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Policy and planningUrban
Karachi, informal settlements and COVID-19
From Karachi, guest blogger Arif Hasan reports on how the city’s informal settlements are managing the COVID-19 lockdown and discusses how existing government structures can support the city’s settlements during COVID-19 recovery, and beyond.
Arif Hasan
Arif Hasan is an architect/planner in Karachi
Pathan Colony, Orangi Town, Karachi. Organised communities within informal settlements have been able to access relief packages more easily and, because they have established trust, distribute that relief more easily and effectively (Photo: copyright Orangi Pilot Project Research and Training Institute (OPP-RTI))
This series of blogs focusing on the transition to a predominantly urban world was planned before COVID-19. This pandemic brings such a devastating current and future health and economic impact that it demands our attention and commitment to work together to overcome it. We invited Arif Hasan, one of Asia’s most distinguished and influential urban scholars, to write this blog, focusing on his home city, Karachi, one of the world’s largest and most rapidly growing large cities.
Karachi is Pakistan’s largest city, with a population of about 17.5 million, of which 2.5 million are political, economic, or illegal migrants. Fifty percent of this population lives in informal settlements most of which were originally 80-120 square metre lots and a single storey in height.
Today, many of these settlements have become medium- to high-rise apartments of 25-40 square metres. Their density varies between 1,000 to 3,500 persons per hectare against an overall Karachi density of 240 persons per hectare. Each has a density of six to eight persons per apartment.
The original single-storey settlements house extended families of 12-15 persons with a shared toilet. In many other locations, male-only accommodation for day wage labourers houses 10-15 persons in the same room and up to 20 persons share a toilet. Almost all these settlements have piped water connections, but supply is erratic and they often have to dispense money for water from tankers to augment it.
Almost half the population works within the settlements, servicing residents’ day-to-day needs through informal private sectors including health, education and transport. There is also an informal industrial sector and lots of small businesses.
The rest of the population works in the city, in the formal industrial, financial, hospitality, transport, and street economy related sectors. Many men and women are domestic workers for better-off families. Most employees in these sectors work on contracts and as such there is little or no job security. A very large number of employees have already been laid off.
Virus prompts urban exodus
COVID-19 descended on Karachi’s vulnerable informal settlements in the last week of February. And in the first week of March the provincial government imposed a strict 15-day lockdown followed by another 15 days.
The announcement triggered a mass exodus of male migrants working as contract employees and day-wage labourers, back to rural areas, mostly to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan’s north-western region. But this wave was arrested as the provincial government sealed the provincial boundaries, offloading passengers from vehicles and confiscating the containers with people smuggled inside.
We do not know how many were infected by the virus during this mass movement, nor the number that managed to leave the city. Hence we do not know how many workers remain, and what this means for the functioning of the city.
The persons who are likely to have migrated are porters at the wholesale markets, waiters in hotels and restaurants, contract industrial labour, domestic workers, and caretakers of various residential and commercial premises and non-resident electricians and plumbers.
Along with the lockdown, the government aggressively promoted social distancing and hand washing. But social distancing cannot be practiced in informal settlement residences given their extraordinarily high densities, although in many public spaces it was made possible through bullying by the law enforcement agencies.
In the narrow lanes of the katchi abadis settlements, children played cricket, men played cards and women gossiped in groups. With large numbers unable to follow social distancing, the majority of those infected in District South of the city belong to katchi abadis and have been infected locally.
But in the middle-income and elite areas of the city, social distancing has been followed. Statistics suggest that here, transmission rates are considerably lower.
Communities self-organise to get rations to the most vulnerable
The lockdown’s impact on livelihoods of those living in informal settlements were quickly recognised and people donated generously. Ration parcels consisting of flour, rice, sugar, cooking oil, and tea were distributed to families of six to cover a period of 7-10 days.
But the process soon ran into trouble. Communities pointed out that many well-off households were also receiving rations. And when there were not enough packages to go round, those who did not receive them protested, sometimes in an ugly manner.
In response, many organisations discontinued distributing the packages and gave them instead to temples, churches, and mosques, from where people could pick them up. There were still some accusations of distribution based on preference, although fewer.
Where communities within informal settlement are well organised, they often have stronger links with civil society and government organisations and with political parties and can access relief in bulk more easily.
And it is interesting to note that these communities implemented the same formula for distribution: households with members who had permanent jobs were not given any rations; those that had successful businesses were given 50% of the ration; day wage labourer and those living in extreme poverty were given 100%.
No one complained about these transactions since the office bearers of the community and the elders trusted those distributing the packages and that they knew who was eligible.
Government provides grants, but prompts questions for the longer term
Meanwhile, the government provided a grant of Rs 42 billion to the seven million women who were listed in the state’s poverty alleviation programme and an additional 12 thousand rupees to a further 12 million families on the list. So far, it is not clear whether this will be followed by another payment next month.
The percentage for Karachi eligible for these programmes was very small and for the Rs 12,000 programme, people had to have some knowledge of information technology to be able to access these benefits online and also undergo biometric verification, which was not always easily available.
But civil society organisations cannot provide relief indefinitely. There are already signs of fatigue and a lack of resources. Government support to families has already cost 144 billion rupees. Will the state be able to continue providing this huge amount? There are serious sustainability issues here.
Towards urban equality, post-COVID: bolstering Karachi’s Union Council
Drawing from the above lessons, the Urban Resource Center (URC) Karachi has proposed that the Union Council (UC), which is the lowest rung of local government and which is usually ignored, should be developed and made proactive by higher levels of government. All relief could be distributed through it.
Its structure is well suited for this purpose. Each UC is divided into four wards, each represented by a counsellor and two counsellors for women affairs and one each for labour, youth, and minorities. In addition, there is a chair and a vice chair of the UC and a 16 grade officer of the local government is the secretary to the UC.
The UC already has lists of the residents of the UC and further details regarding skills and earnings are readily to hand.
The UC should not be limited to providing relief. Post-COVID-19, millions of Karachiites will be unemployed and thousands will lose their businesses. At that stage, a revitalised UC can, with the involvement of community institutions, launch a government-funded work programme to physically improve UC and establish sustainable health, education and IT related programmes which build on what exists.
It is estimated that such programmes for the first year will be able to fulfil the job requirements of the UC populations. The cost of an effective works programme should work out to Rs. 120 million.
The Urban Resource Center feels that, in the long run, a revitalised UC would be the best guarantee for building an environmentally friendly and equitable city. The virus offers us an opportunity, and we should grab it.
The next blog in the series will be by Selvi Manivanan Devandra, a community leader with Mahila Milan, the federation of women’s savings groups, and will focus on responding to COVID-19 in a high density low-income district in Mumbai.
Arif Hasan is an architect/planner in Karachi. He has been involved with the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) since 1981 and is the founding chair of Karachi's Urban Resource Centre (URC) and a member of the executive board of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights
Urban Matters
Informal settlements (slums)
Global urban change
The transition to a predominantly urban world
Exploring what social, political and environmental factors cause cities to thrive or decline
Series of blogs and interviews
Blogs integrating research and action for more inclusive and sustainable cities
Bridging the gap: how women-led federations are strengthening communities in Patna's informal settlements
City residents and urban refugees: from shared living to shared futures
Rubbish dump turned lush urban farm
Outside the large cities
The impact of COVID-19 on sustainable development. More in this collection
Q&A: Achieving housing rights for all: issues and recommendations
Call to international funders: address grassroots organisations’ priorities, not yours
Choosing a sustainable way out of the pandemic’s economic chaos
Getting housing back onto the development agenda in the time of COVID-19
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Frances Bean Cobain has secretly wed
The 23-year-old daughter of Courtney Love and the late Kurt Cobain reportedly tied the knot with Isaiah Silva.
Jane Walsh
Kurt and Francis Bean Cobain...and a kitten. Flickr
The 23-year-old daughter of Courtney Love and the late Kurt Cobain reportedly tied the knot with her partner of five years Isaiah Silva, with her mother only finding out after the pair had said 'I do'.
A source said: "Frances is totally loved up with Isaiah, but she's never been one to broadcast it to the world. She only invited a close circle of friends to the party, and then phoned her mum afterwards to tell her the good news."
And the 'Paradise City' hit maker is said to be "sad" she wasn't able to be there for her daughter's big day.
The insider added to the Daily Mirror newspaper: "Courtney and Frances have had a strained relationship over the years, but after tons of fall outs they actually get on quite well now.
"Courtney is sad she wasn't there but she totally understands that Frances is her own person and she's happy to let her do her own thing. Plus, Isaiah is a really nice guy."
Meanwhile, Frances recently opened up about the late Nirvana front man, admitting she was never really a fan of the band.
She said: "I would have felt more awkward if I'd been a fan. I was around 15 when I realized he was inescapable. Even if I was in a car and had the radio on, there's my dad. He's larger than life. Our culture is obsessed with dead musicians."
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MainAll NewsDefense/SecurityArabs Try to Burn Jerusalem Family Alive
Arabs Try to Burn Jerusalem Family Alive
Yom Kippur no respite from attacks for Jerusalem family as rioters target young children with firebombs.
Tags: Abu Tor Jerusalem Arab Attacks Firebomb Attacks Rock And Firebomb Attacks
Arutz Sheva , Sep 17 , 2013 1:15 AM
The Fairman family's demolished sukkah
Courtesy of the Fairman family
Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, nearly ended in tragedy for the Fairman family of Jerusalem. In the middle of the night, the family was targeted with firebombs in an attack that destroyed many of their children’s possessions, and nearly burned down the entire house.
The Fairman family lives in a predominantly Arab area of the mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood of Abu Tor in Jerusalem. While life is quiet just a five minute walk away, the Fairmans and the other Jewish families in their building have grown used to frequent attacks.
Bat-Ami Fairman was in the house with her two young sisters, ages 7 and 9, and her baby.
“The children had already gone to sleep. We were in our rooms when suddenly we heard that they were throwing rocks and metal at us from outside,” she told Arutz Sheva.
“We’re already used to it, so we didn’t get up,” she continued. “But when we heard a bottle explode, we realized we needed to run.”
Bat-Ami grabbed her sisters and baby and ran to her mother’s apartment nearby. One firebomb had missed its target, but a second one hit the family’s sukkah, a temporary hut built for the Sukkot holiday, and set it on fire.
“I heard the sound of little explosions as it burned… the flames were two meters high,” she recalled. A security guard tried to put out the fire, but with no success. Bat-Ami realized that the flames could reach the second floor and enter the rooms.
The family later saw that the first firebomb had been aimed at the living room window. Bat-Ami believes that the attackers saw her sister, who was clearly visible through the window, and were aiming for her.
By the time firefighters arrived, the flames had reached the entrance to the home. The firefighters were able to save the house, but were unable to save the children’s toys, which had been near the entrance. A wading pool, see-saw, and many other games were destroyed.
For children who are sometimes unable to leave their homes due to Arab attacks, the toys for at-home use are crucial, Bat-Ami explained. But the children still have their ideals to keep them going, she added, “The families that live here are families that teach the value of the land of Israel from age zero.”
The fire at the Fairman home was put out, and the family was allowed to return to the building. They found the rooms where the smell of burning was weakest, and went to sleep.
Bat-Ami Fairman said she believes police will eventually catch the attackers, because of the attack’s severity. She noted that when an Arab gang hurled cement blocks at Jews in the same area one week earlier, police managed to track down two of the attackers, and anticipate more arrests.
Jews in Abu Tor have been the target of firebomb attacks in the past. An attack in February nearly set an entire building on fire when a firebomb narrowly missed a gas pipe.
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Born in Montreal in 1987, Julian Stamboulieh is a lens-based media artist whose work explores themes of childhood, maturity and the imagination.
Following a BFA in Photography from Concordia University, Julian co-founded Beanduck Productions (beanduck.com), a video production company at which assumes the roles of director, editor and cinematographer. The company's main achievement is LARPs, a multi-award-winning web series now licensed by Geek & Sundry, a subsidiary of Legendary Pictures in LA.
His artistic practice also extends to performance whereby he began his acting career in 2002, and continues to train in both the theatre and in front of the camera.
He also enjoys speaking in the third person.
Contact
julian.stamboulieh@gmail.com
Montreal, QC, Canada |
julian.stamboulieh@gmail.com
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Live Jazz
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The group has been active since 2015 and in June of 2018 they released their debut album 'Sitting on a Cloud' featuring Ben-Or's compositions.
YOTAM BEN-OR IS A NYC-BASED ISRAELI-BELGIAN HARMONICA PLAYER AND COMPOSER. ONE OF THE MOST PROMINENT, UP AND COMING MUSICIANS ON HIS INSTRUMENT AND ON THE SCENE IN GENERAL.
Ben-Or was born and raised in Nataf, a small village in the Jerusalem area. He started playing the harmonica at the age of 11, taught by his uncle. After graduating high school, Ben-Or moved to Tel-Aviv to attend the collaborative program of the Tel-Aviv Conservatory and The New School for Jazz Studies (New York). During his studies, Ben-Or performed throughout Israel and shared the stage with Israel’s finest musicians, won the America-Israel Grant between 2014-2016, took the first prize in the Rostov International Jazz competition (Russia 2013) and recorded with his group “Jupiter” for the album “All Original – Best Young Israeli Jazz, presented by Avishai Cohen” (2013).
In August 2014, Ben-Or moved to NYC after winning a full scholarship to study at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he graduated in May 2016. In March 2015 he attended Betty Carter Jazz Ahead at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, directed by pianist Jason Moran. Since moving to NYC, Ben-Or has been performing with his group at the most prestigious venues in town such as: Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola (Jazz at Lincoln Center), Rockwood Music Hall, Cornelia Street Cafe, to name a few, and toured Europe and Israel. Besides his activity as a bandleader, Ben-Or is also a member of The TM Street Band, and participates as a sideman in various projects.
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In Israel, Hebrew as a Second Language Unlocks Opportunity
Students participate in JDC TEVET's Hebrew as a second language course (held virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic). For many Israeli Arabs, Hebrew language skills are empowering, unlocking new opportunities for employment and economic mobility.
By: Saeed Diabat - JDC-TEVET Program Manager
When I first started working for JDC in Israel, I didn’t talk about it a lot, but now someone in my village asks me just about every week: What’s it like to work there? What are they trying to achieve?
From that question, I find myself explaining all of JDC’s projects and how important they are, not just for the Arab community in Israel but also wider Israeli society. JDC in Israel works to ensure every group can fulfill its maximum potential.
I was born in the village of Tur’an, in the Galilee, and I lived there until I was 18, when I went to college to study engineering. I soon realized that wasn’t the right path for me, though. I wanted to work more directly with people and help my community, so I studied behavioral psychology. I was also always taken by the cultural diversity of Israel, and after graduation, I started a project for Israeli Arab university students, helping them find work in the Israeli job market.
Saeed Diabat began working for JDC’s cross-Israel network of Riyan Arab employment centers in 2017.
That’s how I found out about TEVET, the JDC-Israel initiative that works to make life better for unemployed and underemployed Israelis. At the beginning of 2017, I started working for JDC’s cross-Israel network of Riyan Arab employment centers as a knowledge management administrator. My job was to collect data from different areas to see what ideas might actually work to bring the Arab community in Israel and broader Israeli society together.
My community doesn’t necessarily adopt new trends or adapt to new approaches quickly, so we need this mediator in the shape of employment centers to bring opportunities and vocational training into the villages. The Riyan centers bring the Israeli job market directly into Arab villages and communities.
At the end of 2018, I heard about a new project from another TEVET program manager, an initiative designed to help Israeli Arab men and women improve their Hebrew language skills. The premise of “Hebrew As A Second Language” (HAASL) is that better language skills can empower people to find better jobs, improve their income level, and increase representation in sectors and fields of employment where the Arab community in Israel has been historically absent.
The Arab community in Israel learns Hebrew for almost 10 years, from third to twelfth grade, but it’s somehow not enough. Most of the time, Hebrew teachers in our schools are from our community, and we’ve found that to really learn a language you need to learn it from a native speaker. You also need to practice it, which there’s not always a chance to do in our villages. We find men and women 18 and older who know Hebrew but can’t really speak it. When they start using it in the workforce, they realize they’re not using it correctly and need more practice.
We quickly discovered that, when you work with adults, you can’t use the same formal educational methods used with children. You need new content and new approaches for adults, as well as teachers capable of handling men and women learning both new job skills and a new language. There are many programs for Hebrew language learners, like ulpan, for people who’ve made aliyah, but their content isn’t always suitable for the Arab community in Israel. You need to write content with names the learner can connect to. For example, books for ulpan that use Sandy, James, or Michael may make an Arab student feel a little weird, but when you see Fatima or Ahmed, you can connect. We also have to adjust the places described in the text, too. We can talk about Tel Aviv or Eilat or Rosh HaAyin and it might be fine, but if we’re open to talking about Nazareth, Rahat, or Sakhnin, it’s easier for one of our students.
HAASL students with their graduation certificates. Better Hebrew language skills can empower people to find better jobs, improve their income level, and increase representation in the workplace.
To have a language proficiency sufficient for the job market, you need to reach what we call the third level — at least 500 hours of classes, which could take six to eight months. It’s not easy, and most of the job seekers we meet in our program are still at the first level. When we began working on the program in 2018, we built a proficiency test that every client who arrived at a Riyan employment center could take. It was helpful to use Riyan’s established brand to build trust with our students, and testing for proficiency was innovative, because it allowed us to group our students into classes based on their existing Hebrew skills. In the past, we didn’t have that data.
We have students aged 18 to 65, and 90 percent of our students are women, with almost 60 percent of them below the age of 30. The main thing is that all of our students are looking to improve their quality of life. We meet three or four times a week for six hours a day. The goal is to help them realize what a workday looks like; as they’re improving their Hebrew skills, learning what a job will feel like is a parallel process.
It wasn’t easy to find our teachers. We needed native Hebrew speakers with a professional teaching background but also a familiarity with the Arab community in Israel and an expertise in the job market and its needs and trends. We soon realized we’d need to train our teachers, not from scratch, but in the nuances of the student population they’d be working with. We have about 30 teachers now, but we need more, especially in East Jerusalem.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, HAASL was in almost every Riyan center, with 20 classes of 20 students each. Once COVID-19 struck, our first instinct was to shut our classes down, since the employment centers were closed. Then we looked at the situation more closely and saw an opportunity. We had already been thinking about how to move our classes into a digital space, but it was a large project that required a lot of lead time. COVID-19 showed us we were on the right track.
So what were we supposed to do with the 20 classes already in progress? The full digital version of HAASL wouldn’t be ready until mid-2021. We decided to train our teachers on video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Teams. Initially, we faced some resistance, since our teachers were used to teaching in a classroom with a big whiteboard on the wall, and now we were asking them to do the same thing on a screen 5 percent that size. It was a challenge, but after we trained our professionals, we were glad to hear that they liked this new approach to teaching, with some of them even saying, “That’s it. I’ll continue this way even after the pandemic.”
Since COVID-19 struck, Saeed and his team have moved their HAASL classes online. Of the 20 in-person classes, 18 continued. Six months into COVID-19, more than 35 new classes have opened to teach HAASL remotely, with more already planned.
From 20 classes, 18 continued. Through this process, we discovered there’s still a big digital access gap within the Arab community in Israel. For one of our classes, the teacher noticed her students didn’t have computers at home. She looked on the Internet for used computers someone might be willing to donate. She reached out to a small community volunteer project offering to donate 15 computers, organized two volunteers to help with transportation, and brought them from Jerusalem to Shibli, a Bedouin village in northern Israel. It was a great success story, but things like that can only go so far. Two of our participating villages lacked Internet connectivity, and that’s an infrastructure program we can’t quickly find a solution for.
Through my work, I want to build a bridge between Israeli communities so we can build a shared, inclusive, and diverse job market in Israel.
Today, six months into COVID-19, more than 35 new classes have opened to teach HAASL remotely, with more planned for the coming months. Our teachers and students have both started to adjust to this new method of learning Hebrew. The new approach could help us reach even more students as long as we continue developing new teaching materials suitable for distance learning and train our professionals in how to teach remotely.
COVID-19 changed a lot of things for us. At first, we wanted our graduates to seek vocational training for in-demand sectors, like high-tech and finance, and also to pursue higher education that would help them secure better positions, like in management. But now everything’s changing, and we’re realizing that we’ll need to add a session about career planning in uncertain times. It’s still unclear exactly how the pandemic will change the job market.
What is clear is the need for HAASL. Our goal is to close the gap for the Arab community in Israel and build a better and more inclusive society. Breaking down stereotypes and finding ways for the various parts of Israeli society is something I truly believe in. When you can respect and honor someone different than you, you can see the potential and opportunities found in everyone around you.
Through my work, I want to build a bridge between Israeli communities so we can build a shared, inclusive, and diverse job market in Israel. What I’m doing now with HAASL is a continuing step to what I did with Riyan. With JDC’s support, the Arab community in Israel can obtain the skills needed to be proactive in seeking a new career, a better job, or a promotion. I’m proud that my work lets me help my community.
Saeed Diabat is a JDC-TEVET program manager.
Your ticket for the: In Israel, Hebrew as a Second Language Unlocks Opportunity
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Driven by developments in IT, third party capital and regulation, the law is just off the blocks at the start of a period of huge structural change. Because these drivers are so powerful, it’s hard to foresee, on a spectrum between ‘the end of lawyers’ and ‘business as usual’, where things will be in 10 to 15 years’ time but in my first blog on kempitlaw.com, I’m sticking my neck out to make a prediction or two.
Starting a law business is as good a time as any, meerkat-like, to take a look around. As anyone who has ever read a report about a legal industry awards dinner knows, the profession is intensely competitive. Looking out however, the macro picture of the UK legal services world is more startling. Here, the industry’s best kept secret is its biggest number: add up all the pieces, and the UK legal sector is worth around £30bn, or 2% of UK GDP.
Although law is a real success story of UK PLC – all that competition is the biggest spur to growth – interpretation of the figures depends on your perspective. They are either stonkingly large – £1 in every £50 of national income, employing 300,000 and equivalent to 20% of the country’s manufacturing base; or nowhere – the aggregate global revenue of the big 4 accounting practices was £70bn in 2013, and each of Deloitte and PwC, at a whisker shy of £20bn, wasn’t too far short of the total UK legal market, making accountancy and related services an even bigger success story.
What is clear is that IT, third party capital and regulatory change have started to redefine legal services at a rapidly increasing rate since the 2008 financial crisis. Law, the most conservative of the large professions, has traditionally been change resistant but it is now happening, fast. Yet looking ahead, it’s difficult enough to predict the first generation changes caused by any of these big drivers, let alone the second and third generation changes as they all interact with each other.
In my specialist area of IT, setting up again has put into sharp focus and clarity that the Cloud is a huge structural shift that’s just starting and will impact every law business: it may sound a bit fanciful, but you could say that IT is to legal services now what steam was to transport or textiles in the early 1800s. In 1997 setting up Kemp & Co – when a 144 MHz desktop was fast – launch and year 1 IT spend were £125k. This time round you can get everything you need for industrial strength, enhanced law firm IT and online legal information for £25k, 20% of the 1997 price. Not just law firm in a box, but law firm ‘as a service’, alongside software (SaaS) platform (PaaS) and infrastructure (IaaS) as a service.
So what do all these changes mean? Is it a total rethinking of the nature of legal services – ‘the end of lawyers’ in Prof Richard Susskind’s memorable phrase – or will the law’s traditional steadiness – the only business for which governments make the raw materials – prevail?
It’s worth looking back at how the UK profession has developed since the 20 partner rule was removed by the Companies Act 1967, the time when UK law firm growth really began. In 1970, there were 22,000 UK solicitors in private practice (see chart). This doubled to 46,000 in 1990, and then almost doubled again to 87,500 in 2013. 2012 was the first year that numbers came down – very slightly, and that’s been repeated again between 2012 and 2013. Correlating this increase with UK GDP growth (see chart), each private practice solicitor accounted for around £24m of GDP in the 1970s, £20m in the ’80s, £19m between 1990 and 2008 and £17m since the financial crisis. This might suggest that the UK has been over lawyered for the last 5 years, but it could as easily be due to increasing regulation and complexity in business – certainly, the rising cost of external legal services has significantly contributed to the tripling of in-house solicitor numbers, up from 5,000 in 2000 (8% of private practice) to 15,000 last year (17% of private practice).
