on April 6, 2012 Below is a survey of books that were published in the past month or so and look to me like interesting reads (note: I have not actually read these books yet, and these are previews not reviews). No one in the world was surprised that Vladimir Putin was elected President of the Russian Federation yet again this year. News about Russian opposition movements — none too threatening to Putin’s grip on Russia — has been featured on the front pages of the Western press for the past couple of months. As that nation seems to be tragically slinking back into old habits of autocracy, historians have been looking to Russia’s past to find success stories when moderating forces opposed corrupt centralization of power. The primary question these historians seem to be asking is this: is autocracy inevitable in Russia? A classic work of this type is Victor Leontovitsch’s The History of Liberalism in Russia, which was published in English for the first time this January (it was written in German and first released in 1957). In May of last year, Julia Berest published a biographical account of one of Russia’s early liberals during the Napoleonic era: Alexander Kunitsyn. A more recent contribution to the debate will be published in June of this year by the university press of my alma mater: the University of Wisconsin. Anton A. Fedyashin’s Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866-1904 utilizes the history of Russia’s primary liberal journal before the 1917 revolution, The Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy) as a lens into what he sees as a uniquely Russian brand of liberalism. One of the greatest challenges to liberalization in Russia is the self-fulfilling idea among many Russians that the nation “needs” a strong (i.e. autocratic) leader. Historical inquiries into the successes and failures of Russian liberals may help debunk this myth. The increasing influence of India and China on the world stage is both benefiting and upsetting Western nations. Although few in North America and Europe grumble about paying low prices for goods and services exported from Asia, they are reluctant to share power with emerging nations. China vetoing (with Russia) the recent United Nations resolution condemning the Syrian government’s crimes against humanity was a reminder that the period of unilateral power enjoyed by the West after the Cold War is drawing to a close. The entire history of Western cooperation and intervention in East and South Asia is relatively unknown in the United States. Stephen R. Platt’s new book, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, describes a civil war in China during the middle of the 19th Century that left 20 million people dead and was decided in the government’s favor with the help of Western powers. In February, Katherine Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, published a highly praised work of narrative nonfiction about the slums in India. Reading books such as these can help readers in the West better understand the history and social life of emerging Asian nations. Relative to the conflicts of the previous century which began in 1914, the world today is calm. But the imprint of the 20th century lives on with us in many subconscious ways, and historians will be very busy in the upcoming decades analyzing the meaning of that bloody but technologically progressive century. Jack Beatty has recently published a new work that tries to challenge the reigning assumption that the most tragic conflict of the 20th century — the First World War — was inevitable. Works like Barbara Tuchman’s excellent book The Guns of August often paint a pessimistically bleak picture of humanity’s ability to avoid the painful consequences of flawed human nature. Beatty argues that humans have more control over our destiny than we currently admit: a refreshing perspective. Also recently published is Thinking the Twentieth Century. The last book by the late historian Tony Judt, it is a set of conversations between him and another scholar. The intriguing thing for me about this work is that it takes a look at the 20th century through the prism of intellectual history, a relatively rare perspective in scholarship today. I think there is a lot of potential in history books to investigate the effect that personal and public events have on how people form and act upon their ideas (and how those ideas go on to influence events anew). The previous century is certainly rich with such stories. Tagged with: emerging economies, intellectual history, liberalism « Art and moral courage New history books (March 2012 edition) » Cassie said, on April 6, 2012 at 9:44 pm These all look really great. Thank you for bringing them to my attention.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1876
__label__wiki	0.523459	0.523459	New history articles (August-December 2012 edition) Posted in Journals, Reading by Alex L. on December 30, 2012 Since I’ve fallen behind on my monthly articles and books posts, I’ve decided to condense the past several months into a couple final posts for the year. That way, I can start 2013 afresh with the regular format, reviewing and previewing books and articles every month. Below are the articles for the second half of 2012 that interested me but that I haven’t had a chance to review on this blog. “Vernacular Metaphysics: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line“ by Robert Pippin in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2013). “How Motion Pictures Industrialized Entertainment” by Gerben Bakker in The Journal of Economic History (December 2012). “Ethical Progress as Problem-Resolving” by Amanda Roth in The Journal of Political Philosophy (December 2012). “Intuiting Gods: Creed and Cognition in the Fourth Century” by Marilyn Dunn in Historical Reflections (Winter 2012). “Imagining the Unconscious” by Wouter J. Hanegraaffa in Intellectual History Review (Winter 2012). “Overshadowed New York” by Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman in American Literary History (Winter 2012). “Is Socratic Ethics Egoistic?” by Sara Ahbel-Rappe in Classical Philology (October 2012). “Inventing Intermediates: Mathematical Discourse and Its Objects in Republic VII” by Lee Franklin in Journal of the History of Philosophy (October 2012). “Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization” by Yoav Di-Capua in The American Historical Review (October 2012). “Why Was It Europeans Who Conquered the World?” by Philip T. Hoffman in The Journal of Economic History (September 2012). “Forging Soviet Racial Enlightenment: Soviet Writers Condemn American Racial Mores, 1926, 1936, 1946” by Meredith L. Roman in The Historian (Fall 2012). “An Unbreakable Game: Baseball and Its Inability to Bring About Equality during Reconstruction” by Stephen Segal in The Historian (Fall 2012). “Barbarian Virtues in a Bottle: Patent Indian Medicines and the Commodification of Primitivism in the United States, 1870–1900” by John Rosenberg in Gender & History (August 2012). “Chto delat’?: World War I in Russian Historiography after Communism” by Kees Boterbloem in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies (Fall 2012). “Tank Repair and the Red Army in World War II” by Gary A. Dickson in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies (Fall 2012). « New history articles (July 2012 edition) New history books (August-December 2012 edition) »	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1877
__label__wiki	0.681593	0.681593	On This Day, October 27th B R October 27, 2016 American HistoryCinematic HistoryForgotten HistoryHistory's BadassesHollywood HistoryPhotosToday In HistoryWomen0 Comments 1 1. 1954: Marilyn Monroe and DiMaggio get divorced Photo: nydailynews It was on this date in 1954 that Marilyn Monroe won an uncontested divorce against baseball legend, Joe DiMaggio. She claimed that he was “mentally abusive” as well as being “terribly moody”. America’s favorite couple had gotten married just over nine months prior after dating for over a year. Their relationship was heavily publicized in the media and it appeared as if they were a perfect match for each other. However, behind closed doors, there was significantly more to the story. Just over a month before the divorce, DiMaggio marked himself as a jealous and controlling man when Marilyn was shooting her famous subway grate upskirt photo. According to reports, he made quite the scene demanding that she not participate in the photo shoot. When she made the decision to go ahead and do it DiMaggio apparently stormed off the set which ultimately was the beginning of the for America’s most popular couple at the time. As soon as Monroe returned home to California after the shoot she contacted her lawyer, Jerry Giesler, and filed for divorce. 2. 1904: The opening of the New York City subway Photo: alllenall Photo: kalw It was on this date in 1904 that the first stretch of what would become the biggest underground subway system in the world opened in New York City. It was a 9.1-mile section of track that ran from the Grand Central Terminal in midtown down to City Hall in lower Manhattan, then west along 42nd Street to Times Square before heading north to finish all the way up on 145th Street in Harlem. Along the route, there were 28 stations where passengers could get on and off to reach their desired destination. The first part of the day the subway wasn’t open to the public, instead it was reserved for city officials and other V.I.P.’s. Although starting at 7pm it was open to any and all comers, each paying a nickel for the ride. According to reports, more than 100,000 people showed up for this momentous event. The following year the subway system was expanded to reach the Bronx and continued growing at a significant rate in the coming years 3. 2004: The “Curse of the Bambino” finally ends Photo: boston Photo: thenkblog The “Curse of the Bambino” finally came to an end when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series on this date in 2004. This was the first time they’d won since 1918, roughly 86 years prior. It all started back in 1920 when Red Sox team owner Harry Frazee made the boneheaded decision of selling Babe Ruth to the Sox’s nemesis, the New York Yankees. Not only was Ruth the best player on the team at the time, but he also went on to become one of the all-time greats. Frazee apparently made the deal for just $125,000 as well as a loan for an additional $300,000, for which he apparently used to produce a musical as well as to pay the mortgage on Fenway Park. Prior to him making the deal, the Sox had won the championship a total of five times and the Yankees hadn’t won a single one. But after the deal was made, the tables drastically turned. After 1920, the Yankees became world champs a record 26 times and the poor Red Sox went on an 86-year stretch without another championship title. On This Day, November 16th B R November 16, 2016 The Human Imprint on the Shifting Sahara Desert Elizabeth Lundin March 21, 2017 Charles R. Drew, the Surgeon Instrumental in Creating Blood Banks during World War II AO July 28, 2017 On This Day, May 13th B R May 13, 2016 Doll Days: Meet The Figure Who Inspired Barbie Hannah November 14, 2020	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1878
__label__wiki	0.60218	0.60218	Earth observations show Europe’s natural wealth in steep decline by Frieda Klotz <h2>Earth observations show Europe’s natural wealth in steep decline</h2><br /><p>With an average decline of 33%, a host of once-common farmland bird species is disappearing — the grey partridge, the Eurasian skylark, the meadow pipit and many others. Although devastating, this news was no surprise to scientists at <a href="http://www.ecopotential-project.eu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ecopotential</a>, an ecosystem monitoring project that tracks protected areas around the world to analyse environmental shifts.</p> <p>As part of their work, researchers analysed data from the Camargue natural reserve near Arles in southern France. Sandwiched between the Mediterranean sea and the mouth of the Rhone, the wetland reserve is Western Europe’s largest river delta. Surrounded by a large cultivated area, the Camargue wetlands have been a haven for wildlife and birds since becoming a protected area in 1927. Now, however, a combination of agriculture and rising sea levels are damaging Camargue’s pristine wetlands, home to dozens of bird species and France’s only breeding colony of flamingos.</p> <p><strong>Environmental shifts</strong></p> <p>Ecopotential uses satellite data from powerful Sentinel satellites launched by the European Space Agency in 2014, which allows researchers to observe minute variations in protected habitats with sensors that can focus on areas as small as 10 square metres. </p> <p>Dr Antonello Provenzale, director of the Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources in Pisa, Italy, is the project’s coordinator. The scientific community has used satellite imagery for at least 30 years, he says, but this project integrates the data with local measurements to create rich maps of information that give practical help to those working on the ground.</p> <p>‘The resolution provided by Sentinels allows us to look at the fine grain of the ecosystems,’ Dr Provenzale said. ‘What is new is the way we use the information, blending it with the in-situ field measurements and simulation models.’</p> <p> <div class="quote-view quotesBlock quote_horizontal"> <div class="quotesTop"><img src="https://horizon-magazine.eu/sites/all/themes/horizon/images/quotes_top.png" alt="" title="" /></div> <p>'The resolution provided by Sentinels allows us to look at the fine grain of the ecosystems.'</p> <blockquote><p>Dr. Antonello Provenzale, Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources, Pisa, Italy</p></blockquote> <div class="quotesBottom"><img src="https://horizon-magazine.eu/sites/all/themes/horizon/images/quotes_bottom.png" alt="" title="" /></div> </div> </p> <p>Environmental change is happening more quickly than the researchers had envisaged, with protected areas — and the species they shelter — under pressure from a number of different angles at once. Climate change isn’t the only problem, although it is significant. Increased use of land for agriculture, encroachment by invasive species and poaching are combining to accelerate its impact.</p> <p>The trajectory of the tropical tiger mosquito, a pest responsible for transmitting illnesses like dengue fever and the Zika virus, is one example. The insect made its way to Europe from Southeast Asia by train, boat and even car, independent of climate change — but the fact that it found a warm and convenient place to breed enabled it to gain a foothold in Europe.</p> <p><strong>Ecosystem services</strong></p> <p>Change itself is not bad, as Dr Provenzale points out. But the rate of change and the manner in which it is occurring puts ecosystems at risk. It also has the effect of reducing the net benefits these environmental resources offer humans — so-called ‘ecoysystem services’ — such as providing and purifying our air and water, capturing carbon dioxide gas, preventing soil erosion and providing practical resources like raw materials, wood and food.</p> <p>Then there are economic benefits from fishing, tourism and other recreational uses, as well as a more abstract benefit from its heritage value. ‘There is a type of service which is very difficult to quantify,’ Dr Provenzale said. ‘The biodiversity, the fact that it took millions of years to develop and we should preserve it even though we don’t fully understand what it means in all situations.’</p> <p>But, ‘it is not a catastrophe yet,’ Dr Provenzale suggests. ‘Can we improve our lifestyle without destroying the source of the benefits?’ he said. ‘These questions are at the back of the mind of every scientist working on the natural world.’</p> <p>One of the world’s most essential ecosystem services is water, a basic element in human survival. Another monitoring project, the Satellite-based Wetland Observation Service (SWOS) coordinated by German space company Jena-Optronik, is also using data from ESA Sentinel satellites to chart what is happening in the world’s wetland areas.</p> <p>Wetlands are home to more than 100,000 types of amphibians, reptiles and birds. As ecosystems, they are also among the most at risk from human activity. Since 1900, 64% of wetlands are estimated to have disappeared, and as the world’s population rises they are increasingly in demand as sources of water and for agriculture.</p> <p>The threats to wetlands from human activity are varied and imposing — irrigation, settlements whose populations take water for drinking, or the conversion of natural wetlands for artificial purposes such as rice paddies.</p> <p><strong>Oasis</strong></p> <p>SWOS develops standards and tools for the satellite-based analysis of the ecology of wetlands and provides information to decision makers on the ground. One region the project focuses on is Azraq in Jordan, a permanent oasis around 100km from Amman, the capital of Jordan, with a population of 4 million.</p> <p>In 2014, Azraq became home to 36,000 refugees from Syria, in a camp set up by Jordan and the UNHCR - which placed increasing demands on the fresh water oasis. Azraq, meaning blue in Arabic, was once a lush parkland hosting cheetah and gazelles — creatures now decimated by hunting. The oasis itself is so depleted that Jordan has begun to pump water from another source in the south of the country.</p> <p>It’s a conundrum local people are trying to resolve as they seek a balance between competing human and ecological needs, says Kathrin Weise, the project co-ordinator of SWOS. She stresses that SWOS is not a political project but provides information and recommendations for policymakers.</p> <p>‘We do not influence any political decisions directly, Weise explained, ‘It’s the task of political people to find solutions for wetland protection and restoration.’</p> <p><em>The research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media. </em></p> <p><a href="http://bit.ly/newsalertsignup" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img src="https://horizon-magazine.eu/sites/default/files/news-alert-final.jpg" width="983" height="222" /></a></p> <br /> <img src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-40077089-1&cid=earth-observations-show-europe’s-natural-wealth-in-steep-decline&t=event&ec=republish&ea=read&el=earth-observations-show-europe’s-natural-wealth-in-steep-decline&cs=republish&cm=republish&cn=republish&cm1=1" /> This post <a href="https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/earth-observations-show-europe-s-natural-wealth-steep-decline.html">Earth observations show Europe’s natural wealth in steep decline</a> was originally published on <a href="https://horizon-magazine.eu/">Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine \| European Commission</a>. Satellite data can show environmental shifts in protected areas like the Camargue wetlands, where rising sea levels have a damaging impact. Image credit - Nathalie Ducrot, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 In March 2018, French scientists reported a steep decline in the country’s bird populations, primarily as a result of agricultural activity. Causes include the increase in monoculture, detrimental land-use policies and, perhaps most importantly, the growth in the use of powerful pesticides such as neonicotinoids, which, by killing off insects, reduces the bird population by reducing the food available to them. With an average decline of 33%, a host of once-common farmland bird species is disappearing — the grey partridge, the Eurasian skylark, the meadow pipit and many others. Although devastating, this news was no surprise to scientists at Ecopotential, an ecosystem monitoring project that tracks protected areas around the world to analyse environmental shifts. Microsatellite swarms could paint clearer picture of our planet Cleaned-up data shows bigger-than-thought reduction in Europe’s NO2 pollution – Dr Folkert Boersma Supercomputers and space-based laser to help predict extreme weather events Keeping an eye on Earth As part of their work, researchers analysed data from the Camargue natural reserve near Arles in southern France. Sandwiched between the Mediterranean sea and the mouth of the Rhone, the wetland reserve is Western Europe’s largest river delta. Surrounded by a large cultivated area, the Camargue wetlands have been a haven for wildlife and birds since becoming a protected area in 1927. Now, however, a combination of agriculture and rising sea levels are damaging Camargue’s pristine wetlands, home to dozens of bird species and France’s only breeding colony of flamingos. Environmental shifts Ecopotential uses satellite data from powerful Sentinel satellites launched by the European Space Agency in 2014, which allows researchers to observe minute variations in protected habitats with sensors that can focus on areas as small as 10 square metres. Dr Antonello Provenzale, director of the Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources in Pisa, Italy, is the project’s coordinator. The scientific community has used satellite imagery for at least 30 years, he says, but this project integrates the data with local measurements to create rich maps of information that give practical help to those working on the ground. ‘The resolution provided by Sentinels allows us to look at the fine grain of the ecosystems,’ Dr Provenzale said. ‘What is new is the way we use the information, blending it with the in-situ field measurements and simulation models.’ 'The resolution provided by Sentinels allows us to look at the fine grain of the ecosystems.' Dr. Antonello Provenzale, Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources, Pisa, Italy Environmental change is happening more quickly than the researchers had envisaged, with protected areas — and the species they shelter — under pressure from a number of different angles at once. Climate change isn’t the only problem, although it is significant. Increased use of land for agriculture, encroachment by invasive species and poaching are combining to accelerate its impact. The trajectory of the tropical tiger mosquito, a pest responsible for transmitting illnesses like dengue fever and the Zika virus, is one example. The insect made its way to Europe from Southeast Asia by train, boat and even car, independent of climate change — but the fact that it found a warm and convenient place to breed enabled it to gain a foothold in Europe. Change itself is not bad, as Dr Provenzale points out. But the rate of change and the manner in which it is occurring puts ecosystems at risk. It also has the effect of reducing the net benefits these environmental resources offer humans — so-called ‘ecoysystem services’ — such as providing and purifying our air and water, capturing carbon dioxide gas, preventing soil erosion and providing practical resources like raw materials, wood and food. Then there are economic benefits from fishing, tourism and other recreational uses, as well as a more abstract benefit from its heritage value. ‘There is a type of service which is very difficult to quantify,’ Dr Provenzale said. ‘The biodiversity, the fact that it took millions of years to develop and we should preserve it even though we don’t fully understand what it means in all situations.’ But, ‘it is not a catastrophe yet,’ Dr Provenzale suggests. ‘Can we improve our lifestyle without destroying the source of the benefits?’ he said. ‘These questions are at the back of the mind of every scientist working on the natural world.’ One of the world’s most essential ecosystem services is water, a basic element in human survival. Another monitoring project, the Satellite-based Wetland Observation Service (SWOS) coordinated by German space company Jena-Optronik, is also using data from ESA Sentinel satellites to chart what is happening in the world’s wetland areas. Wetlands are home to more than 100,000 types of amphibians, reptiles and birds. As ecosystems, they are also among the most at risk from human activity. Since 1900, 64% of wetlands are estimated to have disappeared, and as the world’s population rises they are increasingly in demand as sources of water and for agriculture. The threats to wetlands from human activity are varied and imposing — irrigation, settlements whose populations take water for drinking, or the conversion of natural wetlands for artificial purposes such as rice paddies. SWOS develops standards and tools for the satellite-based analysis of the ecology of wetlands and provides information to decision makers on the ground. One region the project focuses on is Azraq in Jordan, a permanent oasis around 100km from Amman, the capital of Jordan, with a population of 4 million. In 2014, Azraq became home to 36,000 refugees from Syria, in a camp set up by Jordan and the UNHCR - which placed increasing demands on the fresh water oasis. Azraq, meaning blue in Arabic, was once a lush parkland hosting cheetah and gazelles — creatures now decimated by hunting. The oasis itself is so depleted that Jordan has begun to pump water from another source in the south of the country. It’s a conundrum local people are trying to resolve as they seek a balance between competing human and ecological needs, says Kathrin Weise, the project co-ordinator of SWOS. She stresses that SWOS is not a political project but provides information and recommendations for policymakers. ‘We do not influence any political decisions directly, Weise explained, ‘It’s the task of political people to find solutions for wetland protection and restoration.’ The research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media. ECOPOTENTIAL SWOS	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1884
__label__wiki	0.583445	0.583445	About Hugh Bryant hughdbryant Six Feet above Criticism? Archives for posts with tag: Bethlehem Holocaust Memorial 2019 Sermon for Evensong on the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany, 27th January 2019 Psalm 33; Numbers 9:17-24; 1 Corinthians 7:17-24 – Holocaust Memorial Day 2019 When I went to the Holy Land a few years ago, on the Clandon parish pilgrimage led by Revd Barry Preece, we had an optional visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum. It came as a complete change of mood from the rest of the trip. Every day we had visited sites from the Bible, in Bethlehem or in Galilee or in Jerusalem, following in the footsteps of Jesus, and every day we worshipped together in these fabled places, which before we had only imagined, perhaps helped by some pictures in books or in museums which we had been to, but now where we actually were in the places where Jesus had been. Now we really were in the Garden of Gethsemane, or out in the Sea of Galilee, imagining St Peter and the disciples not catching any fish. Generally, it was a happy, upbeat time. We met for supper and told each other stories over nice suppers and drinkable wines. Some of the Lebanese wines were really memorable … We didn’t actually go to a party at Cana in Galilee, but we got the flavour of it. At the same time, we could see that there was a difference between the Israeli and Palestinian districts. We could see the awfully ugly and massive wall, dividing the two. We came across the ‘settlements’, which we had read about, where Israeli ‘settlers’ had established themselves, in contravention of United Nations resolutions. But despite the rather temporary-sounding name, ‘settlements’, they weren’t some sort of temporary camp; think instead of something like Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes on the top of a hill, in one instance [Wadi Fuqeen], pouring its sewage down into the valley below, where the Palestinians, whose land had been taken, still eked out a meagre existence. There was a ‘night tour’ by coach around Israeli Jerusalem. No more dusty Middle Eastern roads, teeming with scruffy lorries and minivans, that you get in the Palestinian part of Jerusalem. No, here it was broad highways, sprinklers, green grass verges. Almost nobody walking, but rather most people driving. A beautiful hotel, the ‘American Colony’ – that is really its name. We didn’t go in, but I could tell that it would be nice to stay there. On the way down to Masada in the desert, to see Herod’s amazing mountain-top palace, we went through a check-point between Israel and Palestine. It took our 40-seater coach a couple of minutes to be waved through. The queue of weary-looking Palestinians waiting to cross the border – some of them to their own land, which had been arbitrarily divided by the Israeli wall – were, we were told, often delayed for more than an hour, for no reason. And then some of us went to the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. I remember remarkably mundane exhibits; freight trains whose cargo was people; endless paperwork, detailing everything about that ‘cargo’; personal effects, the stuff ordinary people had with them. But truly I felt a kind of internal contradiction. The exhibits were fine, so far as they went. But the point was, that the banality of this industrialised slaughter was overwhelming. Very few of the things we saw in the museum were, in themselves, weapons or instruments of torture. But nevertheless, this was killing on an unforeseeable and awful scale. It was too much to take in properly, but it looked mundane and normal. Nothing could justify the awfulness of the Nazi persecution in the Second World War, nothing could justify that genocide. I’ve just finished reading a really good and enlightening book by Philippe Sands, the well-known QC who specialises in the defence of human rights, called ‘East West Street’. That street is in the city called Lvov, or Lviv, or Lemburg – a city now in Ukraine, which has been in Austria and Poland also at various times, where two of the greatest academic lawyers of the modern era were born: Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, who invented the legal concept of crimes against humanity, and Professor Raphael Lemkin, who invented the word – and the concept – of ‘genocide’. Both were Jewish. Both lost many of their families in the Holocaust. Philippe Sands’ grandfather also came from there. ‘Genocide’ was defined by Prof. Lemkin as acts ‘directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of national groups’. [See http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-1.htm] The Nazis killed people not because of who they were or what they had done, but because of what they were. To be a Jew was to attract a death sentence. The term ‘genocide’ was first used, at Prof. Lemkin’s suggestion, in the charges brought in the great Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leaders in 1944. Prof. Lemkin had coined the word from the Greek root γενος, a tribe, and the Latin cido, I kill. When I went round the Yad Vashem museum, I felt strangely detached. On the one hand, I felt the mundane, industrial horror of the concentration camps. Holocaust Memorial Day is on January 27th because that is the day when Auschwitz was liberated. On the other hand, the fact that surely no-one, now, would seriously think of doing anything as awful as the Nazis did. Except that they have done. There have been other instances of genocide since WW2. The massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia, for instance. What causes it? No clues in the lesson from the Book of Numbers. Rather recondite stuff about when the Israelites, in exile but having come out of captivity in Egypt, would move forward when the ‘tabernacle’, the tent covering the Ark of the Covenant, the very ornamental box containing the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets, was covered and uncovered by clouds. This is part of the Torah, the law, the story, of Moses, and of the people of Israel, God’s chosen people: fine; but why would anyone hate those people? And in the other lesson from St Paul, the emphasis is on the inclusiveness of Christianity. Come as you are. You don’t have to attain any status first. You can be a slave and still be a good Christian. You can, certainly, be Jewish. Being a Christian doesn’t mean you can’t be Jewish too. We might wonder why St Paul didn’t object to the existence of slavery, but certainly there is no suggestion that some people are less deserving of salvation than others. Indeed St Paul uses the mechanisms of slavery to illustrate how Jesus can set people free, literally. But despite these innocent Bible passages, we know that anti-Jewish feeling is a very old thing. The Jews, as a race, have been blamed for killing Jesus. They have been called ‘god-killers’. Martin Luther was very antisemitic, blaming the Jews for failing to recognise Jesus as the Messiah. He was out of line with most of the other Reformers in this. After all, the story of Paul’s conversion and acceptance by the early Christians, even though he had been persecuting them – and Jesus’ own words from the cross, ‘Forgive them, they know not what they do’, and so on, go against any blanket condemnation of the Jews. It is still an issue. In this country the Labour Party has been condemned for being antisemitic, although I think that I would make a distinction between being opposed to some of the actions of the modern state of Israel, such as the expropriation of Palestinian land and building ‘settlements’ in contravention of United Nations resolutions, being opposed to that on the one hand, which seems to me to be legitimate, and being anti-Jewish in general. That distinction recalls Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, in that people who are antisemitic are against people because of what they are, rather than because of what they do. St Paul’s message of acceptance, of inclusion, is still very relevant. In some places when I was a boy, there were adverts which specified ‘no blacks and no Jews’ could apply. It surely couldn’t happen nowadays. But there has recently been the EMPIRE WINDRUSH scandal, where our own government, Mrs May herself, the Prime Minister in her previous post, forcibly sent elderly black people to places in the Caribbean which they had left when they were children, left at our invitation, in order to come and work here. That recent scandal again shows people judging others by what they are – in that case, black people who have come from other countries – rather than by who they are or what they do. The banal routines, the orderliness, of the Holocaust are still a danger, I fear. Very few people would just go and shoot someone: but what if you are a soldier and you are ordered to do it? Of course that was at the heart of the Nuremberg trials. The railway employees who drove the trains, who manned the signal boxes, who repaired the main lines, wouldn’t normally be looked on as authors of genocide. But without their work, the poor Jews would not have been put in the concentration camps so efficiently and in such vast numbers. There were lots of innocent routines and ordinary jobs, which nevertheless made genocide possible. The other great lawyer whom Philippe Sands celebrates in his book is Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, whose son was Sands’ tutor at university. Lauterpacht developed the other great concept which was first used in the Nuremberg trials, the concept of crimes against humanity. The United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights grew out of Lauterpacht’s work, and was, by contrast with Lemkin’s work, concerned not with crimes against whole peoples, but with crimes against individuals. What was the true nature of the evil contained in the Holocaust? When the victorious allies were preparing to try the Nazi leaders, what was the essence of their crimes? It was an assault on people as individuals, on who they were, as much as on what they were. These are still vital ideas. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, his great command to us to love our neighbours as ourselves, and St Paul’s message all through his letters that it doesn’t matter what our origins are if we are to become Christians – these are so relevant today. When we hear people saying things against people because of what they are – foreigners, migrants, black people, say – and when we hear people saying that it’s just too bad (but there’s nothing which can be done about it) that many people don’t have enough to eat, or can’t afford medicines – those are the sorts of ideas which in the past have resulted in genocide. Archbishop John Sentamu is starting to raise money for a bishop, Bishop Hannington Mutebi in Kampala, Uganda, who needs cancer treatment – which costs £155,000. What do we feel about that? We hope he gets the money, and the treatment. What if you weren’t a bishop but still had cancer in Uganda? You are still entitled to be treated, because you are human. You have human rights. Perhaps it has taken the history of the Holocaust to bring it home to us how vital those rights are. Tags American Colony Hotel, antisemitism, Ark of the Covenant, Auschwitz, Austria, Bethlehem, Bible, black people, Book of Numbers, Bosnia, Cambodia, Cana, Caribbean, Christianity, concentration camps, East West Street, EMPIRE WINDRUSH, foreigners, Galilee, genocide, Gethsemane, Hannington Mutebi, Herod, Holocaust, Holy Land pilgrimage, human-rights, Israel, Jerusalem, Jesus, john sentamu, Kampala, labour party, Lemburg, Lviv, Lwow, Martin Luther, Masada, migrants, Milton Keynes, Moses, Nazis, Nuremberg trials, Palestine, Philippe Sands QC, Poland, Raphael Lemkin, Reformation, Rev Barry Preece, Rwanda, settlements, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, St Paul, St Peter, Theresa May, Torah, Uganda, Ukraine, united nations, Wadi Fuqeen, WW2, Yad Vashem	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1888
__label__cc	0.541337	0.458663	Rehabilitation and mental health in Lebanon (Current page) Rehabilitation and mental health in Lebanon Health Rehabilitation Since June 2017, psychosocial support and rehabilitation go hand in hand for children with disabilities in Lebanon thanks to Humanity & Inclusions’s partnership with the Mousawat rehabilitation centre in the Beqaa Valley. Youssef attends an occupational therapy session with Maya \| © Oriane van den Broeck / HI A global approach Psychosocial assistants work in conjunction with rehabilitation specialists at the Mousawat centre, in the Beqaa Valley. Every week, the team gets together to discuss their patients and share advice. Children at the centre have access to comprehensive rehabilitation treatment including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy and psychosocial support. 300 children supported Every year around 300 children are treated free of charge thanks to HI. The organisation focuses mainly on early intervention and follow-up care with the parents of children with disabilities. Many families are beginning to return to Syria, and it is important, for example, that parents learn the rehabilitation exercises needed for their child’s treatment. Most of the patients at the centre were told about it by friends, family members or neighbours who recommended the services in Mousawat. At least one parent attends each rehabilitation session. The centre also offers parents psychological assistance and a support group has been set up where parents can help each other. Having a disabled child takes its toll on parents psychologically, especially in an environment where disability is stigmatised. At the start of the project, parents were reluctant to consult a psychologist, for fear of being stigmatised by their community. Today, it has become common for them to request these services.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1889
__label__wiki	0.865491	0.865491	Home Local News Partnerships manager goes from deep South to deep space Partnerships manager goes from deep South to deep space Click here to view original web page at www.theredstonerocket.com Reginald Alexander Growing up in tiny Kossuth, Mississippi – a farming village of some 200 people – Reggie Alexander recalls afternoons with his brother, exploring the galaxy on TV with the starship Enterprise crew on “Star Trek.” Back then, he never imagined he would one day guide development of spacecraft and propulsion technologies supporting exploration missions, including those part of NASA’s Artemis program. The agency’s lunar program includes landing the first woman and next man on the Moon in 2024, establishing sustainable lunar exploration by the end of the decade and getting ready for human exploration of Mars. Since fall 2019, Alexander has managed the Partnerships & Formulation Office, part of the Science and Technology Office at Marshall Space Flight Center. His team and its industry partners are pursuing some of the most ambitious work Marshall has undertaken since the Apollo-era Saturn rockets and space systems designed and tested in the 1960s. “Working with our commercial partners, we analyze past development tactics and engineering documentation to formulate strategies for developing new hardware and propulsion systems and solutions,” he said. The team incorporates the needs and insights of scientists and engineers across the agency, determining not just how best to launch astronauts and cargo to their destinations, but how their mission milestones and goals may refine or enhance aerospace technologies farther in the future. “This is a whole new way of partnering to do business,” Alexander said. “We set out to be more strategic in developing new work, executing current tasks and partnering more effectively with our commercial and academic counterparts.” Among its pursuits, his office is working to support commercial development of future human landing systems, one of which will begin carrying Artemis astronauts to the Moon’s surface in 2024. “With a sustained lunar presence, how do we facilitate that? What routine and special activities are involved? How do we best serve the mission and the explorers?” he said. “We ask these questions as a team – and then deliver the answers.” The Partnerships & Formulation Office also works with lunar and planetary scientists to explore options for finding and using in situ resources – materials available on other worlds to reduce the need to haul heavy, costly supplies from Earth. It also helps to refine and reduce risks associated with nuclear thermal propulsion technologies, which could speed up human journeys into deep space. Alexander’s team also pursues new cryofluid management techniques – the ground-based and in-space storage and transfer of supercooled liquid propellants – and assesses how best to prepare for crewed missions to Mars using the lessons being learned right now in the pursuit of new lunar expeditions. “It’s exciting every day to look at our resources and breadth of expertise and put them to work, continuing Marshall’s contributions to the nation’s journey of exploration,” he said. During his 30-year career, Alexander has held a number of key leadership posts, including propulsion system lead for NASA’s X-37 – an advanced technology flight demonstrator now being tested by the Air Force – and manager of Marshall’s Advanced Concepts Office. He helped lead concept development for the Space Launch System, the rocket set to power the Artemis missions, and was lead systems engineer for a project developing technologies to ferry crew to the International Space Station. Alexander earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Mississippi State University in Starkville in 1989 and a master’s in aerospace engineering from the University in Alabama in Huntsville in 1998. He moved to North Alabama in 1988 as a co-op with the Tennessee Valley Authority, before joining NASA as a thermal analyst in 1990. He completed a Senior Executive Fellows course in 2012 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which helped cement his desire to stay at NASA in a leadership capacity. “I realized what an honor it was to be part of a great legacy of engineers who put men on the Moon and today are planning the future of space transportation and solar system exploration,” he said. “I spend my days doing work most engineers only dream of, creating and enabling our future in space. It’s the most fun anyone could ever have.” Editor’s note: Rick Smith, an ASRC Federal/Analytical Services employee, supports the Office of Strategic Analysis & Communications. Originally published on www.theredstonerocket.com Previous articleLocal Alabama bakery to close permanently Next articleFacebook helps Huntsville non-profit make 9,000 COVID masks for hospitals Butterball investing $8.7 million in two Arkansas processing facilities Blue Origin Mission Demonstrates Crew Capsule Upgrades Butterball expanding two Arkansas plants	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1890
__label__wiki	0.731021	0.731021	Michael Palage Revision as of 12:33, 3 February 2011 by Pulasthi (talk \| contribs) LinkedIn: [Michael Palage Michael Palage] Michael Palage is an intellectual property attorney and an information technology consultant. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University, and a Juris Doctorate from the Temple University School of Law. Mr. Palage is admitted to the bars of both Florida and Pennsylvania. Mr. Palage has been actively involved in ICANN policy since its formation in connection with his former role as Chair of the ICANN Registrar Constituency. He formerly served as the former Chair of ICANN's Working Group B and currently serves as a WIPO UDRP panelist. Mr. Palage currently provides consulting services to domain name registration authorities and has testified as an expert witness in a number of Internet related matters. Michael Palage was selected for the ICANN Board by the Generic Names Supporting Organisation. He served on the Board from April 2003 to 3 April 2006.[1]Palage Resigned from ICANN Board April 3, 2006.[2] ↑ ICANN biography data ↑ Palage Resigns from ICANN Board Retrieved from "https://icannwiki.org/index.php?title=Michael_Palage&oldid=7177"	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1893
__label__wiki	0.720268	0.720268	the transformative work of Stephen Karcher, Ph.D. Finding the Way of Change Fixing the Omen: The Stories of the Time Daodejing: The Looms of Change. ROOM \|\| Imaginal Menagerie ROOM \|\| Perspectives on Change ROOM \|\| Guideways Articles ROOM \|\| World of Change ROOM \|\| Nuts & Bolts ROOM \|\| Four Pillars Stephen Karcherpets2019-03-05T18:13:51-06:00 “I sometimes call myself three legged man. When I stand on the first leg, I’m a scholar and intellectual. I’m interested in languages and books and how they work, in just what a wisdom book is and how it affects us and, as a translator of ancient Chinese characters, in seeking out the deeper mythic meanings and associations embedded in them. When I stand on the second leg, I’m a dancer and a choreographer. I’m interested in how we embody meaning and perform it, in how I can create improvisational structures that let us walk the talk, keeping the experience of meaning alive and fresh and letting it move though us into a possible future. These two passions don’t always get along, but the tension between them gets resolved when I stand on or in the third leg, in the ritual space where the Dream Body and the Sangoma or spirit-intermediary live. This realm of dream image and imaginal body, this uniting third space, is where the Yijing can enter us and change the shape of what those old ages called our heart-mind.” -Stephen Karcher, Ph.D. Over 40 years ago, a fated encounter in a Vancouver, B.C. Canada bookstore that had first appeared in a precognitive dream introduced Stephen to Richard Wilhelm and Cary Baynes’ translation of the I Ching, the first publication to bring this ancient divinatory tool to the West. This encounter was the seminal, life altering moment that called Stephen to what became his life work. He is today one of the most creative and controversial writers and practitioners in the field of Yijing studies, divination and myth. An internationally recognized scholar, translator, graphic artist and initiated diviner, Stephen has lectured and taught on the Yijing and other divination systems throughout the U.S., Great Britain, France, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa. He pioneered a depth psychological approach to divination during his tenure as Research Director of the Eranos Foundation in Ascona, Switzerland from 1988 to 1996 and is a prolific author, with ten books and numerous articles in the field of comparative mythology, divination, depth psychology and religious experience. Formerly a faculty member of the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, California, Stephen gives lectures, workshops and private divination consultations. He is currently working on two illustrated books that expand and deepen the processes intrinsic to working with Taoist Astrology, the Five Processes or Elements and the I Ching as a divinatory tool including the latest version of his ongoing translation project, “I Ching: Guideways for Change.” “Karcher liberates meanings…that have been missing from our understanding for a couple of thousand years…revealing a whole new landscape of interpretation that makes previous translations feel cramped by comparison.” Stephen now lives in Port Townsend, WA. Copyright 2015 IChingLivingChange.com \| All Rights Reserved \| Design by Plain English Technology Services	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1894
__label__wiki	0.6466	0.6466	Home Blog Psychological Response to COVID-19 & Loneliness in the UK Psychological Response to COVID-19 & Loneliness in the UK Akshay Sharan 2-April-2020 Employee Health, General Psychology Researchers at UCL have stepped forward in this time of global crisis to ascertain the impact of a pandemic such as COVID-19 on individuals living in the UK. Currently, adult participants living in the UK are being recruited to study the impact of the pandemic. Researchers hope that the data collected could help inform policy and practice with regards to mental health and loneliness in the UK. The study’s lead author, Dr. Daisy Fancourt (UCL Behavioural Science & Health) states, “This is a very distressing and challenging time, with people having to cope with worries about family, friends, work, and finances as well as increasing numbers of people having to enter full isolation. However, it’s vital that people stay at home,” “This research will help us to understand what psychological and social challenges people are facing and what factors can protect against negative effects on mental health. The data will be analysed in real time to inform the support people are given and the advice about how to stay well at home.” The study already has over 18000 participants with more being recruited, observably over various social media platforms. Results of the research could make visible the impact of social distancing & health advice given by government bodies to nationals. Data for the study will be revealed publicly each week with attempts to carry out cross-national comparisons, by liaising with health bodies in the UK. Mental health & loneliness in the UK has been a key concern for years in the UK. An expansive literature review was written by the author of this article for the purpose of a small research on loneliness in the UK. As of 2018, it is believed that over 9 million britishers suffer from loneliness. The notion of loneliness was initially pursued by Minister Jo Cox through a commission on the issue, up until her unfortunate demise. Upon her demise, John Cacioppo & the Jo Cox Commission quantified loneliness in the UK, as prevalent among 1 in every 4 British national. Cacioppo stated in his research that modern day existence is far from the community-based lives that humans are meant to live in. He further, specified that loneliness is more dangerous than obesity and smoking (Smith, 2018). With extensive increase in social media use, there is an associated increase in perceived social isolation as various studies have revealed (Primack et. Al., 2017). While the social media use affects the millennials more, the most affected continue to be the elderly. A common belief held by health practitioners in the UK is that the government does not allocate enough resources to deal with the mental health crisis in the UK. Based on varied evidence, Theresa May appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018. The latter part of the article provides a context in which the latest study on COVID-19 & loneliness can be placed. With a population already majorly affected by a mental health crisis, the impact of a pandemic such as COVID-19 may accelerate mental illnesses & cases of loneliness in the UK. On the brighter side, an event such as COVID-19 may elicit responses of empathy & a sense of solidarity that could prove to be positive in this fight against loneliness. From a social identity perspective, there may be a shift in salience from being an individual in the UK to the identity of being a citizen of the UK or a citizen of the world. This shift in salience could bring the citizens of the UK closer together to look after one another at a personal level.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1897
__label__cc	0.545776	0.454224	Iliad The Musical Opening 2022 in Hisarlik, Turkey Iliad Symposium Post author By Sean McGowan The judgement of Paris led to the Trojan War. It also led to some of the finest works of art ever created. The story of the Trojan War begins at the wedding of Achilles’s parents, Thetis and Peleus. All the gods are invited to the wedding except one: Eris, the goddess of discord. But this doesn’t stop her from leaving her mark on the occasion. Instead of attending the wedding, Eris plucks a golden apple from the Garden of Hesperides, writes “To the fairest one” on it, and tosses it inside the wedding ceremony. Three goddesses – Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite – each claim that the apple is meant for herself. When they ask Zeus to settle the matter, and decide who is the fairest, he suggests that they ask a Trojan shepherd named Paris. So Hermes leads them to Mount Ida. Here Paris is confronted with three gods, each wanting the golden apple, each offering Paris something in return for judging her the fairest. Hera offers Paris political power over Europe and Asia. Athena offers Paris neverending victories on the battlefield. Aphrodite offers Paris the most beautiful woman in the world. The judgement of Paris is to award Aphrodite the apple. This leads to Helen and Paris eloping, Agamemnon launching a thousand ships, Odysseus building the Trojan Horse, and eventually Helen sailing back home to Sparta with her husband Menelaus. Above is a 1904 painting by Enrique Simonet titled El Juicio De Paris, and below are are some other classic renditions of the world-famous scene. 4th-3rd century BC engraving on the back of an Etruscan bronze mirror by unknown artist 1st century AD mosaic by unknown artist c. 1485-1488 painting by Sandro Botticelli c. 1510-1520 print by Mercantonio Raimondi, after Raphael c 1550s painting by Frans Floris c. 1600 painting by Hans Rottenhammer c. 1638 painting by Peter Paul Rubens c. 1645-1646 painting by Claude Lorrain c. 1710-1720 painting by Michele Rocca c. 1808 painting by Francois-Xavier Fabre c. 1812 painting by Guillaume Guillon Lethiere c. 1862-1864 painting by Paul Cezanne c. 1906 painting by Eduard Lebiedzki 1908-1910 painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir Tags Art, History Where is the center of the world? The center of the Ancient Greek world is in the town of Delphi. This stone is called the Omphalos, or “navel” of the world. Think of it as Mother Earth’s bellybutton. A long time ago, Zeus wanted to find the center of the world, so he sent two eagles — one from each end of the earth. When they met at Delphi, Zeus sent down the Omphalos, a stone that his father ate and regurgitated (thinking he was eating his son Zeus) as navel of the world. Omphalos Syndrome is the belief that the city with the most money and most powerful politicians is in fact the center of the world. So, where is the center of the world? It used to be by the temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the great oracle Sibyl gave prophesy. Now, it’s just up the road at the new museum. The Ancient Greek aulos The aulos is a double-reeded pipe, like an oboe (though it’s sometimes played with a single reed, like a clarinet) made out of bamboo and bone. This 1st century AD mosaic from the “House of the Tragic Poet” in Pompeii shows a piper playing two auli at once, surrounded by actors in goatskin dresses and theatrical masks. Traditionally, you play two auli at once. This allows you to harmonize with yourself, and anyhow each aulos has only 1/2 of the notes in a scale, so you need two auli to play a complete scale. While the lyre is associated with Apollo, the aulos is associated with Dionysus. Here is a 2-minute aulos performance by Prof. Stefan Hagel. Tags Art, History, Music, Theater Fresco of Actor & Lyre Player This 1st century AD fresco from Pompeii shows a singer/actor with his theatrical mask on the top of his head, and a lyre player playing a 9-string lyre. Homer’s Iliad is traditionally performed by two such people. Indeed, at the time, the Iliad was the most popular show in Ancient Rome. Each line in the Iliad is played to six beats, and sung to notes on the lyre tuned to the enharmonic genus, playing notes in the ancient dorian scale. So, we know the musical chords Homer composed for the Iliad. We know the drum beats. We know the lyrics. We just don’t know the melody. Tags Art, Music, Theater Vase of Sarpedon This vase, painted around 440 BC, shows Hypnos and Thanatos carrying the body of Sarpedon off of the Trojan battlefield. Tags Art Ogilby’s Iliad People often overlook John Ogilby’s English translation of Homer’s Iliad. The frontispiece of this 1660 edition was engraved by Wenceslas Hollar. It was published just after George Chapman’s famous translation, which he wrote in long-lined non-rhyming verse, in installments starting in 1598. It was published just before Alexander Pope’s timeless translation, which he wrote in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets, in installments starting in 1715. But Ogilby’s English translation was one of the first to be annotated, and his editions were always beautifully illustrated. Tags Art, Poetry Marble statue of Athena This sculpture of Athena was carved out of marble in the 1st century AD/BC in Rome. It was a copy of an earlier Greek sculpture from the 4th century BC. Of all Athena’s iconography, her helmet might be the most widely recognized, but she has other icons that you can use to identify her. If you look closely you can also see snakes on her tunic, and a big Gorgon on her brooch. These are dead giveaways you’re looking at Athena. Homer characterizes her as the god of battle strategy and wisdom. The death of Aeschylus In his life, Aeschylus wrote musicals, won awards, and pioneered innovations that are now standard in today’s theater. This 15th century illustration shows his death in 456 BC. Legend has it he died from a turtle dropped on him by an eagle. Now, that may sound ridiculous, but in fact there are eagles in that region that eat turtles by dropping them on stones from high up to crack their shells. Apparently, the eagle mistook Aeschylus’s bald head for a hard stone. Pliny adds an ironic twist: Aeschylus was only outside in the first place to avoid a prophecy that he’d be killed by falling object. Tags Art, Theater Fresco of lyre player This fresco from the Bronze Age palace of Nestor (who fought in the Trojan war) in Ancient Greece shows a lyre player performing a song. The song is represented by a bird. Homer’s noble characters often speak with “winged words”. Mosaic of Achilles, Athena & Agamemnon This 1st century AD mosaic, recovered from the ruins of Pompeii in the “house of Apollo”, depicts Book I of the Iliad. Achilles draws his sword, ready to attack Agamemnon, but Athena grabs Achilles’s hair and restrains him. She advises him to use his words instead. Leda and the Swan This painting showing the birth of Helen of Troy is a copy of a now-lost Leonardo Da Vinci painting. It was painted by Cesar Da Sesto, one of Da Vinci’s students, in 1505-1510 AD. It shows Leda and Zeus (the swan) next to two hatching eggs. Helen and Clytemnestra are coming out of one egg. Castor and Pollux are coming out of the other egg. Here’s a study Da Vinci did in his notebook around the same time. Roman bust of Homer This Roman bust of Homer was sculpted in the 2nd century AD. It is believed to be a copy of a Greek bust of Homer sculpted some 100-400 years earlier. The all-white eyes seem ghastly in these ancient marbles, but remember in the old days these were painted with life-like colors, so it would have looked more like a figure in a modern wax museum. After all, even blind people have pupils. Painting of Achilles & Briseis This fresco was painted 2,000 years ago on the east wall of the “house of the tragic poet” in Pompeii. It shows Achilles angrily giving up his slave Briseis, from the first book of the Iliad. When the volcano on Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, the entire town was suffocated and engulfed in volcanic ash, preserving the painting. The excavated ghost town now acts as a eerie time capsule of that ancient city. Ancient vase of Achilles healing Patroclus This beautiful wine cup from about 300bc shows Achilles tending to the wounded Patroclus. Ancient artwork like this red-figured Attic vase are much better sources for the Trojan War than modern artwork. For example, compare Achilles’s horsehair helmet to modern renditions. La Caduta Di Troia (1911) Listen to songs from Iliad The Musical Scene 01 – Invocation Scene 22 – Hector © 2021 Iliad The Musical	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1898
__label__wiki	0.654934	0.654934	Towards Scholarly Evangelists and Evangelistic Scholars by John Bowen. June 10, 2005 In 1984, Haddon Robinson, then President of Denver Seminary, gave an address on the topic, “The Evangelist and the Theologian.”[1] He observed that evangelism and scholarship have generally been estranged during the past two hundred years, to the detriment of both. Yet, Robinson argued, the church needs both “scholarly evangelists” and “evangelistic scholars.” He pointed to examples of those who had integrated the scholarly and the evangelistic modes of ministry, such as the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Jerome, John Calvin, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, William Carey and Francis Schaeffer. In this article, I will assume that the ministry of evangelism is necessary to the life and health of the church. I will merely suggest at this point that the roots of evangelism are deep in the ministry of Jesus and the model of the apostolic church. It seems to me also that the lasting influence of scholar-evangelists like those on Robinson’s list speaks of its importance. Yet, with such distinguished forebears, it might be asked why the church no longer seems to produce leaders who are both scholarly and evangelistic. In broad strokes, Robinson lays the blame at the feet of the university-based seminary: Theologians in the seminaries often belittled evangelism… Many in the churches, on the other hand, reacted against seminaries and scholarship.[2] The issue thus raised rhetorically has been discussed by others in more scholarly fashion. David Kelsey has helpfully summarized the ongoing debate about the nature of theological education in his 1993 book, Between Athens and Berlin.[3] Kelsey contrasts two visions of theological education. The “Athens” model, which goes back to ancient Greece, and which was effortlessly adopted by the early church, stresses “schooling as ‘character formation’.” [4] In Christian terms, it is an education “whose goal is knowledge of God and, correlatively, forming persons’ souls to be holy.”[5] “Berlin,” on the other hand, stands for a type of theological education pioneered by Schleiermacher at the University of Berlin in the early nineteenth century. Here, theology had to justify its existence in a secular Enlightenment, research-oriented university, and it did so by arguing that theology trains people in one of the professions needed by society—the church, which exists alongside medicine and the law.[6] Charles Wood, in his 1985 discussion of theological education, Vision and Discernment, contends that the shape of theology has been determined ever since by the demands and expectations of “Berlin.” [7] Schleiermacher’s shaping of theological education into three streams, historical theology (which included the Bible), philosophical theology (which included systematic theology), and practical theology (which included the social sciences), thus located “the ‘theological’ character and unity of these disciplines neither in their method nor in their subject matter per se, but in their orientation to a particular purpose”—that purpose being to serve the wider culture.[8] Not surprisingly, the teaching of evangelism has no place in the Berlin model. William Abraham offers a useful definition of evangelism as “that set of intentional activities which is governed by the goal of initiating people into the kingdom of God.” [9] This goal, however, is antithetical to the goal of objectivity which is fundamental to the Berlin model. Abraham states the problem thus: Evangelism is seen as a sectarian issue that requires the kind of prior faith commitments that are out of place in a serious academic environment.[10] The teaching of evangelism and indeed the practice of evangelism exist more comfortably in an Athens environment where faith commitments are understood as fundamental to life and learning. Thus teaching and training in evangelism, while generally absent from seminary curricula, were common in the Bible colleges which sprang up in the late nineteenth century specifically to provide a preparation for ministry which was free of the constraints on faith imposed by university-based seminaries. [11] Three developments in the past fifty years have, however, brought about a new opportunity for evangelism and scholarship to grow together again. First, churches have awoken to the ways in which the marriage of church and state under Christendom hampered the integrity of its witness. Second, there has been a move towards seeing the natural locus of evangelism as the life of the local congregation. And, third, there has been an openness to consider the philosophical underpinnings of the whole theological–educational venture. I will touch briefly on the first two of these, and then look in more detail at the latter. The End of Christendom The adoption of the Christian faith by the emperor Constantine in the year 313 is generally regarded as a turning point in the relationship of the church to the state. Thus began the project known as Christendom which, while it had many strengths, is widely agreed to have led to the weakening of the distinctive message and values of the Gospel. John Stackhouse comments that “All Bible schools shared the same basic qualities: concern for correct doctrine, a Bible-centered curriculum, and practical training—especially in evangelism.” He also gives a vivid example of how Bible colleges perceived seminaries to be destructive to faith (pp. 80-81). Hauerwas and William Willimon are typical of writers on this subject in pointing out that the church in the world of Christendom was: a church that had ceased to ask itself the right questions as it went about congratulating itself for transforming the world, not noticing that in fact the world had tamed the church.[12] Rodney Clapp illustrates the relationship of church to world in Christendom like this: For the better part of recorded history, the church has been the sponsor of western civilization. Like gym-shoe manufacturers who win the right to advertise their wares with the world’s most famous athletes, the church has coveted its association with Western civilization.[13] The church, he suggests, has been the chaplain on the ship of the state, offering religious services but with no influence over the direction or running of the ship; the captain has been on the bridge with the real power, deciding the direction of the vessel. Thus when Schleiermacher needed to justify the teaching of theology in the modern university, he had to do it in terms that the largely secular university understood: theology prepares pastors who will serve the needs of the state. The chaplain provides religious services, regardless of which direction the ship travels. Now, however, Christendom is at an end. Hauerwas and Willimon suggest (somewhat tongue in cheek) that it happened in 1963, on a Sunday when the Fox Theater in Greensville SC opened its doors on a Sunday, and went head to head with the church.[14] Or, to return to Clapp’s metaphor, the captain has decided that the chaplain is no longer needed. The question for the chaplain, of course, is: what now? The answer coming from many quarters is an optimistic one. Hauerwas and Willimon are again typical: The demise of the Constantinian world view…is not a death to lament. The decline of the old, Constantinian synthesis means that…Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.[15] Finally the church can recover its true calling, and can be captain of her own ship—or, rather, follow the direction of Christ, her true captain. This new freedom has many implications which will take some years to think through. One area in which rethinking has already begun is the shape of theological education. What does a theological education look like which is shaped by the nature of theology itself, indeed by the shape of Christian faith itself, rather than by external and—many would now agree—inappropriate criteria? What should congregational leadership look like in a church whose purpose is mission to an alien world rather than chaplaincy to a semi-pagan state? I would contend that the door is now open for a reconsideration of the place of evangelism in the enterprise of theological education. It was hardly appropriate in a Christendom seminary: in a post-Christendom model, however, it can take on the role and significance it has within the faith itself. The Church as Evangelizing Community In recent years, thinking and writing about evangelism has moved away from an emphasis on the gifted individual evangelist and has begun to explore the role of the congregation as the place where healthy evangelism is most likely to happen.[16] It has become popular to say that people often belong before they believe, in the sense that, for many, becoming part of a Christian community often precedes actual profession of Christian faith by months or even years. There are at least two reasons for this shift. One is pragmatic, a dissatisfaction with forms of evangelism taking place away from the community of the church, such as crusades or television preaching, which may produce “decisions for Christ” but do not always produce baptized, committed members of Christian communities. If, however, the community is the place where the evangelism happens, then converts are already involved in a community of disciples by the time they find themselves believing. Thus congregationally-based evangelism is more likely to nurture long-term disciples than event-oriented evangelism. The second reason for the shift from individual to communal is, I believe, more philosophical—the postmodern contention that truth is discovered in community. As an illustration, Stanley Grenz paraphrases postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty thus: Everything one can say about truth or rationality is embedded in the understanding and concepts unique to the society in which one lives… [I]t is impossible for us to rise above human communities.[17] This point of view, though coming from a secular philosopher, should resonate for Christians. After all, most people do not come to believe in Christ through hearing abstract propositions in a relational vacuum. Christianity believes in a Word which became flesh: we come to believe because we get involved with the person of the living Christ. Thus evangelism happens best (though by no means exclusively: God is sovereign, after all), when we have the opportunity to be with other people who are seeking to know and live God’s truth, and who discuss it in concrete rather than theoretical ways. When the Word is made flesh again in the community of Christ’s people, people discover God’s reality there. How is this change connected to theological education? If churches are to become this kind of evangelizing communities, it is their pastors who will lead them to become so, and pastors are (in most denominations) trained in seminaries. Thus, if seminaries do not train their future pastors in evangelism, it is unlikely that the congregations they lead will ever develop a ministry of evangelism. Harold Percy speaks passionately to this issue of appropriate leadership for congregations: Transformational leaders have a clear conviction that God can and will work through their congregation to change lives, and that their congregation of people can be used by God to help change the world. Such vision begins with a clear vision of the evangelizing community and what that community might look like in its particular setting and circumstances.[18] I hope it is not unfair to suggest that seminaries by and large do not produce this kind of “transformational leader” who can help a congregation become an evangelizing community. One way they might do so is by introducing the teaching of evangelism into the formation of future pastors. A New Model for Theological Education Of course, the need for training in evangelism could be addressed simply by hiring adjunct faculty to teach courses on evangelism. Many seminaries in Canada do just that. If, however, evangelism is to be an integral part of the seminary curriculum, rather than an optional appendix, a new model of theological education will have a more lasting effect. Charles Wood offers just such a paradigm. After reviewing how theological study has been understood historically, Wood proposes that “Christian theology may be defined as a critical enquiry into the validity of Christian witness.”[19] To some, the idea of “witness” is inescapably a freighted term, redolent of revival meetings and street-corner evangelists. Wood’s understanding of “witness,” however, is more theological and nuanced: “Christian witness” is meant here in a comprehensive sense, roughly equivalent to a similarly broad sense of “Christian tradition,” that is, one embracing both the activity of bearing witness (or handing on the tradition) and the substance of what is borne or handed on. The role of theology in relation to witness is thus: an attempt to bring witness to reflection, and to ask about its validity—its faithfulness, its truth, its aptness to its circumstances…an exercise in self criticism, aimed at enabling those so engaged to bear more adequate witness… As such, theology is an aspect of the continuing repentance to which the church and all its members are called.[20] The heart of theological education, then, is to reflect on the work of witness, the Bible’s own witness to the work of God in history, the church’s witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the practices of the church as in some measure bearing witness to God’s work in the lives of communities and individuals. Wood argues that this “witness” can be considered according to three criteria—historical, philosophical and practical—and proposes that theological study be divided into three main disciplines according to these criteria: 1. Historical. This discipline would look at the history of God’s people, in biblical times and in church history, and ask such questions as: a. Is a particular instance of historical witness genuine and faithful in its presentation of Christian tradition? b. How far is it true to the church’s mandate to be a witness to God’s work in Christ? Wood proposes that this theological discipline should take over the name “historical theology,” and use the tools of historical research to consider the whole of Christian tradition. Study of the Bible would be included under this rubric. 2. Philosophical. This discipline would consider such questions as: a. What is witness? b. What may be known about God? c. In what sense may Jesus be said to be the “Son of God”? d. Is any given example of Christian witness meaningful and true? To describe this discipline, Wood proposes to co-opt the term “philosophical theology.” 3. Practical. This discipline would look at questions of Christian witness in human society, and ask such questions as: a. How did Jesus’ witness impact the society of his day? b. How did the apostles take the gospel to the Gentile world? c. How do cross-cultural missions operate today? It may also be asked whether Christian witness is, in any given circumstance, appropriate. Is it a fitting enactment of witness for the cultural context in which it is performed? This field of study Wood terms “practical theology.” It would use the scholarly tools of the human sciences, such as sociology, psychology and anthropology, in considering questions such as these. Wood’s paradigm is helpful as we think about training in evangelism because of the privileged position he gives to the concept of “witness,” which is, after all, a central component in all evangelism. Indeed, he suggests that the aim of studying theology is “enabling those so engaged to bear more adequate witness.”[21] It is true that Wood makes “witness” mean “everything the church is and does as the church”[22]—whether liturgical worship or social service, professional ministry or political involvement—and in a sense he is right to do so since any authentically churchly activity inevitably bears witness to the reality of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, in the New Testament the word “martyria” (witness) refers most frequently to evangelistic witness. For example, of thirty uses of the word “martyria” in the Johannine writings, twenty-seven of them are dominated by the specific sense of “evangelistic witness to the nature and significance of Christ.”[23] Thus any system of theological education which puts the concept of witness at the centre is by implication opening the door to the subject of evangelism. If Wood’s model of theological education were to be adopted, seminary work would come to include significant theological reflection on evangelism, not as an academic embarrassment, or a cultural aberration from the true task of theology, but as a basic aspect of witness, theology’s fundamental driving force. The three main components of theological education, in Wood’s vision—historical, philosophical and practical—could readily be applied to the subject of evangelism: 1. In studying the historical aspect of witness, for instance, theology would ask: a. How is evangelism carried out in Scripture? b. How does Jesus himself bear witness to the Kingdom? c. How has the church through the centuries followed the evangelistic mandate? d. What makes Christian evangelism authentic? e. How has the Church’s evangelism been faithful to the witness of the apostles and of Jesus himself? 2. Within the discipline of philosophical theology, questions would be asked of evangelism: a. In what sense is the message as proclaimed true? b. Is it legitimate for the Gospel to claim what it claims? c. Is it coherent and meaningful? 3. Under the rubric of what Wood calls practical theology, students would ask questions such as: a. What is an appropriate way to express the Gospel to this person or group, in this culture, at this time? b. What does evangelistic preaching look like in this culture? c. What is the place of the catechumenate today? d. What can I learn from practising evangelists? e. What can Christians in the West learn from evangelists in other cultures? If Wood’s model were to be adopted, and the door was thus opened to the teaching of evangelism in seminaries, the benefit would be at least two-fold. On the one hand, the teaching of evangelism would greatly benefit pastors as they prepare for congregational leadership, which in a post-Christendom world must include a sharply-defined sense of mission. On the other hand, this model would also serve to bring the resources of theology to bear on evangelism. An evangelism that was informed by history, philosophy and social sciences (to name Wood’s three disciplines) would be a very different phenomenon from that which we presently experience—richer, broader, more historically aware, more culturally sensitive, more theologically nuanced—indeed, to use Wood’s own criteria, more faithful, true and appropriate. Then the church would be faced with the exciting prospect of a new generation of scholarly evangelists and evangelistic scholars. Two Examples Is this more than a theoretical ideal? Two contemporary evangelists illustrate the possibility of evangelism and theological education enriching one another: the late Terry Winter and Michael Green. Unfortunately, their experience does not shed light on the systemic question of the place of evangelism in theological education, nor can they be taken as examples of how Wood’s paradigm might work. The two are simply ad hoc instances of people in the world of theological education who had a passion for evangelism and found pragmatic ways for the two to work together. Nevertheless, their example is encouraging: these two worlds are not necessarily antithetical to one another. Terry Winter (1942–1998) was an independent evangelist of Plymouth Brethren background, based in British Columbia. He had his own television show which was seen across Canada on Vision TV. Winter had a B.A. from the University of British Columbia and a Doctorate in Pastoral Theology (a predecessor of the D.Min.) from Fuller Seminary. Canon Dr. Michael Green, a New Testament scholar, has been Principal of St. John’s Theological College, Nottingham, England, and Professor of Evangelism at Regent College, Vancouver. He is currently Professor of Evangelism at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. Of his many books, perhaps the best-known are Evangelism in the Early Church and I Believe in the Holy Spirit. [24] Green has M.A.s in Classics and Theology, and a B.D. from Cambridge, an honorary D.D. from the University of Toronto, and a Lambeth D.D.[25] In interviews I conducted for my Doctor of Ministry thesis,[26] Winter was one of the very few evangelists with whom I spoke who thought that his seminary experience had actually enhanced his evangelistic ministry. During doctoral studies at Fuller Seminary, he had in Paul Jewett a sympathetic supervisor who saw beyond the modernist dichotomy between evangelism and scholarship. In a taped interview, Winter states: I happened to like systematic theology, so I did my doctorate in systematic theology and evangelism… My Professor, Paul Jewett, [said,] “Terry, we want you to be a better evangelist, so let’s study systematic theology with an evangelistic application. We need more systematic theologians who are evangelists or evangelists who are systematic theologians.”[27] For Jewett and Winter, healthy evangelism needed good theology. Indeed, the subjects at the heart of the evangelist’s message—sin, the person of Christ, atonement, salvation, repentance, faith, discipleship—are among the most profoundly theological topics anywhere. As Robinson argues: What does it mean “to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”? …Take that Biblical assertion apart and you are working with theology… Only if we understand the gospel ourselves can we hope to make it clear to others… Theology clarifies our thought, sets what Christians believe in contrast with false doctrine, and helps us make the message clear to outsiders.[28] I am persuaded that an evangelist trained in systematic theology is likely to be a better evangelist. Michael Green has been a pioneer in the teaching of evangelism in seminaries. In his role as seminary principal and professor of evangelism, he has always made it a practice to engage students in “real-life” evangelistic opportunities. Like Jewett, he does not see a necessary distinction between the teaching of evangelism and the teaching of more traditional academic subjects. Indeed, he described to me how, when he first went to teach at St. John’s College: I started to do [evangelistic] missions, and…would take students off on those. When I became Principal, I’d take them off in term time and, boy! they were good at their Hebrew verbs when they got back because their motivation was so high.[29] He continued this model of education when he was Professor of Evangelism at Regent College in the 1980s, combining classroom teaching with church-based or city-wide missions, where students would form Green’s team, and participate in speaking, testifying and other evangelistic activities. The testimonies of Green (as teacher) and Winter (as student) suggest that seminary education and training in evangelism can in fact go hand in hand, even though neither Green nor Winter was working in an institution where evangelism had been formally integrated into the curriculum in the way Wood recommends. For two hundred years, evangelism and scholarship have had little to do with one another. Yet the church in a post-Constantinian, postmodern world is not only in urgent need of scholarly evangelists, but is in a unique position to nurture them. Charles Wood’s proposal for a witness centred model of theological education, while radical, would give a more appropriate place to the teaching of evangelism in seminaries. Terry Winter and Michael Green, on the other hand, show that theology and evangelism can go hand in hand at the practical level. If seminaries pursue this integration, the church may once again produce scholarly evangelists and evangelistic scholars, and be the healthier for it. McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry 6 (2003-2005) [1] Haddon W. Robinson, “The Theologian and the Evangelist,” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 28.1 (March 1985), 3-8. [2] Robinson, “The Theologian and the Evangelist,” 3. [3] David Kelsey, Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993). [7] Charles M. Wood, Vision and Discernment: An Orientation in Theological Study (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985). [9] William J. Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 95. [11] John G. Stackhouse, Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to its Character (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 75. [12] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 41. [13] Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post- Christian Society (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 17. [14] Hauerwas and Willimon, 15. [16] See, e.g., Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism; Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993); Michael Green, Evangelism through the Local Church (Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990),George G. Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999); Sally Morgenthaler, Worship Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995); Harold J. Percy, Good News People (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1996); and John P. Bowen, Evangelism for “Normal” People ( Minneapolis: Augsburg–Fortress Press, 2002). [17] Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism ( Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 156-57. [18] Percy, 82. [19] Wood, 21. [23] H. Strathmann, “mavrtu”, ktl.,” TDNT IV, 500 [24] Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church (Crowborough, UK: Highland Books, 1970); idem, I Believe in the Holy Spirit ( London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975). [25] A British B.D. is the equivalent of a North American M.Div. A “Lambeth D.D.” is the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is the equivalent of an Oxford D.D., and is considered the equivalent of an earned doctorate. [26] John P. Bowen, “Teaching Proclamation: A Model for Training Evangelistic Preachers”, unpublished D.Min. thesis, McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, ON, 1996. [27] Terry Winter, telephone interview with author, tape recording, May 15, 1996. [28] Robinson, 6-7. [29] Michael Green, interview with author, tape recording, Hamilton, ON, August 18, 1996. “If Necessary, Use Words”—Really? Having Second Thoughts about Evangelism	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1900
__label__cc	0.724831	0.275169	Talks on Turkey’s accession to the EU could come to an end – Merkel April 29, 2017 IMMWorld Europe and Turkey should not completely turn away from each other, but the introduction by Ankara of the death penalty will mean the end of dialogue on Turkey’s membership in the EU. This was stated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in an interview with the publications of the media group Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland, Deutsche Welle reports. Merkel has called for prudence in the further relations of the European Union and Turkey. The head of the German government stressed that the task to open a new Chapter in talks with Turkey about EU membership is not worth it. At the same time, according to Merkel, the possible introduction by Ankara of the death penalty will mean the end of the dialogue. Earlier, the head of EU diplomacy Federica Mogherini said that the EU’s relations with Turkey, “outside the context of accession to the European Union.” She noted that “the process of Turkey’s accession, from the point of view of the EU, continues.” As you know, the referendum in Turkey, which took place on 16 April, was submitted the question of amendments to the Constitution, which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gets all the power in the country. Following the plebiscite, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he intends to restore the death penalty. Turkish opposition demanded to cancel the results of the referendum in connection with mass violations, but the Supreme court of Turkey has refused to consider their claim. In the report of the observers of the OSCE and the Council of Europe stated that the referendum in Turkey did not meet democratic standards, which are normalized by the Council of Europe and the OSCE. In particular, more than 2.5 million votes were rigged. In the European Parliament in connection to the referendum called to suspend talks on Turkey’s membership in the EU. Posted in World Merkel hopes for progress in resolving the Ukrainian and Syrian crises at the G20 summit As produce gas in Ukraine: thousands of atmospheres and energy independence Loud the purpose of the state Department in Ukraine: who is Kurt Volker How to lose weight: TOP 7 ways to spend vacation with advantage At the nearest meeting “channel four” Ukraine can “kill two birds with one stone” – Klimkin To capitalize on the gas storage: how much money Ukraine will bring one solution Georgy Zubko: hockey match Ukraine – Poland watched more than 8 million viewers Genius video pleased with new, amazing cinematics (video) A great strategy to Donald trump? “You could hear the earth shake”: in the Philippines, a powerful earthquake	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1901
__label__wiki	0.749844	0.749844	What should we learn from the Russian Federation in the question of national identity May 1, 2017 IMMSocial Maybe it’s time for us to begin serious discussion on the issue of national identity. It is difficult to give a clear definition of national identity. Within the academic community there is no agreement on exactly what the category in question — a scientific, or political. For some, national identity is an essential characteristic of any entity based on irrational feelings. Others speak of it as a social construct. Third put on the forefront of a certain instrumental function of national identity. In addition to these theories, there are many others that deal with the meaning and content of national identity, But yet no one theory has failed to give a full interpretation. The same difficulties as in the scientific quest for the definition of national identity, appear when we move into the sphere of politics. What is the national identity of the state, society or ethnic group? Who and how forms of national identity? Be it people, or her pose for people of the elite? Is there a need for a strong national identity for the stability of the state, and what are its differences from the multinational and multi-confessional unions? In the modern Russian Federation all of these issues are in public discourse. Suffice it to say that after the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Russian political, religious and scientific elites, national identity, Russia has become one of the main objects of interest. Regardless of what period there is a speech: about the Kyiv Rus, the Russian Empire, the USSR or the Russian Federation — one fact plays a fundamental role in understanding what the Russian state. What is meant by the Russian government (for many in the West and the USSR were Russian or “Communist”), never in the history was not a state exclusively Russian or East Slavic peoples origin. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia has never been a nation state or a “vessel for melting” like America. Russia has formed and developed over the centuries as a multinational state, ethnic Russians and hundreds of other ethnic groups. No intolerance was not Thus, assertions about Russia as a “pure” Slavic state, which we have heard very often, only reflect the romanticized view, and sometimes a complete ignorance of the facts. Russian identity is much harder to understand, and its most striking elements is a Russian ethnicity, Russian language, Orthodoxy and what is called the Russian culture. However, besides these aspects, the identity and the spirit of the Russian people influenced other Nations with their different genes and traditions. The peoples of Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Caucasian, Iranian origin, like many other “alien” peoples in the service of the Russian state have left an indelible mark in the Russian identity. Unlike some societies who consider themselves the most advanced and free, but in the past repeatedly demonstrated intolerance towards citizens of different ethnic origin, religion or skin colour — in the Russian state (regardless of what the period in question) such an idea never found significant support. It someone may object, arguing pogroms and Stalin’s deportations, but, in spite of their tragic consequences, they can’t compare to the Cromwell conquest of Ireland, the Huguenot wars or the conquest of the conquistadors in Central and South America. Events in the Belgian Congo, the fate of the indigenous people of Australia and North America, and the slavery of blacks — examples that continue this series. Crimes caused by intolerance to ethnic and religious differences and committed during the Second world war, the countries of the axis and their allies, by their scale and nature surpass all the previous. Russian development of Siberia, the indigenous inhabitants of those territories, of course, was not met with enthusiasm, but they don’t have to worry, and that passed through the natives of the New world, faced with European colonizers. According to many authors, in Russian state policy did not exist developed ideas of racial superiority, which in practice would lead to attempts to destroy or complete the destruction of the “less useful” people. Some cite a lack of ideology based on racial superiority as one tagcause the Russian colonization of the Caucasus and Central Asia of factors. The role of memories of the Second world Today in the Russian Federation inhabited by about 200 ethnic groups, which, besides common features, there are many differences. Due to internal and mostly external factors, these differences may adversely affect the stability of the country. The political leadership of the Russian Federation considers that the answer to this challenge should be the strengthening of a common national identity, which the Russian Federation is often called the Russian. Russian identity, in contrast to the Russian, comprehensive. It is based on Russian language and culture, rather than Russian ethnic origin. By its nature it involves other ethnic groups and encourages them to commitment to the state in which they live, its history, characters and, importantly, power. Tatar, Ossetian, Chuvash, Yakut or Nanay should not abdicate from its primary identity, to take Russian. On the contrary, they complement each other. The victory of the red army over Nazi Germany is perceived by the Russian public as a common victory of all Soviet citizens, as an event not to be forgotten, and which must be treated with reverence. Due to this crucial contribution of the Soviet soldier and the man in the defeat of Hitler’s military machine by the wayside depart Stalin’s purges, deportations and camps. Memories of world war II in the Russian Federation and unite, not exacerbate old wounds and disagreements. And yet the Russian identity is a concept that is not fully developed and generally accepted. Besides him, there are other ideas about what should be the national identity of post-Soviet Russia. The main problem of the Russian concept associated with difficulties in the exact definition of what is Russian culture, to surpass the cultural boundaries of the modern state, and that all who speak in Russian, especially non-native speakers can “truly” make the Russian identity. The situation becomes more complicated if we consider the numerous Russian-speaking population of the former Soviet republics and their relation to the question of identity. Many representatives of the Russian community warned that Russian identity is threatened Russian identity, and moderate criticism “rosista” claim that ethnic Russians always played the role of “older brothers”, and now don’t have to give her up. The extreme right in fact reject the concept, believing that the state and its identity can only be “pure” Russian. In recent years, due to government action and internecine conflicts, right-wing groups have lost power, and their dreams of a “Russian” Russia does not get a special response from the public. Eurasianism, known primarily thanks to the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, by contrast, is booming. According to Dugin and his followers, Russia is neither European, nor to Asian civilizations, and is a special and unique civilization. The mission of Russia as the most powerful continental powers to resist the Maritime powers, represent primarily the US, which wants to take full control of Eurasian space (Mackinder — Heartland), and thus the whole world. The formation of the concept of Eurasianism Dugin was influenced by the works of Mackinder, Russell, Haushofer and thinkers of the interwar period from the midst of white emigration. Dugin advocates the creation of a Eurasian Empire, which was Russia. In Germany, he sees a partner in the fight against the “sea powers” and not the enemy of Russia, strongly rejects the liberal values that impose “sea power,” primarily the United States, and calls for the preservation of traditions. In the West, Dugin is considered the main ideologist of the Kremlin, the father of a new Russian national politics and a close friend of Vladimir Putin. Often the Western media called Dugin obscure, marginal and dangerous philosopher. However, the influence of Dugin in the Russian policy and Vladimir Putin overestimated and exaggerated by the media. Dugin himself publicly expressed sharp criticism of the Kremlin’s policy in the Ukrainian crisis, and in 2014, Dugin left the professorship at MSU. The post-Soviet era: a conflict of concepts The collapse of the Soviet Union meant also the collapse of the system of values which the Communist party has built more than seventy years. The Soviet identity of the citizen of the Russian Federation did not disappear in an instant, but weak, and, more importantly, its content was vague. Its foundations were destroyed or has largely lost its meaning. State, army, education system and health care experienced in the 90s is a difficult period. State ideology, which existed for decades and based on Marxism-Leninism, became an undesirable and often condemned in public discourse. It was during this period in the Russian political arena, the ball is ruled by the liberals and reformers, the purpose of which was to form Russia on the Western model. In other words, in their opinion, the Russian Federation can be stable only when one becomes a liberal democracy with civil society, market economy and freed from the burden of Communist and Imperial past. Outstanding representatives of this approach were some high-ranking members of the Yeltsin administration, in particular, Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar and Andrey Kozyrev. The project “modernisation” of the Russian state instead of enhance the quality of life of citizens, brought the country to a complete political and economic collapse, and a comprehensive privatization (“shock therapy”) public property left millions of people without work. Citizens of the Russian Federation was faced not only with material difficulties — many of them have experienced a serious identity crisis. Moscow has lost international prestige. Chechnya, in fact, from 1991 to 1999, was an independent state. The combat capability of the Russian army was dangerously low. According to the opinion polls, the majority of respondents have a negative attitude to such concepts as national pride, trust in state institutions and the army. With the arrival of Vladimir Putin to power and in connection with the traumatic experience of the 90s, the idea of nation-building and identity on the Western model was relegated to the background. Building a new national identity, adapted to the XXI century, has become one of the most important tasks in the work of Putin and his administration. As he himself once said, the Russian government supported the formation of a common identity based on cultural affinity, shared history and respect of common victories and heroes. Because this process of formation is ongoing and its final results are unpredictable, the Russian public does not stop the discussion of this issue. An interesting contribution to the debate on Russian national identity has made the report of the panel discussion of the Valdai club in 2014. Is it possible to apply the model of the Russian Federation In the report titled National identity and the Future of Russia, among other things, States that the Russian identity is characterized by a love of liberty, willingness to sacrifice, openness, tolerance and sense of justice. Among the negative traits is inconsistency, impulsiveness, lack of personal initiative. According to the authors of this report, the government should steer the development of human capital, and to the citizens of the country should not be treated just as subjects of power. The development of human capital involves three key aspects: education (for better future), a sense of “owning” their own country (for the present) and genuine acceptance of the country’s history (for the past). As in the case of the Russian Federation, most countries of the Western Balkans, in fact, there is no articulated national identity, and many activists of the liberal persuasion in our area think national identity is something unnecessary and outdated. However, they do not pay enough attention to her features and lose sight of the fact that they are so close to the West cosmopolitanism or globalism are unable to completely displace national identity. National identity has three main functions: firstly, the political, which implies the strengthening of common interests, and the leveling of differences within a society, secondly, the strengthening of personal confidence, and thirdly, the satisfaction of innate human needs to be part of the group. Maybe it’s time for us to begin serious discussion on the issue of national identity based on respect for different opinions. Of course, by itself, identity does not guarantee financial stability and prosperity, but it is clear formulated and adopted by the greater part of the society’s identity can be a good incentive to achieve a state of prosperity. Posted in Social Russia and Israel: friends or foes? It became known how many people Poroshenko has deprived of citizenship in 2017 The foreign Minister of Poland called the main condition for resolving the Russian-Ukrainian conflict How the iPhone led to the emergence of a new city in China Trump: U.S. Relations and Ukraine has never been more important TOP 10 most amazing elevators in the world (photos) The victory of Makron — bad news for Putin and good for team Merkel on the world stage The foreign Ministry of Ukraine told, when the expected negotiations leaders “Norman Quartet” 59 amazing facts you didn’t know about Russia Russia then and now: a tale of two trips	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1902
__label__wiki	0.823441	0.823441	Tag: Electric Ladyland October 16 – Jimi Hendrix’s Magnum Opus The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland If there’s such a thing as the quintessential 1968 album, I believe this would be it. A recurring theme among many of these 50-year-old albums is the blending of 60’s pop and the trendy, fashionable, and overall quite brief psychedelic phase of rock and pop with harder rock, blues, and roots in general. It continues to amaze me how quickly music evolved in the 1960’s, and it’s a testament to how great the music is despite the short periods some of the sub-genres lasted in terms of their actual creation. The 1967 debut Are You Experienced may have been a Flower Power creation, and it’s continuing shelf life speaks for itself. But with the epic Electric Ladyland, we have what critics have deemed to be the full realization of Hendrix’s vision – a combination of all the aforementioned elements into a beautifully un-cohesive double album. Ambitious and experimental, Electric Ladyland is the third and final album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It’s also the only one where Hendrix is credited as producer. Recording sessions took place over numerous months beginning in July of 1967 at Olympic Studios in London and at the Record Plant and Mayfair studios in New York. Chas Chandler, producer of the band’s first two albums, began overseeing the New York sessions but left the project as it dragged on due to Hendrix’s demands for repeated takes as well as the party atmosphere in the studio with many of Jimi’s friends and hangers-on. Out of the chaos arose a double album that confused some critics at the time as being all over the place to its detriment, but one which you might have difficulty finding retrospective reviews of fewer than five stars. Much of the credit belongs to engineer Eddie Kramer, who is lauded for his experimentation with new mic techniques, echos, and backward tapes which were considered groundbreaking at the level of Phil Spector just a few years earlier. The album is a combination of the more psychedelic sound of their first two albums with the more blues and funk of the Band of Gypsys which followed. And as a result of Jimi’s love for late-night jam sessions, there’s quite an array of guest musicians credited, including Jack Casady (bass on Voodoo Chile), Steve Winwood (Hammond organ on Voodoo Chile), Dave Mason (12-string on All Along the Watchtower), Chris Wood, Buddy Miles, Brian Jones (percussion on All Along the Watchtower), and Al Kooper (piano on Long Hot Summer – of course Al Kooper’s on this record!). By mid-November, Electric Ladyland was the #1 album in the US and #6 in the UK. Arguably the most famous track from the album is Hendrix’s rendition of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, which became the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s highest selling single. Dylan offered the highest praise possible for Hendrix’s version, which he’s stated Jimi made his own. Dylan described his own reaction: “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way… Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.” Bob has also stated, It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day. Perhaps on the other end of the album’s spectrum is the mid-60’s Brit Pop sounding tune sung by Noel Redding, Little Miss Strange. Tony Glover, in his original Rolling Stone review, considered this song to be the most commercial sounding track on the album, which is a testament to how well the album has aged since that song is probably not at the top of most people’s list of favorites from the release, yet it’s still good. And everything in-between? It ranges from the standard length guitar driven classics Crosstown Traffic and Voodoo Child (Slight Return) and the less celebrated