But the scale of the forces reshaping the UK legal sector may well mean that this is one of those times where the past isn’t such a good guide to the future. Although the Law Society in its December 2012 market analysis[2] is looking ahead to 4.2% annual growth in the UK legal services market from 2015 – higher than the 3.7% average annual growth from 1970 to 2007 – there’s no doubt that by 2025 legal service will be delivered in a very different way from today. So, looking into the crystal ball, my bets are that specialisation, segmentation, globalisation and competition will increase, and that this will see:
at the volume end, large scale (possibly international) capital- and computer- intensive, commoditised, mass market providers dominating all the consumer areas like probate, domestic conveyancing and person injury, and most of debt recovery;
large scale commoditisation – service computerisation coupled with effective project management and QA (quality assurance) from lower cost bases – moving up the value chain in the business legal services market, squeezing the middle market and taking out chunks of even the largest projects;
the Cloud adding to the pressure, forcing the middle market to work even harder to innovate and become more efficient in order to justify the indirect platform costs (property, back office, etc.) that typically account for £1 in every £3 of UK law firm fee income;
UK corporate counsel numbers on a rising trend at between a quarter and a third of the total for UK private practice; and
at the top end, a smaller number of much larger global firms (although still small compared with the Big 4) competing for the premium work to provide the best service for, say, a buyer in Djakarta of a chemicals plant in Sao Paulo or a bank in Beijing buying a financial services business in Copenhagen.
richard.kemp@kempitlaw.com
[1] Sources:
Law Society Annual Statistics Reports – http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/representation/research-trends/annual-statistical-reports/;
Office for National Statistics – Long-term profile of GDP in the UK – http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/elmr/explaining-economic-statistics/long-term-profile-of-gdp-in-the-uk/sty-long-term-profile-of-gdp.html
[2] Law Society Market assessment report 2012/13 – http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/representation/research-trends/market-assessment-2012-13/
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Home - October expo to tackle productivity at the workplace
October expo to tackle productivity at the workplace
Sok Chan / Khmer Times Share:
The first National Career and Productivity Fair was held last year in Phnom Penh. KT/Chor Sokunthea
The government and manufacturer associations have urged firms and factories from all sectors of economic activity to join company efficiency competitions that will be held in October as part of a productivity fair in Phnom Penh.
The second National Career and Productivity Fair will be held on October 27-28 at Diamond Island Convention and Exhibition Center, and will feature competitions to determine the best employer or the company that most faithfully adheres to the management system known as ‘5S.’
According to a press release, the fair will be a place to network and share information on the job market and job openings.
Another focus of the expo will be to raise awareness regarding productivity, particularly in the garment industry, according to the statement, which was released by the Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training.
The event is expected to attract 30,000 visitors and about 130 participants, including representatives of companies, factories and training institutes from across the country.
“The fair will help increase productivity in the country,” said Andrew Tey, director of the Cambodian Garment Training Institute, the first-ever fashion and textile training institute in Cambodia.
“It will help the government draft a strategy to improve vocational training in the country.”
Mr Tey explained that productivity in the country varies from company to company, but that it is generally lower than neighbouring nations like Vietnam and Thailand.
To address the issue, the fair will feature a ‘5S system’ competition, he said.
The 5S system is a lean manufacturing tool that originated in Japan. It focuses on improving efficiency at the workplace and eliminating waste.
The 5S stands for the Japanese terms seiri (tidiness), seiton (orderliness), seiso (cleanliness), seiketsu (standarisation) and shitsuke (discipline).
Mr Tey said the competition is an initiative of GMAC to encourage more factories to adopt the system.
“The 5S system is helping factories run better. It creates a good working environment and helps in getting everything right the first time,” he said, adding that already more than half of GMAC members are using the system.
“It is a long term process related to the Japanese principle of ‘kaizen,’ or continuous improvement,” he explained.
To improve the way GMAC members are implementing the system, the association will hold a workshop on the 5S technique and the principle of ‘kaizen’ on August 18.
Tags: Economic, Expo, Factories, Ministry of Labor, Phnom Penh, productivity
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Most recently, another 15-year-old, Xavier Shell, was hit by gang-related gunfire in the home of friends he was visiting in the neighborhood in late March, police said. The bullet lodged near his heart and doctors told him it was too dangerous to have it removed.
The recent spurt of gang activity is not the first for the neighborhood. The lot where the new sports complex is slated to be built includes a memorial to 5-year-old Brittany Daniels, who was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in 1996 while she was playing on the sidewalk outside her house. She, too, was caught in the crossfire of a bloody gang war, Knoxville police said at the time.
KCDC officials said last month that the idea for the park came from Dobson's mother, Zenobia Dobson.
“He made the ultimate sacrifice, and he leaves a powerful legacy of hope for kids in this neighborhood and everywhere,” she said at the time. “The playground is really about raising awareness for kids and gun violence and the need to have a safe haven for all the children in the neighborhood. It’s just need a safe place for them to go and play and be kids."
KCDC, Gerdau and the city have donated $35,000 for the park and Recreational Concepts all but gave the equipment to the city and are installing it basically for free, KCDC officials said. Additional donations were made online through the Legacy Park Foundation at legacyparks.org.
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Otricoli & Umbria
We spent two days visiting friends living in the small medieval town of Otricoli and touring Umbria.
View from the village of Otricoli in Umbria. From WIKIPEDIA: Otricoli is a town and comune in the province of Terni, Umbria, Italy. It is located on the Via Flaminia, near the east bank of the Tiber, 44 miles north of Rome and 12 miles south of Narni. ... Anciently named Ocriculum, the Umbrian city concluded an alliance with Rome in 308 BC. The modern village lies on the site of the ancient town about two km north of the Roman relocation, which was moved down from the defensible position, probably at the end of the Republican era, in order to be closer to the curve of the Tiber and the Via Flaminia, which crossed the river here to enter Umbria. Its river port was the "oil port", signalling the olive culture that supported its economy.
A walking tour of Otricoli.
The roofs of Otricoli.
Down the hill from the village of Otricoli is the Roman city, long abandoned.
A Roman amphitheater in the ancient town of Otricoli.
A street in the village of Narni. From WIKIPEDIA: Narni (in Latin, Narnia) is an ancient hilltown and comune of Umbria, in central Italy, with about 20,000 inhabitants. At an altitude of 240 m (787 ft), it overhangs a narrow gorge of the Nera River in the province of Terni. It is very close to the geographic center of Italy.
Narni.
Inside a very old church in Narni.
The main square in Narni.
A very old window is home for a pigeon.
A busy central square in Narni.
A street in Narni.
One of several fountains in Narni.
A lovely door to someone's home in Narni.
Bolsena Lake and the town of Marta. From WIKIPEDIA: Lake Bolsena (Italian: Lago di Bolsena) is a crater lake of central Italy, of volcanic origin, which was formed starting 370,000 years ago following the collapse of a caldera of the Vulsini volcanic complex into a deep aquifer. Roman historic records indicate activity of the Vulsini volcano occurred as recently as 104 BC, since when it has been dormant. The two islands in the southern part of the lake were formed by underwater eruptions following the initial collapse of the caldera.
A lakeside home in the town of Marta on Lake Bolsena.
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What are you looking for Book "The Penguin State Of The World Atlas" ? Click "Read Now PDF" / "Download", Get it for FREE, Register 100% Easily. You can read all your books for as long as a month for FREE and will get the latest Books Notifications. SIGN UP NOW!
The Penguin State Of The World Atlas
Presents a world atlas that iIllustrates key indicators affecting international politics, economics, and society using maps and graphics.
Author : Dan Smith
Publisher : Penguin Paperbacks
A guide to the geographic and regional factors relating to world politics uses maps to illustrate modern economic networks and worldwide patterns of government and society.
Genre : Reference
Publisher : Penguin Group USA
ISBN-13 : UCSC:32106016140375
The State Of The World Atlas
Over 50 full-colour world maps and graphics break down hardcore statistics to provide a compelling analysis of all the political, social, economic and ecological nightmares that keep us awake at night. The world's car population has grown five times as fast as the human population over the last 50 years. Wal-Mart's sales revenue exceeds the GDP of 150 countries. Climate change may put 2.7 billion at risk of armed conflict. Germany generates more tourists than anywhere else. Americans use 160 times more water than people in Rwanda. If you want to get behind the headlines and understand the world - from urbanization to globalization, terrorism to tourism, military spending to human rights - The State of the World Atlas is unmatched.
Genre : Social Science
A guide to the geographic and regional factors relating to world politics uses maps to illustrate modern economic networks and worldwide patterns of government and society
The New State Of The World Atlas
Combining colorful maps, graphs, and text, this revised volume provides an updated view of the state of the world. It incorporates previously unavailable data on the changing political and economic scenario. The maps cover topics such as population, natural resources, military power, government, business, labor, society, and environment. By including maps with titles such as "Shares in the Apocalypse" (nuclear weapons), "Exploration" (wages and salaries), "Crumbs from the Cake" (social security), and "Scourges of the State" (political forces and the death penalty), the volume demonstrates its political view points. Other topics include: the emerging role of China, and new information on gold trading, food, and women's rights. The volume has also been translated into 13 languages. ISBN 0-671-64554-4: $22.95; ISBN 0-671-64555-2 (pbk.): $12.05 (For use only in the library).
Genre : Atlases
Author : Michael Kidron
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13 : UOM:39015026957228
The State Of The Middle East Atlas
The author of the best-selling State of the World Atlas builds a unique contemporary understanding of the factors and forces at play by homing in on the key events, themes, resources and relationships. Blending the creative use of maps and graphics with incisive text and the most-up-to-date statistics, this Atlas explains the background to current events in the Middle East.
Publisher : New Internationalist
The Penguin State Of The Middle East Atlas
From the author of The Penguin State of the World Atlas, an essential tool for understanding the modern Middle East The Middle East is in a constant state of change, and understanding it has never been more important. In this essential guide to the region and its politics, Dan Smith unravels the history of the Middle East from the Ottoman Empire to the present day. With the acute and fair-minded analysis readers have come to expect from him, Smith highlights key issues and maps their global implications to explain why the Middle East has become, and will remain, the focal point of foreign policy. There can be no one-line summary of the Middle East, but in The Penguin State of the Middle East Atlas, Smith gives readers the primer they need to understand the ongoing conflicts in the region.
Publisher : Penguin Books
Human Geography Of The Uk
`Using up-to-date data, modern cartographic methods, and an approach that addresses students' everyday lives, Danny Dorling has produced an engaging introduction to the contemporary geography of the UK. It will be the focus of many lively discussions of patterns and trends’ - Ron Johnston, School of Geography, University of Bristol Using statistics from many sources in an engaging and accessible way, Human Geography of the UK is written from the perspective of a beginning undergraduate, it's objective is to define the key elements of population geography and show how they fit together. Highly visual – with maps and figures on every page – the text uses different data to describe the social landscape of the United Kingdom. Organized in ten short thematic chapters, explaining the nuts and bolts of population, including: birth, inequality; education; mobility; work; and mortality. The book concludes with a comparative analysis of UK in global context. Human Geography of the UK features practical exercises, and clear summaries in tables and specially drawn maps.
Genre : Science
Author : Danny Dorling
Publisher : SAGE
The Women S Atlas
The most up-to-date global perspective on how women are living today across continents and cultures In this completely revised and updated fifth edition of her groundbreaking atlas, Joni Seager provides comprehensive and accessible analysis of up-to-the-minute global data on the key issues facing women today: equality, motherhood, feminism, the culture of beauty, women at work, women in the global economy, changing households, domestic violence, lesbian rights, women in government, and more. The result is an invaluable resource on the status of women around the world today.
Author : Joni Seager
The Penguin Historical Atlas Of The Medieval World
Full-color maps, photographs, and illustrations enhance a detailed study of the peoples, cultures, social institutions, and religious faiths of the medieval world, ranging from the fourth-century barbarian invasions to the early voyages of discovery to the New World in the sixteenth, chronicling such key events as the fall of Rome, the birth of Islam, the spread of Christianity, and more. Original.
Author : Andrew Jotischky
Publisher : Penguin Classics
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Bill Hybels: What Bono Taught Me About Fighting Poverty
|In Blog, On Movies & Media
At U.S. News and World Report, Bill Hybels is talking about Bono.
Hybels is the founder of Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago, the fourth largest congregation in the country. He says:
Nearly two weeks ago, I stood before 7,000 people—and an additional 60,000 connected via satellite feed—who gathered for the Willow Creek Association’s annual two-day conference the Global Leadership Summit to hear from diverse faculty on the subject of how to get better at leading whatever it is that we lead. Part of the assortment this year included Bono, who agreed to a follow-up discussion to our 2006 interview, during which he called out the local church for being inexcusably late to the game of fighting extreme poverty and treatable disease.
The evangelical church has taken a lot of justifiable heat in recent years for being vocal about the things we hate while staying silent about some of the most pressing needs in our world. There are times when I believe the church should be the conscience of our culture, but to Bono’s point, a reframing must occur, one where the divisiveness that once defined us as people of faith gets edged out by a unity around great societal causes. And what has to unite us in this day and age is the fight against poverty and disease. Faith leaders the world over expected this day would come. What we didn’t expect was that it would take an Irish rock star to demand the dawn.
As leaders, there are so many things we must get better at: casting vision, building teams, solving problems, enforcing values, and building the next generation of leaders. But if we excel in those areas and still neglect to use our leadership octane to address God’s clear mandate to serve the poor, what have we really gained?
Jeffrey, are you familiar with Dambisa Moyo? She’s a highly educated Zambian author who argues in her new book “Dead Aid” that the majority of aid to Africa, including the “glamour aid” by celebrities, has not only not done any good to the continent, but done *significant* harm. While not necessarily questioning their intentions, she has some pretty stern words for Bono and other celebrities’ aid efforts in Africa. Here’s a very compelling interview with her:
http://bit.ly/63F3a (parts 2-5 on main page)
Chris Overholt
About time someone calls the church out. It made me so sick that I left the organized church. I think that the church should also be uniting not only against poverty and treatable diseases, but against the root of them – oppression – which we as a country in the USA have been supporters by not speaking out against it. I think that the church has lost its way and has been usurped by politics and is too closely aligned with the Republican party – not that they should be aligned with the Democratic party. Just that they should be aligned and united with speaking out against any state sponsored oppression and aligned with doing what they can to fight disease and poverty. What a great social change agent they could be and by doing so truly living their lives the way Christ meant them to be lived.
Dawn-Treading Where They Shouldn't?
I know what'll be playing in my home this Christmas.
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Στούντιο & Διαμερίσματα
Βίλλα Νίκη
Λουτρό
Στούντιο & Διαμερίσματα Villa Niki © 2021
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Anthony R Wells
Anthony R Wells - Author
Anthony Wells received a Master's and Doctoral degrees from the University of London, his Bachelor's and a Master's degree from the University of Durham, and was trained at the Royal Naval College Dartmouth, the School of Maritime Operations, and by the Honourable Alastair Buchan at Trinity College, Oxford. He was trained in the 1960s by the most distinguished exponents of deception and other clandestine operations from the World War Two period. He was the youngest Senior Lecturer and Tutor in uniform as a newly promoted Lieutenant Commander at the Royal Naval College Greenwich 1972-1974. While in the Royal Navy he served in Washington and at sea with the US Navy. After becoming a US citizen he has worked at sea in USS Coronado and USS Florida. Dr. Wells has led programs in the US National Intelligence Community and has led programs to mitigate the worst effects of terrorist attacks on personnel and infrastructure, political systems, and communities. In conjunction with other companies Dr. Wells has led the way in the development of key C4ISRT systems and technologies and their applications to countering the worst effects of terrorism, other forms of irregular warfare and non-state-sponsored insurgency and revolt. Dr. Wells is a foremost expert in the science and art of modern Information and Deception Operations, in both the offensive and defensive modes. He currently workswith a US-UK group on the leading edge of cyber related systems and operations. He is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King'sCollege, London, specializing in intelligence.
Featured books by Anthony R Wells
Between Five Eyes
Author: Anthony R Wells Format: Hardback Release Date: 28/10/2020
Detailed, interesting, and offering a personal insight into The Five Eyes intelligence community from the only man to have worked for both US and UK intelligence organisations while a citizen of each country. The Five Eyes alliance, comprising of the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, formed after the Second World War. Anthony R Wells believes that the intelligence institutions covered in this book have saved the free world. He says: “This book does not profess at all to be all-seeing and all-knowing”, he hopes that readers can: “make their own observations, draw their own conclusions, and come away with informed, educated, and non-biased and most certainly non-politicised views on intelligence in the modern era”. We read about the author’s experiences in chronological order over 50 years, covering a variety of threats, new opportunities, and technological advancements. It is quite clear that there is still much that we, the public, don’t know and shouldn’t know. Having said that, Between Five Eyes is an absolutely fascinating read for anyone interested in the intelligence community and wider world.
Author: Anthony R Wells Format: Ebook Release Date: 30/09/2020
If this is your author page then you can share your Facebook updates with your readers right here on LoveReading
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When a custody setup no longer serves a child’s best interests
On behalf of The Law Office of Lauren S. Cohen, LLC | Nov 12, 2014 | Child Custody |
Child custody arrangements are supposed to be based on what is in a child’s best interests. Thus, one could imagine how deeply troubling it would be for a parent, after a child custody arrangement has been put in place, to make a discovery that indicates that the previously reached child custody arrangement might actually now be harmful to their child’s well-being.
Such discoveries could include things such as noticing signs that there are significant troubles at the other parent’s home or signs that the other parent may be acting in a neglectful or abusive manner towards the child. When a parent makes such a discovery, one of the first questions they will likely have is: what can I do to protect my child’s well-being?
One option parents in such a situation may have is to request a child custody modification. Courts here in New York are allowed to modify previously reached child custody arrangements under certain circumstances.
Our firm understands how scary it can be for a parent when concerns arise regarding their children’s well-being under a current child custody arrangement, and thus how important it is for such parents to get caring and knowledgeable guidance when they are considering whether to pursue a child custody modification in relation to such concerns. We can help parents who have such concerns look into the possibility of pursuing such a modification and guide parents who decide to pursue such a modification through the various procedures of requesting a change to a child custody arrangement.
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Blogs tagged with money laundering
anti-corruption (1)
Read more at: Progress in Global Anti-Corruption Efforts? Not So Fast - Professor Jason Sharman
Progress in Global Anti-Corruption Efforts? Not So Fast - Professor Jason Sharman
Jason Sharman is the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999, and his undergraduate degree in history and politics from the University of Western Australia. Previously, Jason worked at American University in Bulgaria, the University of Sydney and Griffith University, and he has spent shorter periods as a visitor at St Petersburg State University, Columbia University and the London School of Economics. Jason’s research interests range from the study of international corruption, money laundering and tax havens, to the global politics of the early modern world.
Progress in Global Anti-Corruption Efforts? Not So Fast is written by Jason Sharman, University of Cambridge; Daniel L Nielson, Brigham Young University and Michael G Findley, University of Texas at Austin
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COVID-19 Policies and Restrictions
Arts Community
About The Bed and Breakfast
The Mannex, residence for male colonists
We believe the house was originally built in the early 1870s. In 1910, the home, described at the time as “an old two-family house by the Nubanusit River”, was purchased by Marian and Edward MacDowell to be used as housing for the first male artists accepted to the world famous MacDowell Colony (the oldest artist colony in the United States, incorporated in 1907).
Referred to as The Mannex, the accommodations were a bit more rustic in those days as the earliest male colonists remarked about the lack of running water and the need to bathe in the river, but by 1913 the Colony's annual report indicated that electricity, running water and open fireplaces were all available.
It is believed that Thornton Wilder stayed here during some of his nine summer stays at the Colony starting in 1924. Other visits to the Colony by Thornton Wilder included one in June 1937 when it is believed that he was working on his now classic American play "Our Town" (set in the fictional town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, which was modeled in part after Peterborough and other towns in the Monadnock region).
Beginning in the 1930s, the house, along with two nearby properties (The Rosery, seen in the background of the above photo, and The Lower House, just up the road), was operated as the MacDowell Colony Inn and welcomed travelers to Peterborough and the Monadnock region. The Inn was in operation until the 1940s when the start of World War II significantly slowed the tourism business in the area.
Original MacDowell Colony Inn Sign
From the 1950s to the early 2000s the house was used as a single and multi-family residence and the second building on the property, now referred to as The Carriage House, was home to various businesses. Chance visits from previous owners have provided clues as to some of the ages of various features in the home, but we are still working on putting all of the pieces together.
In the Fall of 2005, Paula and Rob Fox purchased the home with the intention of converting it into a Bed and Breakfast. At the time of their purchase, they were unfamiliar with the home's history. They were very pleasantly surprised to discover the history of the home and learn it had hosted guests in the past. Major renovations filled all of 2006 and some of 2007, but the Fox's hosted their first guests at Little River Bed and Breakfast in the Spring of 2007.
About Our Name
Little River Bed & Breakfast is scenically situated along the Nubanusit River, a fourteen mile long tributary of the Contoocook River. In another bit of fate, we selected our name to highlight that which attracted us to the property, the river. Later, we discovered that the origin of the word “nubanusit” is Native American (local Abenaki tribe) and has been translated to mean “small waters”.
About The Innkeepers
Gary and Patty
We started our journey to B&B ownership in 2007. We went on our first vacation together to Prince Edward Island where we stayed at a beautiful B&B on a red clay cliff overlooking an expanse of the blue waters of the Atlantic. At that point, we fell in love with the B&B experience. Three months later, we stayed at a B&B in New Hampshire where we fell in love with each other.
Throughout the years, we would choose B&B's when we traveled. Each time, we would dream of owning one ourselves.
Unfortunately, the reality was that we both had careers and needed to raise our children. Gary is a construction supervisor who oversees infrastructure projects for towns in Massachusetts. Patty was a mental health counselor specializing in addiction and recovery.
Finally in September of 2018, we became empty nesters and were able to pursue our dreams. We searched from Florida to Maine for the right place. When we saw Little River, we knew it was the perfect fit. We loved the inn and the town. And for a bit of fate - Patty's last name and Peterborough are different languages that both mean “town of rock”.
Patty retired from a 30 year career of helping others to be a full time innkeeper. Gary continues his full-time job in Massachusetts and helps out on evenings and weekends.
We are so grateful to the former owners - Paula and Rob - for creating such an amazing property and allowing us to take over. We appreciate their patience and generosity in helping us through our transition. We hope to continue their tradition of excellence and hospitality.
The Former Innkeepers
Rob and Paula
Like many, our dream of owning and operating a B&B began with our own wonderful experiences as guests. Our first B&B stay was in the mid-1990s at The Village Country Inn in Manchester Village, Vermont. We had traveled there to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a ski trip. We had a wonderful time and on our way out the door, we stopped in the gift shop to browse. Featured among their other items was a book, “The Best Places to Kiss in New England” by Pamela P. Hegarty. We purchased the book and read it on the way home. (Well actually, Rob drove and Paula read out-loud.) In a sort of game, we’d pick various states and towns we knew or had heard of and looked for the listings that had “4-kiss” ratings, the best. We spent the next several years visiting many of the locations we read about. The unique rooms, gracious hosts, and delicious breakfasts all made the best of impressions on us and we knew deep in our hearts that owning our own B&B someday would be the perfect way to combine our diverse skills and interests. Over time, our dream of being innkeepers began to take shape, but careers kept us firmly planted in the “here and now” and we relegated our dream for “some day”.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, our “here and now” included moves from the Northeast (Rob from Long Island, New York; Paula from central Connecticut) to northeast Ohio and careers (Rob in his family’s commercial door hardware business; Paula as a chemist - first as a product development chemist in industry, later as an adjunct college professor). Eventually however, our careers brought us to the point where we both were interested in making a significant change. After considering a few other options, we decided “why not now?” and started what turned out to be a fairly lengthy search for a B&B in the Northeast. We were looking for something that was just right for us. It had to be the right community and the right property. Our search took us to many well-known and popular New England destinations including Cape Cod, Newport, Rhode Island, and coastal Maine. Eventually we turned inland, and when we came to Peterborough, New Hampshire, we found our “home”. We still had to find the right property though!
In the summer of 2005, we found that B&B, although it was just a large single-family home at the time. In the spring of 2006, we began our renovations, and in early 2007 we hosted our first guests. Our “some day” had arrived.
Rob’s accounting degree from Bryant University in Rhode Island, his experience in his family’s business, and his interest in computers have served us well as Rob tends to most of our business needs. Paula on the other hand focuses on many of the domestic and culinary details. She has made an easy transition from the chemistry lab to the kitchen and frequently uses her analytical skills as she perfects her recipes for granola, muffins, and other breakfast offerings.
We enjoy hiking, biking, kayaking, geocaching, traveling, good food (especially ice cream) and good company, and we have been lucky to find all of these in Peterborough and New Hampshire in general. We also love to travel, both locally and further afar, and as time permits we have been on a mission to discover all the special places to visit in New Hampshire and New England. In addition, Rob is a huge sports fan (primarily football and hockey) and Paula loves crafts of all types. Her weaknesses are paper, namely scrapbooking and stamping, and glass, mostly stained glass and beads, but it could be said that she has never met a craft she didn’t like.
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Email: littlerivernh@gmail.com
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Event Driven Advisory
Strategic Portfolio Management
Strategy and Sustainability
Consumer, Health and Wellness
Management Consulting At Charles River Associates
© 2021 Marakon
Marina Belezina
Director, Financial Services
Christine Delivanis
Director, Consumer, Health & Wellness
Alex Formstone
Johann Franke
Neal Kissel
Mason Kissell
Reto Kohler
Ron Langford
Andrew Macpherson
Lauren Yarbrough
Yassir Ahmed
Quan Li
Roland Foxcroft
Keith Matthew
Happy Liu
Charlie Johnson
Associate Principal
Arushi Chopra
Yassir Ahmed is an experienced manager in Marakon’s European Oil and Gas Practice.
Yassir has advised senior executives on a range of strategy and organisational issues across the petroleum value-chains in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East.
He has also provided specific functional expertise to engagements with clients in the Chemicals, Defence, and Consumer Goods sectors.
MEng, Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London
Marina is a Director in Marakon’s Financial Services practice. She has nearly 15 years experience working with senior executives of leading banks and insurers in the UK, Europe and North America.
Marina’s area of expertise spans retail banking, business banking, commercial and wholesale banking and private clients and insurance. She has also served clients in the consumer goods and industrial sectors.
She has advised clients on a wide range of issues including:portfolio management, capital management, customer proposition and operating model design and implementation, growth and profitability improvement, organisational design and change management and transaction advisory and support.
Her past clients include Bank of Ireland, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, Santander, KBC, ABN AMRO, AIG, Prudential and Aegon among others.
Portfolio management and resource allocation
Organizational design
Strategy to execution support
Banking, Insurance, Wealth
MBA with distinction, London Business School
M.S., Mathematics and Economics (magna cum laude), Kemerovo State University, Russia
Brian Burwell
Brian Burwell has recently transitioned to a senior advisor role at Marakon. In concert with this change in role, I, along with the global partner team, want to take this opportunity to recognize and celebrate Brian’s truly exceptional and impactful career at Marakon.
There are few people who devote 37 years of their career to one company. Brian joined Marakon as a Stanford MBA in August 1979, just one year after the firm was founded. Over the course of his career, he served as both CEO and COO of the firm, and has worked out of offices in San Francisco, London, New York, and Melbourne.
Brian’s work has spanned sectors including healthcare, consumer products, retail, hospitality, entertainment, and education. He has been critical to the success of many of Marakon’s biggest and most important flagship clients over three decades including: Diageo, Roche, Cadburys, Boots, IHG, Heineken and Prudential. Brian can truly say he spent his career advising the CEOs of some of the world’s most admired companies.
On the firm front, Brian has always been passionate about our people and people development. ~10 years ago, Brian set an ambition to have a partner team with more gender diversity, and set the groundwork for a talent model that would support that ambition. Perhaps one of his greatest legacies is the partner team he is leaving behind; one that is comprised of 35% women.
As he embarks on his next chapter, Brian is continuing to pursue his passion for philanthropic consulting as a partner at Bridgespan, and as a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council at UC Davis. He will remain a senior advisor to Marakon, supporting us where his experience, expertise and relationships can be helpful.
Brian is also very much looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren, traveling with his wife Bieke, and drinking more Brunello (which as he describes, can be paired with anything or can stand on its own).
Please join me in giving our deepest appreciation and thanks to Brian for all he has done for Marakon over the past 37 years.
Mason Kissell and the Partner team
Productivity and cost management
Consumer products, Retail, Healthcare
MBA, Stanford University
Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from University of California, Davis
Building the Organizational Capabilities to Achieve Sustainable Organic Growth
Achieving sustainable and profitable organic growth requires more than new ideas, innovation, and strong execution. Rather, organic growth exemplars embed a set of institutional capabilities and a growth culture that define the organization and that are key enablers to realizing advantaged performance.
Christine Delivanis has been a consultant and senior advisor for over 15 years, with a focus on the Consumer Goods industry and a geographic reach that has spanned Europe, Asia, Latin America, the US, Africa, and Australia.
She has served senior executives in the food, beverage, alcohol, and tobacco sectors, on topics including strategic transformation, organic growth, productivity improvement, pricing and revenue management, new business models, and brand development / premiumisation.
Christine is a recognised authority on helping low margin manufacturing businesses in the food sector drive performance improvement and value creation. She has authored and published numerous articles on this topic in leading industry publications, including Food Manufacture and the Grocer.
Prior to joining Marakon, Christine was a Partner at the Monitor Group’s London office.
Productivity improvement
Brand growth / premiumisation
Consumer analytics and segmentation
Food, beverage, retail
M.S., International Economics, Georgetown University
B.A. Economics (Magna Cum Laude), Williams College
Beyond ESG: Building more confidence and assurance in corporate sustainability practices
Sustainability and ESG are the buzzwords of the day, and indeed much progress has been made to bring transparency and focus onto these issues in the business world. As capability and sophistication in this space evolve, many companies and investors are understanding the need to move beyond using relatively simple, sometimes self-reported ESG scores to build more confidence and assurance in corporate sustainability strategies and policies. Charles River Associates, via Marakon and its Investigations practice provides an effective supporting capability that enables corporates and investors to do just that.
A total capital approach for developing a sustainability agenda
The gap between what markets value and what society values is closing. Financial markets and investors are increasingly focused on the fact that risks and opportunities linked to sustainability are tangible and can have a significant impact on business performance. By better understanding the relationship between stakeholder and shareholder value in the context of what a company does, leaders can shape more robust sustainability agendas. Once these agendas are progressed via an appropriate approach for institutional change, the company is then well on the path of simultaneous growth of both shareholder and stakeholder value.
Patrick Foley
Strategic Resource Management - The Hidden Secret to Outperformance
Solid operational performance matters; if your team can’t reliably execute you’re finished. However, our comprehensive study of 1,200 companies revealed that the path to superior performance is determined by management’s decisions about where to focus the firm’s strategic resources (time, people and capital). At least 60–75% of the difference in performance can be attributed to high-level portfolio choices. The implications for senior management are stark and the report outlines the common challenges they face and six actions they can take to help ensure outperformance is within their grasp.
Making the Transition to CEO: A Strategy for Personal Success
Many new CEOs fail to appreciate that success requires a different strategy than what worked before. Most of the CEOs who found the transition difficult, fell into the trap of believing the job was simply a bigger version of their current role. It is not.
Alex has over 10 years of experience in strategic resource management working with senior executives across the UK, Europe and North America.
The main sectors Alex focuses on are consumer packaged goods and financial services. He has worked with clients on a broad range of topics including defining their enterprise strategy, portfolio management and reshaping, consumer-centric organic growth strategies, large scale M&A and transaction support.
Some of his more recent work included building alignment on the strategic direction for a global health and wellness company, translating it into a set of actionable growth drivers and working with country units to realign resources with opportunities for profitable growth.
D. Phil Molecular and Microbiology, University of Oxford
Masters of Biochemistry, University of Oxford
In search of alpha: Unlocking value growth in CPG
Despite pressures on recent performance, market expectations for the consumer and packaged goods (CPG) industry are high. Growth has been trending up and margins are expected to continue to improve. Taken together the rate of profit growth in the next three years is forecast to be three times what was delivered in the last five. The challenge for CPG companies is how to meet and exceed the high expectations imbedded in their valuations, given the considerable headwinds.
Johann Franke has over 10 years of experience in strategy and organization advisory across Europe, Asia and North America.
The main sectors Johann focuses on are life & health insurance and oil & gas, but he has also served senior executives in industrials and petrochemicals. He has helped clients set the forward strategy for their businesses, shape corporate portfolios and develop their organisations to enable sustainable long term growth.
Johann’s recent work has included setting the long term strategic direction and investment programme for a integrated downstream and petrochemicals business in South Asia, designing a growth orientated
operating model for a mid-sized E&P company in Europe, and determining the future participation model for a global health insurance and healthcare company headquartered in the EU.
Risk and Capital Management
PhD in Management, London Business School
Dipl.-Kfm. (Univ.), Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany
Neal is a Managing Director at Marakon and leads the firm’s operations in the UK and Europe.
For over 20 years, Neal has been advising chief executives and board-level management in developed and emerging markets on strategic, operating and organizational changes needed to deliver superior shareholder returns. He has a particular interest in portfolio shaping and design through organic and inorganic means.
Neal is a recognized authority on improving corporate performance both in the customer and capital markets and has extensive experience in financial services, energy, and health care. His recent work has focused on developing and implementing new growth platforms in the accumulation rollover and de-commutation phases of the retirement markets.
In addition to his client work, Neal has been a guest lecturer at LBS, authored many articles and contributed to the FT and Sunday times on topics of management.
Prior to joining Marakon, Neal worked as an attorney and spent several years as a professional free-style skier in Aspen Co.
CEO advisory
Portfolio shape and design
Organisational effectiveness and design
Insurance, Banking, Upstream, Downstream
J.D., Stanford Law School
B.Ph., Miami University in Ohio (Summa
Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa)
Australian Graduate School of Management,
Rotary Fellow
Utilities Are Not Immune This Time
In this white paper, Marakon and CRA colleagues Quan Li, Neal Kissel, and Jim McMahon analyze the intense pressure on affordability, uncertainty in utility rate base growth, the heightened scrutiny on investments, and pressure on regulated ROEs in the current environment. Most of these issues were at play to some degree before the current economic downturn. The COVID-19 crisis has brought them to the fore at an accelerated pace. Consequently, there are deep strategic implications that all utility CEOs need to consider to better weather the storm in the current crisis, be better prepared for the next crisis, and increase the odds of creating long-term business resilience.
People, Planet, Profit
Here are our top five ideas for helping CEOs drive more joined up thinking between people, planet and profits to positively impact more of all three, more of the time.
Mason Kissell is a Managing Director and leader of Marakon globally.
In his 30 years of experience, Mason has worked with leadership teams to transform company performance through changes to portfolio and business strategies and organisational design – talent, management process, structure, and goals / measures / rewards.
Mason’s work has focused on B2B2C companies with extensive experience in OTC Medicines, Health & Wellness, Infant Nutrition, Personal & Small business P&C insurance, Wealth Management and Retail Banking.
Retail banking, Insurance
MBA, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration
BA, English & History (Dean’s list) - Denison University
The long tail of consumer packaged goods: Are you a stubborn persister or disciplined adapter?
The COVID crisis makes the challenges of CPG companies even harder with price-sensitive consumers trading down, customer demands for higher trade, and consumer shifts to lower margin e-commerce. These are but a few from a long list of structural challenges to growth and profitability. The crisis presents an opportunity for CPG companies to restructure portfolios where they have been reticent to do so.
Reto J Kohler joined Marakon in January 2017 as a Director with close to 20 years of experience in Strategy Consulting and Banking.
Reto joined after a sabbatical which he used to fulfill long-held ambitions such as working as a ski instructor in Colorado. Prior to that, Reto was a senior Managing Director and Global Head of Strategy & Change at Barclays Investment Bank, based in New York. In this role, Reto and his team were advising senior management and the Board throughout the major developments at Barclays and in the wider investment banking industry since 2004.
Before his relocation to New York from London in 2007, Reto acted as the interim Head of Barclays Group Strategy in 2006 and held the role of COO for IBD EMEA at Barclays Capital during 2005. He joined the Barclays Capital Strategy team in London in spring 2004 after 6 years with the Boston Consulting Group in Zurich and London where he focused mainly on Financial Services with some experiences in Pharma and the Used Car Market.
He has lived and worked in several European countries and the US
Product, customer and regional strategies
Regulatory strategy and change implementation
Strategic due diligence and post-merger integration
Organic Chemistry Degree, Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich
PhD in Biophysical Chemistry, Imperial College, London
Ron has advised senior executives on issues ranging from corporate and business unit growth strategies to organization design and leadership. His expertise spans an array of industries, including financial services, energy, chemicals, consumer products, telecommunications and technology.
Ron joined Marakon in 1980 and later relocated to the East Coast to help establish the firm’s presence in the region. In 2000, he joined the London office, where he oversaw global practice development and partner management. He has authored a number of articles on senior management issues, including how to fuel profitable growth through improved customer insight and investment, how to make M&A more consistently profitable and how to better link pay with performance.
Prior to joining Marakon, Ron worked for Security Pacific National Bank (now Bank of America) in marketing and for Applied Decision Analysis as a consultant.
B.S. (Phi Beta Kappa) and M.S., Industrial Engineering, Stanford University
Sales Force Effectiveness - How to Balance Customer Centricity and Shareholder Value
In this paper, we identify five common organizational tendencies that can reduce sales force effectiveness and upset the balance between customer and shareholder value. We also provide observations on what makes an effective, customer-centric sales performance system as well as its benefits, challenges, and avoidable pitfalls.
Economics of Breakups - Conglomerate Discounts and Premiums
Top diversified companies command premium multiples and outperform their pure-play peers through overcoming four distinct disadvantages that diversified companies have vs. pure-plays.
Quan has over 10 years of experience advising senior executives in the Energy, Consumer Goods, and Industrial sectors in Europe and North America. His experience spans portfolio management, customer value, business model design, and organic and inorganic growth. He has recently been focusing on the topics of energy transition and sustainability, including supporting energy clients in defining and evaluating alternative transition pathways.
B.S., Electrical Engineering and Economics, Northwestern University
Private Equity Cannot Rely on Tried and Tested Strategies in Food
In recent years the European food manufacturing sector has come under pressure from the forces of recession, rapidly changing consumer tastes, and the fragmentation of competition. We ask the question of whether the traditional PE model needs a re-think in the food space.
Andrew has been a consultant and senior advisor to large corporations for more than 15 years working with senior executives across the UK, Europe and North America.
His main areas of expertise are in insurance, wealth and asset management, although he has also advised clients in banking and manufacturing sectors. He has worked with clients on a broad range of topics including corporate and business unit strategy, organic growth, new business launches, operational performance improvement and strategy implementation.
Prior to joining Marakon, Andrew worked in corporate finance and in strategy consulting at Mars & Co where he is experience included portfolio rationalisation, operational improvement and new market entry strategies for large corporations across Europe.
Banking, Insurance, Wealth Management
Postgraduate Diploma in Design, Manufacturing and Management, Cambridge University
MA Engineering (first class), Cambridge University
Making Elephants Dance: Enabling Agile in Large Corporate
Agile techniques are increasingly used to alter the DNA of large corporates. However, the agile elephant remains an elusive beast; to date many large corporates have used agile working practices to improve efficiency and effectiveness of operations, but until decision-making processes, standards and culture are rewired from the boardroom down, the full benefits of agile will not be realised.
2020 Emissions Regulations - A Storm Brewing for Global Shipping
The shipping industry, oil refiners, and commodity traders will all be impacted by the new IMO sulphur emission regulations that come into effect in 2020.
David Roxby
Leading Through The Oil Glut
One simple idea has driven Oil and Gas strategies for the last decade. Now, with the industry facing a supply glut, and expectations this will last for several years, it is time for a new approach. David Roxby discusses the options available, beyond cost cutting, and why some strategies work better than others.
Making Better Technology Investments in Oil Sands
Ramping up your investment in innovation and technology is a logical response to increasingly complex and marginal – but potentially huge - oil and gas projects. And the numbers confirm it: despite the recession, overall R&D spending by oil and companies has jumped by several billion dollars in the last 5 years as national oil companies and independents have piled in. Yet chief executives cite “making technology work” as one of the hardest challenges of the industry. In this article, we highlight what oil sands operators – as owners of the largest volumes of marginal barrels and growing investors in technology – are doing to improve their odds of success.
Lauren Yarbrough has over 15 years’ experience in strategic advisory with deep expertise in customer insight and customer-centric strategy development.
Lauren has advised a wide range of branded consumer goods companies, as well as regional and global retailers, helping them develop actionable consumer/customer insight, tightly linked to economics, to drive both growth and productivity improvements.
More recently, Lauren has focused on helping companies outside the traditional B2C space to embed customer-centric tools and capabilities to unlock profitable growth. This includes industrials with distribution /dealer networks (B2B2C), financial services, and education.
Lauren has a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Duke University and an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Brand growth strategies
Retail, Packaged Goods, Wellness
MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
BA in Economics from Duke University
Smart Growth: What B2B Can Learn From Consumer Companies
Consumer companies ‘know’ their customers – who they are, what they buy, when and why they switch brands, what motivates them, and how much they are worth – in an increasingly granular way. Many B2C firms are driving towards ‘segments of one’ in how they target and engage customers to win business. By contrast, B2B companies tend to view the world through a product and end market lens, with actionable customer insight on where and how to grow profitably often underdeveloped. This creates a big untapped opportunity to reignite growth in what are often slow growth markets.
Jim McTaggart
Are Acquisition Multiples Too High?
Companies should not think about acquisitions in terms of pre-deal multiples, but through analysis of fundamentals. This in turn will create better post-deal strategies.
Arnie Lowenstein
The Power of Portfolio Focus: The Chemical Sector
Arnie Lowenstein discusses the importance of portfolio strategy in executive suites and boardrooms. A fast changing world, shifting growth dynamics in key sectors of the economy and across regions, plus often conflicting views of value between management and investors place portfolio choices at the top of many management agendas.
Managing Differentiated Commodities
Most industrial businesses are neither purely commodity nor fully differentiated, but are a combination of the two—in essence, differentiated commodities.
Joanne McCollum
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Partner at Heidrick & Struggles
Click Here to views Todd's profile at Heidrick & Struggles
Winning with Digital in Consumer Financial Services
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Click here to view Ryan's profile at Heidrick & Struggles
Roland Foxcroft is a Principal in Marakon’s London office with over a decade of experience in strategy advisory across Europe, North America and Asia.
Roland has supported senior executives at group, business unit and functional leadership levels as they define and shape their corporate portfolios; launch new businesses and accelerate the organic growth of existing ones; design and execute transactions; and enhance their operational performance. He has worked with clients across the consumer goods, healthcare and financial services sectors for both listed and privately owned clients.
Roland has previously published articles on adjusting business models to changes in industry structure; building new data-driven commercial models; and developing digital alliances. He has designed and led programmes that have won the MCA Strategy Project of the Year award and have been shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Galien UK prize.
Prior to joining Marakon, Roland worked at Barclays Wealth and at Monitor Group. He is a graduate of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Commercial Strategy
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MA (Cantab), Psychology, University of Cambridge
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Keith is a Principal in Marakon’s Chicago office.
He has advised senior executives on topics including resource allocation, portfolio shape, vertical integration, channel strategy, and strategic pricing. Keith has experience across industrials, financial services, and consumer products.
Recently, Keith has led engagements including evaluating M&A opportunities for a board-level strategy review, helping a diversified manufacturer prioritize its capital budget across business units and assets, and identifying growth opportunities for a Canadian asset manager.
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Happy is a Principal in Marakon's New York office. She has also spent a year with Marakon's London office and has experience advising clients across North America, Europe and Asia.
Happy has partnered with senior executives across a wide range of sectors in helping them maximize value creation. Examples of her recent engagements include optimizing the balance sheet for a bank, finding pockets of growth for a consumer company in a mature industry, and solving for the right portfolio shape for an industrial client.
B.S. Economics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Charlie is an Associate Principal in Marakon’s London office. He has advised senior executives on a wide range of strategy and organisational issues across energy value chains in Europe and North America.
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MBA, London Business School
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Arushi has expertise in supporting senior executives shape their strategy at the intersection of business and technology. She has led teams in the UK, US, Europe and India to help companies shape their portfolio, enter new markets, derive greater synergies from partnerships and leverage emerging technologies to unlock shareholder value. Industries she’s worked on include Retail and Consumer Goods & Services, Food & Beverage, Airlines, Pharma and Financial Services.
Arushi spent a year with the World Economic Forum, shaping their global agenda on digital transformation across thirteen industries and three cross-industry themes. Her team’s findings were showcased to 100+ CEOs, heads of state and policymakers at Davos 2017, and her publications have been extensively cited in the business world.
Prior to joining Marakon, she was with Accenture Strategy where she worked on corporate strategy, digital strategy and sustainability strategy across three continents. Arushi holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in India and ESSEC Business School in France (Exchange term). She has a BA (Hons) degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.
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From start to finish Marakon is personally invested in the partnership and relentlessly pursues the right answers and optimal outcomes. From Marakon you will get robust and leading strategic thinking, and a roadmap to implementation. They have set themselves apart within their industry, and we are a better company for having partnered with them.
Philip Yuzpe, President and COO - Sentry Investments
Marakon applied a disciplined approach to help us navigate our complex questions. They employ a good blend of classic strategy approaches, advanced analytics and a much welcomed sense of pragmatism.
Head of Strategy - Large online brokerage
The partnership is unparalleled. Marakon helped us to develop the right strategic priorities and build-out the capabilities to deliver against them. In that way we were able to create significant value in the business in a relatively short time — disciplined value creation.
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Marakon’s strategic thinking, organisational insights and personal dedication to our success is the best I have experienced in the strategy space.
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A consultancy that has advised some of the world’s most consistently successful companies.
An absolutely top notch consultancy, among the half-dozen firms that form the elite in strategy consulting.
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Oklahoma AG Mike Hunter laid out plans for Marsy's Law week before it goes into effect
OKLAHOMA CITY — A law that will empower victims of crime in Oklahoma goes into effect next week.
State Question 794, which is also known as Marsy's Law, guarantees victims of their rights and allows them to be heard. On Tuesday, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter gave an update to how Marsy's Law will work, and he and other victims rights advocates spoke about the necessity for it.
Read more here or below...
KOCO News 5
Oklahoma AG Mike Hunter laid out plans for Marsy’s Law week before it goes into effect
It has been about five years since Ben and Ky Crockett, of Stillwater, had to bury their son Jacob. He was brutally murdered by someone he considered a friend.
They told KOCO 5 that the weeks after the slaying felt like a slap in the face.
"They talked about the man that killed our son and his rights, his attorneys," Ky Crockett said. "I kept on thinking to myself, 'Well, what about Jacob?' And I thought we're almost forgotten."
That's what advocates of Marsy's Law will correct. Hunter laid out the plan for Oklahoma's version of the law, which would grant victims the same level of protection as the defendant.
"This means crime victims must be informed of their rights, in writing, by a law enforcement agent," Hunter said. "Then, once the DA chooses to prosecute an alleged criminal, the victim will get notified again by the DA."
Victims would also be allowed to have input in court proceedings. The Attorney General's Office is also required to post a set of victims rights groups and other resources on its website.
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HOME BROWSE JOURNALS MANCHESTERHIVE MANCHESTER UP
HOME BROWSE COLLECTIONS JOURNALS RESORCES MANCHESTER UP
Ian Mackillop and Neil Sinyard
Celebrating British cinema of the 1950s
in British cinema of the 1950s
Chapter DOI:
Open Access (free)
ABSTRACT / EXCERPT
Far from being cinematically backward, 1950s British film had dashes of imagination that outdid more famous or prestigious examples from the cinematic canon. In his contribution to this book, Dave Rolinson, particularly in his recovery of the neglected The Horse's Mouth, aptly draws attention to a sharper edge to 1950s British film comedy than is always acknowledged. British film of this period is not often credited with that kind of audacity or comic cheek. The comedy is often characterised as postcard or parochial, with the likeable but limited registers of, say, Henry Cornelius's Genevieve or Basil Dearden's The Smallest Show on Earth being typical of the range. Again a classic image from 1950s British cinema would be Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, the epitome of quiet English integrity.
To counterbalance the rather tepid humanism of our cinema, it might also be said that it is snobbish, anti-intelligent, emotionally inhibited, willfully blind to the conditions and problems of the present, dedicated to an out of date, exhausted national idea. (Lindsay Anderson)
Who will ever forget those days at Iver when, cloistered in the fumed oak dining room (reminiscent of the golf club where no one ever paid his subscription), frightened producers blanched at the mere idea of any film that contained the smallest tincture of reality? (Frederic Raphael)
THE ORIGIN OF this book is an event which took place on Saturday, 5 December 1998 at the British Library in London. It was a study day consisting of lectures about British cinema in the 1950s: most of these are printed here, with an equal number of new essays which have been written since. In the evenings of the week preceding the study day, seven films were screened. They appeared under the headings of ‘Festive Fifties’ (The Importance of Being Earnest, in a sparkling new print), ‘Community Fifties’ (John and Julie and The Browning Version), ‘Tough Fifties’ (Women of Twilight and Hell Drivers) and ‘Women’s Fifties’ (My Teenage Daughter and Yield to the Night).
Why the 1950s? After all, as the prefatory remarks of Anderson and Raphael show, this is perhaps the most derided decade in British film history. It is commonly characterised as the era in which the national cinema retreated into quaintly comic evocations of community or into nostalgic recollections of the war. (It was Brian McFarlane who suggested that Lewis Gilbert’s stereotypical war film of 1953, The Sea Shall Not Have Them, could be more aptly retitled The Sea is Welcome to Them.) Coming after the golden period of the immediate post-war years (with Olivier’s rousing Shakespeare, Lean’s compelling Dickens, the passionate opuses of Powell and Pressburger, a trilogy of masterpieces from Carol Reed and much else besides) and before the mould-breaking New Wave of the early 1960s (Richardson, Reisz, Schlesinger and others), British cinema of the 1950s has commonly been stigmatised as conservative and dull. It is a judgment ripe for reappraisal, and the films of the decade invite a closer consideration not simply as social documents (which hitherto has generally been the approach, apologetically undertaken) but also as aesthetic artefacts.
It would not do to over-state the achievement: after all, it is a period in which directors such as Alberto Cavalcanti, Thorold Dickinson, Carol Reed and Robert Hamer (as Philip Kemp persuasively demonstrates in this collection) for the most part failed to deliver on the promise they had shown in the late 1940s. It is also a period which sees a migration to Hollywood of some of its most luminous acting talent: James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Stewart Granger, the inimitable Audrey Hepburn and the irreplaceable Jean Simmons. At the same time, this is a period in which British cinema was connecting with its home audience more successfully than at any time in its history, culminating in the quite extraordinary statistic (almost inconceivable today) that the top twelve box-office films of 1959 in Britain were all actually made in Britain. The legacy of the 1950s is being felt to this day. The modest and genial mayhem of comedies like The Parole Officer (2001) and Lucky Break (2001) recall the filmic material of stars like Norman Wisdom, Tony Hancock and Peter Sellars in their 1950s heyday, just as Hugh Grant’s bumbling comic hero in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) is essentially the Ian Carmichael ‘silly ass’ transmogrified for a more permissive era. It might be recalled that two of the most progressive directors of the modern cinema, Mike Figgis and David Mamet, have seen fit to remake Terence Rattigan classics of around that era, respectively, The Browning Version (1994) and The Winslow Boy (1999); and who could really argue that either made a better fist of it than the Anthony Asquith versions of half a century ago? (The chapter by Dominic Shellard in this volume offers a powerful contribution to the continuing re-evaluation of Rattigan.)