but still very solid Come On (Pt. 1) and House Burning Down, to the epic jam that is Voodoo Chile and the experimental and fascinating 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be). My favorite stretch of the album is Side Three, which begins with the jazzy, stoney Rainy Day, Dream Away. Having mainly listened to the album on CD, this segment extends for me into the first song on Side Four, Still Raining, Still Dreaming, with the final segment consisting of the three songs after it. As Glover wrote, Electric Ladyland is “an extended look into Hendrix’s head.” It seems Jimi had lots of twists and turns happening between the ears, which resulted in what is considered one of the greatest albums of all time. A few years back, in addition to my daytime “real” job, I kept a part-time gig at a used music store. Employees took turns playing CDs of their choice and, as is the case in life, we didn’t all share the same tastes. In an effort to stave-off one of the many inevitable 35 minute discs of show tunes one of my co-workers was fond of, I’d pull the single-disc remaster (i.e., a full hour and fifteen minute disc) of this one off the shelf when it was in stock and let it rip. When my sons come for a visit, my 17-year-old heads straight for the Zeppelin and Hendrix. He mostly learned about them on his own. I like to add YouTube album links to my posts, but not surprisingly only fragments of this one are available online. The Hendrix estate keeps a rather tight rein on his material. But if you like it, you probably own it. If you don’t own it, get it! And the Gods Made Love Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland) Crosstown Traffic Little Miss Strange Long Hot Summer Night Come On (Pt. 1) Gypsy Eyes Burning of the Midnight Lamp Rainy Day, Dream Away 1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be) Moon, Turn the Tides…Gently Gently Away Still Raining, Still Dreaming House Burning Down Voodoo Child (Slight Return) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Ladyland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Along_the_Watchtower https://www.allmusic.com/album/electric-ladyland-mw0000527658 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/electric-ladyland-183197/ Author introgroovePosted on October 16, 2018 October 15, 2018 Categories UncategorizedTags 1968 Albums, Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, Noel Redding, The Jimi Hendrix Experience11 Comments on October 16 – Jimi Hendrix’s Magnum Opus	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1903
__label__cc	0.593124	0.406876	Ken Langone 5 Lessons From Billionaire, Ken Langone Home Depot Co-Founder Episode #365 SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE PODCASTS SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE SUBSCRIBE ON STITCHER I got to spend two hours with Ken Langone, billionaire co-founder of Home Depot. I got to ask him all the questions I wanted. And then I told him I’d never been to one of his 2,274 stores. “A pox on your house!” He screamed it again. “A pox on your house!” My producer was laughing. I don’t know what It looked like. I’ll have to watch the video to find out. He kept going. “May all your faucets leak!” “May all your windows have drafts!” I tried to explain. “I would hired a contractor to do it for me.” He said, “If you were enlightened, you would say to the contractor, ‘You ought to buy everything at Home Depot.” I think I’m cursed. “Look,” he said. He kept telling me to look. He’s 82 years old, a billionaire. He works everyday (still). His marriage is a success (61 years). His kids like him. They’re happy. He’s happy. So when he tells me to “look,” I listen. “Look,” he said, “every once in a while, people need leadership, OK? You exercise your leadership and tell him.” I could see why he’s so successful. Here are five lessons from Ken Langone about building wealth, success and value, but also about honesty, sticking to your word and “putting your money where your mouth is.” 1. INVEST IN GOOD PEOPLE Ken kept telling me how great his assistant is. “Christ, take my eyes out of my head before you take Pam away from me.” Ken had a story and something nice to say for everyone. He said he and his co-founder Bernie Marcus wouldn’t walk into a Home Depot without collecting a few carts from the parking lot first. About Frank Blake, CEO of Home Depot, Ken said, “Make no bones about it. I can’t think of anyone that stands up to Frank as a CEO of any corporation I’ve ever been involved in.” He also had a rule: Don’t be fake. “There are people I don’t like and they know I don’t like them and don’t want to be around them. I don’t want to be a fake. I’ll be polite to them but I won’t go out of my way to have a pizza with them.” We all lean on people. And the people we lean on can either be step-stools or they can be people. “Anybody that thinks I’m saying there’s no such thing as a self-made man is wrong. I’m saying, as it relates to me and me alone and nobody else, I am the result of a lot of people’s hard work.” “Take people off the Earth, it’s a big, round blob of dirt.” 2. ACCOMPLISH WHAT YOU WANT Ken said it’s going to be hard for my listeners not to say, “This guy’s full of shit.” He was about to tell me what’s at the heart of his work. “It should never be about the money,” he said. “It always be about the accomplishment. OK?” I agreed. “I’m 82 years old. I go to work everyday. If I didn’t need sleep, I would work 24 hours a day. If you didn’t pay me a nickel, I would work just as hard ‘cause I love what I’m doing. I’m having the time of my life.” 3. BE CURIOUS Amazon has a good relationship with death. When it starts talking about pharma, the market responds. When it backs away from pharma, the market responds. Companies live and die by people’s loyalty to Amazon. I see articles online that say, “Save Barnes & Noble.” I asked Ken what he thinks. He said, “I had lunch with Jeff Bezos last December and I tell people, ‘Be careful with Bezos.’ He’s smart and he’s humble. That’s a winning combination. A guy that, no matter how gifted he is, can relate back to people who are not so gifted. That’s a winner.” Then he said, “I think a fundamental characteristic of an intelligent person is an incurably curious mind.” Amazon competes with everyone because they serve everyone. But that doesn’t scare Ken. He said, “I think a great competitor will make you a better competitor if you’ve got the guts to hang in there, if you’ve got the staying power, if you’ve got the resolve, if you’ve got the fire in the belly.” 4. INVEST IN GOOD PEOPLE (PART 2) This is my favorite lesson from Ken. As soon as we left the studio, I tweeted: He said, “The secret weapon always was and always will be those kids that put the aprons on every morning. They understand the goal is not to sell something to somebody. They understand the goal is to make somebody happy and satisfied that they came into the store. And don’t sell somebody a $40 item if a $2 item will do.” They don’t just train good people. They hire them. And then those people grow. And the company does, too. 5. QUESTION YOUR INTEGRITY I wish I could remember my old idea of a billionaire, who these people are, what they sound like, act like, etc. Maybe I would’ve drawn up a monster or someone fat, selfish and hungry. I’d be wrong. Every billionaire I’ve ever talked to is kind, they smile, they laugh, they feel feelings. They’re all individuals with different personalities but they have a strong moral compass, a hard dedication to their endeavors, and an ease about them. Maybe the money helped them relax. And the success helped them be humble. I don’t know. I’ll show you just how human Ken really is… He said, “Be careful with my humility.” I laughed. “No, I’m serious,” he said. “I even challenge myself sometimes. Am I really being humble or am I playing to the crowd?” Ken’s book includes his personal history. You see him growing up in Roslyn Heights, New York during WWII. You get to know his father who was a plumber. You see his small beginnings. You see why he ended our interview by saying, “All I can tell people is we live in the greatest country on Earth. This would not have happened to me except I was blessed to be born in America and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.” “I think faith is a strong part of your story of success,” I said. “It’s my whole story.” I Love Capitalism!: An American Story by Ken Langone Also Mentioned My interview with Garry Kasparov My interview with Sara Blakely My interview with Arianna Huffington Amy Schumer’s SNL monologue Pete Cunningham Frank Blake NYU Langone Health Centers Warren Buffet quote, “It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and you can lose it in 5 minutes.” The Wizard of Lies Bob Nardelli Ross Perot Jim Kaplan who collaborated with Ken on his book Stanley Druckenmiller Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy Pam Goldman (Ken’s assistant) Steve Easterbrook Strayer – Jack Welch Management Institute Personal Development 67 Book Recommendation 46 Impression Technique 27 Ep. 208:…	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1905
__label__wiki	0.84573	0.84573	Fresh off Thor and X-Men: First Class, Hollywood's next big writing duo is about to explode Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz have written two of the summer's biggest movies, Thor and X-Men: First Class. They're fast becoming the go-to writers for revitalizing beloved science-fiction characters. We talked to them about what they've learned so far. Miller and Stentz made their bones writing for Andromeda and Twilight Zone, then went on to write for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (Including the nuclear sub two-parter.) And then they wrote four of the strongest, most mythology-heavy episodes of Fringe. (Including "strawberry-flavored death.") How did writing for John Connor and Walter Bishop prepare them to tackle Charles Xavier and Loki? And will we ever see their Richard Feynman adventure movie? Find out below. You guys had some pretty divergent careers before you got into writing for television and movies. Schoolteacher, consultant to the Navy, journalist... what made you both want to be writers instead? What did you learn from those other jobs that you're able to apply in your writing gigs? Miller: I've always wanted to be a writer. My mother tells me I used to wander around the kitchen when I was three years old, dictating stories to her. I was evidently the subject of her doctoral thesis on teaching reading and writing, so she actually sat and took the dictation. It was a little like having an assistant who also made me PB&J and changed my diapers. That costs you extra in today's workplace environment. As for the need to tell stories... it's always been with me. Always. As a child, it was largely regurgitation of stories I loved. Now, with THOR and X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, it's largely regurgitation of stories I loved as a child. Make of that what you will. My early and very eclectic work experiences had an enormous influence on who I am as a writer. Certainly the technical knowledge can be circumstantially useful — the T:SCC 2-parter is a great example, and in some sense so are all of the episodes with a foot in the future ala "Goodbye to All That" — but the real importance is a little more subtle than that. First, we feel blessed to have had real life experiences. I think the great weakness of many young writers is that they come to LA, graduate from USC or wherever, and immediately jump into TV and features. They don't have anything to say, generally, because they don't have anything to talk about except that thing they've all done. The dragon swallows it's own tail, to some degree. Maybe it's better to say the ice cream cone licks itself. That's a real problem. For me, I like to think that I'm accessing genuine emotions and personal history when I write almost anything. Whether it's ANDROMEDA'S Dylan Hunt coldly engaging an enemy starship in our very first produced credit, "D Minus Zero" or Agent Coulson watching in something akin to wonder and anger as Thor kicks the shit out of his agents, I feel as though I know those guys. I've met them. I'm not pulling that stuff out of my ass. I'm not saying no one else could write that, but I can say no one else would write it quite the same way we did because our characters are coming from someplace real. That's the emotional piece. The intellectual pieces are smaller but add up. Being a teacher taught me how to manage my time, how to manage other people's time, how to keep a group of people on target and how to impart information to an audience who'd rather be doing anything else. Teaching English and Creative Writing meant I spent a lot of time deconstructing and reconstructing my own ideas of how an audience experiences text (text can also mean visual storytelling) and how writers convey ideas through text. The transitive power of imagery and ideas hit home for me in a big way. For example, I taught Jonathan Livingston Seagull to my 8th graders. One day toward the end of the school year, I was having an argument with one of the other teachers in my department as to whether or not we should buy a class set and include it in the curriculum. Her position — and she is a GREAT teacher, by the way — was that the book was too complex for the kids to really access it. As we were talking, one of my kids passed the room so I called him in. The exchange went something like this: ME: "Michael, what is happiness?" MICHAEL: "Happiness is perfect speed, Mr. Miller." ME: "And what is perfect speed?" MICHAEL: "Perfect speed is being there, Mr. Miller." ME: "Okay. Michael. If that's true... what is happiness?" MICHAEL: "Mr. Miller... Happiness is being there." As a teacher, I was insufferably pleased with myself. As a writer, I realized how the audience by its nature will connect what is presented to them. My job as a writer is to give them what they need to make the connections that matter. It's all experiential. You can't argue an audience into believing your story — they will read it, hear it, or see it and they will decide what it means. It's something I come back to a lot when talking to execs, producers or other writers — what's the audience's experience of this film? How does what they've seen inform what they're seeing now? Context is king. My work for the Navy had another interesting effect. In much the same way that the creative side of my brain helped me solve problems by identifying new approaches, building analytical muscles really helped me with revision and thinking through the impact of story or script changes. Sometimes the hardest part of addressing a note or breaking a story is mentally playing out the "what happens next" of it, or seeing how a change here has an unexpected impact (for good or ill) elsewhere. It also gave me an insight into production, in that I can do breakdowns in my head and look at making television as a business process. Early on in our ANDROMEDA careers, I actually used my business analysis experience to break down an episode we'd written and save it from the line producer's axe. The line producer was pissed, but fuck it. I had darlings to protect. Stentz: Unlike Ash, I didn't always know I wanted to be a screenwriter. I always wanted to do something creative with my life, but I can't draw, paint or sculpt, I'm nearly tone deaf (unlike my brother who's a brilliant musician), and I have two left feet. But I always seemed to be okay at writing, so that's what I focused my energies on and draw satisfaction from. I've always loved movies, and screenwriting attracted me because it forced me out of my comfort zone of writing prose stories that were long on atmosphere and internal monologues and short on story and dialogue. I took a course in it in college from the great novelist Ron Hansen (The Assassination of Jesse James) and then was lucky to be mentored through my early 20s by a great writer named Terrence McNally— not the playwright, but the guy who co-wrote Earth Girls Are Easy, which actually impressed me more! And just to pick up on what Ash said, I think it's invaluable to have actually been out in the world and lived a life for a bit before beginning one's professional writing career. Nearly all of the writers I admire had done other things with their lives that informed their writing, from Dashiell Hammett's time as a Pinkerton agent to Gene Roddenberry's experience as a pilot and an LAPD officer. In my case, I was trying to crack the screenwriting thing even while I was doing other things in my life, from being an Earth First! activist in the northern California redwood forests to bumming around the world trying to figure out my life to working as a journalist for a variety of publications, from The Economist and Entertainment Weekly to Meat and Poultry (don't laugh, trade journalism pays the bills for many a writer!). In particular, the experience in journalism of diving into a subject and intensively researching it until you become if not an expert at least someone who can hold an intelligent conversation with the expert carried over into screenwriting. So did getting out in the world and talking to people from all walks of life and getting a feel for their voices, the cadences of their dialogue. I'm by nature a very shy person, so journalism really forced me to come out of my shell and engage with the world in a way that provided fuel for my creative engine. I've always been curious about the "writing partner" thing. How do you decide on a long-term collaboration like that? Were you just assigned to work on "D Minus Zero" together, or did you decide to work together on it? Miller: You decide to collaborate as partners in the short-term. The long-term happens through success. By that I don't mean (necessarily) career or financial success, but creative success. My experience with Zack has been great and rewarding since the first Voyager pitch we put together. That keeps the partnership alive. Stentz: We met on the Internet — Usenet! — back in the 1990s, arguing about Star Trek during the great Deep Space Nine/Babylon Five wars of the mid-90s. (For the record, we're both Niners through and through) We started an email correspondence, discovered we were both aspiring screenwriters, D&D players, and all around nerds, and decided to give the collaboration thing a whirl. We wrote two and a half feature screenplays together and pitched Star Trek: Voyager three or four times before ever meeting in person or even seeing a photograph of each other. Only when Robert offered us a job on Andromeda and Ash flew out and lived in our guest room for a month while his wife moved them out from Virginia did we spend any time together in the same room. Miller: "D Minus Zero" was a story we pitched together. In fact, we originally pitched seven stories to Robert. He essentially bought five in the room, and assigned us that one. Over the course of the show, we got to write everything we pitched to him in our very first session. How do you formalize the "writing partner" relationship? How does it work in practice? Miller: In a technical sense, it's formalized by contract every time we accept a new gig. Both of our names are on the same piece of paper. The partnership itself isn't formalized other than the rules we set down for ourselves very early on. There are two: first, the story is boss. Period. That's the master we serve. Second, nothing is precious. One writer proposes, the other disposes. Those rules have worked for a decade now and over time have helped us become better writers and better collaborators. What's it like in a TV writer's room? How was the Andromeda writers room different from Fringe or T:SCC? What did you learn from working with an experienced hand like Robert Hewitt Wolfe? How did you both get to be on board Andromeda from so early on in the series? Miller: We've worked on four shows, for five different showrunners or showrunner teams. In order, Robert Wolfe, Bob Engels, Ira Behr (The Twilight Zone), Josh Friedman and John Wirth, and Jeff Pinkner and Joel Wyman. Each of those rooms has been different. Robert had an enormous influence on us as writers in general and as television writer/producers. I'd say he probably had the biggest influence overall. To some degree, he cheated because we walked onto that show with an encyclopedic knowledge of everything he'd ever written, broken down such that we knew a priori how he understood this strange thing we call "story". As writers, Robert really shaped our sense of structure. That's probably his great strength — he understands story structure as well or better than any writer I've ever met. It was really the perfect first job for us in that sense. Robert also ran a very egalitarian room, which is not always the case but should be. We were staff writers with no credits under our belts, but Robert treated us no differently than he treated the "senior" writer/producers on that show. We were given a real voice on the show, and a real place at the table. He fought up and protected down. He didn't hide us from Tribune, he put us out there. He invited our opinions on dailies and cuts. He was generous to a fault, and In his mind, ANDROMEDA was our film school. Bob Engels (who came from SEAQUEST DSV and TWIN PEAKS) was a totally different cat. Totally different management style. When we met Bob, we were two seasons in and we knew that show better than anyone alive. We'd written something on the order of 12-14 episodes depending on how you were keeping score. That was nearly a third of the episodes. He didn't run the same kind of room as Robert, but in retrospect it was really effective too. We learned a lot of great shit from Bob. For example, "the love bomb" is when you deluge your execs with paper — story ideas, treatments, drafts, etc. So much they can't keep up. He also taught us the best, most passive-aggressive showrunner trick in the world, which is to address a note in one draft and slowly change it back to the way you like it as you get toward actual production. Bob used to say, "Do you hate it yet?" and when the answer was "yes", you knew you were done addressing notes and it was time to push back. He also liked to have happy hour on Fridays, so that kind of ruled. Ira ran his room very similarly to Robert, which is to be expected given that Robert was Ira's writing partner on DS9 and cut his teeth as a writer/producer in that room. That said, the TWILIGHT ZONE room often had to run itself because production on that show was insane. Four days of prep, four days to shoot, a different show every eight days. The discipline Robert taught us early on was very useful there. The T:SCC experience was different and amazing. It was another instance where we happened on to a show at exactly the right moment in our lives and careers. Josh Friedman had never run a show before, or worked on a staff. He had no clue how it worked. But he knows writers, and he respects writers. He would only hire writers he believed had a real voice, which is an incredibly egoless thing for him to do. It speaks to his confidence as a creator, and also probably his secret agenda just to have people to shoot the shit with all day. If we learned structure from Robert, Josh really taught us the power of film. On ANDROMEDA, we compressed as much plot as we could into the smallest space available; Josh was Mr. Low Incident. I suddenly realized how much could be conveyed in absolute silence, by the right actor or the right image. I learned to love that silence and the stillness that informed that show, like standing in a breeze on a summer's day with your eyes closed and your arms out. That's what writing T:SCC was like. The actual breaking of story involved lots of dust-ups with writers I adore, and copious amounts of sushi and cheese plates. But the writing of it? The experience of it? Like being a child in the best possible way. For his part, John Wirth took everyone to school on how to keep the train moving. The man was asked to herd cats, and he did. It was an incredible managerial feat. He was also generous in the way Robert was generous, both personally and professionally. When you screwed up, he let you know and he gave you room to fix it. When you did well, he let you know. When we got the THOR gig during the back half of 2nd season, no one was more supportive than JW (which is what everyone calls him). He's just been enormously supportive of us, period. I'd run through a brick wall for that man - any writer who's worked with him who tells you different is, by definition, a fucking idiot. JW turns his writers into the best writers they can be as long as they let him. As for FRINGE, it was yet another completely different experience. It was the first show we worked on where the entire staff didn't break story together. Largely, we worked out our episodes in detail on our own — once we knew what our marching orders were — then we went through it very methodically with Jeff and Joel. Sometimes, we were called in to help them break their episodes or break story with staff writers and freelancers. We did a lot of work on that show, everyone did. But there was no real room — you just helped everywhere you could help, whenever you could help. We learned a lot from those guys, too. Jeff has an amazing way of breaking down a scene or a sequence into a core idea and asking how everything within it serves that idea. Joel has this wonderful, childlike ability to bring out the wonder in the mundane. We loved both of them. They're a great team. Stentz: An interesting thing about writers' rooms is that room cultures vary greatly and tend to be passed down from show to show. The Andromeda room was one that Robert had adapted from his work with Ira Behr, which in turn was influenced by the late, great Michael Piller on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Josh Friedman and John Wirth had their own styles that they fused together, but it in turn was influenced by a lot of the lessons John had learned working with Carlton Cuse on Brisco County Jr. and Nash Bridges. And Jeff Pinkner and Joel Wyman had a room running style was uniquely their own yet drew elements from the J.J. Abrams method Jeff was exposed on Alias and Felicity. So we feel like the creative grandchildren of these great writers, some of whom we've never even met. How did you make the jump from working on Andromeda to scripting Agent Cody Banks? If you were sitting on someone's couch while they were watching Agent Cody Banks, what would you be telling them to watch out for? What did you learn about screenwriting from that experience? Miller: We were good friends with one of the producers of the film, Rob Burnett. He had read a spec feature of ours that he loved (it's called NIGHT, a pseudo-post apocalyptic vampire story). He thought we were the guys to rewrite Jeff Jurgensen's original screenplay based on our writing. Plus he knew we had some TV under our belt and could turn the script around quickly. The big thing we learned from that experience was just how quickly we could turn a script around. It was 9 days from start to finish, all to accommodate Frankie Muniz's available window. We knew it was possible — that kind of schedule isn't unheard of in television on a page-by-page basis. Television is the great teacher of screenwriters in that it grants you focus and discipline, if you're so inclined to accept either. But people were pretty blown away by just how fast we gave them a page-one rewrite. The movie was greenlit off of that draft. The other thing we learned is that Hollywood runs on fear. The start of production was nine weeks after MGM bought the script. In the feature world, that's a terrifying schedule. The studio probably kept us aboard for no other reason than we were always the guys in the room saying "we'll be fine. This can be accomplished." We were saying that from experience. In TV, nine weeks is a lifetime. Watch for the scene where Angie Harmon tells Cody to "go home. Be a kid." That was the heart of the movie for us when we wrote it — the moment of epiphany that comes when you're a boy, when you realize you are not yet a man. The moment you understand the difference. To us, that was the moment Cody was ready to take the next step and become an adult. Our original draft was tonally much more like that scene than anything else in the final film. It was still a fun, James Bond meets teenage rom/com mash-up, but it had a lot more on its mind. With T:SCC, you were part of helping to expand a beloved universe that people were already really familiar with, adding a lot of elements that opened up the familiar mythos, including Derek Reese and John Henry, without leaving behind the familiar Skynet/killer robots from the future storyline. How does an experience like that prepare you to tackle huge franchises like the X-Men and Thor? Miller: T:SCC helped us get our heads around the idea that no matter how large the canvas, you're writing about the characters first. We like to think of ourselves as character-focused regardless, but there is a temptation to go crazy with plot when you're playing with these massive, sprawling properties. If T:SCC proved anything, it's that small, real character moves take on epic sweep when set in the proper context. It's the most dramatically satisfying experience, even if it doesn't always please the mythology-porn and action-porn fetishists — and bear in mind, we probably wrote the most action-porn and mythology-porn heavy episodes. Were there storylines or ideas that you really wanted to do in T:SCC that were too way-out, or that you didn't get to do because the show was cancelled? Stentz: We had a whole list of stories on the board in the TSCC room of stories to do in seasons three and four, from the serious to the facetious to the inexplicable (I still am scratching my head over "Sarah helps a wedding cake.") The one I was always waving the flag for was labeled "Pope Brazen Head." I was obsessed with the legend of Pope Sylvester the Second and his magical talking metal head (seriously, look it up) and liked to imagine that it was a Terminator head that had been thrown back in time and spent 1000 years secretly influencing the course of western civilization. Josh was actually intrigued by the notion, but alas, the cancellation monster claimed us first. But really, when we got to do stories about Jazz Age Terminators and a Terminator on nuclear submarine, I feel that we really got to fly our freak flags on that show. Miller: We were blessed with the T:SCC experience in that we were granted the opportunity to tell all sorts of stories that we wanted to tell. If I had to name one thing we left on the table, it would be the story of John sending Kyle back to save Sarah, knowing he was sending his father to his death. That's obviously the core story of the franchise, but what interested us was John's POV. We got to some of the emotions we associate with that story a few times, but we never quite got to that beat. Probably with good reason. Josh would never sign off on something like that unless it was a perfect moment, in the vein of Sarah's meeting with Ellison in "Mr. Ferguson is Ill Today". He vigilantly guarded the show against indulgences, and that very easily could have been one. Other than that, there was a story we all wanted to do that eventually became the Ellison/John Henry story. That's all that needs to be said (because Josh would murder us if we said more) but there were a few, small moments from the original conception that we miss. On the whole, we landed on something much better. Josh also had an idea for a Cameron episode that would have been amazing. AMAZING. If you ask nicely and beg a little bit, I'm sure he will absolutely refuse to talk about it. Oh, and there was that other thing. Josh won't speak of that either. Are we ever going to see the Feynman Chronicles movie? Can you explain to us how Richard Feynman is basically the perfect Disney hero? Stentz: My not-so-secret plot is to write enough giant Hollywood summer movies that we get enough clout to revisit The Feynman Chronicles and get it made. I deeply love that script and think that in the right hands, audiences could really respond to this offbeat love letter to one of the 20th Century's great minds disguised as a Spielbergian adventure romp. Miller: You never want to say "never," because you always hear about scripts that kick around for years before becoming films, but the passage of time makes it seem increasingly and unfortunately unlikely. We haven't lost hope, but we've decided to let the universe happily surprise us on its own schedule. That story began life as something of a bar bet. We were both reacting against a film portrayal of Feynman that took this vital, vibrant, volatile personality and turned him inward toward melancholy. I think it was Zack who said "That guy needs to be an action hero!". It was just one of those things you say. But then we looked at each other and said... holy shit. We married it to another idea, wrote the script thinking it would get us some really great meetings, and then Disney bought it pre-emptively. Really, it worked because we let Feynman be Feynman and we never tried to turn him into something he was not. Zack's exclamation to the contrary, we didn't paint him as Indiana Jones. He was just a young man in over his head — a young man who happened to be one of the smartest people who ever lived. We teamed him up with Antoine St. Exupery, who we also allowed to be himself. Saint-Ex was the soul to Feynman's mind (though we should point out for the record that Saint-Ex wasn't some cheese eating, poetry writing wimp — he was a bad ass). The action was largely carried by a female British spy character we created. The three of them together were our perfect Disney action hero. Throw in a mystery in the Congo, a giant zeppelin, Nazis, the Red Army and Werner Von Braun and what you've got is UNTAPPED BOX OFFICE GOLD. Not to mention cameos by Einstein, Oppenheimer and John Wheeler. Also, monkeys. That's just gravy. The Walter Bishop quartet During your time on Fringe, you wrote a few of the most important "arc" episodes where the mythology of the cross-universe war was developed. How much freedom did you have to get crazy with storylines like Walter's missing brain piece and his experiments on kids? Also, your episodes seemed to hint at the idea that Walter with an intact brain really was a scary psychopath — was that something you really wanted to push? Miller: Any television show is a collaborative effort. We were given a tremendous amount of leeway in working through those stories, but you always have to bring it back to the show and remember that it belongs to the showrunners. You can't just go off half-cocked and invent mythology willy-nilly. For our part, we were very interested in the person Walter used to be versus the person we know him to be. We felt (and still feel) the strongest version of Walter is the monster whose madness made him a man. We pushed hard on that front, sometimes very hard. I think we largely won out because that idea tracked with how others generally saw him. That said, it's very easy for a writer to become too sympathetic to his or her characters. You start backing away from the things that make them difficult, because you just like them too damn much. Looking at him or her objectively and allowing the character to be all things — good and bad, without judgment — can be very hard. You have to be a cold son of a bitch sometimes, and not everyone can do that. The good news is your characters will often assert themselves, and remind you who they really are. In "Grey Matters" there's a moment where pre-madness Walter wakes up in the chair — that beat emerged on the page. We had no idea it was going to be in the script until we were writing the scene. As a writer, you live for that. On the other side of the coin, Walter's breakdown in "Northwest Passage" also came largely out of nowhere. It was a thought experiment that took on a life of its own. At the time we were on the show, we really thought we were writing a bunch of Olivia episodes ("Northwest Passage" notwithstanding). In retrospect, we really wrote a four-part story about Walter, his relationship to children, and the struggle between Walter-who-was and Walter-who-is. If you look at it that way, his decision at the end of "Northwest Passage" becomes the moment where he reconciles those things. He doesn't resolve them, but he comes to grips with them. Once again in retrospect, I think that's what the supermarket breakdown was really about. This happens — you think a scene is about one thing when you're in the middle of it, and realize it's something else entirely when you look back. Characters can be sneaky motherfuckers that way. Stentz: I'm not sure how we ended up writing so many of season two's mythology episodes, but it was deeply gratifying to get to dig into the character of Walter Bishop, one of the greatest characters in television history, played by one of our greatest living actors. I think we were filling in a lot of what had already been implied about Walter and his past, but I was always fascinated by the idea that this sad, sweet, broken man had once been this terrifying, Mengele-like figure. It reminded me a little of Ricky Lee Rector, the convict in Arkansas who had murdered a cop and then tried to kill himself with the same gun. He effectively lobotomized himself, to the extent that there was a debate over his execution— was he functionally the same human being who had done those awful things? And of course, the Walter-Peter relationship was endlessly fascinating and fun to write for. Whenever I wrote scenes for them, I'd always listen to the Kate Bush song "Cloudbusting" because the story of Wilhelm and Peter Reich in the song reminded me so much of Walter and Peter Bishop...a relationship that Bob Orci later told me actually did play into the creation of those two characters. Do you miss the relatively instant gratification of writing for television, and the give-and-take in a writers' room? Miller: Absolutely on both counts. Aside from the pleasure of watching great actors say your words, and the feeling of control you have over your material as a writer on a TV show, watching performances and seeing cuts makes you better at your craft. Constantly breaking stories or building outlines or writing scripts makes you better. Dealing with studio and network notes, especially the difficult or frustrating ones, makes you better. If you let it, these experiences give you tools that you can apply to the feature world. Honestly, television writers have it all over feature writers. Most feature writers churn out one, maybe two scripts a year. They go through the process with a studio in a production setting even less than that on average. On television, it's another day at the office. We also miss the room. It amuses me sometimes to read what people on the internet think about the fact that some shows have many writers, and how they buy into this silly idea of an auteur. There are no auteurs. There are only great leaders with vision who gather talented people and let them do their jobs. When you're a part of that, it's the best thing in the world. Those other talented people are generally fun to be with, they challenge you, they teach you and they improve you. Even Shakespeare had a fucking room. Stentz: Oh, God yes. Spending the day in a room with smart people creating television is heaven itself, and we're actively looking to get back into television and do that again soon, hopefully with shows of our own. Writing Thor and X-Men: First Class How did you manage to score the gigs writing for both Thor and X-Men right after leaving Fringe? Did both gigs come around the same time, or is it just a weird fluke that both films are coming out the same summer? Miller: It's a fluke. We wrote THOR in the winter of 2008-2009 while we were on T:SCC. We were offered X-MEN after we left Fringe, but in part because we already had a different script assignment from Fox. We left Fringe to pursue features, which seems to have worked out okay. Thor is one of those characters that a lot of comics writers don't seem to know what to do with, ever since the awesome Walt Simonson run. How do you make this larger-than-life but also kind of silly character cool? How do you resist the temptation to make Thor "relevant" or emo? Were there any particular runs on Thor that you guys found helpful in getting a handle on the character? Miller: Walt Simonson was a huge influence. So was Mark Millar, in terms of how Thor was presented in action in the Ultimates 1 and 2. I'm a huge fan of Thor, which I think is key. I believe in his emotional reality, so it's not hard to translate that into a script. That's the key with any of these movies — find the emotional reality and dramatize it. That gives your characters weight and your stories value. It's as true for Thor as it is for Derek Reese. Stentz: What did they used to say in the 80s? "Let Reagan be Reagan?" We just tried to let Thor be Thor, because there's a really strong, defined core of that character that comes through loud and clear across the decades, whether it's in the space opera of Simonson, the epic hero of the Fraction one shots, or the more grounded version in the JMS run. And honestly, we also went straight back to the source when thinking about and writing Thor— the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlson and various Norse myths, which are so vivid and memorable themselves. Those Norse storytellers knew what they were doing when they paired a strong man and a clever man as friends, brothers, and rivals. The X-Men are often used as a metaphor for the Civil Rights movement, but X-Men: First Class actually takes place during the era of MLK. Given that this is a much more repressive culture, where difference of all sorts is less tolerated, how does that change the way you think about the mutant struggle for acceptance? Miller: That sort of thing certainly runs through your mind, but you can't make the movie about that. You can't even make the movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's layered into subtext - although oddly in this case, I think it's more explicit with respect to attitudes toward women. Even that is very small. Stentz: I think the MLK-Malcolm X dichotomy has always been in the Singer X-Men films...he even has Magneto say "By any means necessary" at one point! But actually setting an X-Men film during the Civil Rights Era, which coincided with this wonderful, crazy period of technological optimism and possibility, opened up the storytelling in a lot of ways. Partway through the process, we realized that what we were writing in many ways had the vibe of a 1960s Connery Bond film, which was something Matthew Vaughn really responded to in the material and ran with. He just did a wonderful job of transplanting the X-Men into a whole jet age, swingin' London, Civil Rights, JFK New Frontier era. Also, should we be calling that plane the Blackbird, or just the SR-71? Miller: Call it whatever you prefer. In the script, the first X-jet is actually a modified XB-70. That appears to have changed on its way to the stage, although never in the pages. Stentz: Yes, in our drafts, the original X-Jet was a prototype of the XB-70 Valkyrie, my favorite Cold War superjet of all time. It was changed to an SR-71 fairly late in the game, but I admit it would have been nice to see that crazy Mach 3 stainless steel bomber on the big screen. Finally, what's going on with Damn Nation? You mentioned you were working on it the last time we interviewed you guys. Inside Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class with Marvel's Go-To Screenwriters Zack Stentz and Ashley Edward Miller made their genre bones in TV, as writer-producers on… Miller: No idea what's happening with Damn Nation right now. Dark Horse has it, they love it. We'll see. Stentz: We need to ask Keith Goldberg at Dark Horse about that! Even with the number of zombie/vampire/post apocalyptic features int he landscape, we feel like Damn Nation's combination of horror/men on a mission action/political thriller is pretty unique, and we'd love to see it made. And is there anything else in the pipeline you can tell us about? Miller: There is a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline. Unfortunately, we seem to specialize in taking on projects that for one reason or another have to remain top secret. Sometimes it's obvious why these things are close hold, other times it seems unnecessary. But that's the job. We think of ourselves as the Green Berets of screenwriting - we get dropped into dangerous, highly classified situations, expected to win or die fighting. We're also very close to finishing a young adult novel that is nothing like anything you've seen from us before. It's based on a spec pilot we wrote a few years ago (which caught the attention of Josh Friedman and got us our jobs on T:SCC) but it's in no way a genre piece. Not even a little bit. It's very close to our hearts. Stentz: As Ash said, we're either actively writing or developing a number of projects we can't get into in detail, though we're thrilled that we suddenly seem to be in business with people we've long admired, from legendary superproducer Walter Parkes to genius director and all around nice guy Peyton Reed and many others who would murder us in our sleep if we revealed their names here. Diogenes-the-Cynic I'm guessing the picture is Havoc?	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1908
__label__wiki	0.813149	0.813149	#Indonesia's state banks seek to spark sharia sector via mergers Indonesia's three state-owned banks will merge their sharia banking units to create one of the country's biggest lenders. Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Bank Mandiri and Bank Negara Indonesia have signed a conditional merger agreement for their Islamic banking units. The new bank will have combined assets of 207 trillion rupiah ($14 billion), making it the eighth-largest lender by assets in the country. The merger is slated to complete next year and is still subject to approval from regulators and shareholders. Indonesia is keen to position the country as the hub of the region's Islamic economy. The country's five-year master plan aims to increase the market share of Islamic financing in the country to 20% by 2024. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Finance/Indonesia-s-state-banks-seek-to... Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) US startup PayJoy unlocks smartphone loans for Asia's unbanked American startup PayJoy makes it easier for people without a bank account or credit profile to purchase a smartphone on installment. The phones and loans are provided by third parties. What PayJoy provides is proprietary software that locks the phone if payments are not made on time, making the device unusable. Once the missed installments are paid, the phone is unlocked and can be used as normal. According to PayJoy, its technology can do more than just put smartphones in users' hands. Customers' payment histories are reported back to local credit bureaus, which serves to build up credit profiles. PayJoy aims to expand in emerging markets such as Asia, particularly in India and Indonesia. In most markets, PayJoy partners up with local mobile makers, distributors and lending institutions. The company then takes a cut from every loan originated using its technology, a business model that lowers costs as well as risks for PayJoy. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Startups/US-startup-PayJoy-unlocks-smar... PayJoy BTMU provides $353m Islamic #loan to Malaysian Saudi Telecom unit The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ has provided an Islamic syndicated loan to the Malaysian affiliate of Saudi Telecom. The ringgit-based loan amount is about 41.7 billion yen ($353 million). BTMU is the first Japanese bank to act as an agent bank for a syndicated loan in Malaysia. The loan will be provided with HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank of the U.K. Japanese banks in Malaysia mostly provide loans to Japanese companies operating in the country. Now, BTMU aims to expand operations in the country through Islamic finance. BTMU has extended foreign-currency Islamic loans in Malaysia since 2008 and ringgit-based Islamic loans since 2014. The ratio of Islamic finance to total loans in Malaysia rose to about 30% at the end of 2017, from 17% at the end of 2009. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/BTMU-provides-353m-Islamic-lo... Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Saudi Telecom Company (STC) Malaysian Islamic banking to heat up as smaller lenders #merge Malaysia Building Society (MBSB) is a step closer to becoming a full-fledged Islamic bank after the proposed acquisition of Asian Finance Bank (AFB). If the merger takes place, the tie-up between non-bank MBSB and AFB would create the country's second largest Islamic bank. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Malaysian-Islamic-banking-to-heat... Asian Finance Bank (AFB) Malaysia Building Society (MBSB) Business schools teach Islamic finance, and all are welcome The world's growing Muslim population opens up near limitless potential for Islamic finance. However, the pool of talent is very limited at the moment. The International Center for Education in Islamic Finance (INCEIF) welcomes students from all over the world. Since its opening in 2006, half of the 1,300-plus graduates have been Malaysians, but the other half have been from over 70 countries. The list includes predominantly Muslim nations, like Indonesia, Pakistan and Somalia, but one does not have to be Muslim to enroll. Malaysian authorities are encouraging other educational endeavors, too. The Islamic Banking and Finance Institute Malaysia will launch two new programs offering professional certifications in Islamic finance. The two certifications, chartered Islamic banker and chartered takaful practitioner, are the equivalent of conventional financial qualifications. https://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20171102/Special-Report/Business-school... International Center for Education in Islamic Finance (INCEIF) Asia ripe for Islamic finance as #fintech comes to the fore According to Zahid ur Rehman Khokher, secretary-general of the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), the growth potential of Islamic finance in the Asian market is much bigger than might be expected. He emphasized the developing role of fintech within the sector and the IFSB's role in setting standards. He noted the importance of Islamic microfinance in addressing issues of financial inclusion and improving participation in the financial sector. With the range of new services that are emerging, Zahid feels that capacity building is the biggest challenge at the moment. He feels there is a need for developing human resources and appropriate expertise within central banks, Shariah boards, as well as in commercial financial institutions. https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Asia-ripe-for-Islamic-f... Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) Zahid ur Rehman Khokher Abu Dhabi builds a '#fintech bridge' to Asia Abu Dhabi is taking ambitious steps to tap into financial technology. The Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) signed a cooperation deal with the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The goal of the arrangement is to spur financial entrepreneurship through mutual exchanges of fintech know-how. Last November the ADGM launched the FinTech Regulatory Laboratory, or RegLab, to provide a platform for foreign players to innovate. So far five companies have been selected to participate. Richard Teng, CEO of the emirate's Financial Services Regulatory Authority, said there was a clear trend toward cultivating sectors besides oil and the cooperation with Singapore is designed to make fintech the driving force of economic diversification. In his view, Asian financial companies have a big market in the Middle East to develop and explore business in wealth management, remittances and other fields. http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Abu-Dhabi-builds-a-finte... Richard Teng Mizuho opens $300m Islamic #credit facility to Jeddah group Mizuho Bank #Malaysia opened a $300 million credit facility to the Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD). The two-year deal will finance projects in the member countries of ICD. According to ICD Chief Executive Khaled Al Aboodi, the $300 million accounts for 24% of funding programs earmarked by ICD in 2017. He added that funds could be disbursed for hospitals in Gambia, manufacturing facilities in Tajikistan or trade finance in Maldives. For Mizuho Bank Malaysia, the deal marks its first cross-border bilateral Islamic facility based on the concept of Murabahah. The bank's deputy CEO, Shinichi Nishiyama, said lending to ICD will expose Mizuho Bank Malaysia indirectly to the markets in Islamic countries and they are looking forward to a long-term partnership with ICD. http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Mizuho-opens-300m-Islamic-cred... Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD) Mizuho Bank Malaysia Khaled Al Aboodi Shinichi Nishiyama Massive gold-backed #ETF certified as sharia compliant US-based State Street Global Advisors announced that a huge exchange-traded fund for investment in gold has been certified as being sharia compliant. The question of whether ETFs themselves comply with Islamic law has not been addressed. The fund, called SPDR Gold Shares, is one of the world's largest ETFs, having a net asset balance of more than $30 billion. Managed and marketed by State Street Global, it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The World Gold Council paved the way for certification by asking the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions to determine criteria for gold trading. The AAOIFI announced standards for gold trading in December 2016. Joseph Cavatoni, who is in charge of ETFs at the World Gold Council, said the certification is an important step toward meeting demand for gold in the Islamic financial market. http://asia.nikkei.com/Markets/Commodities/Massive-gold-backed-ETF-certi... Joseph Cavatoni #Indonesia looks to Islamic schools to spur Sharia banking In an effort to boost the industry, Bank Indonesia has decided to work with Islamic boarding schools known as pesantren. Anwar Basori, Bank Indonesia's head of Islamic Finance and Economy, said there is a lot of potential in the 27,000 pesantren, which have about 3.6 million students. The central bank said it is finalizing a roadmap for the program under which it will work with the Religious Affairs Ministry to help the business units of pesantren to become financially independent. The schools operate in various business areas, including mini-markets and cattle farms, and provide extracurricular entrepreneurship and Islamic finance education to students. Anwar said that the roadmap would be implemented in early 2017, starting with a pilot project. http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Indonesia-looks-... Anwar Basori Islamic finance looks for a second wind At a conference on Islamic finance in Singapore many experts warned that the industry depends too heavily on oil and gas for revenue. According to expert Rushdi Siddiqui the industry saw a 43% drop in sukuk issuance and he argued for the need to 'delink' Islamic finance from oil and gas. Other participants noted that the industry's growth is slowed by the 'perception price' that comes with political volatility in the Middle East and Malaysia. http://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20160602-THE-BUSINESS-of-HALAL/On-the-Co... Rushdi Siddiqui Sharif helps Sharia banking to spread Islamic banking is growing fast in predominantly Muslim Pakistan, thanks to the growing popularity of its Sharia compliant structure and a helping hand from the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. According to the State Bank of Pakistan most of Pakistan's conventional banks have now opened Sharia-compliant branches and many are working on full conversion to Islamic banking, which is growing at an annual rate double that of the country's Western-style banking sector. Pakistan's 250 million people are served by 22 local and foreign banks, five of which are Islamic. With a few exceptions almost all local and foreign conventional banks also offer Islamic financing services. http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Trends/Sharif-helps-Sharia-banking-to-sp... State Bank of Pakistan Indonesia Islamic finance miniscule, but growing rapidly: study A report launched by Thomson Reuters on Friday -- called "Indonesia Islamic Finance: Prospects for Exponential Growth" -- says the country's shariah finance industry recorded 559 trillion rupiah ($42.3 billion) in assets as of 2014, merely 3% of the country's financial industry assets overall. However, while the total financial sector's assets grew by 42% during the 2010-2014 period, assets for shariah finance surged by 139%. Boosted by government infrastructure spending and road maps for development of shariah finance, Indonesia's Islamic finance sector is expected to record double growth over the next five years. http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Indonesia-Islamic-financ...	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1909
__label__cc	0.726143	0.273857	Ain’t Dividing Jerusalem! Ben PackerJune 2, 2016 Seemingly in connection with the upcoming 49th anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967, Israeli Channel 10 has put out a program “investigating” the current possibility of redividing and abandoning Jerusalem. This is despite the fact that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Jews around the world view the reunification of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty as a miraculous event. (However, not as “miraculous” as the fact that Channel 10 still exists regardless of the fact that no one watches it.) Here is a link to their program: http://10tv.nana10.co.il/Article/?ArticleID=1190486 I thought it would be helpful to go through some of the various inaccuracies and faults in the piece and then provide a more accurate (albeit brief) description of the current situation. In the piece, 2 leftist reporters travel to a few mixed neighborhoods in Jerusalem – Maale Zeitim/Ras al-Amud, Kfar Teimanim/Ir Dovid/Silwan and the Old City. They speak with both Jews and Muslims along the way to understand the “real situation”. Cost of Security: One of the issues that seems to really bother the “reporters” is the cost of security for the Jews living in the mixed neighborhoods. First of all, I’m not sure we put a price limit on security – it’s pretty important. However, if one would want to, it’s not the simplest of sciences. For example, ,leftists complained about the supposed high cost of securing the Gaza Strip and its Jewish residents before the “disengagement”. However, this pales in comparison to the cost of having the airport for the entire country closed for days and for the Iron Dome batteries that are now necessary as a result of that disastrous policy. Would these “security experts” prefer that the residents defended themselves? I think its safe to say that they would be at least slightly more aggressive and costly than the current system. Legal Extortion Claim: While in Ir Dovid, the “investigators” suggested that if Jews are unable to purchase specific houses from arabs, they seek legal action to have the arabs evicted. This is preposterous. Does anyone really believe that Jewish activists simply file frivolous legal cases against random Arabs in an attempt to steal their legally owned houses? It only gets more and more absurd! Niso Shacham vs. Arieh King: Next, after taking shots at all of the Jewish residents of the area, they decide to take aim at one particular resident – Arieh King. One doesn’t have to agree with all of King’s ideas, but he is a member of City Council, the head of a non-profit organization and not accused of any crimes. This is in stark contrast to the infamous and disgraced Niso Shacham, who is brought in to malign Mr. King. Shockingly (even to me), nothing is mentioned of Shacham’s dishonorable removal from the police force for a whole slew of crimes, such as sexual harassment, fraud and indecent acts. This guy is a pariah, not a source of credible information. This is beyond pathetic! Arab “Testimony”: Of course its only reasonable to hear from the arab residents. So we get to hear from Mr. Rajabi in Kfar Teimanim/Silwan. Its remarkable that Mr. Rajabi finds time to breathe in between all the lies and nonsense he is spouting. He owns everything and there is no terror. Wow. This is not even questioned by our seasoned reporters. They could have easily researched the number of attacks on Jews in Silwan – in the thousands – before speaking to this known liar and instigator. They even complain about the lack of cooperation they receive from the Jewish residents to provide proof of the attacks – while standing in front of a door covered in paint and ash from numerous attacks! Nobody is this stupid. The agenda is clear. Borders: When examining the previous, and what they hope is the future border dividing Jerusalem, there is no mention of previously Jewish neighborhoods, like Shimon HaTzadik/Nachalat Shimon and Nissan Bek, that existed and again exist on the “wrong side of the border”. So they bring in an “expert” – Danny Tirza – the famed planner of the “Separation Fence/Wall that is “protecting” us from terror. Of course he is unable to conclude that his life work is a total waste of time and inconsequential and therefore posits that Jerusalem can still be redivided, despite the efforts of those trying to prevent that. However, he does say one important thing: If Jews build in “Abu Dis”/ Kidmat Tzion, then the whole scheme will have been scuttled. I can’t think of a better pitch to be used by those trying to attain support for this project. G-d willing, success is right around the corner! The major failure of the program is the lack of focus on MOMENTUM. Where is the momentum? Clearly, the momentum is on the side of those strengthening the Jewish Presence in all of Jerusalem. The successes of Ateret Cohanim, Ir Dovid/ELAD, Arieh King and others in just the past few years is staggering. And there is no reason to believe that the pace will do anything but increase. As lawsuits conclude – in our favor! – and as more and more Arabs see the financial incentive to sell (like just a few weeks ago in the “Muslim Quarter”), the number of Jews living in these areas will increase dramatically. Another glaring example that will prove the point (but of course was was ignored in the leftist propaganda news report), is Kfar Teimanim. The number of Jewish residences has more than doubled in the last 2 years and will likely double again in the next year or so. Additionally, the historical Yemenite Great Synagogue has been reclaimed and is in the process of full renovation. The number of new Jewish residents in Ir Dovid in the past few years has also skyrocketed. The Shepherd Hotel Project, next to Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood, is nearing completion. Additional building projects are awaiting approval in Shimon HaTzadik, Beit Hanina, Silwan, the Old City, and of course, Kidmat Tzion. The leftist dream of a divided Jerusalem is turning into a nightmare very quickly. They are just too asleep to realize. “Jerusalem, if I forget you…” Yom Yerushalayim Sameach! Old City, Jerusalem Jerusalem Shimon HaTzadik Yemenite Village Previous Post The IDF and Israel's Commandment to Liberate the Land Next Post A Pakistani Muslim's Path to Zionism: An Interview With Noor Dahri Originally from Petersburg, Virginia, Ben Packer moved to Israel in 1999, where he served in the IDF's Givati Brigade in the Gaza Strip. Ben served as a Rabbi on campus at Univ. of North Carolina and at Duke Univ. Ben now serves as Director of the Jerusalem Heritage House (www.heritagehouse.org.il) and Co-Director of Young Jewish Conservatives (www.youngjewishconservatives.org). He lives in the Old City of Jerusalem with his wife and 6 children. Jewish Home Receives Direct Rocket Hit, IDF to Increase Intensity Against Hamas With a missile directly hitting a house in Sderot over Shabbat, injuring the family… Orit ben Tzvi July 15, 2018 Blogs Igbo “Nigeria the Jericho, Nnamdi the Joshua .” Can one Leader over one tribe the IGBOS , (Biafrans ) referred to as… Candy Stallworth January 24, 2018 More From: Blogs Blogs Thought Trump’s Jerusalem Declaration has Moved an Entire Nation Trump , The Seed that will help transition a whole Nation.” Trump , The… Blogs Frontlines Which is worse – UNESCO or Bibi? The Israeli Government is all up in arms over the decision by UNESCO today… Ben Packer July 7, 2017 Jewish Sovereignty Over the Land of Israel, Zionism and Our Indigeneity This week’s Torah portion is the Parsha of Mas’ei. “You shall possess the land… Yehuda HaKohen August 4, 2016 Originally from Petersburg, Virginia, Ben Packer moved to Israel in 1999, where he served in the IDF's Givati Brigade in the Gaza Strip. Ben served as a Rabbi on campus at Univ. of North Carolina and at Duke Univ. Ben now serves as Director of the Jerusalem Heritage House (www.heritagehouse.org.il) and Co-Director of Young Jewish Conservatives (www.youngjewishconservatives.org). He lives in the Old City of Jerusalem with his wife and 6 children.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1910
__label__cc	0.711452	0.288548	J.D. Grimes's Blog A second American revolution? Wrong Doctor Independence requires Reliance Pluto Looks Young \| J.D. Grimes's Blog on Will Pluto Surprise Us? ACSII Art (1) Funny Names (1) Minced Sayings (2) J.D.’s Nature Photography J.D.’s Dev Blog, Code Symphony J.D.’s Bible Teaching The Psalms Project Bible Conservative Boehner Why Mark Meadows Should Have Said No June 26, 2015 J.D. Grimes Leave a comment A few days ago, congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC) was fired as subcommittee chairman on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by the Republican “leadership” in retaliation for his opposition to Obamatrade. Yesterday, after a nationwide outcry, he had a meeting with the committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), and was reinstated. This is being hailed among conservatives as a victory over Boehner. But I disagree. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that congressman Meadows did the wrong thing. He shouldn’t have accepted the position back. He should have said no. And here is why. Reason 1: It’s Unseemly Accepting back the position looks bad for two reasons. The first is that it makes it look like Meadows might have been compromised. In Washington, anytime there is a backroom discussion between members of congress, there’s trouble. And when Chaffetz comes out and talks about how he and Meadows understand each other much better now, it makes one question whether Meadows was asked to make any concessions to get his position back. I should make it clear, I’m not saying that Meadows did make any concessions. In fact, he said that he will still never vote for Obamatrade. And although you can’t trust anyone in Washington, I don’t doubt him. My point is that it looks bad. It looks sleazy. It looks just like something that a politician would say, while doing something else. That surely isn’t the image the Meadows intended to give. Which is why he should have said no. Reason 2: It’s Inconsiderate Continuing in the same theme, it looks inconsiderate for Meadows to accept back his position. He isn’t the only one who has been punished for “voting his conscience.” There were others who were fired for opposing Obamatrade as well. What about them? Don’t they deserve their positions back, too? And let’s not forget, that this isn’t the first time that Boehner has retaliated. What about the others that he’s taken action against in the past? Why does Meadows get his position back, but they get crushed by the Washington Machine? Again, this shows why it is unseemly for Meadows to accept back his position. Shouldn’t he show solidarity with his fellow rebels? Certainly Meadows didn’t mean to be inconsiderate. Which is why he should have said no. Reason 3: It’s Being a Puppet By saying yes, Meadows has turned himself into a pawn, which can be fired and reinstated at will. He sacrificed his manhood, his independence, his value as an individual. He’s allowed himself to become a mere token, jostled around to apply or relieve political pressure on the establishment’s whim. By saying yes, Meadows was saying that it is OK to fire him for voting with the people. “You can always come back and reinstate me if you need to, and we’ll all be friends again.” Of course, that isn’t the message Meadows intended to send. Which is why he should have said no. Reason 4: It’s Becoming Beholden Further, by accepting his position back, Meadows has made himself beholden to Chaffetz and Boehner. They can now point to this as a down-payment on future political favors. And let’s face it, even if it is only subconsciously, one is bound to feel that way. It has the affect of forging a bit of a bond between Meadows and the leadership, at least psychologically. This feeling is likely to go beyond just Meadows himself, but could easily effect others on his side of the issue. Thus, by saying yes, Meadows may unintentionally be making it harder to rebel the next time. Which is why he should have said no. Reason 5: It’s a Truce This leads us to the biggest problem with saying “yes”: rather than wining ground, it only maintains the status quo. Boehner and the House Leadership were under intense political pressure for their misdeeds. People are fed up with their “leadership,” which is why so many of them called Washington to demand that Meadows be reinstated. Boehner could feel another rebellion coming. So he made a cheap political move: he reinstated Meadows in hopes that it would release the pressure of the American people breathing down his back, and things could return to normal. And return to “normal” they will. Boehner has already made that quite clear. There will be more punishments in the very near future. Some may already be on the way. Of course, Meadows had no intention of surrendering to Boehner. Which is why he should have said no. What Meadows Should Have Said When he was approached by Chaffetz to offer his position back, Meadows should have replied something like this: Representative Chaffetz, I’m sorry, but I can’t in good conscience accept the position back. You must remember that I’m not the only one to be “punished” for my opposition to Obamatrade, and that this isn’t the first time that Boehner has retaliated against conservatives. I can’t accept my position back as long others will continue to be punished. And as far as I can tell, that will continue to happen as long as Boehner is in power. Look, you and I both know that Boehner is only asking you to reinstate me because of the pressure from the American people. He hasn’t changed his tactics, nor will he. He’s just trying to maintain the status quo. But isn’t that what these people are really fed up with? The people who have been melting your phone lines don’t want to see you stop punishing conservatives. They don’t want to see the leadership start helping conservatives. Sir, they want to see the leadership start leading the conservative charge. That is what the leadership is supposed to do, after all. But Boehner has demonstrated repeatedly that he isn’t capable of conservative leadership. So, the only way to fix this problem and relieve the tension for good, is if Boehner steps down as Speaker. By repeatedly attacking the freshmen Representatives who have been sent here on a clear mission, he has demonstrated his unworthiness of that position. And by joining with him in that, you have shown yourself unworthy of chairing this committee. If you ask me, sir, the right thing for you to do isn’t to reinstate me. The right thing for you to do is to step down, and show Boehner the way. That’s the only thing that my constituents deserve, and I will accept nothing less. In conclusion, I’d like to make something very clear: I’m not attacking Mark Meadows. I’m not saying that he’s traitor, or worse, a RINO. I’m saying this: like many people in Congress, Meadows is willing to fight the leadership, but he doesn’t know how to beat them. And let’s be clear: this was a fight. But it wasn’t a victory. Neither side won, because nothing has changed. The status quo and Boehner’s power are preserved. This isn’t a win, it’s resistance. And I applaud Mark Meadows