In the recent edition of the Journal of Popular British Cinema (Flicks Books 2001), Roy Stafford quotes some representative views of British cinema of the 1950s: ‘timid’, ‘complacent’, ‘safe’, ‘dim’, ‘anodyne’ are the adjectives used, with the judgment being that this is the ‘doldrums era’. British cinema at this time consists of parochial comedy – what one might compositely call the ‘Carry On Doctor at St Trinian’s’ school of mirth – weary transpositions of West End successes, and bland World War II heroics designed to steel us against the loss of the Empire. But is this really true? For example, Anthony Asquith’s stage adaptations have often been dismissed as unimaginative filmed theatre, but to see his version of The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) with an appreciative audience is to recognise how meticulously it has been edited, with every cut timed to the second to ensure that each laugh is given its due, but without covering the following line and therefore without disrupting the verbal flow. Similarly with the war films, as Fred Inglis argues passionately in his chapter, there is a lot more going on than nostalgia. What home audiences might have been responding to in these films was a proud but restrained Englishness that made a welcome contrast to American brashness. (There is a separate book to be written about the depiction of Americans in British films of that time: some way from a special relationship.) In any case, is it not an oversimplifiation to recall the service portrayal of, say, Jack Hawkins, Richard Todd and Kenneth More as icons of wartime heroism, and imply that the evocations of World War II were always offered in a spirit of nostalgia and as demonstrations of national cohesion where everyone knew his place? This hardly fits the madness of David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) or the cruelties of Asquith’s Orders to Kill (1958) and Jack Lee’s Circle of Deception (1960). John Mills’s justly famous performance of masculinity in crisis in Ice Cold in Alex (1958) is the absolute reverse of stiff upper-lip: he is as tremulous, sulky, simpering and vulnerable as James Stewart on a bad day, and indeed foreshadows Stewart’s performance nearly a decade later in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), where, like Mills, he almost cracks up at the indignity of being bested by German superiority. Nor does nostalgia and nobility fit the impudent opening of a war film like Don Chaffey’s Danger Within (1958), when what at first looks like a dead body tragically stretched out on the ground after battle is actually revealed to be a sunbathing prisoner of war. (The deception is exposed when he begins to scratch his behind.) ‘What do you think this place is, a holiday camp?’ asks Bernard Lee of Dennis Price, and it is a fair question: as well as its extended homage to the plot situation of Billy Wilder’s 1953 hit, Stalag 17 (‘Who is the traitor in our midst?’), Danger Within is also not afraid to seek an emulation of that film’s wicked and sometimes transgressive comedy. Dennis Price (as Hamlet!), Michael Wilding and Peter Jones have a whale of a time. The film seems less about war than an extended metaphor on the concept, in all its forms, of camp.
British film of this period is not often credited with that kind of audacity or comic cheek. The comedy is often characterised as postcard or parochial, with the likeable but limited registers of, say, Henry Cornelius’s Genevieve (1953) or Basil Dearden’s The Smallest Show on Earth (1957) being typical of the range. Actually there is a surreal quality to the latter film, exemplified by Margaret Rutherford’s imperious observation, as the person in charge of the of the Bijou cinema’s finances, that ‘you could hardly send a third of a chicken to the Chancellor of the Exchequer!’ (The context of such a statement seems quite superfluous.) It also has its cutting edge, as when someone remarks that ‘she was as pretty as a picture’ before adding the mortifying modification, ‘a B-picture, mind you’. In his contribution to this book, Dave Rolinson, particularly in his recovery of the neglected The Horse’s Mouth (Ronald Neame, 1958), aptly draws attention to a sharper edge to 1950s British film comedy than is always acknowledged. This edge sometimes comes through in a performance like Peter Sellers’s hatchet job on Wilfred Pickles in The Naked Truth (Mario Zampi, 1957), or even in Sellers’s plaintive last line in Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955) when confronted by a former friend, now frenzied assailant (Danny Green), who is about to kill him: ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ The darkness of that film has been generally recognised and celebrated, but this is not the case with Mackendrick’s previous and most underrated comedy, The Maggie (1954), about an American businessman (Paul Douglas) who, trying to transport some cargo to a nearby Scottish island, has the misfortune to run into the crew of an old puffer who offer to help him – at a price. Often characterised as a light piece of Scottish whimsy, The Maggie is actually closer to the ferocity of something like The Wicker Man in its study of the progressive humiliation and torture by wily locals of its naive, outsider hero. After a series of adventures more harrowing than humorous and where the hero is almost killed by the young boy in the crew, the film builds to an extraordinary moment when the American decides to sacrifice his cargo (symbolically, materialism) in order to save the boat (symbolically, tradition). At this point, Douglas turns to the old skipper, who has given him such grief, and, with the utmost logic and sincerity, utters what must be one of the most remarkable lines of any screen comedy. ‘I want you to understand something – I’m serious,’ he says. ‘If you laugh at me for this, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.’
The screenplay for The Maggie was the work of the American, William Rose, one of the best screenwriters of this (or any other) period. His contribution is a reminder of the truism that one of the limitations of British film at this time was that it was a writer’s and an actor’s cinema: the director’s presence was nebulous to the point of invisibility and there was a poverty of visual style. The point tended to be underlined by the curious statistic that, during the 1950s, no fewer than eleven British films were Oscar-nominated in the writing categories, which was by far its best representation in any Oscar category. Between the Oscar-winning writing successes of Seven Days to Noon (1950), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and Room at the Top (1959) came nominations for The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Sound Barrier (1952), Genevieve (1953), The Cruel Sea (1953), The Captain’s Paradise (1953), The Ladykillers (1955), The Horse’s Mouth (1958) and Separate Tables (1958). These remind us that the literateness of British film of the decade is something to be treasured, but pictorial skill must be recognised too. After all, visual reticence is an appropriate correlative to a reticence of temperament: when Anthony Asquith shoots the emotional breakdown of the repressed schoolmaster Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) in The Browning Version from behind his back, one senses a perfectly appropriate visual respect for the character’s private pain, for the man’s sense of shame at this ungentlemanly release of tears that must be hidden from view. (Corin Redgrave discusses this moment sensitively in his moving recollection of his father in this book.) In a different vein, J. Lee Thompson’s heightened style can also be absolutely in harmony with its subject: Melanie Williams’s discussion in this volume of the expressive appropriateness of his mise-enscène in Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) silences forever Jean-Luc Godard’s vituperation against its so-called excrescences.
Indeed there is more visual bravura in the British cinema of this time than is often recognised. Think of the virtuoso scene in Lean’s Hobson’s Choice (1953) when a drunken Charles Laughton is mesmerised by the reflection of the moon in a gleaming Manchester puddle; or, in the same film, the wonderful Victorian self-parody of the opening, the grim atmosphere deflated when the dark shadow of Laughton appears at the doorway, wobbles and then emits a rotund belch. The stricken close-up of Claire Bloom in Carol Reed’s The Man Between (1953), as she sees her lover shot in the snow, resonates long after the film is over: it affected Andrew Sarris more deeply, he said, than the whole of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Charles Frend’s The Long Arm (1957) has a teasingly deceptive flashback in the manner of Hitchcock, and a poignant use of subjective fades to black to suggest the ‘dying of the light’ as a mortally injured Ian Bannen tries unavailingly to attend to what a policeman is saying to him. In Charles Crichton’s Dance Hall (1950), the crosscutting between dance hall and train station as the heroine (Natasha Parry) is taken almost to the point of suicide eloquently forges a connection between the deceptive illusions of the former setting (‘You’re Only Dreaming’ is its theme song) and the heroine’s current desperation: considering the film thirty years later in the December 1981 issue of Films Illustrated, the critic Brian Baxter had no hesitation in declaring Crichton, on this evidence, as a greater director than Bernardo Bertolucci. No less memorable is a begrimed and tormented Rod Steiger finally destroyed by his one human weakness – his love of his dog – as he tries to cross the border in Ken Annakin’s extraordinary Across the Bridge (1957). This is one of the finest of all Graham Greene adaptations, a masterpiece in Mike Leigh’s eyes (see his foreword to Annakin’s autobiography, So You Wanna be a Film Director), one of Quentin Tarantino’s top ten films, and a British film that, in theme, ambience and atmosphere, even looks ahead to Orson Welles’s noir masterpiece of a year later, Touch of Evil. No visual impoverishment there.
Far from being cinematically backward, 1950s British film had dashes of imagination that outdid more famous or prestigious examples from the cinematic canon. Lewis Gilbert’s The Good Die Young (1954) has a doomed fatalistic narration over a planned crime that becomes a rendezvous with death which anticipates the similar mode of narrative presentation in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). For shock effect, the star heroine of The Ship that Died of Shame (Basil Dearden, 1956), played by Virginia McKenna, is killed off even sooner than Janet Leigh in Psycho. The wail of a car horn in Seth Holt’s Nowhere to Go (1958), in its context, is an imaginative trope of tragedy and death in a manner that looks forward to Chinatown (1974). Even Guy Hamilton’s film of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1954) makes one think ahead to Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) with its similar ingredients of interrupted meals and ghosts, and its critique of a self-serving, uncaring bourgeoisie who believe there is no such thing as society. Of course, one is not chauvinistically arguing that these British films are on the same level of artistic accomplishment as the films they recall: in some cases, far from it. But it does suggest that British cinema of the time was more formally and thematically adventurous than it is sometimes given credit for.
The national cinema of the decade was, then, shot through with sometimes unexpected variety and interesting contradictions. It has been described as insular and parochial, but, in fact, a number of foreign voices added a more complex colouration. The case of Joseph Losey is discussed elsewhere in these pages, but one might also cite Jacques Tourneur, whose British horror film Night of the Demon (1957) has the spooky suggestiveness of his best work for Val Lewton, or Hugo Fregonese, whose Harry Black and the Tiger (1958) is one of the finest safari movies ever made, or Robert Parrish, whose film The Purple Plain (1954) is a war film with a difference, pitting a quest for survival alongside a fascination with death and featuring the finest ever screen performance of one of our most dependable supporting actors, Maurice Denham. A special case is the blacklisted Cy Endfield, who, like Losey, came to England from Hollywood to restart his career, and who was to find his alter ego in Stanley Baker and fulfil his promise in Zulu (1964). Hell Drivers (1957) is particularly interesting for the way Endfield uses the material to suggest an allegory of his own situation (a hero trying to shake off his past and make a new start) and injects an unashamed melodrama into the action that is redolent of the radical American cinema of the late 1940s. Patrick McGoohan’s black-leather villainy in the film seems almost like a conscious aping of Marlon Brando’s performance in The Wild One (1954), which, for many of us at that time, would have been the nearest we could get to seeing it: The Wild One had been banned from public exhibition for alleged excessive violence by the British Board of Film Censors, whose operation then is astutely discussed below by Tony Aldgate.
Again a classic image from 1950s British cinema would be Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, the epitome of quiet English integrity. But during this decade, Hawkins is also the permanently irascible Police Inspector Gideon of Gideon’s Day (John Ford, 1958), possibly a forerunner of David Jason’s Frost; or the Hentzau-like suave political villain in Sidney Gilliat’s State Secret (1950) who, having made a hurried getaway, even has the cheek to pop back and enquire of the hero if he knows of any good vacant Chair of Political Science. Dirk Bogarde is, archetypally, Simon Sparrow of the Doctor films and Rank’s resident self-sacrificing romantic of The Wind Cannot Read (1956) and A Tale of Two Cities (1958); see Robert Giddings’s piece for a careful historical placing of the latter film in the British film history of the decade. But Bogarde is also the exotic (‘homoerotic’?) Spanish hero of The Spanish Gardener (Philip Leacock, 1956) and the notorious bandit in The Singer not the Song (Roy Baker, 1960), which is the closest the British cinema has got – or might want to get – to Duel in the Sun. A dual role in Libel (Anthony Asquith, 1959) allows Bogarde to give his screen image a thorough going over, as if he is already looking forward to The Servant: he does a hilarious, mocking impression of his ‘good’ self and even makes the simple phrase ‘in Darlington’ sound like the height of decadence and degeneracy.
If the British cinema of the decade has been characterised as a complacent cinema, then the cracks in that complacency are discernible some time before the appearance of the New Wave, with its new priorities, its new order of things, its new social configurations. The old class hierarchies are breaking down along with the remembered comradeship of the war. ‘Gentleman’s agreement, old boy?’ says Roland Culver’s peacetime Major (a superb performance) to Richard Attenborough’s post-war spiv in The Ship that Died of Shame (1955), to which Attenborough replies: ‘Don’t be silly’. It seems a logical progression from that to The League of Gentlemen (Basil Dearden, 1960), where the kind of military expertise that was formerly put to the service of the nation is now applied to bank robbery, the ultimate statement of post-war disillusionment. And, as Alison Platt argues later in these pages about The Spanish Gardener, if the moral health of the country can be gauged by the way it treats its children, then the British cinema of the time was giving off some quite ambiguous signals. Films like Alexander Mackendrick’s Mandy (1952) and J. Lee Thompson’s The Yellow Balloon (1952) both convey a troubled sense of the vulnerability of children in an era of post-war demoralisation where the scars of battle are still visible on the landscape.
In his essay on Raymond Durgnat Robert Murphy points out how film criticism can become outdated and its authors be time-bound. The academic manner aspires to a universality which time will show to be pitiful. As editors we do not think we can escape being locked into the period in which these essay were written and we freely confess it. We have tried to admit our time-determined nature by the small device of giving biographical notes on contributors which are more personal than is customary, pointing up the generations (several) to which we belong. Just as criticism and commentary belong in time, so do the films themselves on which we write: for them existence in time implies deterioration. Of course film is prolifically available in the theatres, not to mention TV, video and DVD, but there is actually no reason to be optimistic about the survival and preservation of the medium, a subject dealt with here by Bryony Dixon. Even landmark films are not reliably available. One such is the subject of Dave Rolinson’s essay: The Horse’s Mouth (Ronald Neame, 1958), with Alec Guinness who partly wrote it. Dixon tells us that it is held at the British Film Institute, but only in a colour positive acquired from a major American distributor which was clearing out its vaults. As this is the only element archivally existing, it is unavailable for screening or research in the United Kingdom. There may be 16mm prints somewhere, dating from the time when many films were reprinted for non-theatrical use and there is an American VHS tape available, but it cannot be said that there is a proper original-format 35mm print preserved in any UK collection. We hope this book will draw attention to such problems.
Although not intended as a comprehensive survey of the decade (film historians such as David Pirie and Peter Hutchings, for example, have dealt with the 1950s phenomenon of Hammer horror in some detail), this collection tries to give new perspectives on areas and personalities hitherto neglected: for example, Charles Barr’s investigation of the post-Western Approaches work of Pat Jackson; Brian McFarlane’s heartening tribute to that staple diet of the double bill, the British B-movie; Stephen Lacey’s analysis of the close interaction between theatre and film in the British cinema of this decade; Kerry Kidd’s reading of Women of Twilight that fascinatingly reconstructs the sexual politics of the time. As well as revaluing large areas of British cinema, the book offers surveys of other cinematic features of the decade. Archivist Bryony Dixon shows her expertise on how these films are preserved; Sarah Easen recalls the impact of the Festival of Britain on the British film industry; Eric Hedling and Robert Murphy pay homage to two of the most valuable film commentators of the period, Lindsay Anderson and Raymond Durgnat. Isabel Quigly sharply evokes the life of the national film critic during this time, in so doing recovering something of the quality of the whole cinema-going experience in the 1950s, which, memory tells us, is so different from our present multiplex days. (As Terence Davies’s films lovingly show, there was still a magic and an innocence attached to the cinema in those days, which one can rediscover in reading through fan magazines and old film annuals: a reader wins 10s 6d from Picturegoer for observing that ‘no screen actor has whiter teeth than Audie Murphy’; a Preview film annual (1960) has an article by Rock Hudson with a title that would now take on a retrospective irony: ‘Leave My Private Life Alone’.)
We would have liked to include more. We have Isabel Quigly, Erik Hedling and Robert Murphy on film criticism of the 1950s, but we would have liked something on Paul Dehn, on Kenneth Tynan as film critic and on the underrated Richard Mallett of Punch, admirably disinterred by Richard Chatten in a 2001 essay in the Journal of British Cinema. We would have liked reference to foreign views of British cinema, say, Stanley Kauffmann’s from New York. We are always hearing that Truffaut said ‘Britain’ and ‘cinema’ are incompatible terms. But less known is his clear-sighted appraisal of Doctor in the House.
This is a historical documentary – hardly romanticized – about British medical schools. It has no plot, no suspense, no drama, but a series of gags and of characters, calm good humour, and excellent actors – especially Kenneth More, one of the drivers in Genevieve, playing the role of a student who deliberately fails his exams because his grandmother has bequeathed him £1000 a year for as long as his studies last. All lovers of English humour have to see this movie. It has lots of spirit. (Arts, December 1954)
Every word of this is true. The first ‘Doctor’ film has some of the quality of the first ‘Carry On’ film; an accuracy in showing what an actual work situation is like (medical school, army national service), which in any case is a particular strength of British cinema. Of course, the ‘Doctors’ and the ‘Carry Ons’ degenerated into raucousness and camp, but at the beginning they were unpretentious observant comedy – and Doctor in the House is actually observant in an area in which the ‘Doctors’ are supposed to be weak (or, worse, ‘misogynist’): note the place of Muriel Pavlow in it. Following through Truffaut’s review, we might have had something to say about Genevieve with its enchanting score, and about Kenneth More, who was indeed an interesting actor, as realised by Peter Hall when he offered More the part of Claudius in Hamlet (More modestly declined). We would have liked more on cinemas themselves (the multiples like the emerging Granadas and State movie theatres, the aptly named Classics, and the best London cinemas, like the Curzon and the Academy). We are aware that we have nothing on the Film Society movement or on the avant garde, or on art films (though Sarah Easen mentions the ‘Poet and Painter’ films made for the Festival of Britain).
Nonetheless our contributors give unprecedented coverage to the decade and help us understand interrelationships between past and present, two in particular. First: a past period can help us see the present more clearly, by supplying a standard for judging the new. If we know X of the past, we are less likely to be bowled over by Y in the present. So Alison Platt’s essay about the old Spanish Gardener makes the new Billy Elliot look less than impressive. Second: our present can alert us to unrecognised felicities of the past. Thus, Platt also shows that we who have The Sixth Sense now are the better placed for observing how good the 1950s was at showing children, especially children old before their time (whatever that is).
Our contributors also show what it was like to see films in the 1950s, by trying to account for the experience of a generation of filmgoers whose enduring fondness for the films is bound up with recollections of the circumstances and conditions under which they were shown. A new era was undoubtedly coming. ‘Change was the keyword for the end of the fifties,’ said Patricia Warren, seeing on the horizon the films of the British New Wave and first-rate movies like Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959), Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) and Tunes of Glory (Ronald Neame, 1960) which portended a different direction. We hope this book demonstrates that these later achievements came out of the rich soil of the 1950s.
I am Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. I am the author of two books on British intellectual life: F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (Allan Lane, 1995) and The British Ethical Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1985), and a book about François Truffaut and Henri Pierre Roché, author of Jules and Jim and Two English Girls and the Continent. Ian MacKillop
I have written over twenty books on film, including studies of Richard Lester, Nicolas Roeg and Jack Clayton. I am the co-editor of the ongoing series of monographs, ‘British Film Makers’, published by Manchester University Press. I grew up in the 1950s and my love of cinema dates from a childhood which has left indelible filmgoing memories: of a cinema within walking distance of seemingly everyone’s home, of copies of Picturegoer and the ABC Film Review, of usherettes, and choc ices before the main feature, of continuous programmes that permitted you to stay in the cinema all day and see the main feature more than once, of the undignified scramble at the end to get out before the striking up of the National Anthem.Neil Sinyard
British cinema of the 1950s
Editors: Ian Mackillop and Neil Sinyard
1950s British cinema; art cinema aesthetics; auteurism; British film culture; British film history; Festival of Britain; film reviewing; Jack Hawkins; Joseph Losey; Lindsay Anderson; maverick directors; Michael Redgrave; Pat Jackson; post-Ealing films; Raymond Durgnat; Robert Hamer; war films; White Corridors
(249 total)
A 1950s timeline
Raymond Durgnat and A Mirror for England
Mirroring England
National snapshots
Film and the Festival of Britain
The national health
The long shadow
‘If they want culture, they pay’
Boys, ballet and begonias
Intimate stranger
Painfully squalid?
Women of Twilight
Yield to the Night
From script to screen
Housewife’s choice
Too theatrical by half?
A Tale of Two Cities and the Cold War
Adaptable Terence Rattigan
Archiving the 1950s
Being a film reviewer in the 1950s
Michael Redgrave and The Mountebank’s Tale
Dance and politics
Moving beyond boundaries
Author: Dana Mills
Dance has always been a method of self- expression for human beings. This book examines the political power of dance and especially its transgressive potential. Focusing on readings of dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, Gumboots dancers in the gold mines of South Africa, the One Billion Rising movement using dance to protest against gendered violence, dabkeh in Palestine and dance as protest against human rights abuse in Israel, the Sun Dance within the Native American Crow tribe, the book focuses on the political power of dance and moments in which dance transgresses politics articulated in words. Thus the book seeks ways in which reading political dance as interruption unsettles conceptions of politics and dance.
Art, authorship and activism
Authors: Ian Scott and Henry Thompson
This book charts and analyses the work of Oliver Stone – arguably one of the foremost political filmmakers in Hollywood during the last thirty years. Drawing on previously unseen production files from Oliver Stone’s personal archives and hours of interviews both with Stone and a range of present and former associates within the industry, the book employs a thematic structure to explore Stone’s life and work in terms of war, politics, money, love and corporations. This allows the authors both to provide a synthesis of earlier and later film work as well as locate that work within Stone’s developing critique of government. The book explores the development of aesthetic changes in Stone’s filmmaking and locates those changes within ongoing academic debates about the relationship between film and history as well as wider debates about Hollywood and the film industry. All of this is explored with detailed reference to the films themselves and related to a set of wider concerns that Stone has sought to grapple with -the American Century, exceptionalism and the American Dream, global empire, government surveillance and corporate accountability. The book concludes with a perspective on Stone’s ‘brand’ as not just an auteur and commercially viable independent filmmaker but as an activist arguing for a very distinct kind of American exceptionalism that seeks a positive role for the US globally whilst eschewing military adventurism.
This book offers a startling re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lacklustre period of the British film history. It includes fresh assessment of maverick directors; Pat Jackson, Robert Hamer and Joseph Losey, and even of a maverick critic Raymond Durgnat. The book features personal insights from those inidividually implicated in 1950s cinema; Corin Redgrave on Michael Redgrave, Isabel Quigly on film reviewing, and Bryony Dixon of the BFI on archiving and preservation. A classic image from 1950s British cinema would be Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, the epitome of quiet English integrity. Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, which deals extensively with British films of the 1950s, was written in the mid-1960s and was published in 1970. In a 1947 article called 'Angles of Approach' Lindsay Anderson delivered a fierce attack on contemporary British film culture, outlining a model for a devoted politics of creation, well in line with what we would later understand as auteurism and art cinema aesthetics . The war films of the 1950s together constitute the assented-to record of the emotions and moral judgments called upon to set in order those disorderly events. The book also talks about the Festival of Britain, White Corridors, and four Hamer's post-Ealing films: The Spider and the Fly, The Long Memory, Father Brown and The Scapegoat. A number of factors have contributed to the relative neglect of the 1950s as a decade in British cinema history.
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Lifestyle, Tourism & Entertainment
Rural Development Programs
Smart Interactive
MCM Cares
MCM Group Selected as a Finalist in the International Design Competition to Renovate the Historically Important Minyuan Sports Stadium in Tianjin
Jul 12, 2012 | Press Room
Tianjin, PRC, July 12, 2012. The MCM Design Team was selected as one of the five finalists in an international competition to present a renovation plan for Minyuan Stadium to the Tianjin planning and city leadership. Minyuan Stadium holds particular importance to the ten million people of Tianjin.
Minyuan is one of China’s oldest stadiums having served the Tianjin community with local and national events for over eighty years. Eric Liddell helped build the stadium when he was a missionary in Tianjin, modeling it on Stamford Bridge of London, which was Liddell’s favorite athletics venue. Liddell was the winner of the men’s 400 meters at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris where he set the world’s record.
Often called the “Flying Scotsman” he was born in Tianjin in 1902 and lived in Tianjin until the age of five, when he was enrolled in Eltham College, England. He then returned to China after the Olympics where he spent the remainder of his life. He is often considered the first person from China to win an Olympic Gold Medal. His life was famously depicted in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire.
Following his death in 1945 Liddell’s remains were placed in the Mausoleum of Martyrs at Shih-Chia-Chuang, 150 miles south-west of Beijing, where China honors 700 respected individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice in the liberation of China from the Japanese. He died as a prisoner of war fighting for Chinese prisoner rights.