for resisting. I only wish that he’d gone beyond that, and done more than just resist. I wish he’d called their bluff. I wish he’d have said no. Then maybe we would have had more than resistance. Maybe we’d have won. BoehnerMark MeadowsObamatradeRINOs	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1911
__label__cc	0.725459	0.274541	Jon Pincus Gratitude and Empathy after the Trumpocalypse The first draft of this post started with some very pointed observations about the US in November 2016 and how it’s a little hard to focus on gratitude right now. It was kind of a downer, to be honest, which is not really the vibe any of us wants right now. So consider it all said. Here’s some useful links to “survival guides” and things you can do. Now on to the gratitude. Even in a difficult situation, focusing on gratitude is a good way to look at the positive things I have to be grateful for. Tonight, this will be a good topic to reflect on as I’m dancing and as I’m meditating. But gratitude isn’t the only thing I’ll be reflecting on. As Baratunde says ““The biggest problem in this world? Too much empathy,” said no one, ever.” So tonight will be a balance between gratitude and empathy. And why wait for tonight? Might as well get started now! Most of all I’m grateful for my family and friends. Family and friends always top my gratitude list, and this year I’m even more conscious of how thankful I am that we do our best to live our shared values, and support each other in difficult situations. And there’s also all the usual reasons, things I hope I never take for granted: the happiness you bring into my life, the good times we’ve had together, the great advice you give, the friendship and love we share, the way so many of you inspire me. Thanks to all of you … and extra special super double-and-triple thanks with a gold star to those of you who are in my “inner circle”. I think you’re swell :) Balancing my appreciation for all of that wonderfulness … there are so many heartbreaking stories of people having to deal with bigoted and hateful friends and family, or well-meaning friends and family who are willing to overlook bigotry and hatred, or even friends and family who try to be supportive but keep saying things “I wish you wouldn’t be like that” or “your life would be a lot easier and safer if you acted more like how people ‘should’ act”. My heart goes out to everybody in situations like that. I don’t have any great advice for you; there’s no one right answer about what to do. But I hope that each of you finds the strength to cut the ties that are harmful to you and endure the downsides of the ties you decide to keep — and that you find friends and family who appreciate and support you for who you are. Moving beyond my friends and family, there are a few other groups particularly in my mind, with equal measure of gratitude (for everything you do, for me and the for the world) and empathy (because I know how difficult it can be and how many unfair things you have to deal with). In no particular order: civil rights, civil liberties, racial justice, LGBTQ, feminist, womanist, social justice, and human rights advocates, organizers, and activists here and around the world — and in particular the women of color who are leading so many of these efforts. what I think of is the “diversity-in-tech” community: the people committed to an intersectional, inclusive approach to diversity in technology and society as a whole the Fortune Circle, and the broader Tarot community, especially for helping me learn about balance, surrender (in the positive sense!), and the power of archetypes and intuition Optyvists, and everybody working to co-create a positive, transformational, and sustainable future tapestry makers, for everything — with an extra helping of empathy for all the stuff you put up with, sorry about that, it’s on the list of things to fix one of these days! everybody I’m working to advance the causes we care about and the values we believe in When I think about it, almost all my friends are in one or more of these groups. So I’m also very thankful for the opportunities to hang out in these circles and make new friends :) Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more to be grateful for and a lot more to empathize with. This post has gone on long enough already, though, and pretty soon I need to get to work on the traditional Thanksgiving paella! So now’s a good time to wrap things up. To whoever’s reading this, I hope there are things in your life that you too are thankful for. If so, take a moment (or longer) to reflect on them. And as well as empathizing with people less fortunate than you, have some empathy for yourself as well — which includes taking care of yourself and paying attention to your own needs and desires as well as everybody else’s. Originally published at A Change Is Coming. strategist, software engineer, entrepreneur, activist ... More from Jon Pincus Gender HCI, Feminist HCI, Post-Colonial Computing, Anti-Oppressive Design, and Design Justice Jon Pincus in A Change Is Coming #EqualPayDay: Intersectional and Entrepreneurial Perspectives Mobilizing to help fight voter suppression Jon Pincus in #VotingRights Using Zoom for activism? Think about security! Jon Pincus in #resist! "Social threat modeling" Reflections of a Strategy DIVA: strategy, diversity, and Shahid for Change	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1912
__label__cc	0.60042	0.39958	Jewcy’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books Of 2010 This year’s crop of non-fiction books gave us a chance to really spread out and move from drunken adventures across Europe on justification as to why we didn’t continue our studies in Russian literature on an academic level. Read More By Jason Diamond / December 28, 2010 While we loved fiction in 2010, it’s the year’s non-fiction books that gave us a chance to really spread out and move from drunken adventures across Europe on justification as to why we didn’t continue our studies in Russian literature on an academic level. 1. And The Pursuit of Happiness by Maira Kalman It may have not been the most inspiring year for America, but Ms. Kalman’s book of drawings made us want to revisit everything that is truly great about this country. One of the most beautiful books to come out in a long time. 2. Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour by Rachel Shukert I think we may have gotten a little ahead of ourselves when we said this was the funniest book of the year, considering it had just come out. Thank goodness for end of year lists where we can look back and say we were right. 3. The Possessed by Elif Batuman If you ever thought you wanted to study Russian writers like Isaac Babel or Tolstoy for a living, read this amazing book first. 4. How did you get This Number by Sloane Crosley 2010 might not be remembered as the year that Sloane Crosley bucked the “sophomore slump” label, but it really should be. Nearly as funny as I was Told There’d Be Cake, and much more confident. 5. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus Of all of the revolutions to bubble up out of the musical underground in the 1990s, the Riot Grrrl movement was the one whose voice was the loudest, and who had the biggest and arguably most important impact. Sara Marcus spared no detail in this account, and it deserves your attention. 6. When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone by Gal Beckerman A work that was enjoyable to read, and of the utmost importance. The world owes Mr. Beckerman a thanks for making this amazing book happen. 7. I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I’ve Dated by Julie Klausner Since the Sex and the City and the creepy culture it seems to have created is slowly going the way of the dinosaur, we vote for Julie Klausner’s book to become the new handbook to teach people exactly how bloody the dating battlefield of New York has become. 8. And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould We hereby enact a law stating that no longer should Emily Gould be known as the ex-Gawker writer who had the cover story in the New York Times Magazine. She shall now be recognized as the clever memoirist who knows that nobody is innocent–including herself–and it’s all thanks to this superb memoir. 9. Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg We like anybody who works in a prison library for two years. If they can write a memoir as good as this one about it, we like them even more. 10. Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim I don’t feel like we really need to give any reasons for why this is on the list. Also of note: Listen to This by Alex Ross, The Road by Vasily Grossman, Half Empty by David Rakoff, Tagged with: Avi Steinberg , Elif Batuman , Emily Gould , Gal Beckerman , Julie Klausner , LOS ANGELES , Maira Kalman , NEW YORK , Rachel Shukert , San Francisco , Sara Marcus , Sloane Crosley What Do Jew Do On Christmas: Randi Brookman Harris, Freelance Prop Stylist Jewcy Top 10 Art Books of 2010	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1915
__label__wiki	0.623798	0.623798	Health and Wellness Minister, Dr. the Hon. Christopher Tufton Prime Minister, the Most. Hon. Andrew Holness, speaking in the House of Representatives on January 12. Minister of State, Ministry of Education, Youth and Information, Hon. Robert Nesta Morgan (centre), presents a resident of Homestead Place of Safety (left) with a tablet during the handover of 200 devices, donated by the Ministry to the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), on Tuesday (January 12), at the agency’s office in Kingston. Observing is Chief Executive Officer, CPFSA, Rosalee Gage Grey. The devices were donated under the Ministry’s ‘One Laptop or Tablet pQAer Child’ initiative. Forest Technician with the Forestry Department, Stephen Williams (left), overseas a tree planting exercise involving student volunteers from the University of the West Indies (UWI) Rotaract Club, among other participants, on Saturday (January 9). The volunteers (from second left) are: Roshan Gordon, Valeska Morrison, and Kimona Kenlock. The exercise was undertaken along a section of Highway 2000, in the vicinity of the Linstead Toll Plaza in St. Catherine. State Minister in the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce, Dr. the Hon. Norman Dunn (left), listens to Managing Director of Superchard and Sons Furnishing Company, Superchard Singh, during a tour of the entity, which is situated at the White Marl Complex in St. Catherine, on (January 8). Prime Minister, the Most Hon. Andrew Holness (left), is greeted by Founder of Power of Faith Ministries International Inc., Bishop Dr. Delford Davis Minister of State in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information, Hon. Robert Morgan (right), addresses students at the Crescent Primary School in St. Catherine, today (January 5). Minister of Education, Youth and Information, Hon. Fayval Williams, (second right) engages with Seaward Primary & Junior High School student, Shardanaye Crawford (left), during her visit to the institution on Tuesday (January 5). Looking on (in background from left) are Education Officer, Ricardo Kennedy; Acting Regional Director, Region 1, Dasmine Kennedy; Vice Principal, Seaward Primary & Junior High School, Carol Gordon Marshall; and Principal, Arlene Thomas. (Centre): Charles Johnson, Commissioned Land Surveyor, receives his survey plan, which is the first to be examined within the new Digital Submission of Survey Plans platform from Dr. Glendon G. Newsome, Senior Director, Surveys and Mapping on December 2, 2020. Also in photo (L-R) Edwards Chambers, Manager, Plan Examination and Certification; Milton Saunders, Manager, Mapping Services; and Cynthia Edwards, Manager, Cadastral Mapping. Minister of Health and Wellness. Dr. the Hon Christopher Tufton (left), listens to Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jacquiline Bisasor-McKenzie, at a virtual press conference, on Saturday (January 2), at the Ministry of Health and Wellness, in Kingston. Health and Wellness Minister, Dr. the Hon. Christopher Tufton (left), holds seven-month-old Sherina Grant, at the National Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) certification ceremony and launch of the National Infant and Young Child Feeding Network, on Tuesday (December 3), at the Courtleigh Auditorium in New Kingston. Enjoying the moment are (from second left) Country Representative, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Mariko Kagoshima; Sherina’s mother, Patrina Rowe, and Food and Nutrition Advisor, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Audrey Morris.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1916
__label__wiki	0.924788	0.924788	HERD Login Request Your Free Commercial Small Business Guide to Effective Radio Advertising CMN Auction Letter Johnny Cash Documentary to Debut on Anniversary of His Death A unique documentary about the legendary Johnny Cash is set to premiere on the 12th anniversary of his passing. Cash died on Sept. 12, 2003, and Johnny Cash: American Rebel will make its debut on Sept. 12, 2015 on CMT. The film chronicles the musical and social impact of the Man in Black by using 12 of his most important songs as its soundtrack, outlining his messages against war, injustice, racism and prejudice. Those songs include “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Jackson,” “San Quentin,” “Man in Black,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Ring of Fire,” “Hurt” and more. According to a press release, “Each song illustrates a chapter in his life, as well the story of an ever-changing America from the 1950s to modern day, as told through interviews, archival concert footage, photographs and personal artifacts from the Cash family.” The documentary marks the first time Cash’s children, John Carter Cash and Rosanne Cash, have appeared along with June Carter’s daughter Carlene Carter in a film about Johnny Cash. The documentary also features interviews with Eric Church, Sheryl Crow, Rodney Crowell, Clive Davis, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, John Mellencamp, Kid Rock, Rick Rubin, Willie Nelson and more. The film promises to reveal new layers to the musical icon. “The way he related to an audience and who he was on stage, was his best self,” Rosanne Cash says. “He had an intimate relationship with his audience and he worked out a lot of his problems under the spotlight.” “There were so many different facets to him, such an undefinable depth to his character,” John Carter Cash adds. “You could see it in his eyes and it brought on mystery, and it brought on a need for, perhaps, understanding him in a deeper way and this is part of the appeal of who the man was.” Johnny Cash: American Rebel premieres Saturday, Sept. 12 at 9PM ET/PT. Check out a trailer for the film at CMT.com. Read More: Johnny Cash Documentary to Debut on Anniversary of His Death \| http://tasteofcountry.com/johnny-cash-american-rebel/?trackback=tsmclip KMOO Crew Copyright © 2021 99.9 FM - KMOO.com. All Rights Reserved. Designed, Developed & Hosted by Duncan Multi-Media.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1925
__label__cc	0.723623	0.276377	Why Counseling Often the reason is fairly clear. If we think of families as living organisms the parts of which work together to deal with the outside world, then there simply are times that new stressors appear and have to be dealt with. Sometimes the pain and challenge of those new events are just too difficult to cope with if there isn’t some outside assistance available. Some of the obvious stressors that cause families to seek help are the death of a loved one, the loss of a pregnancy or the death of a newborn, divorce, remarriage, the need to blend families together, the birth of a child, the loss of a job, or the necessity to move to a new home or even to a new section of the country. Life is difficult and sometimes an added stress can just overwhelm. One goal of family counseling is to help families deal with those stressors. While family counseling can help deal with such stressors, working with families has another important function, one that is not so obvious. It is an effective method for dealing with many emotional and behavioral problems that appear to be rooted in individuals. It can be an effective alternative or adjunct to more traditional individual psychotherapies. What are some of the indications that family therapy might be a good choice? First is the rapid onset of the problem behavior, particularly if the person whose behavior has changed was previously functioning well and there is no obvious trauma that might have set things awry. An example might be a child who had been doing fine suddenly refusing to attend school. Even if the behavior of this “patient of record,” which is what we call the problem individual, seems so bizarre as to be labeled crazy or in the usual diagnostic terms psychotic, family treatment can often accomplish a lot. In fact, one of the advantages of family therapy is the removal of the stigma of being the “patient” and replacing it with the idea that this is a shared problem. A second indicator for family counseling is the unwillingness of some members of the household to take part in solving the problem, of helping that “patient of record” to get better. Since the assumption that makes families work is that the members love one another, there should be a willingness of everybody to help with this problematic situation. If somebody is “too busy,” “can’t see the point of meeting as a family” or offers similar resistance, that’s a good indication that there is in fact a family problem. A third indication is that the person whose problem is difficult tries to make their behavior seem quite natural and normal. For example, they might try to make the problem seem like a medical issue rather than a behavioral one or they might say they are working on the solution or they may try to deny that the problem behavior exists; such denial is frequently found with substance abuse and eating disorders. That “normalization” of behavior is often belied by the individual’s finding ways to come into conflict with others about it. For example, an anorexic will do battle with everybody about what family meals and menus should be instead of the much less conflictful reduction of serving sizes and possibly avoiding meals by being so busy. Dr. Kenneth Weene Ph.D. More About Kenneth Weene Ken Weene was born outside of Boston and grew up in Massachusetts and Maine. Although he has lived many places since, Ken considers himself a Broody New Englander. Ken went to high school at the Governor’s Academy in South Byfield, Mass and then to Princeton University where he studied economics. From there he went to Teachers’ College at Columbia University to study International Education and Social Psychology. Ken then spent a few years teaching, primarily at Northeastern University and in public schools. Returning to graduate school, Ken spent a year at the University of Iowa before transferring to The Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University in New York. While working on his PhD in Human Behavior, he also studied at the Ackerman Family Institute. Dr. Weene continued teaching in New York, primarily at SUNY Old Westbury, Suffolk Community College, and a special program for police at New York Institute of Technology. His clinical work experience included the Suffolk County Mental Health Board, Northeast Nassau State Hospital, and the Counseling Service of the Long Island Council of Churches, where he directed family and youth services. Ken was in private practice as a psychologist for many years before he and his wife moved to Arizona. Once settled in Phoenix, Ken directed most of his energy to his passion for writing novels, essays, poetry, and short stories. Having been ordained, he also offered assistance as a pastoral counselor. Recently moved to Tucson, Ken is currently working on a book about families and counseling. It will be his second work of non-fiction. The first was co-writing a memoir with one of the Lost Boys of South Sudan. Ken continues to offer counseling services at a low fee both in his office and via Skye. While most counseling is done individually, Ken remains committed to working with families and intimate groups because he strongly believes that more often than not symptoms are caused by difficulty in communicating with those who are closest to us and that such difficulty is often the result of people feeling unsafe in sharing their emotions and needs. As a Therapist I guess you could say I’m an old-timer and an eclectic. I studied psychology at both one of the most behavioristic schools and at one of the most psychoanalytic in America, the University of Iowa and then Adelphi Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies. I also studied with the father of family therapy, Nat Ackerman. I did my internship in a county mental health service which included working with family court and a state hospital and then worked for years at a faith-based counseling service, the Counseling Service of the Long Island (New York) Council of Churches. I also worked closely with one of the premier psychopharmacologists on Long Island. Once in private practice, I was known as the therapist of last resort for children and adolescents who had been to a number of previous therapists without success. Working with kids and families is rewarding but draining. I must admit it took a toll. Other groups with whom I worked extensively were transgender and gender-dysphoric clients and those who had difficulty accepting their sexual preferences. I have also worked with a number of people who have had issues with self-medicating and with couples having difficulty with their marriages. My approach has always been eclectic, problem-solving oriented, and supportive. I believe that psychotherapy and counseling are vocations not just jobs. I also believe that counselors work for their clients and that it our professional responsibility to help clients make viable life choices that work for them rather than simply conforming to the expectations of others. In that regard, I have always respected my clients’ religious and political views as well as their decisions regarding medication. I encourage my clients to use other resources beyond my services; these include twelve-step programs like AA, bibliotherapy (reading books they find helpful), and joining groups and classes. My fees are based on a sliding scale which is geared to each client’s ability to pay. It is my policy to not charge for the first session if we do not continue working together; that policy is based on my view that clients are consumers and have the right to shop and find the service they want. As to my own life, I grew up in New England, went to boarding school at age fourteen and then to Princeton. After that, I did some grad work at Columbia and then taught for a few years. After marrying, I went to Iowa and then to Adelphi. We lived on Long Island until 2002, when we moved to Phoenix, AZ. Even though it tore us away from our son and other loved ones, it was a good move for us. After fifteen years there, my wife and I decided we preferred the quality of life in Tucson, a city we had been visiting regularly, and relocated here. You are most welcome to contact me to set up an appointment or for further inquiries. Counseling Fees, Frequencies, and Policies Kenneth Weene, Ph.D. Fees: My fees are set on a sliding scale with a minimum of $45 per session and a maximum of $125. The actual fee is set with the client(s) and should be based on their reasonable ability to pay. There is no charge for the initial session unless the client(s) and I decide to continue working together. Generally, sessions for individual counseling are 50 minutes and for couples an hour. Family sessions are typically double length, that is to say about 100 minutes. Payment is expected at the time of sessions. Failure to pay as agreed does automatically terminate my services. Also, payment is required for sessions cancelled with less than 24 hours’ notice. Phone and Skype sessions may be paid for using PayPal. Frequency: While I see usually start seeing clients weekly, I try to move towards a lower frequency as quickly as possible. I try to be available for emergency sessions when the need arises. I can, if needs be, provide Skype or telephone sessions; however, I cannot guarantee the privacy of those sessions as I do not have access to the requisite computer-ware to do so. I do charge for Skype and phone sessions. Medical issues: My services are never to be construed as being an alternative to proper medical care. This caveat includes but is not limited to psychiatric, neurological, and endocrinological screening and treatment. Substance Abuse and Self Harm: I will work with substance abusers and clients who engage in self-destructive behaviors and with their families, I insist they recognize that such issues may require medical intervention and possibly confinement in a treatment center or hospital. No therapist can guarantee success, health, or safety for their clients, and especially not when self-harm is involved. Confidentiality: All sessions are confidential. While I encourage honesty and transparency within families, I will not share information shared in confidence with others unless it is my legal and/or ethical responsibility to do so.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1930
__label__wiki	0.573246	0.573246	Kentucky Scholarship Online University Presses All Partner Presses Kentucky Scholarship Online The American South and the Vietnam War Joseph A. Fry Publisher: University Press of Kentucky Published in print: 2015 Published online: January 2016 Obama at War Ryan C. Hendrickson Ziegfeld and His Follies Cynthia Brideson and others Charles Walters Brent Phillips Published online: May 2015 Larry Ceplair and others Rex Ingram Ruth Barton Jan-Christopher Horak Kentucky's Cookbook Heritage John van Willigen You are looking at 1-2 of 2 items for: American History: early to 18th Century x Download complete list of books in this Collection (.pdf) (.xls) See results from UPSO American History: early to 18th Century (2) From 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 — To 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 Sort by: Title - A to ZTitle - Z to ADate - Old to RecentDate - Recent to OldAuthor - A to ZAuthor - Z to A George Rogers Clark and William Croghan: A Story of the Revolution, Settlement, and Early Life at Locust Grove Gwynne Tuell Potts History, American History: early to 18th Century This is a story of greed, adventure and settlement; of causes won and lost. The book’s theme is eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conflict and settlement in the Ohio River valley, told within ... More This is a story of greed, adventure and settlement; of causes won and lost. The book’s theme is eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conflict and settlement in the Ohio River valley, told within the context of the national and international events that led to the American Revolution and guided Kentucky’s postwar future.“Colonel” George Croghan serves as the exemplar of Britain’s trans-Appalachian experience. The Revolution was fought in three theaters; the northern belonged to George Washington, and among his officers was Croghan’s nephew, Major William Croghan. The major joined the southern theater at the moment the Continental Army surrendered to Britain in Charleston. The third theater was the Revolution in the West, and its leader was Virginia colonel, later general, George Rogers Clark, whose vision secured the old Northwest Territory for the new nation. Taken together, the war adventures of Clark and Croghan epitomize the American course of the Revolution. Croghan and Clark arrived at the Falls of the Ohio River after the Revolutionto survey the land that served as payment for Virginia’s soldiers. Clark, however, regularly was called by Virginia and the federal government to secure peace in the Ohio River valley, leading to his financial ruin and emotional decline. Croghan, his partner and brother-in-law, remained at Clark’s side throughout it all, even as he prospered in the new world they had fought to create, while Clark languished.Less George Rogers Clark and William Croghan : A Story of the Revolution, Settlement, and Early Life at Locust Grove This is a story of greed, adventure and settlement; of causes won and lost. The book’s theme is eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conflict and settlement in the Ohio River valley, told within the context of the national and international events that led to the American Revolution and guided Kentucky’s postwar future.“Colonel” George Croghan serves as the exemplar of Britain’s trans-Appalachian experience. The Revolution was fought in three theaters; the northern belonged to George Washington, and among his officers was Croghan’s nephew, Major William Croghan. The major joined the southern theater at the moment the Continental Army surrendered to Britain in Charleston. The third theater was the Revolution in the West, and its leader was Virginia colonel, later general, George Rogers Clark, whose vision secured the old Northwest Territory for the new nation. Taken together, the war adventures of Clark and Croghan epitomize the American course of the Revolution. Croghan and Clark arrived at the Falls of the Ohio River after the Revolutionto survey the land that served as payment for Virginia’s soldiers. Clark, however, regularly was called by Virginia and the federal government to secure peace in the Ohio River valley, leading to his financial ruin and emotional decline. Croghan, his partner and brother-in-law, remained at Clark’s side throughout it all, even as he prospered in the new world they had fought to create, while Clark languished. Keywords: George Rogers Clark, George Croghan, William Croghan, American Revolution, Trans-Appalachian settlement, Native Americans, Land, Political intrigue How Kentucky Became Southern: A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers, and Breeders Maryjean Wall The conflicts of the Civil War continued long after the conclusion of the war: jockeys and Thoroughbreds took up the fight on the racetrack. A border state with a shifting identity, Kentucky was ... More The conflicts of the Civil War continued long after the conclusion of the war: jockeys and Thoroughbreds took up the fight on the racetrack. A border state with a shifting identity, Kentucky was scorned for its violence and lawlessness and struggled to keep up with competition from horse breeders and businessmen from New York and New Jersey. As part of this struggle, from 1865 to 1910 the social and physical landscape of Kentucky underwent a remarkable metamorphosis, resulting in the gentile, beautiful, and quintessentially southern Bluegrass region of today. This book explores the post-Civil War world of Thoroughbred racing, before the Bluegrass region reigned supreme as the unofficial horse capital of the world. The book uses insider knowledge of horse racing as a foundation for an examination of the efforts to establish a Thoroughbred industry in late-nineteenth-century Kentucky. Key events include a challenge between Asteroid, the best horse in Kentucky, and Kentucky, the best horse in New York; a mysterious and deadly horse disease that threatened to wipe out the foal crops for several years; and the disappearance of African American jockeys such as Isaac Murphy.Less How Kentucky Became Southern : A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers, and Breeders The conflicts of the Civil War continued long after the conclusion of the war: jockeys and Thoroughbreds took up the fight on the racetrack. A border state with a shifting identity, Kentucky was scorned for its violence and lawlessness and struggled to keep up with competition from horse breeders and businessmen from New York and New Jersey. As part of this struggle, from 1865 to 1910 the social and physical landscape of Kentucky underwent a remarkable metamorphosis, resulting in the gentile, beautiful, and quintessentially southern Bluegrass region of today. This book explores the post-Civil War world of Thoroughbred racing, before the Bluegrass region reigned supreme as the unofficial horse capital of the world. The book uses insider knowledge of horse racing as a foundation for an examination of the efforts to establish a Thoroughbred industry in late-nineteenth-century Kentucky. Key events include a challenge between Asteroid, the best horse in Kentucky, and Kentucky, the best horse in New York; a mysterious and deadly horse disease that threatened to wipe out the foal crops for several years; and the disappearance of African American jockeys such as Isaac Murphy. Keywords: Civil War, jockeys, Thoroughbreds, horse breeders, Bluegrass, Kentucky, African American jockeys, Isaac Murphy PRINTED FROM KENTUCKY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.kentucky.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright The University Press of Kentucky, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in KSO for personal use.date: 16 January 2021	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1931
__label__wiki	0.584639	0.584639	These Are the States That Really Need Road Repairs Does your state have too many cracks in its roads? They’re all too familiar sights on American roads: small cracks that spider through black pavement or large potholes that send an unsettling jolt through any vehicles that drive over them. Keeping roads in tip-top shape is very important—transporting people, products, and food to many parts of the country would be impossible without them—and yet the task often falls by the wayside. In fact, TRIP, a national transportation research group, found that around 15 percent of rural roads in the U.S. are in poor condition, and a further 21 percent are just mediocre. It doesn’t help that the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which has supported the construction and maintenance of United States Highways since 1956, will likely run dry in the next three years. To be fair, maintaining the United States’ large, complex network of roads is a difficult task, even though states dedicate millions of dollars to keeping road pavement in top shape each year. To take a closer look at which states truly struggle to keep roads in pristine condition, the data scientists at Insurify did some research to discover the 10 states with the highest share of rural roads in poor condition. National averages. In total, 15 percent of rural roads in the United States of America are in poor condition. In contrast, 5.97 percent of state expenditures are dedicated to highways. Lastly, in 2017 there were 2.14 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled on rural, non-interstate roads, and 0.88 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled on all other roads. Road spending versus fatality rate. The data showed no significant correlation, positive or negative, between the percentage of a state’s budget dedicated to road expenditures and the fatality rate on rural, non-interstate roads (per 100 million vehicle miles traveled). Interestingly enough, though, there was a small but not insignificant positive correlation between the total number of dollars spent on roads and the aforementioned fatality rate. In other words, the data shows that states with greater expenditure on roads have a higher fatality rate. This does not imply that spending more on roads leads to more fatalities on rural streets—there are too many other things that can lead to an accident, like population density, reckless driving, or poor weather—but the data nonetheless suggests a correlation between highway budgets and traffic fatalities. Coastal prominence. Perhaps coastal roads just accumulate more wear and tear. Six of the states on the list were from the East and West coasts. In fact, only three states in the top 10 were completely landlocked, and none were from the Midwest, one area that is home to significant rural populations. To determine which states are in the most dire need of road repair, researchers at Insurify, a website for auto insurance quotes comparison, compiled data from a 2019 report by TRIP, a national transportation research group. In the report, mediocre roads are those where the pavement shows significant wear and possibly some visible distress. Poor roads are those that show signs of deterioration, including rutting, cracks, and potholes. Information on the percentage of rural roads in poor condition in each state, as well as fatality rate on rural, non-interstate roads, was taken from that report. Numbers on share of state expenditures dedicated to highways was taken from a 2017 data set on state-by-state spending put together by the United States Census Bureau, while data on the total number of lane miles statewide for each state in the top 10 comes from the Federal Highway Administration. Percentage of rural roads in poor condition: 21% Total lane miles statewide (2017): 33,328 Percentage of state expenditures dedicated to highways: 5.66% Fatality rate on rural, non-interstate roads (per 100 million vehicle miles traveled): 1.09 In the Granite State, 21 percent of rural roads were deemed to be in poor condition. However, New Hampshire has a rural road fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled of just 1.09, lower than all but two other states. That low number isn’t because of low rural population either. In New Hampshire, 38 percent of all people live in rural areas. In addition to high spending on highways, Maine also has a low rural road fatality rate. The percentage of its state budget dedicated to transportation expenses is 22 percent greater than average. Despite this, there are still clear issues with Maine’s roadways, and the Pine Tree State is having difficulty combating them. Rising transportation costs caused the Maine Department of Transportation to cancel roughly $59 million worth of projects in May of 2019. Percentage of state expenditures dedicated to highways: 10.83% Alaska allocates nearly 11 percent of its budget to transportation costs, more than any other state in the top 10 and greater than all but three other states. Interestingly, though, its network of roadways is actually small compared to other states. Alaska has a total of just 31,597 lane miles statewide, according to data compiled by the Federal Highway Administration. Just four other states (and the District of Columbia) have fewer. 