Because Tianjin built a modern football stadium, the community wanted to preserve the historically important Minyuan stadium but no longer needed it for competitive sports. They sought design ideas to make it a long-term community resource. MCM responded to the design challenge by preserving elements of the old structure, but included in our design such features as a sports museum, historical interpretive center, fitness facilities, restaurants, a meeting center, and commercial space which both preserved the historical importance of the facility, but also provided the community with as valuable daily resource.
MCM gave a final presentation on July 12th. The design concept was highly praised by the reviewers after the presentation.
© 2020 MCM Group International. All rights reserved.
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Home News How smart tech hubs in Belfast can be life saving
How smart tech hubs in Belfast can be life saving
Belfast is the first place in the UK that will benefit from Pulse Smart Hubs which will allow free access to services including a defibrillator, with 25 hubs granted permission so far.
Other services include a 999 button connecting directly to the emergency services and sensors that capture data on air quality.
Lord Mayor of Belfast, Councillor Deirdre Hargey joined tech entrepreneur Patrick Fisher, founder and CEO of Urban Innovation Company, to officially launch the network of “smart street furniture” in the City.
She said: “I am particularly impressed by the public health and safety features, plus the flexibility of Pulse offering a tailored service to Belfast’s specific needs - it is so much more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Furthermore, the smart hubs’ IoT capability is something that will become ever more important and valuable over time, as technology evolves and greater innovation is implemented within the City.”
The £3 million project, funded entirely by Fisher’s Urban Innovation Company which designs and builds next generation telecommunication hubs, will help people stay connected - and even save lives.
The implementation and ongoing maintenance of the "smart street furniture" will be funded via digital advertising - operated in Belfast by Exterion Media.
Patrick Fisher, founder and CEO of Urban Innovation Company, said: "In the age of the Smart City, street furniture must do more to earn its place on the High Street. At no cost to the public or taxpayer, the Pulse Smart Hub is the smartest of smart furniture. A network of beautifully designed and engineered hubs that provide next generation connectivity, share information, track the environment, and ultimately, save lives."
The hubs integrate Public Access Defibrillators (PAD) so if someone experiences an ‘out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrest’ (OHSCA) nearby, the likelihood of survival greatly increases from 9% to 59%. The PADs are simple to use without training.
It is fitting that the first Pulse Smart Hub featuring a defibrillator should be installed in Belfast, as the inventor of this life-saving piece of equipment, Professor James Francis Pantridge, known worldwide as the “Father of Emergency Medicine” began his medical career at Belfast’s very own Queen’s University.
Air quality is the biggest environmental cause of premature death in Europe, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and is responsible for 40,000 deaths per year in the UK, say the Royal College of Physicians. Thanks to its ability to collect air quality data and monitor pollution levels, the Pulse Smart Hub will help Belfast City Council to keep a close eye on this important health concern.
Extensive engagement was undertaken with Belfast City Council and other local stakeholders. This has included discussions as to how the data and power provided by the smart hubs could be used by the City Council, universities, and local businesses to gather research and information that will contribute to improving life in Belfast City Centre.
Register for Med-Tech Innovation Expo
defibrillator Belfast Pulse Smart Hubs Urban Innovation Company
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Teresa A. Danton,
A Law Corporation
About Teresa A. Danton, Esq.
My mission as a mediator is to provide professional and impartial solutions to your legal problems in a dignified, respectful and confidential environment. I dedicate myself to providing you with a peaceful place to avoid litigation so that you have control over major decisions in your life.
My mission as a lawyer and litigator is to be a trustworthy and knowledgeable advocate with the highest integrity. One who is responsive and respectful. And because I recognize that life does not happen just during business hours, I am available to you seven days a week. For these reasons, I limit my case load to a fixed number of clients so that you get more than what you expect in today's market.
Whether you’re going through a divorce, an accident, a work conflict, an estate conflict - - the last thing you want is a prolonged and hostile legal battle. My unique approach will help you resolve your legal issue so you understand what is happening every step of the way.
Teresa A. Danton
For over 30 years, Teresa has practiced Family Law and Civil Litigation across the State of California. She’s qualified as an expert in family law and was trial attorney in Finby vs. Finby (2014) 222 Cal.App. 4th 977, a case that made new law in California. Teresa'has worked on cases involving multi-million dollar estates, business valuations, complex custody and support issues, breach of contract, automobile liability, slip and fall, dog bites, homeowner's associations, breaches of fiduciary duty, and actions to divide assets and debts in business relationships, to name a few. In doing so, she has successfully presented thousands of trials and hearings to juries and judges.
Her experience has earned her positions as court-appointed mediator, court-appointed arbitrator, judge pro-tem, expert witness, and invitations to speak at the State Bar Conference on Women in Litigation and continuing education classes. She has also served on Boards of Bar Associations, civic foundations and community outreach and development programs.
Divorce Proceedings
Custody, Support
Division of Assets and Debts
University of California, Los Angeles, Juris Doctor, 1982
University of California, Los Angeles, Bachelor of Arts, Political Science, 1979
Pi Sigma Alpha Honor Society
Criminal Prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney, Los Angeles County, California, 1984 to 1986
Associate Attorney, Civil Litigation, Alevizon, Smith and Lawrence, Orange County, California, 1986 to 1987
Civil Litigator, Family Law and Personal Injury, Sahagun & Danton, Los Angeles County, California, 1987 to 1995
Civil Litigator, Family Law and Personal Injury, Teresa A. Danton, A Professional Corporation
Los Angeles County, California 1995 to 2013
Mediator & Lawyer, Teresa A. Danton, A Law Corporation, Greater Los Angeles County, California 2015 to present
Court-appointed Mediator, Los Angeles County Courts, 1992 to 2013
Court-appointed Arbitrator, Los Angeles County Courts, 1992 to 1997
Judge Pro Tempore, Los Angeles County Courts, 1991 and 1996 to 1999
Expert Witness, Family Law, District Court of El Paso County, Texas, Judicial District 388, 2007
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT:
Long Beach Board of Trustees, Long Beach Community Medical Center Foundation, Long Beach, California 1991 to 2000
Founding Member and Scholarship Sponsor, Hispanic Outreach Taskforce, Whittier, California 1989 to 2014
Board of Directors, Community Rehabilitation Industries Foundation, Long Beach, California, 1991 to 1993
Board of Directors, Community Rehabilitation Industries, Long Beach, California, 1993
Legal Counsel, Latin Business Foundation, Los Angeles, California, 1991
Board of Directors and Sponsor, Capitol Classroom, Long Beach, California, 1991 to 1995
Scholarship Sponsor, Latin Business Foundation, Los Angeles, California, 1990 to 1992
PROFESSIONAL INVOLVEMENT:
Founding Member and Board Member, LGBTQ Bar/Long Beach Bar Association, 2017 to present
American Inns of Court, Long Beach, California, 1996 to 1998 and 2005.
Board of Trustees, Southeast District Bar Association, Norwalk, California, 1997 and 1998
Board of Trustees, Mexican American Bar Association, Los Angeles, California 1992
Board of Trustees, Mexican American Bar Association Political Action Committee
Los Angeles, California 1996, 1997, 2001, 2002
Founding Member, Lawyer Referral Service of the Mexican American Bar Association
Los Angeles, California 1992
Association of Trial Lawyers of America, 2005, 2006
HONORS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS
AV Rated Distinguished Lawyer, Martindale-Hubbell
Finby vs. Finby (2013) 222 Cal. App. 4th 977, Trial Attorney
California Legislature, Certificate of Recognition, 2014
Positive Image Awards, Hispanic Outreach Task Force, 2014
Presenter, Yoga & Meditation for the 21st Century Lawyer, Long Beach Bar Association, 2018
Speaker, State Bar Conference on Women and the Law, 1993
Television Appearance, Public Service, Child Support, 1996
Television Appearance, Public Service, DUI, District Attorney Los Angeles County, 1986
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Rich resource for potential drug therapies discovered in database of disease genes
Written by undefined on Invalid date
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have created a massive online database that matches thousands of genes linked to cancer and other diseases with drugs that target those genes. Some of the drugs are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, while others are in clinical trials or just entering the drug development pipeline.
The database was developed by identical twin brothers, Obi Griffith, PhD, and Malachi Griffith, PhD, whose interest in pairing drugs with genes is as much personal as it is scientific. Their mother died of breast cancer 17 years ago, just weeks before their high school graduation.
"We wanted to create a comprehensive database that is user-friendly, something along the lines of a Google search engine for disease genes," explained Malachi Griffith, a research instructor in genetics. "As we move toward personalized medicine, there's a lot of interest in knowing whether drugs can target mutated genes in particular patients or in certain diseases, like breast or lung cancer. But there hasn't been an easy way to find that information."
Details of the Drug Gene Interaction database are reported online in Nature Methods. The database is weighted heavily toward cancer genes but also includes genes involved in Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, diabetes and many other illnesses. The Griffiths created the database with a team of scientists at The Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis.
The database is easy to search and geared toward researchers and physician-scientists who want to know whether errors in disease genes - identified through genome sequencing or other methods - potentially could be targeted with existing drug therapies. Additional genes included in the database could be the focus of future drug development efforts because they belong to classes of genes that are thought to make promising drug targets.
"Developing the database was a labor of love for the Griffiths," said senior author Richard K. Wilson, PhD, director of The Genome Institute. "There's an amazing depth to this resource, which will be invaluable to researchers working to design better treatment options for patients."
Wilson and his colleagues caution that the database is intended for research purposes and that it does not recommend treatments. The primary purpose of the database is to further clinical research aimed at treating diseases more effectively.
"This database gets us one step closer to that goal," Malachi Griffith said. "It's a really rich resource, and we're excited to make it available to the scientific community."
The database, which took several years to develop, is publicly available and free to use. It includes more than 14,000 drug-gene interactions involving 2,600 genes and 6,300 drugs that target those genes. Another 6,700 genes are in the database because they potentially could be targeted with future drugs.
Before now, researchers wanting to find out whether disease genes could be targeted with drugs had to search piecemeal through scientific literature, clinical trials databases or other sources of information, some of which were not publicly available or easily searchable. Further, many of the existing databases have different ways of identifying genes and drugs, a "language" barrier that can turn a definitive search into an exhaustive exercise.
The Griffith brothers are experts in bioinformatics, a field of science that integrates biology and computing and involves analyzing large amounts of data. The brothers got the idea for the drug-gene interaction database after they repeatedly were asked whether lists of genes identified through cancer genome sequencing could be targeted with existing drugs.
"It shouldn't take a computer wizard to answer that question," said Obi Griffith, research assistant professor of medicine. "But in reality, we often had to write special software to find out. Now, researchers can quickly and easily search for themselves."
The new database brings together information from 15 publicly available databases in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. Users can enter the name of a single gene or lists of many genes to retrieve drugs targeting those genes. The search provides the names of drugs targeted to each gene and details whether the drug is an inhibitor, antibody, vaccine or another type. The search results also indicate the source of the information so users can dig deeper, if they choose.
Pharma Industry / Biotech Industry
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Latest Associations/Organizations News…
Easy Sharing
Skyline Exhibits Announces Retirement of Customer Engagement Director Michael Thimmesch
Skyline Exhibits has announced the retirement of Michael Thimmesch, its Director of Customer Engagement. Thimmesch has played an integral role in the growth of the company and has earned the respect of the industry. He is highly respected in the areas of customer engagement and social media and is seen as a leader in exhibitor education.
Thimmesch began his Skyline career in 1988 as a copywriter eight years after Skyline was founded. Over time, his role evolved and expanded. In 2005, after 17 years with Skyline, he earned a director-level position.
During his tenure Thimmesch had a hand in generating over half a million leads for Skyline which resulted in over $1 billion in retail sales and helped Skyline to grow into the largest exhibit company in North America.
Thimmesch is also credited with publishing 11 industry white papers and eight exhibit education books. He has presented over 100 informational webinar sessions, which were attended by over 23,000 exhibitors. He has also written over 200 blog posts on a variety of exhibiting topics.
“Mike’s contributions to Skyline and to the trade show industry itself cannot be overstated. Whether it was his creation of multiple trade show seminars or the rich content in his blogs and webinars, Mike has left his mark on our company and the trade show industry,” stated Bill Dierberger, president of Skyline Exhibits. “He has been a pioneer in perfecting face-to-face marketing.”
Taking over for Thimmesch is Sofia Troutman who has been named Manager of Customer Engagement & Industry Relations. Troutman has been with Skyline for six years most currently as Product Marketing Segment Manager. She earned her MBA at University of Arizona, Eller College of Management and started her Marketing Career at Pillsbury/General Mills before joining Skyline in 2009.
Future plans, according to Thimmesch, include spending time with his family, plenty of travel and advocating causes that are near to him. “We are truly grateful for Mike’s many contributions to the company and the trade show business as a whole. Our company and our industry are better and healthier because of Mike’s work,” concluded Dierberger.
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Demographic pressures and political instability in North African countries.
History & Miscellaneous: MW 229
Recent instability and revolutionary change in the North African region has highlighted the potential for large flows of migrants into Europe.
The five Arab countries of North Africa have rapidly growing populations. Egypt, at 84 million, already has a larger population than Germany.
Their population grew from 45 million in 1950 to 170 million today - an increase of 125 million, or 2 million people a year on average.
Youth unemployment is very high with three million 15- 24 year olds unemployed (excluding Libya where no figures are available).
Before the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, all these countries were governed by regimes which were regarded as being repressive, authoritarian and corrupt.
1 The Arab countries of North Africa have been the source of substantial migration, both illegal and legal, into Europe. Some countries in the region - notably Libya and Morocco – have also been used for transit by migrants originating in the countries south of the Sahara to immigrate clandestinely into Europe. Estimates of the Sub-Saharan population of Libya, mostly illegal, range up to 2 million. So far, the numbers coming to Britain have been limited (Annex A).
2 Since January this year three countries in North Africa - Egypt, Libya and Tunisia - have experienced acute political unrest and change. Some of the factors behind these developments are unique to each of these countries, but they also share some social and political characteristics with other countries in the region:
All have very high rates of unemployment among those aged 15 - 24.
These young people constituted about one fifth of the populations. Their number has been growing very rapidly over recent decades but is expected to decline somewhat over the next twenty years in Algeria Tunisia and Morocco.
All of these countries to varying degrees have (or had) governments which were authoritarian, politically repressive, and often corrupt.
Demographic pressures
3 Demographic pressures, illustrated in the graph below have been a key factor in driving political and social unrest:
4 Below are summarised some of the consequences of this rapid population increase over the sixty years from 1950 (see also the tables in Annex B).
Between 1950 and 2010 populations of these five countries grew almost fourfold, from 44 million to almost 170 million in 2010 - an increase of over 125 million which is over 2 million a year.
In 1950, the total population of these countries was lower than that of the UK; by 2010, their combined population was almost three times that of the UK
In 1950, the combined population of these countries, at 44 million was one-third that of those European countries (France, Greece, Italy and Spain) facing them across the Mediterranean. By 2010 their population was 169 million - a gap of only 10 million.
The biggest increase was in Egypt, where population grew by over 60 million.
Over the same period, the total number of people aged 15 to 24 in all these countries increased by over 25 million to 34 million - averaging over half a million every year
Excluding Libya, for which there are no data, numbers of young unemployed in 2005 in the remaining four countries totalled over 3 million.
The projected population growth in these countries over the next 20 year period is 46 million, or almost 2.5 million a year, to a total of 215 million.
Economic and social stability
5 Arab countries in the Middle East are reported by the ILO as having the highest rates of unemployment in the world. Unemployment rates for young people - aged 15 to 24 - are tabulated below for four of these countries:
Unemployment Rate (%) for Young people (15 – 24)
Algeria 2008
Tunisia 2005
Source: ILO
Political instability
6 The countries of this region have had governments that are authoritarian, undemocratic and corrupt. Below are results for these countries in two indices that measure democracy and corruption and facilitate comparison between countries (the index dates from 2010 and therefore does not reflect the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia):
Democracy Index
Regime Type
World Ranking (out of 167)
Source: Economist Intelligence Unit
7 Three out of five of these countries are in the bottom quintile of rankings, and the two others are not far removed from it.
Source: Transparency International
8 Whilst comparisons with other countries using this index are more encouraging, only two countries - Morocco and Tunisia - are not in the bottom half of rankings.
Annex A
Figure 1 Grants of Asylum from Algeria and Libya between 2000 and 2009. Source: Control of Immigration Statistics 2009.
Figure 2 Grants of settlement from North Africa between 2000 and 2009. Source: Control of Immigration Statistics 2009.
Annex B
Table 1: Total Population
Table 2: Percentage of Population Aged 15 - 24
Table 3: Numbers of People Aged 15 - 24
Source: UN World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision Population Database
Note: Data for 2010 – 2030 is projected using ‘medium variant’assumption.
Table 4: Numbers of Young - 15 to 24 - Unemployed (‘000)
Note: There are no data for Libya
Sources of Data:
Population: 1950 – 2030
http://esa.un.org/UNPP/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_rate
Illegal Immigrant Numbers in Libya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration
Index of Democracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
Index of Corruption
http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results
Unemployment:
http://laborsta.ilo.org/
http://www.ansamed.info/en/news/ME.XEF68151.html
http://europenews.dk/en/node/39508
See also para. 3 of the ILO Statement on the unrest in Egypt:
http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/press-and-media-centre/statements-and-speeches/WCMS_151208/lang--en/index.htm
Recent History & Miscellaneous Papers
We’re recruiting a Digital Media Strategist
[MW465 - 5 August 2019]
Letter from Lord Green of Deddington, Chairman of …
The History of Immigration to the UK
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Recent Graduate Nominated For Two Student Emmy Awards
By new_view_media on August 12, 2016 No Comment
Two films created by Randolph High School senior and filmmaker Ryan Taggert were nominated for student Emmy awards.
Taggert, who plans to attend Hofstra University in the fall to study film/television, created a documentary titled “Through One Lens” about how he overcame having sight in one eye to become a successful filmmaker and athlete. He also created a music video titled “Stop the Bullying,” which was used in RHS Teacher Lisa Holloway’s anti-bullying assembly this spring. Taggert is also president of the RHS Video Club.
“Ryan is an amazing filmmaker who displays a great deal of passion for cinematic arts,” said RHS Mass Media Teacher Robert Finning.
The Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the National Academic of Television Arts and Sciences presents students with Emmy Awards for their achievements in television and film. Finning noted that Ryan is his first student to be nominated in two categories: documentary and music video.
The awards will be presented at a special ceremony in September. To see his documentary, visit the rtnj.org website: https://www.rtnj.org/Page/2371.
Recent Graduate Nominated For Two Student Emmy Awards added by new_view_media on August 12, 2016
VIRTUAL EMOTIONAL HEALTH COMMUNITY CONVERSATION FOR PARENTS THURSDAY, JANUARY 28 FROM 6:30-7:30PM
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DOL Decision Helps NATCA Fight for Traumatic Stress Claims
Controllers who have filed workers compensation claims following an air traffic event such as a near miss or an airplane crash have often faced an uphill battle during the claims process. In order to obtain workers compensation benefits, the employee must prove that he or she was injured in the course of performing their ATC duties.
It would seem obvious that if you are on position, plugged in and talking to airplanes, that you would be considered in the performance of your ATC duties if you suffer a traumatic stress condition as a result of an air traffic event. However, the FAA has often contested these claims, asserting that there was no actual risk of a collision or that the controller was not directly responsible for the aircraft at the time of the event, and was therefore not injured in the performance of duty. This has caused confusion, delay, and unnecessary litigation in the Department of Labor (DOL) claims process, since DOL claims examiners are often unfamiliar with ATC work.
NATCA has been working with the FAA to resolve this problem by developing joint guidance clarifying that air traffic controllers work in teams and often have shared responsibility for the safety of aircraft, even when they are not the controller who is directly talking to the airplane at the time of the event. In December 2012, the DOL issued an important decision clarifying the issue of performance of duty in the context of air traffic control. The case involved a controller from Miami Center who noticed that two airplanes that were being handed off to his airspace were in conflict because one airplane appeared to be overtaking the other, a slower airplane, due to airspeed. The Miami Center controller asked the radar assist controller to contact Havana Center and have them correct the developing conflict. Havana Center refused, and when the two airplanes reached Miami Center airspace, the Miami Center controller corrected the conflict. In the course of working his radar position during this event, the controller experienced a traumatic stress injury.
However, because the Agency claimed that there was no imminent risk of a collision and that the controller was not “operationally responsible” for the aircraft that were still in Havana Center airspace, the claim was denied on the grounds that the controller was not injured in the performance of duty. The controller requested reconsideration several times and years passed before the claim was finally heard on appeal by the DOL. Concerning whether there was an imminent risk of a crash between the two aircraft that were on a converging course, the DOL rejected this argument as irrelevant to whether the controller was in the performance of his duty at the time he was injured. The DOL emphasized that the injured controller was not simply a bystander, but was plugged-in, on position, and working his assigned duties at the time of the event.
Concerning whether the controller was operationally responsible for the aircraft, the DOL found that the controller was in fact required to monitor the aircraft, notice the conflict, and attempt corrective action even while the two airplanes were still technically in Havana Center airspace. The DOL noted that the Agency had previously issued a disciplinary action against the same controller for not attempting to correct a similar operational conflict when aircraft were still in Havana Center airspace, indicating that the Miami Center controller had shared operational responsibility for the safety of the aircraft. The DOL stated:
With respect to operational responsibility, this was not a situation where appellant was simply standing near the radar and witnessed a stressful incident. Appellant was working his assigned duty monitoring live aircraft traffic on radar. As part of those duties, he observed a potential conflict between two aircraft and attempted to resolve the conflict. The record contains a disciplinary letter regarding a November 2009 incident that specifically noted that it was appellant’s responsibility to take action to resolve a potential conflict, even if Havana Center should have taken action. The disciplinary letter clearly indicated that he had an obligation to take action even if the ultimate responsibility for action was with another radar center. Appellant was advised that it was his responsibility to ensure separation between the aircraft. He was on duty and monitoring radar. Appellant was performing his regular duties as an air traffic controller … when the potential collision arose, a situation he took effort to remedy.
This is an important decision for NATCA’s effort to improve the claims process for controllers who are injured in the course of duty because it highlights that controllers often have shared responsibility for the safety of aircraft. The decision confirms NATCA’s longstanding effort to explain that a controller may or may not be in direct radio communication with the aircraft, and the aircraft may or may not be flying in the controller’s assigned airspace at the time of the event; however, if the controller has an obligation to monitor the aircraft for potential conflicts or other unsafe situations, and has an obligation to take action to correct the unsafe operation, then the controller is performing their duties for purposes of workers compensation. If the controller can be subject to discipline for not monitoring the aircraft, noticing potential conflict and taking action to resolve the unsafe situation, then surely he or she should be understood to have shared responsibility for that operation for purposes of workers compensation.
The reality is controllers work in teams and are obligated to take action to prevent an unsafe situation when they notice one developing, regardless of whether they are in direct radio communication with the aircraft. NATCA will continue to work with the Agency to educate FAA managers and FAA employees who work in the FAA Headquarters Workers Compensation office regarding what controllers do and how these important issues impact the controllers’ right to workers compensation benefits when a traumatic stress injury occurs.
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June 10, 2016 // Communicating For Safety 2016: Steve Hansen Safety Advocate Award Winner: Jeff Woods
From left to right: Hansen, Gilbert, Woods, and NATCA President Paul Rinaldi.
NATCA Executive Vice President Trish Gilbert presented the Steve Hansen Safety Advocate Award at Communicating For Safety 2016. This award was first given in 2011 to NATCA Safety Committee Chair Steve Hansen, and is presented each year to a NATCA member who has made extraordinary achievements and worked tirelessly on NATCA’s behalf to be a leader in furthering aviation safety.
Past winners Steve Hansen, Mike Blake, Andy Marosvari, Leanne Martin, and Chad Sneve have each shown their passion for safety. This year’s winner is no different.
Jeff Woods has been a controller in the FAA since 2001. He has worked at Beaumont ATCT (BPT), Houston Center (ZHU), and Houston TRACON (I90). Before his FAA career began, he served in the U.S. Navy. He has held many Union positions, serving as the I90 Secretary from 2009 to 2011 and I90 VP from Sept. 2011 to May 2012. He became one of the national representatives to OAPM (Optimization of Airspace and Procedures in the Metroplex) in May 2012, currently serves as the NATCA representative to the Program Management Office, and is a member of the newly-formed National Safety & Tech Leadership Council.
Gilbert said Woods has a passion for the Union and a unique ability to pull groups together to break down barriers. His talents have been invaluable to moving many national projects forward.
“This job, it’s getting behind the scenes with the FAA and it’s been pretty exciting,” said Woods, in his acceptance remarks before CFS attendees, of being on the National Safety & Tech Leadership Council.
“The best part is it’s interactive with you guys (the controllers),” he continued. “It’s getting out to facilities, seeing some of the problems, and actually being able to help. This is all for you guys, thank you so much for letting me do this.”
Watch the presentation.