7. Mississippi Total lane miles statewide (2017): 161,909 The percentage of rural roads in Mississippi in poor condition is 80 percent greater than the national average, and it dedicates less of its state budget to transportation than average. However, the Magnolia State hasn’t let all transportation issues fall by the wayside. The United States Department of Transportation recently awarded the state $52.4 million dedicated to improving a section of MS Highway 76, which connects two important Toyota production facilities. Oklahoma has more total lane miles than all but one other state in the top 10, and spends nearly eight percent of its annual budget on improving the roadways. Even so, the fatality rate on rural roads is slightly above the state average. Additionally, 30 percent of Oklahoma’s roads are in poor condition, double the national mean. Total lane miles statewide (2017): 9,781 No state has fewer total lane miles than Hawaii, at 9,781. It is understandable then, that roadway expenses take up a smaller percentage of the state budget. The percentage of state expenditure dedicated to roads in Hawaii is 66 percent smaller than the national average, and the lowest of any United States territory. Still, it’s clear that Hawaii could do some work improving its roads—its rate of roads in poor condition is twice the national average. West Virginia’s fatality rate on rural roads is 19 percent higher than the national average, while its share of rural roads in poor condition is also significantly greater than average. However, the state seems committed to fixing the problem. In an effort to greatly improve its network of roads, West Virginia introduced its Roads to Prosperity program in 2017. The initiative aims to complete over 700 projects statewide, and has nearly three billion dollars in funding. 3. New Mexico New Mexico has the second lowest fatality rate of any state in the top 10, and the third lowest percentage of its state budget dedicated to highways. An increase in funding is clearly needed for the Land of Enchantment, which had over $1 billion in identified road repair needs in January 2019 according to the Department of Transportation. A state budget surplus might help matters, as advocates for improving the road system have proposed the usage of $300-400 million dollars to begin revamping the road system. 2. California The nation’s second-largest network of roads belongs to California. The coastal state has nearly 400,000 miles of roads. Only Texas, which has nearly 700,000 miles of roadway, has a more prolific transportation system. However, California’s massive network of roads is also home to some reckless drivers, evidently. The Golden State has a fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled of 3.16, which is nearly 50 percent greater than the national average and second-highest in the country. No state has a bigger need for road repairs than Rhode Island. The state only has 12,741 total lane miles—second-fewest of any state in the U.S.—but an astonishing 39 percent of roads in the state are in poor condition, a figure that’s 160 percent more than the national average. The state’s fatality rate is also above average, and Rhode Island spends less of its yearly budget on the roads than the national average. The state is, however, trying to fix the problem, with Department of Transportation-sponsored projects to improve both highway and bridge safety.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1933
__label__wiki	0.779173	0.779173	og-emmet The University of Massachusetts is a public institution of higher learning with five campuses, at Amherst, Lowell, Dartmouth (in North Dartmouth), Boston, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as Massachusetts Agricultural College, it opened for classes in 1867. It became Massachusetts State College in 1931 and gained university status in 1947. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the oldest of the campuses, is located near the Connecticut River in the Pioneer Valley. Amherst is a land-grant institution (established with funds from the sale of federal land). The campus enrolls more than 25,000 students, most of whom are undergraduates. It grants degrees at the associate through doctoral levels in a range of disciplines, including liberal arts and sciences, agriculture, business, education, natural resource conservation, nursing, public health, engineering, astronomy, neuroscience, communications, architecture, computer science, area and ethnic studies, and visual and performing arts. The university is known as a leader in the field of polymer science. Its facilities include a 28-story library and outlying stations for marine and agricultural research. An arrangement with Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke colleges allows students from each school to attend classes and social activities at the others. Amherst’s varsity sports teams, nicknamed the Minutemen, compete in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The football team participates in the Football Championship Subdivision. School colors are maroon and white. The University of Massachusetts at Lowell was founded in 1894–95. Lowell is located about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from Boston. Total enrollment consists of roughly 15,000 students, mostly undergraduates. Lowell awards degrees at the associate through doctoral levels through the Manning School of Business, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Health and Environment, the College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, the College of Sciences, and the Francis College of Engineering. Most of Lowell’s varsity sports teams compete in Division II of the NCAA, with the exception being the Division I ice hockey team. The teams are known as the River Hawks, and school colors are red, white, and blue. The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth is located in North Dartmouth, 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Boston. It was founded in 1895. The student body consists of roughly 10,000 students, the majority of whom are undergraduates. The branch awards bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and professional degrees. Programs are conducted in such disciplines as liberal arts and sciences, engineering and related technologies, computer science, marine science, visual and performing arts, education, nursing, medical laboratory technology, business, and law. The Corsairs, the varsity sports teams at Dartmouth, participate in the NCAA’s Division III. School colors are blue, white, and gold. The University of Massachusetts at Boston was founded in 1964. It enrolls more than 15,000 students, predominantly undergraduates. The university conducts programs at the bachelor’s through doctoral levels through the Colleges of Education and Human Development; Liberal Arts; Management; Nursing and Health Sciences; Public and Community Service; and Science and Mathematics, as well as through the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies. University College at Boston offers evening and weekend classes and off-campus and online courses. Boston’s varsity sports teams, called the Beacons, compete in Division III of the NCAA. School colors are blue, black, and white. The University of Massachusetts established graduate studies in the health sciences in 1962. In 1965 Worcester was chosen as the location for these programs, and classes began there in 1970. The Worcester campus enrolls more than 1,000 students in programs of medicine, nursing, and biomedical sciences. The university also operates several health centers.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1934
__label__wiki	0.69107	0.69107	Pull of the 'Big Draw' Brings Drawing and Architecture Alive A listener in Colombia asks about the Great Lakes. And the music of singer and songwriter Conor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes. Transcript of radio broadcast: Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC, in VOA Special English. I'm Faith Lapidus. On our show this week: We answer a question from a listener about the Great Lakes… Play music by Bright Eyes… And report about an event called "The Big Draw." For more than thirty years, David Macaulay has been creating books about the way buildings are made. His clear and simple architectural drawings have explained the complex mechanics of buildings to generations of readers. Mister Macaulay recently visited the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., for an event called “The Big Draw.” Steve Ember has more. STEVE EMBER: “The Big Draw” started in Britain as a campaign to get people of all ages across the country to draw. “The Big Draw” had its first event in the United States last month at the National Building Museum. There were many events for children and families. Children could have their faces painted or have a drawing lesson from art educators. But the main event was David Macaulay. He drew architectural forms on a long piece of paper that was laid out on the floor. Children and adults could add their own drawings to it. This community drawing will hang in the museum for everyone to see. David Macaulay also gave a drawing demonstration. He sat in the large hall of the museum and slowly drew the room around him. A video projected his large piece of paper on a screen so that everyone in the room could watch. Mister Macaulay said that he is a teacher above all else. He said he likes to write and draw about things he finds interesting and does not know a lot about. His books have taught many people about drawing and architecture. David Macaulay’s first book, “Cathedral,” came out in nineteen seventy-three. He describes in simple language how people in the thirteenth century built a Christian religious building. He explains everything from the tools they used to the way they made the tall windows. In his book “Unbuilding” he explains how the Empire State Building in New York City could be taken apart and rebuilt. In two thousand three Mister Macaulay published “Mosque.” It tells how an Islamic religious building was made in sixteenth century Turkey. The book explores the architectural details of a mosque as well as its important social role. David Macaulay’s next book will be about the human body and how it works. Our VOA Listener question this week comes from Colombia. Jack Ramirez asks about the Great Lakes. The five bodies of water known as the Great Lakes are on or near the border between the United States and Canada. Lake Superior holds the most water. Lake Erie holds the least. Lake Michigan is the only one located totally within the United States. The other two are Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. The five Great Lakes are the largest group of fresh water lakes on Earth. Together, they contain about twenty percent of the fresh water in the world. There are about thirty-five thousand islands in the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes control much of the weather on the land that surrounds them. In the winter, moisture picked up by winds produces large amounts of snow, especially in the states of Michigan, Ohio and New York. The lakes also cool the air in the summer, then slowly move the heat over the area in the fall. This makes the area good for producing grapes for wine. The lakes supply drinking water to millions of people living in both the United States and Canada. In the past, industry used the Great Lakes to move products such as iron, coal, stone, grain and salt. But the amount of shipping on the lakes has decreased. Newer, larger ships are too wide for the lakes. But small boats take visitors to many of the islands for vacations. The United States and Canada work together to improve conditions in the Great Lakes area. Officials are now working to change a treaty about ways to slow or stop the effects of climate change. They say that less ice formation over the lakes in recent years has caused lower water levels. The areas around the lakes report environmental conditions at a conference every two years. The last one took place in November of last year. The conference report said some conditions are improving while others are worsening. For example, it reported progress in reducing air pollution, but said some poisons in the air are still a concern. It also said some native plants are decreasing while more than three hundred kinds of non-native fish continue to invade the lakes. Bright Eyes is a band whose main singer and songwriter is twenty-seven-year-old Conor Oberst. This musician from the state of Nebraska has been making records since he was seventeen years old. The songs on his latest album “Cassadaga” deal with religion, war and love as well as personal stories. Mario Ritter has more. MARIO RITTER: The album was named for Cassadaga, a community in the state of Florida. For more than one hundred years, people have lived in this place to worship together. Conor Oberst uses his music to explore his own beliefs. Here is the song “I Must Belong Somewhere." Conor Oberst sings about how every person and thing seems to have a place in the world. Conor Oberst may be young, but he has already made more than six records. In two thousand five alone Bright Eyes came out with two records. By two thousand six the singer was tired and cancelled his performance tour to have time to rest and think. “Cassadaga” is the product of this time off. Critics say that the music of Bright Eyes seems to be growing up. Some have even compared Oberst’s musical skills to the famous American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan. Here is the song “Classic Cars.” It tells about a man who falls in love with an older woman. We leave you with another love song. “Make a Plan to Love Me” tells about a man who wants the busy woman he loves to make more time for him. He notes that life is short and they should be together now. I'm Faith Lapidus. I hope you enjoyed our program today. It was written by Dana Demange and Nancy Steinbach. Caty Weaver was our producer. To read the text of this program and download audio, go to our Web site, voaspecialenglish.com. Join us again next week for AMERICAN MOSAIC, VOA’s radio magazine in Special English.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1940
__label__cc	0.600296	0.399704	Mr. Cooper Serves Bowling Green, MO Whether you're buying a home in Bowling Green or selling one, contact Mr. Cooper in Bowling Green for help along the way. Mr. Cooper is your home loan and loan service ally. Mr. Cooper Mortgages in Bowling Green, MO Ready to make your home ownership dreams come true? Let's do it. As the nation's third-largest home loan servicer, Mr. Cooper is ready to support you throughout your journey to home ownership. Mr. Cooper in Bowling Green can be your home loan ally, whether you're looking for a conventional home loan, a Federal Housing Administration loan (FHA), or a VA loan. Mr. Cooper in Bowling Green can help you do so much — even learn more about your credit score and finances in general. We know getting a mortgage can feel overwhelming, particularly when you're a first-time home buyer in Bowling Green, MO. Mr. Cooper can explain how everything applies to your situation. Just give us a call. In the meantime, here’s what you need to know. Conventional loans are one of the most common and popular mortgage options for home buyers in Bowling Green. These loans are not federally insured. The government backs other home loan types, while private lenders like Mr. Cooper back conventional loans. Some benefits of a conventional loan could include favorable interest terms and various term lengths. Depending on your situation, you may want to consider another type of home loan that's available to many Bowling Green home buyers. It's called FHA. FHA loans are also called Federal Housing Administration loans. They're backed by the U.S. government. An FHA loan can have more flexible credit requirements and typically allows for a lesser down payment than a conventional loan. Learn more about FHA loan requirements in Bowling Green with Mr. Cooper. VA home loans are only available to service members, veterans, and their spouses. If you're getting ready to buy a home in Bowling Green and are an active-duty service member, a veteran, or a surviving spouse, you may be eligible for a VA loan. At Mr. Cooper, we support our country's veterans, active-duty service members, and their families. It's our privilege to help every one of them become homeowners. Because this type of home loan is so unique, we encourage you to call Mr. Cooper for more information about VA loans in Bowling Green. Get Started Mr. Cooper Refinancing in Bowling Green Mr. Cooper offers mortgage refinancing in Bowling Green in addition to new home loans. Refinancing your home loan simply means paying off your current home loan and replacing it with a new one that better suits your financial needs. The new loan may have a shorter loan term, a better interest rate, or both. Most of the time, the objective of refinancing is to get a lower interest rate and decrease your monthly payment (so you can spend more money on making memories and building a life in your Bowling Green home!). Like new home loans, there are a couple of different ways to refinance. There's refinancing to get a more favorable interest rate or loan term. There's also cash-out refinancing, which allows homeowners who want to leverage equity they have built in their home as cash to pay for home improvements or college tuition.† Cash-out refinancing can also be a method for debt consolidation, since you can also use equity from your home to tap into cash and pay down credit card debt, medical bills, or auto loans.^ The right refinance option is a phone call away. Contact Mr. Cooper in Bowling Green to learn more about refinancing today. Buying or Selling a Home in Bowling Green with Mr. Cooper Buying a house in Bowling Green, MO? Then you'll probably want to look into getting prequalified for a mortgage in Bowling Green and seek professional assistance for how to buy a home in Bowling Green. Missouri's real estate market ebbs and flows. Despite the constant change, Mr. Cooper mortgage professionals always have the most up-to-date insights. Mr. Cooper mortgage professionals will help simplify your home-buying experience in a few ways: First off, we can help you calculate how much house you can afford to buy. Then, we can help you get prequalified to buy a home in Bowling Green and introduce you to our affiliate to find a dependable real estate agent.* Lastly, Mr. Cooper can help you secure a home loan that meets your financial needs and accelerates your home ownership journey. Think of Mr. Cooper as your ally, from home search to closing on your loan. Are you researching how to sell a house in Bowling Green, MO? Turn to Mr. Cooper for help. We know the difficulties that come with selling a home in Bowling Green, whether you're trying to sell a home for the first or fifteenth time. As a seller, you'll get comprehensive marketing and sales service at a good value. And as a buyer, you could be eligible for a special credit at closing and gain access to thousands of listings.** Ask about the Mr. Cooper Real Estate Rewards program in Bowling Green to learn more. Mr. Cooper is here to keep the dream of home ownership alive for every customer — including you. Contact us to learn more about refinancing, home loans, and selling or buying a house in Bowling Green. We’ve got your back. We see home loans differently. We see them through your eyes.	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1952
__label__cc	0.735734	0.264266	Loopy Rules report: Just once over lightly? by Ruth LePla November 9, 2015 Brookfields Lawyers partner Linda O’Reilly takes a look at New Zealand’s loopy rules. It is hard to tell if the Rules Reduction Taskforce is a populist sop put together by the government to distract from more serious issues, or a genuine attempt at improving the processes affecting businesses and homeowners who run up against regulatory frustrations. According to its recent report, The loopy rules report: New Zealanders tell their stories, the taskforce was charged “with hearing from property owners, builders, tradespeople and businesses that have experienced the effects of irrelevant or unnecessary regulations”. Of course, the problem lies in determining what is ‘irrelevant’ or ‘unnecessary’, and it appears from the report that two thirds of this is in the realm of the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) and the Building Act 2004, and three quarters of issues are about the responsibilities and actions of councils. It may as well be called “The loopy rules that councils make” report. While many local authorities and related agencies made submissions, the sector group submitters were heavily representative of the construction, development and tourism sectors. Clearly the concerns that have been expressed about the cost of building and development have been given an outlet, with the hope of resultant action. But the problem with the report, in taking on all comers, is that it is bound to be once over lightly. Concentrating as it does on concerns with the performance of councils, and the regulatory impact of the RMA, Building Act and both Local Government Acts (1974 & 2002) – all of which have been under ongoing review now for years on end – it is hard to see what it usefully adds to the dialogue about regulatory impact on businesses and homeowners. To be fair, the report does note that loopy rules can be as frustrating to enforcement agencies as they are to those on whom they impact. And it highlights some “myths”, where the popular understanding of rules supposedly limiting development are simply wrong. But the problem is the report appears to accept many anecdotal instances of loopy rule making at face value, and skips lightly over the purpose of the enabling legislation. Further, many of the suggested “fixes” are simplistic (eg, cap government building fees), overly broad (eg, review the Local Government Act 1974 and the Reserves Act 1977), self-evident (eg, all local government chief executives should have a customer focus), or re-visit well-trammelled ground (eg, review tree protection rules). That is not to say the report does not introduce some interesting possibilities. There are some detailed observations on the RMA and Building Act that would certainly bear further investigation, and some potentially useful and thoughtful analysis has been undertaken. For example, the suggestion that resource and building consent applications for the same development should be treated as a single application warrants consideration, notwithstanding the separate regulatory regimes applicable. It also suggests knocking off some of the low-hanging fruit. For example, antiquated rules that do not recognise a microwave oven as an acceptable means of providing for food preparation in a dwelling without a conventional oven, and removing the need to register hairdressers each year now that they are no longer viewed as a significant health risk. There are also comments on how rules are made, and how the making of loopy rules might be avoided, as well as the suggestion that local authorities adopt the government’s Code of Good Regulatory Practice. Further, the report acknowledges the importance of consultation with stakeholders in making regulations, although it seems to me that local government is already somewhat better and more practised at that than central government. Hopefully some good things will flow, but it is difficult to see it as much more than a distraction. This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of NZ Local Government Magazine. Brookfields LawyersBuilding Act 2004Code of Good Regulatory PracticeLinda O'ReillyLocal Government ActResource Management Act 1991Rules Reduction Taskforce Expert calls for more walkable cities How to work with the media Through the legal looking glass Ruth LePla February 19, 2016 Te Ture Whenua Maori Bill explained Ruth LePla April 20, 2016 Note to elected members Ruth LePla July 4, 2016	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1953
__label__wiki	0.723991	0.723991	Temporal trends in severe malaria in Chittagong, Bangladesh Richard James Maude1,2,3, Mahtab Uddin Hasan4, Md Amir Hossain4, Abdullah Abu Sayeed4, Sanjib Kanti Paul4, Waliur Rahman4, Rapeephan Rattanawongnara Maude1, Nidhi Vaid5, Aniruddha Ghose4, Robed Amin6, Rasheda Samad4, Emran Bin Yunus7,8, M Ridwanur Rahman9, Abdul M Bangali10, M Gofranul Hoque4, Nicholas PJ Day1,2, Nicholas J White1,2, Lisa J White1,2, Arjen M Dondorp1,2 & M Abul Faiz1,7,8 Epidemiological data on malaria in Bangladesh are sparse, particularly on severe and fatal malaria. This hampers the allocation of healthcare provision in this resource-poor setting. Over 85% of the estimated 150,000-250,000 annual malaria cases in Bangladesh occur in Chittagong Division with 80% in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). Chittagong Medical College Hospital (CMCH) is the major tertiary referral hospital for severe malaria in Chittagong Division. Malaria screening data from 22,785 inpatients in CMCH from 1999–2011 were analysed to investigate the patterns of referral, temporal trends and geographical distribution of severe malaria in Chittagong Division, Bangladesh. From 1999 till 2011, 2,394 malaria cases were admitted, of which 96% harboured Plasmodium falciparum and 4% Plasmodium vivax. Infection was commonest in males (67%) between 15 and 34 years of age. Seasonality of malaria incidence was marked with a single peak in P. falciparum transmission from June to August coinciding with peak rainfall, whereas P. vivax showed an additional peak in February-March possibly representing relapse infections. Since 2007 there has been a substantial decrease in the absolute number of admitted malaria cases. Case fatality in severe malaria was 18% from 2008–2011, remaining steady during this period. A travel history obtained in 226 malaria patients revealed only 33% had been to the CHT in the preceding three weeks. Of all admitted malaria patients, only 9% lived in the CHT, and none in the more remote malaria endemic regions near the Indian border. The overall decline in admitted malaria cases to CMCH suggests recent control measures are successful. However, there are no reliable data on the incidence of severe malaria in the CHT, the most endemic area of Bangladesh, and most of these patients do not reach tertiary health facilities. Improvement of early treatment and simple supportive care for severe malaria in remote areas and implementation of a referral system for cases requiring additional supportive care could be important contributors to further reducing malaria-attributable disease and death in Bangladesh. Over a million suspected cases of malaria are reported annually to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Bangladesh, although the number of confirmed cases is only 60,000, and estimates of the true incidence vary widely[1–3]. Cases from most medical college hospitals, specialized hospitals, NGO hospitals and private clinics and hospitals are not included and the true number is estimated to be three times higher[1, 4]. Most malaria cases in Bangladesh did not have a confirmatory blood test until recently and clinical diagnosis of malaria is known to be unreliable[5, 6]. Since 2000, no clear decrease in the overall annual number of cases has been documented, but this could be related to counting methods[2, 3, 5, 7]. From 2006–2008, the number of people tested for malaria more than doubled[5], but despite this, in 2008 only a third of 1.3 million reported suspected cases had a blood test for malaria (microscopy or rapid diagnostic test), one fifth of which (85,000) were positive[3]. The true incidence of malaria is thus probably in the range of 150,000-250,000 cases per year[1, 3, 4]. It is likely that an increase in the efficiency of diagnosis and reporting has masked a decline in incidence. Access to artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) has doubled since 2005[3] and annual reported numbers of confirmed deaths from malaria has decreased 10-fold since 2005 to 47 in 2009[5]. It should be noted that these figures do not include deaths in many hospitals and private facilities or those that do not reach health care and the true figure is likely to be much larger[4]. Published data on geographical distribution of malaria cases in Bangladesh are patchy and incomplete. Under-reporting is thought to be a particular problem in remote areas[8]. The first national malaria prevalence survey in Bangladesh was undertaken in 2007. Over 85% of all cases and 95% of severe cases were reported to occur in the south of Chittagong Division, in 5 Districts: Bandarban, Chittagong, Cox’s Bazar, Khagrachari and Rangamati (Figure1)[8, 9]. Malaria transmission in this area is highly seasonal with an estimated annual rate of infection of around 8 per 1000 people at risk[1, 10]. The highest rates of malaria transmission are thought to be in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) i.e. Bandarban, Khagrachari and Rangamati Districts which together account for 80% of cases[7–9]. These have very low population density and are inland, mostly forested hilly areas. Map of Chittagong division. Accurate figures for numbers of cases of severe malaria in Bangladesh are not readily available. An exception is a WHO report from 2006 reporting 513 case fatalities out of a total of 51,705 confirmed falciparum malaria cases, of which 3,539 were severe[8]. It was estimated that there were 2,200-12,000 actual fatal cases in that year and 1,108,000-6,677,000 total cases of all species malaria in Bangladesh in 2006[2]. A later WHO report stated there were 1,320,581 reported cases in 2006[3]. With a case fatality rate in severe malaria of 15-20%[11], the number of fatal cases suggests a total of 11,000-80,000 severe malaria cases in that year. More recently, a total number of 3591 cases of severe malaria cases were counted between July 2008 and May 2009[7]. There are no published data on long-term trends and very little on the geographical distribution of severe malaria in Bangladesh[7]. Mortality from severe malaria can be greatly reduced by intravenous anti-malarials (particularly artesunate) and high quality supportive care[11]. In Bangladesh, intravenous anti-malarials are widely available in local hospitals but access to advanced supportive care (e.g. blood transfusion, mechanical ventilation and renal dialysis) is much more limited. Recommended practice in Bangladesh is for all severe cases of malaria to be treated in hospital[12]. Numbers of malaria admissions may thus be a useful surrogate in the absence of reliable data on severe disease. Numbers of patients with malaria admitted to hospital in Bangladesh have been published since 2007. There were 5678 such admissions reported in 2007, 3042 in 2008 and 3287 in 2009[5]. This is around half of the lowest estimate for the annual number of severe cases (above) and very few of these would have had access to tertiary level care. There is thus likely to be a large burden of patients who do not reach hospital, representing potentially preventable mortality. In order to improve care for people with severe malaria in Bangladesh it is important to describe this population in more detail. A study was undertaken using routinely collected malaria screening data from the past 13 years from Chittagong Medical College Hospital (CMCH), Bangladesh to investigate the patterns of referral of patients, temporal trends and geographical distribution of severe malaria in Chittagong Division. Place and period of study The study was conducted at CMCH, Chittagong, Bangladesh from January 1999 to December 2011. CMCH is a government-run 1000-bed teaching hospital and the main tertiary referral hospital for severe malaria in Chittagong Division. CMCH receives referrals from throughout southeast Bangladesh, particularly those severe cases who require more intensive management as it is the only government hospital in the south of Chittagong Division with facilities for intensive care and haemodialysis. Its patients are mostly in the lower income range. There is a high quality malaria diagnostic service on-site with a well-developed recording system for malaria screening results. As the malaria laboratory is readily accessible, being located next to the medical wards, and the test is free to the patients, most if not all patients with suspected malaria undergo testing through this facility. The vast majority of malaria patients admitted to CMCH have severe disease. The results thus provide a representative picture of severe malaria cases admitted to CMCH over time. Assuming referral patterns from outlying clinics and hospitals to CMCH have not changed significantly in this period, they may also give an indication of long-term trends of severe malaria across Chittagong Division. Results of all screening of inpatients for malaria by the CMCH malaria diagnostic laboratory during this period were collated and analysed. Malaria diagnosis was by microscopy of thick and thin blood films. Date of testing, age, gender and smear results were collected for all malaria positive patients throughout, area of residence from 2002 (District 2002–2007, District and Thana (i.e. subdistrict) 2008–2011), and all of these from 2008 onwards for smear negative patients. In 2006–2011, additional data were collected from patients with malaria and their relatives to determine whether patients had travelled to another Thana in the 3 weeks before presentation. Admission GCS and outcome were also recorded during this period. Many of the malaria slide positive patients were enrolled in a series of clinical studies of severe malaria and a detailed clinical description will be presented elsewhere. Data on population density were taken from the 2001 national census[13] and data on age distribution from the 2004 Sample Vital Registration Survey[14]. Rainfall data for Chittagong were provided by the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, Government of Bangladesh. In total, there were 22,785 inpatients screened for malaria at CMCH between January 1999 and December 2011. Of these, 2,394 (11%) were positive, 2295/2,394 (96%) with P. falciparum (mean of 177 cases per year), and 93/2,394 (4%) P. vivax. One patient (1/2,384 (0.04%)) had Plasmodium malariae. The median (IQR) age of those who were parasite negative was 25 (15–45) years and those with P. falciparum 26 (18–40) years, p = 0.51. Of those with P. falciparum, 67% were male whereas 59% of parasite negative patients were male (p = 0.002). For 251 unselected patients with P. falciparum between 2008 and 2011, admission Glasgow Coma Scale and outcome were recorded. GCS was <11 in 103/251 (41%) and 44/251 (18%) died. The proportions of patients screened for malaria broken down by age group roughly mirrored the structure of the general population (Figure2A). There were two exceptions to this. Those age 5–19 years were under-represented and those age 20–29 years were over-represented. Plasmodium falciparum was commonest in those aged 15–34 years and the highest proportion positive was in those age 35‐39 years (Figure2B). Of those with P. falciparum, 24.0% were age 18 years or less. Few P. falciparum positive patients were ≤10 years (11.6% of positives versus 19.5% of those screened)) or over 50 years old (10.1% of positives versus 16.3% of those screened). The age profile of those who died was no different to that of those who survived (Figure2C). Age profiles in 5 year age groups. (a) screened patients, (b) P. falciparum (Pf) and P. vivax (Pv) positive patients and C percent of total deaths and percent of total survivors. The solid lines are numbers of individuals and the broken lines are percentages. % of population is the percentage of the population in that age group in the 2004 Sample Vital Registration Survey (SRVS)[14]. Temporal trends The annual number of patients screened for malaria at CMCH was highest in 2008–2009 (Figure3A). Both the number and proportion that were positive for P. falciparum decreased dramatically from 2007 onwards (Figures3A and B). The number with P. vivax decreased from 1999 (Figure3B). The median age of people with P. falciparum infection did not change from 1999–2011 (Figure3C). The proportion of patients with P. falciparum resident in the CHT increased from 2008, although the absolute number did not change (Figure3D). Long term trends. A annual number of individuals screened for malaria and % positive for P. falciparum from 1999–2011. B Annual numbers of individuals positive for P. falciparum (Pf) and P. vivax (Pv). C Median (IQR) age for those with P. falciparum from 1999–2011. D Annual number and % of individuals with P. falciparum from CHT 2002–2011 (data on area of residence were not collected before 2002). The number of P. falciparum positive cases was highest from June to August and this was highly consistent from 1999 to 2011 (Figure4A). There was a clear association with the timing of peak rainfall (Figure4A). The amount of rainfall per month correlated with the number of malaria cases in the same month (p < 0.0001, R2 = 0.40), consistent with a peak of malaria cases in the wet season (Figure4C). However, the annual amount of rainfall and the total in the wettest three months (June-August) were unrelated to the number of cases of malaria in the same or the following month. There was a different seasonal pattern in P. vivax caseload, with a broader peak and an additional peak in February to March 1999 (Figure4B). During the peak transmission season, both the total number of patients screened and the proportion of those that were positive for P. falciparum increased (Figure4D). The amplitude of seasonal variation of P. falciparum was around 80-90%. Seasonality. Cumulative numbers of monthly cases of P. falciparum (Pf) (a) and P. vivax (Pv) (b) at CMCH and rainfall from 1999 to 2011 (shown as average with 95% confidence interval). In a, the bottom band is 1999 and the top band 2011. c Cases of P. falciparum each month with monthly rainfall. d Monthly cumulative numbers screened for malaria with proportion and number positive for P. falciparum. An animated map of the annual numbers of P. falciparum malaria cases by area of residence from 2002 to 2011 is shown inAdditional file 1. The numbers of malaria cases from each District are summarized in Table1. The geographical distributions of patients screened and positive for malaria are shown in Figures5 and6. In Figure6A the three Districts in pale yellow on the right are the CHT. Overall, 400/7950 (5%) screened patients and 57/484 (12%) malaria positive patients (96% P. falciparum) were resident in the CHT in 2008–2011. 86/1147 (7.5%) malaria positive patients from 2002–2007 were resident in the CHT. The annual number of malaria cases who lived in the CHT varied from 2002–2011 although numbers were small and there was no clear overall trend (Figure3C). Table 1 Number screened, P. falciparum and P. vivax positive cases by District of residence from 2008-2011 Geographical distribution of malaria. A patients screened for malaria at CMCH 2008–2011 shown as number per Thana. B Percent of those screened in each Thana who were positive for P. falciparum. Where a Thana had case(s) of P. falciparum but less than 5 individuals were screened, percentages are not shown. Thana boundaries are white and District boundaries blue. Population density and malaria. (A) Population density in Chittagong Division from the 2001 census[13]. The CHT are the three Districts in pale yellow on the right. (B) Number of P. falciparum malaria cases seen at CMCH 2008–2011 per 1000 population km-2. Thana boundaries are white and District boundaries blue. In 2006 to 2011 travel in the 3 weeks before admission was recorded for 266 unselected patients with severe malaria (Table2). All patients surveyed were resident in Chittagong Division, 41/266 (15%) of whom lived in the CHT. A total of 74/266 (28%) had visited another Thana in the preceding 3 weeks of whom 47/74 (64%) had visited the CHT but did not live there. Thus, in total, 88/266 (33%) had been in the CHT in the preceding 3 weeks. All patients who travelled to Thana in the CHT were resident outside of the CHT. 10/266 (3.8%) of the patients lived in Chittagong City and had not travelled, thus suggesting there is malaria transmission in the city itself. Table 2 Travel to another Thana within the 3 weeks preceding admission The present analysis strongly suggests that only a small proportion of severe cases reach tertiary care (0.2-1.6%), since a mean of 177 malaria patients per year were admitted to CMCH, the only tertiary care facility in the area, whereas the estimated total numbers of severe cases nationally is around 11,000-80,000 per year of which 80% reside in the CHT. One of the explanations could be the financial cost of hospitalization, which is high in proportion to the average income in Bangladesh and can thus be a strong disincentive against admission of less severe patients. Many of the less severe cases we probably treated in peripheral Thana or District hospitals and many cases of severe malaria probably remained untreated in the community. Of the patients admitted to CMCH, 96% had P. falciparum and 4% of patients had P. vivax, whereas mortality was only associated with P. falciparum. Previous studies in uncomplicated malaria in this region show that 70% of malaria is caused by P. falciparum and 30% by P. vivax[1, 5, 8], which emphasizes the benign nature of P. vivax infections in this region. Malaria infection was commonest in young adult males in agreement with previous data from the south of Chittagong Division[1]. This may be related to greater occupational exposure of this group to forest malaria[15]. As the breadwinners, it could be postulated that they are also the family member most likely to be supported to attend a distant hospital for potentially expensive treatment[16], hence their over-representation in those screened for malaria. The number of hospitalized P. falciparum cases at CMCH decreased since 2007, despite an increase in the number of patients screened. This decrease was particularly dramatic from 2008–2010. During this period, there have been a number of changes in malaria programmes in the community and a greater than five-fold increase in funding for malaria control[3, 10]. A large increase in the numbers of patients who receive early antimalarial treatment has occurred in the feeder hospitals and clinics referring to CMCH. In particular there has been a doubling of ACT usage from 2007 to 2008[3, 10] and an increase in the availability of parenteral antimalarials. In addition, a new large-scale programme of free distribution of insecticide-treated bednets[3, 10] and introduction of rapid diagnostic tests in the community began in 2008[3, 10]. The present study adds to the evidence that these strategies are having a significant impact. However, potential pockets of high transmission, which are mostly in remote areas[15] may not have been sufficiently covered by this study. Over the past two years there have been initiatives aiming at increased availability of early treatment in more remote areas, including early intravenous therapy in the District hospitals, and as a result it is possible a smaller proportion of cases are being referred to tertiary hospitals. There was a strong and consistent seasonal pattern of P. falciparum incidence, with a large peak between May and September each year largely coinciding with the maximum rainfall during the monsoon season (June-August). This finding is in contrast with the pattern reported in two earlier reports[3, 6] describing one transmission peak in March-May and one in September-November, with June-August being described as ‘off-peak months’[3]. However, in both these publications no monthly incidence data were presented. For the incidence of P. vivax an additional peak was observed in the months from February to March, before arrival of the rains and transmission of P. falciparum, which uses the same vector system. The same seasonality has been described in vivax malaria in Hooghly District in West Bengal in India, and suggests that these are long latency relapse cases of vivax malaria[17]. By far the majority of individuals screened for malaria were from the south of Chittagong Division with relatively few from the CHT. All the malaria positive cases were from the south of Chittagong Division in the five endemic Districts: Chittagong, Cox’s Bazar, Kagrachari, Rangamati and Bandarban. Over 80% of cases in Bangladesh are thought to be resident in the CHT[7–9], although in this study only 12% of those referred to CMCH lived there. This is despite it being the main referral hospital for those needing more advanced care and local policy being to refer the sickest cases from all other government hospitals in the area to CMCH. As expected from existing epidemiological data[9], the probability of having malaria was highest in screened patients coming from the CHT, particularly the southern part: Lama and Alikadam Thana in Bandarban District but also adjacent Lohagara in Chittagong District. The high rate in Lohagara was mainly caused by an apparent focal epidemic of P. falciparum in 2010. Population density in the CHT is much lower than elsewhere in Chittagong Division. The most densely inhabited areas are Chittagong City and Cox’s Bazar and their surroundings and both these areas had very few malaria cases. The highest malaria positivity rates per population density in this study were mostly in those from areas of low population density in a band from north to south through the centre of Chittagong Division. These were Fatikchari and Rangonia in Chittagong District, Kawkhali and Rangamati Sadar in Rangamati District and Bandardan Sadar, Lama, Alikadam, and Thanchi Thana in Bandarban District plus Chakaria in Cox’s Bazar District. The high rates in Fatikchari, Rangonia and Chakaria were a particular surprise as these had not been previously identified as high risk areas, although they are near to the forest fringe. Few of the affected individuals in these three areas had visited the adjacent CHT. Even though very few cases of malaria seen at CMCH lived in the CHT, this study indicated almost three times this number, over a third of the total, are likely to have become infected there. Thus the CHT are an important source of malaria both for residents and travelers, although an important proportion of malaria transmission is outside this area, as has also been described in previous studies[1]. Albeit lower transmission outside the CHT, the much larger population in this area contributes significantly to the malaria case load. In this study two thirds of cases had not visited the CHT during the time in which they became infected. Malaria control efforts to date have been particularly focused on the CHT[18] but these data suggest a broader area should be targeted. There was a limited number of cases from Khagrachari District, the northern third of the CHT, previously found to be the area with the highest transmission in Bangladesh[9]. The small District hospital in Khagrachari town is similar to those in Bandarban and Rangamati and lacks facilities for mechanical ventilation or renal dialysis, which are often needed for patients with severe falciparum malaria. The long travel time to Chittagong might discourage families and physicians from referral to CMCH. Another underrepresented area known to be highly malarious was Rangamati District, particularly in the east near the border with India, although this area is also an endemic zone with relatively high transmission[9]. There are a number of possible reasons for this. A previous study showed that there is a strong preference among indigenous people in this area for seeking treatment from alternative practitioners in the first instance, although this may be different for the severely ill[16]. Transport from this area to Chittagong is also difficult. Between much of this area and Chittagong city is a large man-made lake, Kaptai Lake, and this can only be crossed by a long journey by boat. Road links to this area are poor, particularly in the wet (malaria) season, and from many areas the travel is long and arduous. These difficult travel conditions might encourage people to seek treatment locally. However, patients from other remote areas with similar difficulties during the wet season did reach CMCH. Although there are many pharmacies and health centres in the CHT[16], few of these can provide intravenous treatment and are very limited in their ability to provide more extended supportive care. There are larger and better equipped District hospitals in Khagrachari, Rangamati and Bandarban towns, but these cannot offer mechanical ventilation or renal dialysis, for which referral to a tertiary center is necessary. The dearth of referrals from the CHT to CMCH thus indicates there is likely to be a large burden of patients receiving suboptimal medical treatment in the periphery, and the perceived and real risks of long transportation times to a tertiary treatment centre are likely part of the explanation. For very remote areas in the wet season, it may be that the risk of transport is just too high and the emphasis therefore has to be on improving care locally as much as possible. One recent example has been the introduction of pre-referral treatment with rectal artesunate. This has the advantage that patients begin effective treatment earlier and could potentially ‘buy time’ to allow them to transfer more safely to a better equipped facility[19]. Expanding the availability of effective early antimalarial treatment in general, as has been occurring over the past few years[5], will also mean fewer patients progressing to severe disease. Although overall numbers were large, this study had several limitations. All data were from a single tertiary referral hospital. Data were only collected on those patients who had a malaria test by the on-site malaria diagnostic laboratory. There are several private laboratories in Chittagong who also provide malaria tests, although they charge a fee for this service. A small proportion of patients still undergo testing by these private laboratories although the vast majority of these are retested by the hospital laboratory. The study relies on the assumption that the quality of malaria diagnosis did not change significantly from 1999–2011. This is likely to be the case, as the same highly experienced staff were employed throughout and used the same techniques. It does, however also rely on the medical staff referring the same group of patients for testing during this period but data on this were not collected. Numbers of cases from the CHT and total numbers of P. vivax were small. Conclusions regarding P. vivax epidemiology are thus limited in their scope. Since it has been reported in the most recent government report that in 2008 3.8% of P. falciparum cases in Bangladesh occurred in Chittagong District[7], and we found that, in 2008, 130/165 CMCH admitted severe malaria cases were from that area, the total national number of severe malaria cases in Bangladesh was at least 130/0.038 = 3460. This figure ignores any patients with severe malaria admitted to the many other hospitals in Chittagong District, as well as those that did not reach healthcare and the actual total is thus likely to be much larger. Official data report a total number of 3591 severe cases for the whole country from mid 2008 to mid 2009, which is thus a severe underestimation[7] and there is a clear need for more accurate and complete reporting. Current systems for collating this data are incomplete and many confirmed cases are missed from the official totals[1–4]. Of particular interest would be the trends in numbers of cases, severe malaria and malaria deaths in the CHT which is essential information to assess the efficacy of malaria control measures as well as for the allocation of resources for patient care. The lack of epidemiological data on severe and fatal malaria in Bangladesh makes it difficult to plan allocation of healthcare provision to achieve maximum impact on mortality with limited resources. This study demonstrates that a very small proportion of severe malaria cases receive essential high-level supportive care. Patients from the highest transmission zone, the CHT, are particularly underrepresented. These patients could signify an important hidden group with potentially preventable mortality. Despite the recent reductions in malaria incidence and mortality, optimizing care for those developing clinical disease and especially severe malaria remains a priority. Investment in improving early treatment and simple supportive care for severe malaria at peripheral sites should be prioritized together with streamlining referral pathways to higher level care facilities. Maude RJ, Dondorp AM, Faiz MA, Yunus EB, Samad R, Hossain A, Rahman MR: Malaria in southeast Bangladesh: a descriptive study. Bangladesh Med Res Counc Bull. 2008, 34: 87-89. World Health Organization: World malaria report: Bangladesh. 2008,http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/country-profiles/2008/mal2008-bangladesh-en.pdf, World Health Organization: Country profile world malaria report: Bangladesh. 2009,http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/country-profiles/2009/mal2009_bangladesh_0012.pdf, Malaria and Parasitic Disease Control Unit, Directorate General of Health Services: Strategic Plan for Malaria Control Programme Bangladesh. 2008,http://www.nmcp.info/images/stories/documents/publications/Strategic%20Plan%202008-2015.pdf, –2015, World Health Organization: Country profile world malaria report: Bangladesh. 2010,http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/country-profiles/profile_bgd_en.pdf, Faiz MA, Yunus EB, Rahman MR, Hossain MA, Pang LW, Rahman ME, Bhuiyan SN: Failure of national guidelines to diagnose uncomplicated malaria in Bangladesh. Am J Trop Med Hyg. 2002, 67: 396-399. Malaria and Parasitic Disease Control Unit: Annual Report. 2008, Bangladesh: Directorate General of Health Services,http://www.nmcp.info/images/stories/documents/publications/Annual_Report_08_09.pdf, July to May 2009. GFATM R-6 malaria Component, Bangladesh PR-GoB, World Health Organization Regional Office for South-East Asia: Malaria situation in Bangladesh. 2006,http://www.searo.who.int/LinkFiles/Malaria_in_the_SEAR_BAN_mal06i.pdf, Haque U, Ahmed SM, Hossain S, Huda M, Hossain A, Alam MS, Mondal D, Khan WA, Khalequzzaman M, Haque R: Malaria prevalence in endemic districts of Bangladesh. PLoS One. 2009, 4: e6737-10.1371/journal.pone.0006737. World Health Organization Regional Office for South-East Asia: Malaria situation in SEAR countries. 2010, Bangladesh,http://www.searo.who.int/EN/section10/section21/section340_4015.htm, World Health Organization: Guidelines for the treatment of malaria. 2010,http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2010/9789241547925_eng.pdf, 2, Malaria and Parasitic Disease Control Unit: The Diagnosis and Management of Severe Malaria Learner’s Guide. 2010, Bangladesh: Directorate General of Health Services,http://www.nmcp.info/documents/training/2_EDPT_SM.pdf, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics: Area, Population and Literacy Rate by Upazila/Thana-2001.http://www.bbs.gov.bd/dataindex/census/ce_uzila.pdf, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics: Bangladesh data sheet. 2010,http://www.bbs.gov.bd/dataindex/datasheet.xls, Haque U, Magalhaes RJS, Reid HL, Clements ACA, Ahmed SM, Islam A, Yamamoto T, Haque R, Glass GE: Spatial prediction of malaria prevalence in an endemic area of Bangladesh. Malar J. 2010, 9: 120-10.1186/1475-2875-9-120. Ahmed SM: Different health and health-seeking behaviours: ethnic minorities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Bangladesh. Asia Pacif J Public Health. 2001, 13: 100-10.1177/101053950101300208. Iyengar MOT: Seasonal incidence or tertian, subtertian and quartan infections. Ind J Med Res. 1932, 20: 303- Roll Back Malaria: Bangladesh country profile. 2005,http://www.rollbackmalaria.org/wmr2005/profiles/bangladesh.pdf, Gomes MF, Faiz MA, Gyapong JO, Warsame M, Agbenyega T, Babiker A, Baiden F, Yunus EB, Binka F, Clerk C, Folb P, Hassan R, Hossain MA, Kimbute O, Kitua A, Krishna S, Makasi C, Mensah N, Mrango Z, Olliaro P, Peto R, Peto TJ, Rahman MR, Ribeiro I, Samad R, White NJ, Study 13 Research Group: Pre-referral rectal artesunate to prevent death and disability in severe malaria: a placebo-controlled trial. Lancet. 2009, 373: 557-566. 10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61734-1. The authors would like to thank Mr Sumon Sharma, Dr Tapan Seal and Dr Romal Chowdhury and for their assistance with data entry without which this study would not have been possible. In addition, Begum Jinnatun Nessa for kindly providing rainfall data from the Bangladesh Meteorological Department of the Government of Bangladesh. Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit is funded by the Wellcome Trust of Great Britain. Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand Richard James Maude, Rapeephan Rattanawongnara Maude, Nicholas PJ Day, Nicholas J White, Lisa J White, Arjen M Dondorp & M Abul Faiz Centre for Tropical Medicine, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, Churchill Hospital, Oxford, UK Richard James Maude, Nicholas PJ Day, Nicholas J White, Lisa J White & Arjen M Dondorp Department of Infection and Tropical Medicine, Heartlands Hospital, Birmingham, UK Richard James Maude Chittagong Medical College Hospital, Chittagong, Bangladesh Mahtab Uddin Hasan, Md Amir Hossain, Abdullah Abu Sayeed, Sanjib Kanti Paul, Waliur Rahman, Aniruddha Ghose, Rasheda Samad & M Gofranul Hoque The Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, London, UK Nidhi Vaid Dhaka Medical College, Dhaka, Bangladesh Robed Amin Centre for Specialized Care and Research, Chittagong, Bangladesh Emran Bin Yunus & M Abul Faiz Dev Care Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh Shaheed Shwarwardhy Medical College, Dhaka, Bangladesh M Ridwanur Rahman World Health Organization, Country Office, Dhaka, Bangladesh Abdul M Bangali Mahtab Uddin Hasan Md Amir Hossain Abdullah Abu Sayeed Sanjib Kanti Paul Waliur Rahman Rapeephan Rattanawongnara Maude Aniruddha Ghose Rasheda Samad Emran Bin Yunus M Gofranul Hoque Nicholas PJ Day Nicholas J White Lisa J White Arjen M Dondorp M Abul Faiz Correspondence to Richard James Maude. RJM conceived of and designed the study, analysed the data and drafted the manuscript. RJM, SKP, WR, NV and RRM collected and entered the data. MUH, MAH, AAS, WR, AG, RA, RS, EBY, MGH and AMF provided clinical care for the patients. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Video 1. Additional file 1: Map of annual number of cases of P. falciparum by area of residence from 2002–2011. Before 2008, data on Thana of residence were not available for those from the CHT. (Best viewed using QuickTime player (Apple Inc., CA, USA)). (AVI 3 MB) This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Maude, R.J., Hasan, M.U., Hossain, M.A. et al. Temporal trends in severe malaria in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Malar J 11, 323 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2875-11-323 Accepted: 28 August 2012 Falciparum	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1957
__label__cc	0.614732	0.385268	ARSCLIST September 2015 "The Trouble with Digitizing History" "Leggett, Stephen C" <[log in to unmask]> Sun, 13 Sep 2015 16:34:13 -0400 The Trouble With Digitizing History The Netherlands spent seven years and $202 million to digitize huge swaths of AV archives that most people will never see. Was it worth it? By Tina Amirtha<http://www.fastcompany.com/user/tina-amirtha> Driving through the Dutch countryside near the town of Hilversum, I have an overwhelming feeling that the surrounding water will wash out the road, given that my car is almost level with it. So it's surprising that the Netherlands' main audiovisual archives at the Sound and Vision Institute<http://www.beeldengeluid.nl/en/netherlands-institute-sound-and-vision> reside in a multilevel underground structure here, ostensibly below sea level. http://www.fastcompany.com/3048283/the-trouble-with-digitizing-history?utm_content=buffer7156d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1959
__label__cc	0.509512	0.490488	Baby NamesNew TattoosNew Crime & Tragedy Divorce / Separations Spouses / Partners This 8-Year-Old Boy Raised $50,000 for Homeless Veterans: ‘If They’re Heroes, Why Should They Be on the Street?’ December 5, 2019 September 14, 2020 / Inspiration, News / By Katie Nave Tiny hero alert! Tyler Stallings, an 8-year-old boy, has raised an incredible $50,000 for homeless veterans. The Maryland-based kiddo began helping veterans in need at the young age of four-years-old after his mom, Andrea Blackstone, shared impactful videos with him. YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: This St. Louis Mom-of-Six Gives Out Food to Hundreds of Needy Kids Every Day: ‘I Was Blessed Enough to Have a Little Spare Change’ Meet Tyler Stallings, Who Raised $50,000 for Homeless Veterans Credit: Courtesy Andrea Blackstone “He saw videos of veterans holding signs to no one responding to their cry for help and he thought this isn’t right. He didn’t like it,” Blackstone shared with Good Morning America. “He asked me, ‘If they’re heroes why should they be on the street?’ “ Tyler brainstormed ways to help, initially hoping to build houses for the veterans himself with supplies from the local hardware store. After pitching his idea, the young boy received a $100 grant from Gov. Larry Hogan. YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: 5-Year-Old Cancer Survivor Donates 3,000 Toys to Hospital Where He Received Treatment Tyler Puts the Funds Towards ‘Hero Bags,’ Which Are Essentially Care Packages for Homeless Veterans Thanks to his dedication, the initial grant has grown tremendously over the past four years. He is putting funds towards “Hero Bags,” which are care packages filled with clothing, toiletries, bedding, and food. YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: This 7-Year-Old Boy Used the Money He Saved Up for a Dream Disney Vacation to Help Hurricane Dorian Evacuees Instead “When my mom said we couldn’t build homes for the veterans, I came up with an idea where we could give them Hero Bags,” Tyler shared in an interview with GoFundMe. “The bags have clothes, shoes, snacks, toiletries, soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, lotion, shaving gel, hand sanitizer — all the regular things people need.” “It was supposed to be a one-time thing, but it turned into an all the time event,” added Tyler’s mom. As a member of the Maryland Center for Veteran Education and Training, Tyler has become an advocate for veterans who are struggling. He continues to accept donations on his GoFundMe page. Katie Nave Katie Nave is a freelance writer, producer, and mama living in Brooklyn, New York. Driven by her passion for storytelling, she is always seeking opportunities to elevate people who are working to better the world around them. About Mamas Uncut Mamas Uncut is the place for moms online. We cover the latest news around motherhood and parenting, plus entertainment news as well – all with a mom-focused twist. Looking for parenting advice? We have plenty of it, all for moms, from moms. Our mission is focused solely on empowering moms and moms-to-be with the knowledge and answers they’re looking for. We don’t stop there though, we have expert advice on a range of topics, and all of our categories get updated multiple times a day, so if there’s one website for moms you need to bookmark, it’s Mamas Uncut. We cover it all, from the latest and trendiest baby names, in the US and all over the world, to advice for moms in the workplace, or mom to mom advice on balancing it all. Looking for an answer to a specific question you’ve have? Head over to our new answers section, where you can ask questions on a nearly endless amount of topics, and you’ll get answers fast – really fast. Mamas Uncut is more than just the place for moms, it’s the community of moms – all here to help, make friends, and more. Not sure where to start? Take a look at one of our key topic areas like Pregnancy or Relationships – if you’re looking for advice on a specific topic, there’s a pretty good chance that we’ve already written on it (a few times), or that it’s within our answers section. If you don’t have time to read the site every day, we also have a newsletter that you can control how often you want to receive – that way we send all of the must-see content for moms directly to your inbox – it’s that easy. So go ahead and take a look around, ask a question, or just keep reading, we’re glad you’re here. Copyright © 2021 Mamas Uncut LLC \| Privacy Policy \| Terms and Conditions \| About Us \| Contact \| Cookie Settings	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1960
__label__wiki	0.57478	0.57478	Home News KAMELOT Putting The Finishing Touches On Songwriting For Next Album KAMELOT Putting The Finishing Touches On Songwriting For Next Album Guitarist Thomas Youngblood and keyboardist Oliver Palotai of American / German / Swedish symphonic metallers KAMELOT are in the Stuttgart area of Germany this week “working on the final parts of the next KAMELOT album,” according to Youngblood. He adds: “It’s going great and we have lots of music and ideas in store.” KAMELOT‘s follow-up to 2012’s “Silverthorn” is tentatively due next spring via an as-yet-undetermined record label. Palotai sat out the band’s North American tour last year so he could stay home with longtime girlfriend Simone Simons, (EPICA singer) as they awaited the birth of their first child. Filling in for him was Coen Janssen of EPICA. “Silverthorn” sold 5,400 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 79 on The Billboard 200 chart. The band’s previous CD, “Poetry For The Poisoned”, opened with around 6,100 units in September 2010 to enter the chart at No. 74. “Silverthorn” was released on October 30, 2012 in North America, October 26, 2012 in Germany and October 29, 2012 in the rest of Europe via Steamhammer/SPV. The CD marked the band’s first release with Tommy Karevik, the Swedish vocalist who previously fronted SEVENTH WONDER (a group that he is still a member of). In a 2012 interview with Loudwire, Thomas Youngblood stated about what Karevik brings to the band: “I think when we knew we had to bring in a new person on vocals, we wanted the opportunity to grow the band, not just to maintain the band or survive. We wanted to look at this as an opportunity to make the band bigger, [and] I think with Tommy we can do that. Not only is he an exceptional singer, he’s a great songwriter and he’s way ahead of what I thought he would be in terms of being a frontman. People who come out to shows will see that this guy is a force to be reckoned with. I can’t imagine a better choice, honestly. In the beginning, when this whole thing started, we were a little unsure of what the future might be, but now we’re really excited about it.” Previous articleCAVALERA CONSPIRACY: ‘Pandemonium’ Cover Artwork Unveiled Next articleROBERT PLANT: Second Short Film Exploring Themes Of ‘Lullaby And… The Ceaseless Roar’ Album KAMELOT Unveils Powerful New Live Video ‘Phantom Divine (Shadow Empire)’ Feat. Lauren Hart KAMELOT Premieres ‘Phantom Divine (Shadow Empire)’ Music Video KAMELOT Announces Haven European Tour Part III KAMELOT Premieres ‘My Therapy’ Music Video KAMELOT: ‘Liar Liar (Wasteland Monarchy)’ Video Premiere Feat. Alissa White-Gluz KAMELOT Announce European Tour Dates	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1974
__label__wiki	0.683341	0.683341	Gene Simmons (KISS) Still Thinks Rock Is Dead Awhile back, Gene Simmons (KISS) generated some controversy after claiming that rock is dead. Now, during an interview with Gulf News, he said that he hasn’t changed his mind and that he thinks “new bands haven’t taken the time to create glamor, excitement and epic stuff.” Simmons said the following: “Rock is dead. And that’s because new bands haven’t taken the time to create glamor, excitement and epic stuff. I mean, Foo Fighters is a terrific band, but that’s a 20-year-old band. So you can go back to 1958 until 1988. That’s 30 years. During that time, we had Elvis [Presley], The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones, on and on. In disco, you had Madonna, and then you had your hard rock, you had AC/DC, maybe us, a few others. Motown, all that great music. From 1988, until today, that’s more than 30 years. Tell me who the new Beatles is. You can’t. There are popular bands. BTS is very popular. All kinds of bands are very popular. That doesn’t mean iconic and legacy and for all time. It’s different.” He continued when asked if he thinks time will tell if some artists will become iconic 30 years from now: “I doubt it. Because the singularity that was The Beatles is a band that wrote their own songs, arranged it themselves, produced it themselves, mostly played all their own instruments. No backing tracks. No digital enhancement. No vocal correctness. Yeah, not gonna happen again. You know, the modern artists rely so much on technology. You may not be able to recognize the artist if they record themselves singing in the shower. You’d be shocked. And none of the rappers play instruments. Don’t write songs. They write words. But chords, melodies, harmonies and stuff. It doesn’t mean that rap isn’t important. It’s very important. But it ain’t The Beatles.” Simmons then went on to praise pop artists: “I think Billie Eilish is fantastic. She’s interesting because she and her brother actually write the material and are unique to themselves. Lady Gaga is fantastic in the female category. She writes her own material, she can sing like nobody’s business. But she actually is a musician, writes her own songs, plays piano, she can actually do that. The rest of the world reacts to a lot of the pop divas, although mostly they don’t write their own songs and can’t play an instrument. And by the way, that’s okay, too. It doesn’t matter what you like. But it ain’t The Beatles.” [via Blabbermouth] This entry was posted in Gene Simmons, News and tagged Gene Simmons, Kiss, Rock. Bookmark the permalink. Vice Release New Documentary On Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” AFI To Release New Album This Year	cc/2021-04/en_head_0005.json.gz/line1975

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