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2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Awards
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Awards, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, July 7-13, 2012
2012 Canadia Open Chess Championship Victoria At Night
2012 Canadia Open Chess Championship Victoria At Night, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, July 7-13, 2012
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Hikaru Nakamura Paddleboard Lessons
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Hikaru Nakamura Paddleboard Lessons, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, July 7-13, 2012
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Hikaru Nakamura Simul
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Hikaru Nakamura Simul, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, July 7-13, 2012
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Blitz
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Blitz, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, July 7-13, 2012
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship 5
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship 5, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, July 7-13, 2012
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Opening
2012 Canadian Open Chess Championship Opening, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, July 7-13, 2012
2012 Canadian Youth Chess Championship Hikaru Nakamura Simul
2012 Canadian Youth Chess Championship Hikaru Nakamura Simul, Surrey, BC, Canada, July 2-6, 2012
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Pacific Ethanol Announces Effectiveness of One-for-Seven Reverse Stock Split
June 7, 2011, 12:45 PM UTC / Source: GlobeNewswire
SACRAMENTO, Calif., June 7, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pacific Ethanol, Inc. (Nasdaq:PEIX), the leading marketer and producer of low-carbon renewable fuels in the Western United States, announced today that it has filed an amendment to its Certificate of Incorporation to effect a one-for-seven reverse stock split of its issued and outstanding shares of common stock. The reverse stock split will be effective as to stockholders of record at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, June 8, 2011. Trading of the Company's common stock on a split-adjusted basis is expected to begin at the open of trading on June 8, 2011.
As a result of the reverse stock split, every seven shares of pre-split common stock will automatically be reclassified as and converted into one share of post-split common stock. The reverse stock split, which was approved by the Company's stockholders on May 19, 2011, will reduce the number of shares of the Company's outstanding common stock from approximately 135.2 million shares to approximately 19.3 million shares. Any fractional shares resulting from the reverse stock split will be rounded up to the nearest whole share.
The Company's common stock will continue to trade on The NASDAQ Capital Market under the symbol "PEIX," with the fifth character "D" added to the end of the trading symbol, beginning on Wednesday, June 8, 2011, for a period of 20 trading days to indicate that the reverse split has occurred. The Company's common stock will revert to trading under its original symbol "PEIX" after the 20 trading day period.
The Company has retained American Stock Transfer & Trust Company ("AST") to act as exchange agent for the reverse stock split. AST will manage the exchange of old, pre-split shares for new post-split shares. Stockholders of record as of the effective time of the reverse stock split will receive a letter of transmittal providing instructions for the exchange of their shares. Stockholders who hold their shares in book entry form will be contacted by their banks or brokers with any instructions. For further information, stockholders and securities brokers should contact AST at 877-248-6417 on or after June 8, 2011.
The purpose of the reverse stock split is to raise the per share trading price of the Company's common stock to better enable the Company to maintain the listing of its common stock on The NASDAQ Capital Market. As previously disclosed, in order to maintain the Company's listing on The NASDAQ Capital Market, the Company's common stock must have a closing bid price of $1.00 or more for a minimum of 10 consecutive trading days. If the Company is unable to meet this requirement, The NASDAQ Listing Qualifications Panel will issue a final determination to delist and suspend trading of the Company's common stock. There can be no assurance that the reverse stock split will have the desired effect of timely raising and maintaining the closing bid price of the Company's common stock to meet this requirement.
About Pacific Ethanol, Inc.
Pacific Ethanol, Inc. (Nasdaq:PEIX) is the leading marketer and producer of low-carbon renewable fuels in the Western United States. Pacific Ethanol also sells co-products, including wet distillers grain (WDG), a nutritional animal feed. Serving integrated oil companies and gasoline marketers who blend ethanol into gasoline, Pacific Ethanol provides transportation, storage and delivery of ethanol through third-party service providers in the Western United States, primarily in California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho and Washington. Pacific Ethanol has a 20% ownership interest in New PE Holdco LLC, the owner of four ethanol production facilities. Pacific Ethanol operates and manages the four ethanol production facilities, which have a combined annual production capacity of 200 million gallons. The facilities in operation are located in Boardman, Oregon, Burley, Idaho and Stockton, California, and one idled facility is located in Madera, California. The facilities are near their respective fuel and feed customers, offering significant timing, transportation cost and logistical advantages. Pacific Ethanol's subsidiary, Kinergy Marketing LLC, markets ethanol from Pacific Ethanol's managed plants and from other third-party production facilities, and another subsidiary, Pacific Ag. Products, LLC, markets WDG. For more information please visit www.pacificethanol.net.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995
With the exception of historical information, the matters discussed in this press release including, without limitation, the ability of Pacific Ethanol to sufficiently increase the closing bid price of its common stock and continue to qualify for listing on The NASDAQ Capital Market are forward-looking statements and considerations that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The actual future results of Pacific Ethanol could differ from those statements. Pacific Ethanol refers you to the "Risk Factors" section contained in its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2011 and in its most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 13, 2011.
CONTACT: IR Agency Contact: Rebecca Herrick Lippert / Heilshorn & Assoc. 415-433-3777 Company IR Contact: Pacific Ethanol, Inc. 916-403-2755 866-508-4969 Investorrelations@pacificethanol.net Media Contact: Paul Koehler Pacific Ethanol, Inc. 503-235-8241 paulk@pacificethanol.net
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Torah Pearls #36 – Beha’alotecha (Numbers 8:1-12:16)
In this episode of The Original Torah Pearls, Beha'alotecha (Numbers 8:1-12:16), where are the teaching priests today? Move with the cloud – what was the purpose of the trumpets? Quail and “the graves of lust” – was the mixed multitude framed? Why did Miriam, and not Aaron, suffer the consequences of speaking against Moses? Also, listen to Nehemia as he highlights God’s grace during the 2nd month Passover of Hezekiah in 2 Chronicles 30!
https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Torah_Pearls/Torah-Pearls-36-Numbers-03-Behaalotecha.mp3
Download Torah Pearls Beha'alotecha
You are listening to The Original Torah Pearls with Nehemia Gordon, Keith Johnson, and Jono Vandor. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.
Jono: G’day to Edwin in Tennessee, and Brian in Florida. And wherever you may be around the world, it is good to have your company. It is time for Pearls from the Torah Portion with Keith Johnson and Nehemia Gordon. G’day, fellows.
Keith: G’day! G’day.
Nehemia: G’day! Great to be here, Jono, to join you and Keith. It amazes me each time we do this, we’re on three different continents - I’m over in Jerusalem, Keith is in Charlotte, North Carolina, and you’re like upside down somewhere in Australia, right?
Jono: That’s right.
Nehemia: I want to shout-out to all the people around the world who are listening to us. We’ve got Elvira and Rebecca, Margaret, Pattie, and Garry. Thank you, guys, for sharing the Torah Pearls over on Facebook, and keep listening.
Jono: Yeah. Excellent. And so today we are in Beha’alotecha, is that right?
Nehemia: Something like that. Beha’alotcha.
Jono: Beha’alo-echa. Oh, man. Numbers, chapter 8, verse 1, all the way to the end of chapter 12. My goodness it’s a long one. And it begins like this… now, Keith, it begins with a little bit of candle arrangement here. “And Yehovah spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to Aaron, and say to him, When you arrange the lamps, the seven lamps, you shall give light in front of the lampstand.’ And Aaron did so; he arranged the lamps to face towards the front of the lampstand, as Yehovah commanded Moses. Now this workmanship of the lampstand was hammered gold; with its shaft and its flowers, and it was hammered work according to the pattern which Yehovah had shown Moses, he had made the lampstand.”
So, there it is, and then it’s kind of an interesting little interlude there, isn’t it, about the lamps? Then all of a sudden, we’re talking about cleansing and dedication of the Levites, right?
Keith: Yes. Wait, Nehemia, you’re really going to let us fly pass that section? And you’re over in Israel, and you’re not going to talk about the golden lampstand? Are you really going to let me do this?
Nehemia: I think we talked about that, didn’t… Jono, you said it was the picture of one of the Torah Pearls episodes that the lampstand over in…
Keith: Okay. Well, then everybody, listen, Nehemia is given a pass, he doesn’t want to talk about the golden lampstand.
Nehemia: We’ve talked about that.
Keith: So, I’m going to talk about that for a second.
Nehemia: Okay. Go ahead.
Keith: No, let me talk about it for a second. So, here’s what hits me in this, and Jono, this is contextual for me because one of the things that I have been working on, obviously as we talk a lot about this whole issue of time. And one of the things that I did when I was over in Rome is, I stopped by the most famous arch there, the one named Titus, who was overseeing the destruction of Jerusalem. And, of course, what they did in those days is they would come back into Rome and they would have this triumphal procession and they’d go by what’s called The Sacred Way. The Sacred Way was where every general would walk through Rome, and they’d come back from, and they’d bring, and they would have their spoils of war.
And one of the things that was so eerie for me was to go under this particular arch, where I wasn’t supposed to go and eventually got kicked out. But I went under the arch and I’m sitting and I’m looking up at it and you look and you see, of course, this thing, this image of this lampstand that is actually carved into the stone of this Roman - who became a Roman emperor - and there it is. And I’m saying, and I’m sitting and looking up at it and thinking, why did they take that particular thing? So, I had asked the question, why did they take the lampstand? And I’d asked Jono that, and I’d asked Nehemia that, just based on what we’re reading right here.
Nehemia: Well, I don’t know if it’s based on what we’re reading. But what I can tell you from history is that the lampstand became the symbol of the Temple, and hence by extension, the symbol of the people of Israel. You know, we think today of the Star of David as the symbol of Israel, but that’s really only a symbol that’s been used for about 200 years.
The earliest symbol we find of the Jewish people is the lampstand, the seven-branch Menorah, or candelabrum. You find that on the Hasmonean coins from the 1st century BC, and then you find it etched on as a decoration on the walls of priests who lived in the 1st century, who served in the Temple, who knew exactly what it looked like. This was the symbol of Israel. There were really two symbols; there was the lampstand, this Menorah, and there was Scripture.
The Romans took both of those as booty. It’s very interesting because Josephus describes this; he describes how they took these things and they marched them through Rome and afterwards, the Scripture that they had taken from the Temple was actually taken to the royal palace, the Imperial Palace in Rome. It was kept there for over a hundred years until it was finally returned to Israel by an Emperor named Septimius Severus in the early 3rd century.
But the lampstand, the Menorah, was brought out every year. Every year they brought out the Menorah from the Temple, and they would parade it through the streets of Rome. This continued probably up until 1204, when one of the crusades ransacked Constantinople because, at some point they moved it from Rome to Constantinople. So, every year for over a thousand years, they would parade this in the streets of Rome to remember that they conquered the Jewish Temple. This was the symbol of the people of Israel. To this day if you look on a coin of the state of Israel, that’s the symbol of Israel, that’s the real symbol. You’ll never see a Star of David on an Israeli coin; you’ll always see the candelabrum, the Menorah.
Keith: Well the other thing that hit me, and Jono, I’m not sure if you have anything to say about it, but the other thing that hit me is, so here you’ve got this symbol, this amazing symbol, and we’re going to talk a little bit, there’s even the connection a little bit further in Scripture here. But the other thing is it was made of hammered gold. Nehemia, we talked about this when I was over in Israel, they’ve got another Menorah that’s been set up; the Temple Institute has created this. And what they’ve done is they’ve got a gold-plated, I think is what they’re saying.
Nehemia: Right. Theirs is gold plated, and that’s simply because a talent of…
Nehemia: …solid gold would be, you know, more than they could afford. But the real one is going to be solid gold.
Keith: Solid gold. So, come on. So okay, one is it’s a symbol of Israel, but I guarantee you that if that candelabrum had been made of simple wood, maybe they’d bring it, maybe they wouldn’t, but I guarantee you when they see that this thing is made of…
Nehemia: Wouldn’t it burn if it was made of wood?
Keith: ...pure… yeah it would burn. So pure gold, I mean yeah, it’s a symbol, but it’s also pretty expensive. I mean this is a big… this is treasure.
Jono: It’s a trophy. It’s a trophy?
Keith: Yeah, oh, it’s a huge trophy.
Jono: Sure.
Keith: I mean, and it’s solid gold.
Nehemia: Well, yeah.
Keith: It’s a solid gold trophy.
Nehemia: What I think of here is that what the people wanted to do, what there maybe is an instinct for us to do, is to take gold, and what they did in the desert; make that into an idol and worship that. So I think what maybe God is doing here - I’m just thinking out loud - is that He’s directing that instinct that we have towards something positive and saying, instead of worshiping an idol, use this and put it in the Temple and it’ll become a source of light in the darkness. So, I think maybe this is redirecting that instinct into something positive.
Keith: And Jono, here what I’m telling you now, he just gave me the softball because, you know, what are we supposed to be? What’s supposed to happen? We’re supposed to be... Nehemia, the people of God - they’re supposed to be a light unto the nations, right?
Nehemia: Come on with that! Whoo!
Keith: The idea that they’re to be a light unto the nations.
Jono: Amen.
Keith: And so, it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen either way. But I think what’s really cool about this, and I will talk about it a little bit later, it’s really cool about the fact that this thing was created... Yehovah didn’t just say from heaven, *snaps fingers*, I now put into being a hammered gold lampstand. No. What did He do? Come on tell me where this came from guys? How did they make it into hammered...?
Jono: Well, He showed Moses the specifications, and He put his spirit upon the artisans to produce it, right?
Keith: Aha, you’re getting close.
Jono: A skilled artist to produce the...
Keith: So where did the gold come from, Nehemia, and Jono?
Jono: Aha! So...
Nehemia: Well, it says they took out their earrings and their nose rings…
Nehemia: …and they donated them.
Jono: And those things probably came from... were plundered from Egypt, right?
Nehemia: And there was so much there that, eventually, they had to say, “stop giving, we’ve got more than we need.”
Keith: And so, this is the problem we would like to have with what we’re doing here, and I want to say something, I want to say something. So, here’s an example where, and I think of this... when I was in Rome and I see this thing, it’s like I get goosebumps because you’re not talking about some ancient fairytale that didn’t happen. Here you’ve got this instruction; here in the Torah Pearls in Numbers, chapter 8, and before, where He says, “make this golden lampstand.” So, there’s so many things I could talk about, why certain people say, “oh, there was never a Temple”, “oh this was all made up”, “this is Jewish mythology.” No.
Nehemia: Who says that?
Keith: You’re...
Nehemia: Wait, hold on, I’ve got to stop you.
Keith: What are you talking about?
Nehemia: Who says there was never a Temple?
Keith: What are you talking about? I was just in a place where there were people saying, “oh, this was never the Jewish Temple.” I’ve met people who say that Nehemia, that this is all fairytale, there are people who say that. There are people who say... hey, like, there are people who say the Holocaust never happened.
Keith: There are people who say, you know, Solomon never had his Temple there. There’s all kinds of people who say that. Now, what they’re trying to do is, do what? Take away the fact that God placed His name, placed His people, placed His Temple there. But what was so amazing to me was to be in this faraway country and to have this etched into stone, and it was a picture for me. It’s etched into stone that they took it from Israel, they brought it to Rome, and, as you say, they paraded it out and they did many other things under that arch, which we can talk about another time.
But where did this come from? The people that God called out of Egypt, He said to them, “Now, bring this to Moses,” so that what? These things could be created, and they were created for what purpose? I’m being like a good Methodist - I’m asking you guys a question: what was the purpose that they were created for?
Jono: Okay. So, they were created for the purpose of the furnishings of the Tabernacle, they were created...
Keith: And then what was the Tabernacle supposed to be? In other words, here we’ve got the Creator of the universe saying, “I’m going to let you be a part of what I’m doing.” I mean I always think it’s amazing when we get an invitation to be a part of what God is doing. So that golden lampstand was the people being a part of what God was doing; they brought in their gold, that gold was made according to specification, that lampstand was used as a picture. And Nehemia said it, it’s literally the picture of the symbol for all of Israel.
And then this was thousands of years ago, and yet today, to this very day, we can see that this was something that happened. So, for me, I get kind of excited about this, it was something for me that was a bit of an eye-opening experience...
Keith: …that isn’t me reading my Bible and saying, “yeah, at some point this happened, and yeah, I believe it.” Like Nehemia says, “I believe it, but I haven’t seen it,” but there’s some things you see; this was something to actually, physically see, and it really caught my attention. And I think a lot about just how it happened. Those people had to come, they had a willing heart, they gave, and as a result of giving that was made into that golden lampstand, and as a result that was in the Temple. And then again, eventually, it was taken out of the Temple. And when the next Temple is created, I think that we’ll probably see one again. Amen.
Jono: Amen. And it’ll serve its purpose again.
Keith: Amen. Go ahead.
Jono: “Then Yehovah spoke to Moses, saying, “Take the Levites from among the children of Israel and cleanse them.” Now I’ve got in italics here, “cleanse them ceremonially.” It’s not as if they needed a bath. And it goes on to say, “Sprinkle the water of purification on them, shave the body, wash their clothes, and take a…”
Nehemia: We’ve got to stop there just for a second.
Jono: Okay.
Nehemia: It’s really interesting, I’ve talked about this a few times, about how the book of Numbers isn’t in chronological order. In Numbers 19, a section that we’re going to get to later, we hear about the waters of purification and what they are. That’s not the water that was blessed by a priest; it’s really a solution consisting of the ashes of the red heifer, intermixed with various other things, and mainly water.
Then that’s sprinkled on the people as a form of purification from the dead. Now the concept of becoming impure from the dead is something we haven’t even really been told explicitly about. It appears in Numbers 19 with all of its details. In this section it’s kind of alluded to - they’re going to serve in the Temple, they’ve got to be purified from having touched a dead body; that’s the waters of purification. And in the next chapter, it’s going to become the central subject…
Jono: Right.
Nehemia: …that people have become impure from the dead. What that tells you is that Numbers 19 had to have been revealed before Numbers 8 and 9, otherwise, I mean...
Jono: That’s a good point, yeah.
Nehemia: …it doesn’t make sense. Yeah. And, you know, it’s clearly being structured more according to some principle of association, and possibly by topic, rather than chronologically.
Jono: Sure, yeah. That’s a very good point.
Nehemia: There it is.
Jono: And so, then there’s the sin offering, and there’s the flower. And the thing is, now Nehemia, can you help me understand this? It says in verse 10, “So you shall bring the Levites before Yehovah, and the children of Israel shall lay their hands upon the Levites; and Aaron shall offer the Levites before Yehovah like a wave offering.” Now...
Jono: Now, what is the difference between a wave offering and a heave offering? Are they the same things?
Nehemia: A wave offering is the Hebrew word ‘tnufa,’ and the heave offering is ‘truma;’ it’s a different word. And ‘truma’ is to lift something up, ‘tnufa’ is to wave it. How exactly they waved it, we don’t know exactly. Maybe he took them in and moved them back-and-forth, I don’t know, swung them over his head like a chicken, I don’t know.
But what I find interesting is verse 10, “And the children of Israel shall lay their hands,” literally, “they shall lean their hands upon the Levites.” This image of leaning the hands is something that we see later on, that Moses does when he passes his authority on to Joshua. The word for ‘to lean the hand’, “samach,” “smicha,” that’s the Hebrew word for ordination. So, you could also translate this, “and the children of Israel shall ordain the Levites...”
Keith: Come on.
Nehemia: Which I find amazing because, in many religions it’s the people who are in authority, who then essentially rule over and have authority over the people. Here, the people are coming to the Levites, and they’re the ones ordaining them. They’re deriving their authority from the people of Israel who are saying, “We need someone to do this for us, there’s a service here that needs to be done, there’s a lot of rules and a lot of regulations and the average person can’t really do these things; we need a group of people who are going to be dedicated to protecting the holiness of this Tabernacle. We’re going to authorize you, we’re going to ordain you to do that for us. And that’s essentially what this verse is saying - the children of Israel, they’re the ones who lean their hands upon the Levites and say, “okay, it’s your job now.”
Keith: I wonder if that’s one of the reasons why it was easier for the people of Israel, and this is a pretty amazing thing, just this idea of them laying their hands on them, but I wonder if that’s why it was easier for the people to say, “yes, we will have this, and this group as the set apart...” you know, in my tradition, it’s kind of like - well, here’s the bishops and the cardinals, and here’s all these people, they’re the special people over there, and they’ve got the authority, as it says. I was listening to the Pope in Rome, sorry for bringing him up again, but they opened the conversation and they said, “now, he’s sitting in this chair in succession of Peter, so, therefore, you don’t want to mess with him.” Basically, the idea being it’s a top-down, top-down, he’s there, so you can’t get up to him.
But in this situation, I wonder if it was easier for the people to see the Levites, as Nehemia just mentioned, all this work they’re doing, all the specifics they’re doing. They’re doing stuff they have to know the ins and outs of stuff that the average farmer wouldn’t know. And so, when they lay their hands on them saying, “yes, we affirm the fact that you’re going to be in this role, and we’re going to support it.” In other words, they’re sending them, but they’re also supporting them.
And, now, here’s the way it happens in my tradition, there’s sort of the putting down the stake and saying, “well, I’m the Levite so therefore here’s what you got to do,” versus “no, you’re the Levite and here’s what we want you to do.” It’s just a different way of looking at it.
Keith: Top-down versus the bottom-up.
Jono: Certainly.
Nehemia: They were chosen by God, but the point is that the Israelites come together and essentially, the Israelites are the ones who have to put them in the place of this situation of being Levites; they’re essentially the ones who are ordaining them as Levites. So, yeah, I think it’s profound.
I think we in the western world have this idea that government gets its authority from the people, and that was bizarre - even just a hundred years ago if you would’ve gone to Tsarist Russia and said that, that would’ve been enough to get you killed. And here this was being spoken and taught, this principle in Scripture 3,500 years ago, that the people on the top aren’t supposed be lording it over the people, they’re supposed to be serving the people.
Keith: I know somebody who taught that.
Nehemia: Come on with that. You mean me? Or who are you talking about?
Keith: He’s in the back of the book. He’s in the back of the book, you know about that.
Nehemia: Oh, that guy.
Keith: No, I love that because here again this is this concept, and again one little line, Jono, just one little line, one little line: “And the Israelites are to lay their hands on them.” See, that’s an example of why we have Torah Pearls, that’s an example of why we have...
Nehemia: Torah Pearl, Torah Pearl, Torah Pearl.
Keith: No, that’s why we have Torah Pearl red light, that’s why we’re doing this program, that’s why it’s exciting to be doing this. And it’s no small thing, Jono, that you’ve been able to pull this together. You pulled this together, and I know people have different thoughts and ideas - there’s always perception and reality - but the truth is you’re functioning in a role of helping us to come together to give the information for the people. So, again, you have to be commended for that, Jono, that we’re not taking this lightly. But here’s this one little line, how often do people talk about this one little line, there it is right there. So that’s an example of the Torah Pearl that comes off the page as a result of what you’re doing; I want to thank you.
Jono: Thank you, my friend.
Nehemia: Yeah. Thank you, Jono. Can I share a little story? I was talking and…was asked, “Well, Jono serves the people, what is it that... how is he able to do that? You know, is Jono independently wealthy? He’s able to spend hours on end editing these programs and dedicating his time.” And I said, “I don’t know, maybe, his father...he’s an heir of some large fortune or something, I don’t know.” And I come to find out that he’s dedicated his life to doing this, and he’s kind of like Keith and me, squeezing by by the skin of our teeth. So, I want to thank you Jono, for stepping out on faith, which is essentially what you’ve done. If you would’ve told me five years ago about stepping out on faith, I would say those are just a bunch of words, I don’t know what that means. Now, having been doing that for three years and having intimate knowledge of what that means, I really appreciate what you’re doing.
Jono: Thank you. Thank you, my friend.
Keith: Well, and with that in mind, I want to say that people do have a chance to support, and Jono won’t say it, so I’m going to say it. Those that are listening, and I know we do have a lot of folks that are listening and there’s some people that, you know, a click on the button is nothing for them, there’s other people that would be a challenge and a struggle, we certainly are not calling any Levitical authority for anyone to do that.
But there is a way for you simply to support what’s happening here, and I wish it was that it didn’t take any effort and there was nothing we needed to know and it could just happen, and it just falls out of the sky. It’s like the Menorah that no one knows, but the hammered gold actually comes from people. The way that we’re able to do this is people do support it.
And so for those that have been listening, that are willing to push the button, you just simply push the donate button, and I’m going to ask you to do something - if you push the donate button there’s a little place that you can put in the memo for Torah Pearls, and that’s going to help us know that in fact there’s at least a couple of you out there that are listening and, hopefully, appreciating it.
And again, I wouldn’t have Jono say it, I’d like to say it on behalf of Jono, who is not independently wealthy, but has been digging in the field, and I want to tell you that I think that we can come and bring support to this just like we do to other things. And just like the people brought to the tent of meeting; I’m not calling this the tent of meeting, I’m calling it an idea to enter in where God is working, and we’re working. We need your support, we want your support, and if you’d be willing to push that button and support us, and you put a little note saying it’s for Torah Pearls, it will be greatly appreciated. And heck, if I see you do that, I’ll even give you a shout-out.
Jono: There we go.
Keith: So that’s my plug.
Jono: Look, thank...
Keith: I’m only shouting-out from now on for those that are willing to push the button; I’m not doing shout-outs. Now, we can move on.
Jono: Look, I appreciate that, guys; I appreciate it. And now, since you brought it up, something does come to mind and it’s always, for those that to do contribute to Truth2U, I just want to thank those who do. And I’ve always wondered which program and what was said that blessed you, please let us know because I do understand there’s a place that you can leave a little message, please let us know what it was specifically that blessed you, and what program in Truth2U, what Torah Pearl were you listening to? I’d love to know that kind of information, and...
Keith: And can I say something, one other thing? If anyone really is moved could you, in the memo, could you give a shout-out to Keith, just say: “SHOUT-OUT TO KEITH, I HEARD YOU. HERE’S SOME MONEY, BROTHER. PRAISE BE TO GOD.” Listen, I know that, I’d like a shout-out...
Nehemia: Here’s an earring, from my ear for your ear.
Keith: Here’s my nose ring, I’m supporting the move.
Nehemia: And please don’t send nose rings.
Jono: Please don’t send nose rings, it’s just a special little shout-out to Keith will make him happy...
Keith: There you go. I appreciate it you guys, please let us know. Now we can move on…
Jono: Warm and fuzzy. Okay. So now, Yehovah says, “the Levites shall be mine,” we know that instead of the firstborn he goes into detail there, and then he goes on to say, now in verse 19, “And I have given the Levites,” who are mine, “I have given them as a gift to Aaron and his sons from among the children of Israel, to do the work of the children of Israel in the Tabernacle of Meeting, and to make atonement for the children of Israel, that there be no plague among the children of Israel when the children of Israel come near the sanctuary.” Now if we had to put it in a nutshell, Nehemia, is that fair? If we had to put it in a nutshell, is that it?
Nehemia: Well, their function is to assist; I think verse 26, that’s the nutshell. Their function, the function of the Levites, is to assist the priest. It says, literally, here in verse 26, “And he shall serve his brethren, in the tent of meeting, to guard the ‘mishmeret’,” the thing that needs to be guarded, “but he shall not serve. Thus shall you do to the Levites in their guarding.” Then we can actually see a living example of this, and I was going to wait to bring this, until we get to the next section, which talks about the Passover, but we can actually see some examples of this over in 2 Chronicles chapter 30 and, I think it’s chapter 30 and 35. Maybe we’ll go into more detail when we get to the next chapter, but there we can actually see how the Levites function - that they’re helping the priests out. That the priests are sprinkling the blood, that’s the job of the priest, but there are so many sacrifices there, they need someone to help them, so the Levites are skinning the animals and slaughtering them and doing all the grunt work. Then that leaves the priests open to actually do what they do best, which is doing the sprinkling of the blood. And going back to what Keith said about how... I think you are, in a sense, Jono, a Levite, in that you’re doing the skinning of the animals, which is the editing of these programs, and allowing Keith and me to do best.
Jono: There you go.
Nehemia: To go back to that analogy, not that you’re a literal Levite. But anyway, that’s their function - they’re doing the grunt work like the editing, they’re cutting up the animals and skinning them, and allowing the Levites to do what they do best. So, they’re essentially assistants to the priests; they can’t replace the priests, and that becomes a big issue later. It sounds like a subtle difference, but it becomes a huge issue later in the story of Korach, which we’ll get to later in Numbers...
Nehemia: …where there’s a family of Levites who says, “wait a minute, we’re also descendants of Levi. Why is Aaron, and his brethren, and why are they the ones who actually get to perform the sacrificial service and we’re just the assistants? We want to be elevated as well.” And it doesn’t end well for Korach.
Jono: It doesn’t end well. In fact, there’s also a case for elevation later on that doesn’t end well; we’re going to get to that. But before we jump into chapter 9, I just want to... last week we were talking about the census of the Levites from the age of 30 to 50. But here in verse 24, it says, “This is what pertains to the Levites: from twenty-five years old and above one may enter to perform service in the work.” So basically, it’s from 25 to 50 that they serve, right?
Keith: But it talks about...
Nehemia: Here it talks about them definitely coming and serving in the tent of meeting, and I guess there’s some kind of subtle difference there between the ones who are serving between the ages of 30 and 50, and then 25 and up...
Keith: Yeah, but all I got to say is this, and this is my favorite verse, verse 25, “But at,” say “but at.”
Nehemia: But at.
Keith: “But at the age of fifty years…”
Nehemia: “The age of fifty.”
Keith: “…they must retire.”
Jono: They get to retire. I mean, not only do they retire, it says, “performing the work, and shall work no more.” They retire.
Keith: And you know what it’s interesting about that that...
Keith: We’re talking about them doing the work of… which obviously was no small thing, it wasn’t an easy thing to be physically doing this stuff that they were doing. This isn’t like today where you walk into a church and the hardest thing you do it turn the key in the lock and step in. No, these guys are doing some serious, serious work, and so at 50, they got a chance to retire. And I don’t think at 50 that meant they didn’t...
Jono: Yeah.
Keith: …they didn’t still continue to share with people, talk with people, “hey, tell me about what you did in the Temple when you were doing…” I mean, I’m sure they did that sort of thing, but this idea of the grunt work, the labor, the up-until-midnight-work, they didn’t have to do that anymore after 50.
Jono: Now, this is the thing. Actually, when Nehemia says they’re the ones skinning the animals, for example, and that’s just one of the many, many things that they have to do...
Jono: …so that the Kohen can really focus on what they have to do so that they do not die, as it says in the Torah so many times.
Jono: And it’s so, so important that they do focus on even the smallest of details. And skinning an animal, just taking that as an example, I mean I’ve done that and it’s a real job…
Keith: See. See what I mean? I knew it, Nehemia! You hid...
Nehemia: He’s a Levite.
Keith: He’s a Levite, for God's sake. You mean to tell me...
Nehemia: I’m already seeing 10 percent.
Keith: Honestly, hold on. No, no. Hold on. So, you’re telling me seriously, and now this really is squeamish for me... Jono, are you telling me you’ve actually skinned an animal?
Jono: What are you talking about? Keith, I’ve got goats. I’ve got goats in my...
Keith: What are you talking about? That you’ve skinned an animal?
Nehemia: I thought they were your pets.
Jono: I slaughter them; I skin them; I butcher them; I put them in the freezer; I eat them.
Keith: Oh, my gosh.
Jono: They are delicious.
Jono: Hey, guys…
Nehemia: Hey, so going back to the original question…
Jono: Hey, listen. Hey, hey, when you come to my house, we’re having goat, right?
Nehemia: I’m going to hold you to that.
Nehemia: Hey, going back to the original question here, you’re right - it does mention repeatedly that it’s from 30 to 50 that you count them. In verse 24, it says from 25, in 24 and 25, it says, from the age of 25 through 50 they’ll serve. And to be honest with you, I’m going to confess something here in the interest of full disclosure: I don’t have all the answers.
Jono: You don’t have an answer to that one. But you have to admit it’s curious right? Because why not count from 25 up?
Nehemia: I do have an answer to it, but I don’t have all the answers is my point. I had noticed this before because it repeatedly says from 30 to 50, and here throughout chapter 4, for example, and that’s when it comes to the counting. And look - my off-the-cuff answer, my gut reaction, would be to say that they’re serving in Tabernacle beginning at the age of 25, but they only get counted from the age of 30. I mean, that’s the simplest answer.
Jono: Okay. So...
Keith: I’m now giving the answer.
Jono: It’s a five-year apprenticeship.
Keith: Guys. Guys!
Nehemia: There could be a five-year apprenticeship. Could be.
Keith: It’s like what they do in the Methodist church, I’m telling you, we got this from there.
Nehemia: I thought you did ten years...
Keith: No, first you’re a local pastor, then you get a chance to be a probationary member, then you get to be a deacon, and you don’t get to be official until you’re called an elder. So that’s about a 4 to 5 year process. That’s what happens, that’s what the deal is, and 25+25 is 50, a witness for heaven and earth.
Jono: There it is. Chapter 9, the Second Passover, here we are, “Yehovah spoke to Moses in the Wilderness of Sinai, in the first...” Keith, are you ready for this?
Jono: There’s a whole lot of time here.
Jono: “…the first month...”
Jono: “…of the second year, after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying, ‘Let the children of Israel keep the Passover at its appointed time. On the fourteenth day of this month...’”
Keith: I’m going to interrupt you because you know what? We’ve talked about Passover, but I want to get to verse 6, and you got to hurry up and get to verse 6.
Jono: Here it says, “Now there were certain men,” we’ve done Passover that’s true, “who were defiled by a human corpse,” as we were talking earlier on, “so that they could not keep the Passover on that day; and they came before Moses and Aaron on that day.” And they said, “what are we going to do? We’ve been defiled by a human corpse. Why are we kept from presenting the offering of Yehovah at its appointed time of the children of Israel?” And Moses said to them... now, Nehemia, here’s another example of what you were talking about before...
Nehemia: Exactly.
Jono: …in a previous Torah Pearls, “And Moses said to them, ‘Stand still, that I may hear what Yehovah will command concerning you.’” And there’s another case that not everything was disclosed to him on Sinai.
Nehemia: Right, and there are actually five examples of that. One of them we’ve already seen - Leviticus 24:12, where the man who cursed the name, and Moses didn’t know what to do, he had to go ask God. Numbers 9:8 - here’s a second one. The third one is the man who is gathering the sticks on Shabbat, we’re going to get to that soon. Numbers 15:34. The fourth example is Numbers 27, verse 5, where we have the daughters of Zelophehad, where they don’t know what to do, and their cousins come later in Numbers 36:5. And in all five of those cases Moses clearly doesn’t know what to do, and what does he do? He goes and he asks God.
Nehemia: And through revelation, he gets the instruction of what he’s supposed to do. To me as a Karaite Jew, this is one of the key passages in the Bible for me. And really, the reason is that I was raised with this idea that Moses received everything on Mount Sinai, all the details and all the instructions were revealed to him on Mount Sinai, and when he came down the revelation was complete.
That’s clearly not the case. He clearly didn’t have this part of the revelation until after these incidents, issues, came up. This is something that’s actually talked about - if you’ll give me a minute here, cut me a little bit of grace here, and then I’ll let Keith talk - I know he’s got something burning inside him, but if we can cut over real quick to Deuteronomy 17 there’s whole description there beginning in verse 8. It says, “When a matter is too difficult for you for judgment between blood and blood, etc. - matter of strife in your gates - you will rise up, and you will go to the place that Yehovah your God will choose, and you will come to the Levitical priest, and to the judge who will be in those days.”
So, we’ve got two people you can come to get an answer. You’ve got the Levitical priest at the Temple, that I call the high priest, and you’ve got the “judge who will be in those days.” Read the book of Judges; you can see what that is. It says, “And you shall seek, and they shall tell you the matter of judgment. And you shall do according to the matter which they tell you from that place that Yehovah chooses. And you shall diligently do according to all that they teach you.”
So here we have, essentially, a system set in place when you don’t know what to do. When you’ve got a man who’s been gathering sticks on Shabbat; when you’ve got a situation like, there are people who are ritually impure and they can’t bring the Passover sacrifice, what do we do? You go and you ask the high priest and he’ll give you a judgment.
Now, where does he get that judgment from? Does he just pluck it out of the thin air? Well, no, the answer is given in Numbers 27, and there is actually what we were talking about where, “Moses leans his hands”, those are the exact words in verse 18. Moses leans his hands upon Joshua to pass his authority over to him. I want to quickly read that passage, starting in verse 18, it says, “And Yehovah spoke to Moses, ‘Take to you Joshua the son of Nun,’” say Joshua; Joshua that’s Yehoshua, say Yehoshua.
Jono: Yehoshua.
Keith: Yehoshua.
Nehemia: “Yehoshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, and you shall lean your hands upon him.” Same words as it talked about with the Levites. “And you shall stand him before Eleazar the priest,” Eleazar is the high priest, “and before all the congregation. And you shall instruct him,” or command him, “before their eyes, and you shall give some of your glory upon him in order that they will obey, in order that all the congregation of the children of Israel will obey.”
And it says, “And before Eleazar the priest he shall stand, and he shall ask the judgment of the Urim before Yehovah.” So where does he get this judgment? When you come to the judge and you get this information and you have a question - he goes and he asks the high priest through the Urim and Thummim, through this prophetic device. Well, we actually have a living example of that in Ezra, chapter 2, where there’s a case of these people who have a tradition. Say tradition.
Jono: Tradition.
Nehemia: They’ve got a tradition that they’re priests, but they can’t prove through a direct line father-to-son, father-to-son, the names of who their ancestors are to prove that they’re real priests. It says in verse 62, of Ezra, chapter 2, “And these sought their writing of the genealogies, and they were not found,” because they had these genealogical scrolls, “and they were banished from the priesthood. And the governors said to them, they must not eat of the most holy things until a priest stands with Urim and the Thummim.”
So here was a situation where they didn’t know if these priests were genuine priests; they had a tradition that they were priests, but they couldn’t prove it. And they said, “We need a priest with the Urim and the Thummim, we can’t just make it up, we can’t just pluck these things out of the air, we need a priest with the Urim and the Thummim.”
That really creates a question of, what do we do today? For me, as a Karaite Jew, this is something I’ve struggled with. The rabbis, what they’ve done is, they’ve actually taken the authority of the high priest, and the Urim and the Thummim, and taken that authority as their own. They say that it’s up to us, we’re the ones. They actually talk about Deuteronomy 17, when you go to the Temple. They say, “That’s us; we’re not at the Temple but we have the authority of the Temple, the authority of the high priest and of the high judge.” And I say, “No, that’s not what Scripture says.”
There’s actually a reference to this in 2 Chronicles, chapter 15, a very obscure prophecy of a relatively unknown prophet, Azariah, who’s the son of Oded, and he says - literally what it says in Hebrew in verse 3, it says, “And many days shall be for Israel without the true God and without the teaching priest and without the Torah.” I would say that we are in that situation. We are in the situation where we don’t have the teaching priest, and a lot of us don’t have the Torah. And a lot of us worship a God who’s a God of our own creation, and in that sense, we don’t know the true God.
In other words, we worship a God who, we’ve put words in his mouth; we said, he spoke these things at Sinai. And he didn’t actually speak these things. I think that’s what it’s saying - not that they worship some other completely different God, but what they’ve done is, they’ve essentially falsified what God has spoken, and we end up with this situation where we don’t have the teaching priest.
I’m waiting for that day where we have the teaching priest once again, and he comes, and he teaches us the truth. And we’re going to - and this is something Keith and I have discussed quite a bit, how in his tradition he’s got the whole concept of the Messiah, and in my tradition... he’s waiting for the Messiah to return in his tradition, and where I come from we’re waiting for the Messiah to come. But what we can both agree on is that one of the figures that’s going to come is going to be the king, and the king takes on the role of the judge, that’s very clear...
Nehemia: …in the books of Samuel and Kings, and so Deuteronomy 17, “the judge who will be in those days,” that will be the king. I’m going to read the prophecy everybody agrees is a prophecy about the Messiah, because that’s one of the issues when we talk about all the Messianic prophesies - Christians have a list that they believe are Messianic, the Jews have a different list, that they are Messianic, and they’ll argue, is this Messianic, is it not Messianic, meaning is it referred to the Messiah or not referred to the Messiah. We can go on from now to the time immemorial and argue about that.
But one passage everyone agrees is Isaiah, chapter 11. It says, “A shoot shall go forth from Jesse; and a branch shall blossom from his root.” Jesse, of course, is the father of David. “And the spirit of Yehovah shall rest upon him,” the spirit of Yehovah is going to rest upon the Messiah.
It says, “The spirit of wisdom and knowledge, and the spirit of counsel and might, and the spirit of understanding and fear of Yehovah,” I’m reading from the Hebrew. It literally says, “and the fear of Yehovah shall breathe into him,” or shall blow into him, “and he shall not judge by the sight of his eyes,” meaning he’s not going to look and say, “okay, that seems to me this way, or appears to me this way,” “and he’s not going to rebuke by the hearing of his ears, but he shall judge the poor in righteousness,” meaning, he’s going to be judging with the spirit of Yehovah. It goes on to explain that this is very clear, this person is going to have a spirit that allows him to speak the word of Yehovah. And it’s not just going to be his opinion - these are going to be prophetic judgments.
Nehemia: He’s going to be similar to Moses in that, when he doesn’t know what to do, he’s not just going to make it up and say, a majority of sages have said such and such. What he’s going to do is ask his Father in heaven and say, Creator of the universe, what is to be done in this judgment? Or maybe he’ll just know it. I mean, I don’t know, he may just know it because he’s got the spirit of Yehovah on him.
But it’s not going to be “by the hearing of his ears,” and “by the sight of his eyes.” He’s going to judge through the prophetic spirit. I think that’s why this is such an important passage over in Numbers because it’s a clue, it’s a hint, that this is what Moses did. I think, in that sense, Moses is a picture of the Messiah.
Jono: Fair enough. Keith?
Keith: Hello?
Jono: That’s a Torah Pearl. Thank you Nehemia for that. It was brilliant. That really...
Keith: No, the thing that’s awesome about that is this idea… and you know in my tradition, I say “my tradition,” I think a lot of people that are listening, and we also await this opportunity when, and I think more than anything, I just have to confess this, more than anything, the thing that excites me is that Yehovah is going to be One, his name is going to be One.
Nehemia: Amen! Whoo! Hallelujah.
Keith: There’s not going to be any question about who’s running the show…
Keith: …who’s set up as Messiah. But in the meantime, you know, and we happen to be during that time, I think as this show is being played, we’re very close to having just happen, sorry for the dates, but this idea of Shavuot, wherein we have this picture in the Tanach of Moses coming and hearing from the word, and then the people saying, “we don’t want to hear from God, we just want to hear from you.”
And I think what’s so powerful about the idea of hearing from Yehovah, as Moses heard from Yehovah, our understanding the Torah as His word, the word of God, and allowing our minds to be massaged, our hearts to be massaged through the spirit. And I use the word “through the spirit,” the ruach hakodesh, you know, the spirit of truth, of light, that would help us to get an understanding of what these Scriptures means. It’s just an amazing thing. So we’re doing that now, sort of while we’re in exile, but will it be like when we’re not in exile and we don’t have to wait for Torah Pearls, whether we’re going to hear or understand, but rather we could actually hear the word of God as it was meant to be.
Jono: Now, speaking of... let me read in verse 10. It says, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying, ‘If any of you is unclean because of a corpse, or is far away on a journey, he may still keep Yehovah’s Passover on the fourteenth day of the second month.” Now, what does that mean for us?
Keith: This was where I was waiting for, verse 6, because it says, “some of them could not celebrate the Passover because they were unclean.” And so, I remember some years ago, it must’ve been about 8 years ago, there was this issue regarding the times - what time it was in. And I think, Nehemia, it was in 2005 or so, I don’t remember what the year was, but there was a full month between the Rabbinical celebration of Passover and the Biblical, according to the sighting of the moon and the barley being Aviv, and there was a huge controversy.
But one of the things that was so amazing about it, for me, was just this concept, this idea, that even... we’ve talked about Passover and we don’t have to talk about the whole concept of Passover all over again, but this is a new idea. The new idea is hey, some people weren’t able to celebrate Passover, and that the Father then gives this opportunity for them, Moses goes back and checks with Him, he says, “hey, what are we going to do? There’s these people, this is an important thing, they were on a journey, they were ceremonially unclean.” And He says, “hey, I’ve got another opportunity for them, they can have a Sheni Pesach, a second Passover, a second opportunity to do that.” And when I hear that I kind of think of the character of our Father, that He says, “okay, you know what, life happens.” I could use a different word, there’s children, “life happens...”
Nehemia: What’s the other word?
Keith: What are you talking about? Forget it, I don’t want you to know, you’ll use it. So life happens, things happen, and as a result of things happening, circumstances, people are listening to this show right now, who because, bad situations, something happened with their family and they were planning on having Pesach and they had to go on a journey because something happened with their family or someone was sick; something happened where they couldn’t do it, and there’s a second opportunity. I love that concept; I love the idea that right here in the book of Numbers, the book that many people in my tradition don’t even read, is grace, is an intervention. And even like what we dealt with Aaron and his sons, hey, you know what, Aaron says, “look, are you kidding me? I was mourning my sons, isn’t there some opportunity for grace?” We talked about it before in an earlier portion.
Keith: In this situation that he would say, “there’s a second opportunity,” and isn’t that life? Isn’t this a picture of life? Listen, if you’re hearing me, say “Amen”, I don’t need Nehemia or Jono. If you’re listening to me and you know what it means to sometimes need a Sheni Pesach, a second opportunity.
Nehemia: Pesach Sheni.
Keith: This is what he’s just…you just had to do that… Okay.
Nehemia: I’m sorry. Pesach Sheni. The adjective comes after the noun: Pesach Sheni.
Keith: I’m talking to my Methodist brothers and sisters. Okay? The English speakers of the world, okay? It’s the second Pesach, for God’s sake, Nehemia. We’re not talking about - Jono, listen. No, but the cool thing is, and I’ll stop here, is that He looked at them and said, “life happens and there’s a second opportunity.”
Nehemia: So, this is amazing... I love this passage because this is one of the passages that then refers to something else in the Scripture where this was actually implemented. So, can we look at that and take a little bit of a detour and look at 2 Chronicles chapter 30? And maybe you or Keith can read it. Because 2 Chronicles, chapter 30, describes a Pesach Sheni that actually took place in the time of King Hezekiah, and this is in the situation where they wanted to keep the Passover. They hadn’t actually been keeping it and they realized, “this is really important, we better do this, but we’re a day late and a dollar short, we’re not going to make it in the first month.”
Nehemia: We’ve got a seven-day period of purification; that’s just not going to happen in time. So, they end up doing it in the second month. And so maybe one of you guys can read 2 Chronicles, chapter 30. It’s a powerful passage.
Jono: Verse 13, is that where we’re going from?
Nehemia: No, I don’t…read the whole thing, it’s quick.
Jono: Oh, wow. What, the whole chapter?
Nehemia: Yeah, read the whole thing, this is...
Jono: Okay. Here it comes.
Nehemia: No, this is golden, this chapter. What are you talking about? Read it fast.
Jono: Hezekiah. Okay, so, “Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah, and also wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to the house of Yehovah at Jerusalem, to keep the Passover of Yehovah, Elohim of Israel. For the king and his leaders and all the assembly in Jerusalem had agreed to keep the Passover in the second month. For they had not kept it at the regular time, because a sufficient number of priests had not consecrated themselves, nor had the people gathered together in Jerusalem. And the matter pleased the king...”
Nehemia: So, they got both reasons there - they’re ritually impure, the priests, and the people are far away on a journey. It’s almost a mirror of Numbers, chapter 9.
Jono: There’s both of them.
Nehemia: It’s like they’re quoting Scripture here.
Jono: “And so the matter pleased the king and all the assembly. So, they resolved to make a proclamation throughout all Israel, from Beersheba to Dan, that they should come to keep the Passover to Yehovah Elohim in Israel at Jerusalem, since they had not done it for a long time in the prescribed manner. Then the runners went throughout all Israel...”
Nehemia: Hold on, I got to stop you. Is that what you got there, Keith, “prescribed manner”?
Keith: No, I don’t know. I’m still back in Numbers, I’m listening to...
Jono: I’ve got prescribed in italics.
Nehemia: Chapter 30, verse...
Keith: What does it say in italics?
Nehemia: Okay. So, what it literally says…here I’ll read to you from the King James, which has a more literal translation. “For they had not done it of a long time in such sort as it was written.” That’s what it says, in the Hebrew, “kakatuv,” “as it was written,” or “as it is written.”
Jono: Wow.
Nehemia: So, they’re dealing with the Torah here. They read in the Torah that this is what they’re supposed to do and they’re like, “well we haven’t done this; we’ve got to do it.” Okay, sorry, go on. I’ll let you go on.
Jono: “Then the runners went throughout Israel and Judah and the letters from the king to his leaders and spoke according to the command of the king. And the children of Israel return to Yehovah, Elohim of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel and then He will return to the remnant of you who have escaped from the hand of the king of Assyria. And do not be like your fathers or your brethren, who trespassed against Yehovah the Elohim of their fathers, so that He gave them up to desolation, as you see. Now do not be stiff-necked, as your fathers were, but yield yourselves to Yehovah; and enter into His sanctuary, which He has sanctified forever, and serve Yehovah your Elohim that the fierceness of His wrath may turn away from you. For if you return to Yehovah, your brethren and your children will be treated with compassion by those who led them captive, so that they may come back to this land; for Yehovah...”
Nehemia: So, bear in mind, this is a time when a lot of people have already been taken captive to Assyria. He’s writing to the remnant. He’s actually a lot like Keith, Hezekiah; he’s speaking to the remnant.
Jono: There it is.
Keith: To the remnant, yes.
Jono: “Yehovah your God is gracious and merciful and will not turn His face from you if you return to Him. So, the runners...”
Nehemia: And here’s my favorite part.
Jono: “So the runners passed from city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, as far as Zebulun; but they laughed at them and they mocked them.”
Nehemia: They laughed at them. They were like, “you want us to leave our homes and not sacrifice at our local little Temple here on top of every high hill and under every leafy tree?” Because that’s what they were doing. And he’s like, “no, you got to come to Jerusalem, it’s in Scripture, there’s only one place that Yehovah has chosen to place His name, you can’t just sacrifice wherever you want, on top of every hill and under every leafy tree.” And that’s in Deuteronomy 16, it reiterates that - the Passover, even though in Egypt you did it in your houses, from now on the Passover has to be done at the place Yehovah chooses. And there’s only one place like that. It was originally mobile in the form of the Tabernacle, we’ll read about that later in the chapter, but from the time of Solomon, it was permanently in Jerusalem.
Nehemia: Okay. Sorry.
Jono: “Nevertheless some from Asher, Manasseh, and Zebulun humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem. Also, the hand of God was on Judah to give them singleness of heart to obey the...” that’s great, isn’t it? I’m going to read that again, “Also the hand of God was on Judah to give them singleness of heart to obey the command of the king and the leaders, at the word of Yehovah. Now many people, a very great assembly, gathered at Jerusalem to keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread in the second month. They arose and took away the altars that were in Jerusalem, and they took away all the incense altars...”
Nehemia: The idolatrous altars.
Jono: Aha. “…and cast them into the Brook of Kidron. Then,” we turn the page, “they slaughtered the Passover lamb on the fourteenth day of the second month. And the priests and the Levites were ashamed, and sacrificed…” wait, what? Hang on, “The priests and the Levites were ashamed,” I’ve got here, “The priests and the Levites were ashamed and sacrificed themselves...”
Nehemia: That’s what it says. No, “sanctified themselves.”
Jono: Oh! Sorry. Thank you.
Nehemia: “…sacrificed themselves,” what?
Jono: I’m thinking, I’ve never read this before...
Keith: I can’t believe you got... Look, Nehemia, Jono’s got to read this stuff, you tell him, read the entire chapter, his eyes are crossing, it’s after midnight to him, for God’s sake.
Nehemia: No. This is golden, this chapter.
Keith: You can’t tell him to read another whole chapter.
Nehemia: It’s one of those beautiful chapters in Scripture, when we get to the end, you’re going to...
Keith: “Beseder.”
Nehemia: Keith, when we get to the end of this chapter, you are going to shout. Write it on a piece of paper...
Jono: Okay. So, fortunately, I’m so relieved they didn’t “sacrifice themselves,” they “sanctified themselves and brought the burnt offerings to the house of Yehovah. They stood in their place according to their customs, according to the Law of Moses the man of God...”
Nehemia: And it says, of course, “the Torah of Moshe, the man of Elohim.”
Nehemia: It says, “The priests sprinkled the blood from the hand of the Levites.” You know, the Levites are doing all the work, they’re collecting the blood in little basins, and the priest is just sticking his hand in and sprinkling, he’s like a sprinkle machine. Because there’s thousands of Israelites there, and you know, how many priests were there, after all?
So, the Levites are like slaughtering these animals, and there’s a whole description here, you know. I’ll let you read on, but this is exactly a picture of what we just saw in Numbers 8, and in Numbers 9. I mean, wow! I mean, how could we not read this chapter in this Torah portion? Can I get an Amen?
Jono: Amen. “For there were many in the assembly who had not sanctified themselves; therefore, the Levites had charge of the slaughter of the Passover lambs for everyone who was not clean, to sanctify them to Yehovah. For a multitude of people, many from Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, and Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet they ate the Passover contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah...”
Nehemia: So now we’ll see that in Numbers 19, and also even in Numbers 9, that if you’re ritually unclean from the dead and you haven’t done the whole ritual of the red heifer, you can’t eat the Passover - even in the second month; it’s forbidden. This is a very severe thing to eat the Passover, but they realize, “wait a minute - if we enforce this, no one’s going to be able to eat the Passover.”
Jono: No one will be there, yeah.
Nehemia: No one will do it, and they haven’t been doing it anyway; we’ve got to draw the people back to the Torah. So, we’re kind of in this quandary, we’re in this difficult situation, and I love what they did next. So, I’m going to let you read it.
Jono: So, it says, “…contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, ‘May good Yehovah provide atonement for everyone who prepares his heart to seek Elohim, Yehovah of his fathers, though he is not cleansed according to the purification of the sanctuary.’ And Yehovah listened to Hezekiah...”
Jono: “…and healed the people.” Oh, my goodness.
Nehemia: Whoo!
Nehemia: He healed the people. This wasn’t according to the letter of the Torah, but it was according to the spirit; the people were doing the best they could under those circumstances.
Nehemia: Hezekiah prayed and asked for grace, and Yehovah responded by healing the people. Even though they were ritually unclean, He accepted their sacrifice. And now I’ve got to jump over, and when I’m done with this, I’ll let Keith talk for the whole rest of the program. Hosea chapter 14, we’ve read this before, it’s the prayer that Hosea teaches the people.
Jono: Yes! I love this. Yeah, let’s read this again.
Nehemia: “Return, Israel, to Yehovah your God, for you have stumbled in your iniquity,” is the literal translation from Hebrew, “take with you words and return to Yehovah.” “Take with you words,” which means pray, and, “return to Yehovah,” means repent. “Say to him,” this what you say to him, “forgive all inequity,” you’re asking for forgiveness, “and receive good,” meaning, I’ve done some righteousness in place of the evil that I’ve done. You’re asking Yehovah to accept that. “Receive good,” or take good, “and let us pay for the bulls with our lips...”
Keith: There it is.
Nehemia: …meaning, instead of the sacrifices you can’t bring, please accept this prayer. And you might say, well, that’s not the letter of the Torah, that’s no good. But if you skip ahead to verse 5, Yehovah responds to the prayer. He says, “I will heal…” say heal.
Jono: Heal.
Keith: Heal.
Nehemia: “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely,” or as a free-will offering...
Nehemia: “…for My wrath has returned from them.”
Nehemia: And that’s interesting to me because, here it’s the same concept. They’re saying, “we can’t fulfill all the exact prescriptions of the Torah; we’re all going to burn in hell!” No. Pray to Yehovah and ask for forgiveness and ask Him to accept what you can do, and he’ll heal you and accept you.
Nehemia: Hallelujah!
Jono: Amen! That is great. I’m so glad you brought up that up again, that is just something that we cannot emphasize enough. Keith, you heard him say that you were going to be able to talk for the rest of the Torah Pearls.
Nehemia: …you’re not shouting now.
Keith: No, no. No, I mean listen - Nehemia’s over in Jerusalem, legitimately excited, and people are saying, you can’t be excited, you can’t be excited, your eyes are not open. I think your eyes are open.
Keith: Jono is at midnight, after midnight, and he’s excited. I’m in the morning, I’m excited. I mean, this is an example again of the hidden things that come from the Torah; that was a beautiful and masterful connection of this portion here in Numbers 9, going to Chronicles, connecting the whole issue of the second Passover, and then the idea of our Father having this grace, this mercy, this care for His people, and then bringing Scripture to back it up. Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be about? Isn’t that what this living, breathing book is supposed to be about, that it makes sense?
Keith: That was wonderful.
Jono: That’s awesome.
Keith: Nehemia, you’ve got to pray for us, you’ve got to pray that our eyes are open like that, that we can shout.
Nehemia: Yehovah, Eloheinu, ve-Elohei avoteinu, Avinu shebashamayim, ana Yehovah, gal eneinu ve-nabi-tah niphlaot mi-Torahteha. Yehovah, our God, and the God of our fathers, our Father in Heaven, please Yehovah, open our eyes that we may see the wonderful hidden things of your Torah.
Jono: Keith, you’ve got center stage, my friend, tell us about the cloud and the fire, the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire.
Keith: (singing) The cloud of glory is moving...
Jono: Hey.
Keith: (singing) …move with the cloud, move with the cloud. The cloud of glory is moving, move with the cloud. This is a powerful passage that is an example of present-day life. You guys should read it for yourself. It’s the idea that when the Tent of the Testimony was set up to move it says that the cloud moved with it. And in verse 17, “whenever the cloud lifted from above the tent, the Israelites set out; whenever the cloud settled, the Israelites encamped. At the LORD’s command the Israelites set out, and at his command they encamped. As long as the cloud stayed over the Tabernacle, they remained in camp. And when the cloud remained over the Tabernacle a long time, the Israelites obeyed the LORD’s order and did not set out. Sometimes...” say sometimes, Jono.
Jono: Sometimes.
Nehemia: Sometimes.
Keith: Nehemia, it says, “Sometimes the cloud was over the Tabernacle only a few days…”
Nehemia: Oh.
Keith: “…at the LORD’s command they would encamp,” and, you know, I think I should do the readings sometime because I like this, “and then at His command, they would set out.” I’m going to be done in a minute. “Sometimes,” say sometimes...
Keith: “…the cloud stayed only from evening till morning,” now, this is deep guys, “and when it lifted in the morning, they set out. Whether by day or by night, whenever the cloud lifted, they set out. Whether the cloud stayed over the Tabernacle for two days or a month or a year,” listen to that, “two days, a month or a year, the Israelites would remain in camp and not set out; but when it lifted, they would set out. At the LORD’s command they encamped, and at the LORD’s command they set out. They obeyed the LORD’s order, in accordance with His command.”
Now, let’s get practical here, guys. We’re all Israelites. We’ve got the tribe of… Nehemia’s a Judah, and Jono you’re with the Levites, you’re doing the work, and just let’s say for right now, I’m a, I don’t know… What tribe can I be?
Nehemia: You’re Aaron. You’re the priests.
Keith: I’m a…
Nehemia: You’re a Kohen.
Keith: No, I don’t want to be. No, no. So, here’s the practical side of this. So, the folks that are listening, I want you to imagine this. You got your camp spot, and I mean we’re by the waters, I mean it’s beautiful, and you got the spot right by the water and you got your kids and your family, and you set up your tent and your tent is right by... I mean you’re so happy because you’re closer to the water than your neighbors. We settle in and 24 hours later you hear the trumpets and they’re saying, “we’re moving out.”
Jono: No! But I had such a great real estate here and we’re moving already...
Keith: Yeah, I mean, look, you had great real estate. Then, listen to this - the next camp, man, you’re by the... you’re not in a very good spot at all, and you’re thinking, “boy, I sure hope we move quick.” And you stay there for a year, and your neighbor’s got the good spot. But here’s what... I just want to do this, you guys, because when I read this passage, I think of this - what would you rather do - stay in the good spot when the cloud isn’t there, or move with the cloud?
Jono: Move with the cloud.
Keith: And this is a life application passage.
Nehemia: Move with the cloud.
Keith: Here’s the point - the best place to be, and excuse my excitement, is to be in the center of God’s will.
Keith: If God’s cloud has moved, you better learn to move.
Keith: If God’s cloud doesn’t move, you don’t move. But from a practical standpoint, be the people of Israel. Man, I’ve got a great spot, we’re only here two days? Are you kidding me?
Jono: Nehemia just fell over.
Nehemia: That was too powerful a message; I just fell over. Whoo!
Keith: So, when the cloud moves, Nehemia moves, ladies and gentlemen. When the cloud moves, he moves. If the cloud doesn’t move, he doesn’t move. And I just think this is powerful because think about the people, just practically - it takes a lot to set up a camp, but if the cloud moves, you move.
Jono: If the cloud moves, you move. You know what else occurs to me, Keith, when I read this? I think of surrounding nations, surrounding cities, and they hear about what’s happened to Egypt and they hear about this great multitude of people, and they go and send some spies to go and check them out. And the spies are there and they’re looking down upon the camp and there’s this pillar of fire or there’s a pillar of cloud.
Jono: And when it moves, they go with it and when they set up again it’s still there. You’d be going, “I’m not going near those people, that’s some serious stuff going on there. I don’t think we’re going to win.”
Keith: And maybe it means that we’re...
Nehemia: Let’s think about the ones who did attack them. Wow. I mean...
Keith: Oh gosh.
Nehemia: …think about Amalek, the Amalekites who came and despite seeing the pillar of fire...
Nehemia: …and the pillar of cloud said, “we’re going to attack the weak ones.” That’s what they did, they attacked the weak ones and the old people and the stragglers. They’re like, “well, we’re not going to go into the center of the camp with that cloud, but we’re going to go after the weak ones.” Man...
Jono: I know.
Keith: You see, and again I just wanted this last verse, before you go to chapter 10, Jono, it’s says here, “At Yehovah’s command they encamped, and at Yehovah’s command they set out.” What if we just simply had that as our life? At His command, we camp.
Keith: At His command, we set out. If He doesn’t command it, we don’t move. If He commands it, we move, even when it’s inconvenient, even when it doesn’t look comfortable. I mean that is a powerful... I mean they were trained to hear, and it says this, “They obeyed,” at this part of the passage, “they obeyed, in accordance with His command through Moses.” I, again, want to give some credit to those Israelites who were inconvenienced, who probably at times thought, “you got to be kidding me? For 40 years we’re doing this?” So, anyway, now for my next favorite part since this is the...
Jono: That’s what I was going to say, I’m sticking with you here, Keith, because we’re talking about trumpets, right?
Keith: Nehemia, we’re going to need your help here because this is a big one. What is it about these little trumpets?
Nehemia: Trumpets?
Keith: The trumpets.
Jono: Well, okay, so what I want to know is, are we talking about silver plated shofars or we talking about silver...
Nehemia: Oh, no, no. These are silver trumpets.
Nehemia: There’s two different words in Hebrew, actually three words; there’s ‘shofar,’ which is a little ram's horn, but really shofar could be any horn. Then you have ‘yovel,’ which you could translate it as a Jubilee horn. And ‘yovel’ is specifically the horn of an antelope, and so that tends to be longer than a ram’s horn, but ‘yovel’ is a type of shofar. Then you have ‘hatzozrah,’ say that ten times fast, ‘hatzozrah.’ I can’t even say it in Hebrew ten times fast, hatzozrah. That’s a trumpet; that is a legitimate trumpet. And here in this passage it isn’t shofar, isn’t yovel; it is hatzozrah, which is an all silver - in this case - it’s a silver trumpet, made of all silver.
Jono: Okay. Sure.
Keith: So, let me tell you two something funny. When I was in Israel, I had this passion and desire to want to proclaim Yehovah’s name in the places where they told me I couldn’t. So, I was told you can’t ever pray, and you can’t speak, and you certainly can’t bring shofars up to the Temple Mount, so what did I do? I went up to the Temple Mount, and I wanted to proclaim the Name, and so I brought... I didn’t have my shofar and they wouldn’t let me bring my shofar, they wouldn’t let me bring my little shofar. So, I just brought my video camera and put it in front of the Temple Mount and proclaimed the Name nice and loud.
But I tried to take my big shofar, my yovel, into the southern side of the Temple, and this was really interesting, you guys. So, as I’m preparing, I’m doing this section on the southern side of the Temple, I’ve got all my stuff, I’ve got my camera, whatever, and I’ve got my shofar. And they stop me at the gate. And I’m like, why are you stopping me at the gate, what’s the big problem? He’s like you can’t bring that in there. Well, why can’t I bring it in there? Because you might blow it. And...
Nehemia: Of course, I’m going to blow it.
Keith: And what’s wrong with me blowing it? You can cause an international incident. I’m like, “what are you talking about?” So, they confiscated my yovel and they made me put it in the office. Well, of course, why was this such a big deal for me? Because I’m going to the southern side of the Temple, and ten years ago when I was there in Israel, Nehemia showed me something that was really powerful. Yoel showed it to me again and did an even further explanation when I was there - Yoel who does the show with you Jono, Yoel ben Shlomo, who lives over in the Old City of Jerusalem, teaches Hebrew, wonderful guy. I had him in the project with me on one day, and he brought onto the southern side of the Temple over to the very corner, and Nehemia, we got to talk about this because this is connected to this section.
Over in the corner, when the second Temple was destroyed, they threw down the stones. They threw down, I mean, they just completely desecrated that area, and you can actually see spots on the southern side of the Temple where the stones make an impression - Jono, you’ve got to come with us on tour over there - where the stones make an impression in the actual ground. So, you see the cracked sidewalk, the area where the stones came down and just literally made these huge impressions.
Well, one of the stones that they threw down was one that was a bit on the top corner of the Temple, and on that stone, you actually see engraved the priest blowing the silver trumpet, if I can say. And it’s another one of those amazing pictures where you’re looking at something here we’re reading about what the silver trumpets did, and I’ll let Nehemia talk about this, or Jono, if you’d like to, but then I want to give the application - because what was the purpose of the trumpets? Nehemia, do you know?
Nehemia: Well, so before you get to that, so what you’re talking about is a stone that was pushed down from the Temple Mount by the Romans because they wanted to destroy the Temple, and even destroy the stone foundations. So, they pushed these stones down and some of them came down 10 stories. If you go to my Facebook page and you look in my album called Israel Places, I actually have a photograph of that stone, and it says “lebeit hatkiya,” - for the place of trumpeting. It’s the place where the priest would stand, and we know this from Josephus; at the beginning of Shabbat he would stand there and he would blow the shofar to indicate, now the Sabbath is beginning. That was an announcement essentially to everyone; the sun is setting, Shabbat’s beginning, and he would blow the shofar from there on the Temple. And the place that he would blow it from, that stone, it was uncovered by archeologists down at the bottom, just outside the Temple Mount, exactly where the Romans had pushed it 2,000 years earlier. So, you can see that in the Israel Places album. I think it’s one of the coolest finds that they found in Israel.
Keith: So, what does it say, Jono? It says that, what were these used for? It says this, “then you will be,” it says here, I’m sorry, verse 8, “The sons of Aaron, the priests, are to blow these trumpets.” The trumpets. “This is to be a lasting ordinance for you and the generations to come.” Like, that’s where I want, like, to stop, “a lasting ordinance for you and the generations to come.” What’s the ordinance and what is it that they’re supposed to do?
Nehemia: Blow the trumpets? The silver trumpets.
Keith: Exactly. And they blow the silver trumpets. And when you blow the trumpets, what do the people do? They hear the sound and what does that mean?
Jono: Well, I suppose different sounds mean different things, right?
Jono: Because if it sounds like one thing it means they’re calling a certain class of people, if they blow both of them, I think that everybody is supposed to come, if they blow it in a certain way it could mean war, there’s an enemy who’s coming, and if they blow it in another way, it could be in joyous... it says here in verse ten, “Also in the day of your gladness, in your appointed feasts… you blow them as well.” So, there’s a number of different applications I suppose.
Keith: Yeah. And so why was I excited about this? I just want to tell you that the other thing that the people don’t talk about at this arch of Titus is, not only do you see the Menorah, you also see the silver trumpets engraved in stone.
Nehemia: That’s true, yeah.
Keith: Yeah. So, you see these...
Nehemia: The Romans took that.
Keith: Yes, they took the silver trumpets, they took the Torah, they took the Menorah, they took the table of showbread, supposedly, the table. But the point is, again, they said, “hey, listen, they’re going to take the gold, we’re going to take the silver. They took these things, and what I think is so, how can I use this word, that’s so, well, I’m not even going to say it. I’m going to just let that sit for there for right now. But the point is that these were also taken from the Temple, and it’s actually engraved in stone.
Keith: So, I know we’ve been going for a while so we can move on.
Nehemia: Oh, my gosh. Are you kidding? The next verse is... I’m so excited for the next verse. Numbers, chapter 10, verse 9, I am so excited about that, it says, “When you go out to war in your land against an enemy who oppresses you,” or who vexes you, you could literally translate it, “the vexer who vexes you,” is the literal translation, “you shall blow the trumpets, and you shall be remembered before Yehovah your God and you shall be saved from your enemies.” That...
Nehemia: Come on, can I get a shout from Johnson?
Nehemia: What’s happening?
Keith: No, I’m telling you...
Nehemia: Get your shofar, Johnson.
Keith: I don’t have my shofar.
Nehemia: Where is your shofar? What are you talking about? Now, I’m not a priest, so I’m not going to do it on the trumpet, but if you’ll allow me, I’m going to blow my shofar.
I’m going to blow the shofar because we have an oppressor, both a physical one and a spiritual one; a spiritual enemy who is oppressing us, who’s trying to get at us, who’s trying to shake our faith, and get us into a bad situation and is testing us. I’m going to blow the shofar, and you know, it says, “and you shall be remembered before Yehovah,” the word “remember” also means “to mention.” So, you could translate that as, “you will be mentioned before Yehovah,” he’s going to hear that shofar and say, “that’s My servant Nehemia, I’ve got to save him from his enemy.” Here it is, Yehovah.
Nehemia: He knows I’m asthmatic, I’m doing the best I can, but I know he’s hearing it.
Keith: Amen. Okay.
Nehemia: Johnson, help me out here. Blow the shofar for me.
Keith: May Nehemia be mentioned, so he doesn’t have to blow the shofar anymore.
Jono: Quickly, save him so he can breathe...
Keith: Quickly save him, Father.
Nehemia: I have been saved, Yehovah, from the enemy.
Jono: Clearly in need of saving, clearly.
Nehemia: Hallelujah.
Keith: Okay. Amen.
Jono: There it is. Thank you for blowing the shofar. Hey, now they get moving, okay, from verse 11 they get moving to... now, I want to, we’ve got to sort of move this along, is there anything...
Jono: …that you want to pull out of these verses? Or am I going to jump to verse 29?
Nehemia: 29? Yeah, go ahead.
Jono: Okay. I want to know, what is this about? I’m confused, did I miss something? “Moses said to Hobab…”
Nehemia: Hobab.
Jono: “Hobab, the son of Reuel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law.” What’s going on?
Nehemia: So, you’ve got Jethro, and Jethro has, according to some people, as many as seven different names. He is referred to as, “Yitro,” as “Yether", which is obviously a variation of “Yitro;” it’s like, I don’t know, ‘Jack’ and ‘Jacob’. But then he’s also called "Reuel", which could be translated as ‘the shepherd of God’, so maybe that was one of his titles or his honorific name. This is Hobab, the son of Reuel, and so it sounds like this is Moses’ brother-in-law, and he’s been hanging out with the Israelites all this time, for over a year. And Moses is like, “I’d love to let you go but I don’t trust you enough. I want to trust you, but I can’t afford to trust you, you better stick...”
Jono: So, stick around. Yeah.
Nehemia: Stick around.
Jono: Stick around for a while.
Nehemia: This becomes really significant later on because we’ve got two stories that have to do with Hobab and that clan of people who are the Kenites, who are a specific type of group of Midianites. One of them is Yael, or Jael; she becomes a hero later on when the Kenite, in Judges, chapter 4, he trusts her because he thinks, well, you know, she’s not a real Israelite. She just kind of lives with those people, she’s not really one of them, she’s a sojourner and I’m going to trust her, the Kenite general thinks, and he gets a peg in the head...
Jono: She’s got a big hammer…
Nehemia: Yep. Then the other story that comes up later on is, we have this group called the Rechabites who are one of these factions of Kenites who apparently were stuck, in the time of Moses - Moses is like, “you can’t leave, I’m not going to let you leave.” So, they say, “okay, if we’re going to live among the Israelites, and we’re not going to have land like the Israelites have land, we’re going to take a vow that we won’t be dependent upon the things related to the land. And they undertake, instead of being renters of someone else’s property - because remember, we read this already, you can’t buy property in the land of Israel according to the Torah system, it’s only inherited and then you can lease it for 49 years, and then it returns to the inherit owner. These people didn’t have an inheritance. They were not descendants of Jacob, and they didn’t have a land inheritance and so, this is in the book of Jeremiah, they undertake that they’re not going to drink wine because that can only be grown by sedentary people. They undertake to be itinerant; to be nomads, where they don’t need land, where they’re traveling around in different areas, constantly moving.
That becomes a picture that Jeremiah brings and he says - or Yehovah says through Jeremiah - he says, “if only Israel was as obedient to my commandments as the descendants of Rechab the Kenite” - who’s one of the cousins of Hobab - as obedient as they were to their ancestor. These people took a voluntarily vow that their ancestor asked them to take, and they followed it. And the Israelites, which were commanded to do something…it wasn’t voluntarily. God has…the Creator of the universe is telling you; this is what you must do to be obedient to me, and they weren’t even doing it. So that became a picture of what it meant to be faithful to the God of Israel, the descendants of this man, or of this clan, of this extended family of Hobab. So that comes later on.
Jono: So, Moses says to Hobab, verse 32, “‘And it shall be, if you go with us—indeed it shall be—that whatever good Yehovah will do to us, the same we will be done for you.’ And so, they departed from the mountains of Yehovah and journeyed three days; and the ark of the covenant of Yehovah went before them for the three days’ journey, to search out a resting place for them. And the cloud of Yehovah was above them by day when they went out of the camp. And so it was, whenever the ark set out, that Moses said, ‘Rise up, Yehovah! Let Your enemies be scattered and let those who hate You flee before You.’ And when it rested, he said, ‘Return, Yehovah, to the many thousands of Israel.’”
Keith: Amen. Amen. Amen.
Nehemia: We’ve got to talk about this passage. I mean, this is one of the key passages. First of all, just to talk totally about the technical side - these two verses, 35 and 36 of Numbers 10, are set off from the rest of Scripture with what’s called an upside-down “nun”; there’s one before it and one after it.
Jono: Oh. Right.
Nehemia: This is very unusual. It also appears in the book of Psalms, but it’s a very unusual thing. It’s an upside-down “nun” that says, okay, this is a separate section. Stop and take a look here. So maybe we can do that; stop and take a look.
So, and I’m going to read it literally from Hebrew. It says, “And it came to pass when the ark would travel and Moses would say,” and here’s what he would say, “Arise Yehovah and scatter Your enemies and let those who hate You flee from before You.” That’s interesting - the ark is rising up and he’s addressing Yehovah, and Keith has a whole teaching on this that maybe he’s willing to share about where it talks about in the book of Samuel, if I’m not mistaken. So, it says, “the ark which is called by the Name,” you sure about that Keith?
Keith: Yeah, no, I mean that’s...
Nehemia: Like, where they get that is here. Then he says that, when it would rest he would say, “Return Yehovah of the tens of thousands of the thousands of Israel,” you know, “the one who is the God of the tens of thousands of Israel.” So, can you share that thing about how that became, exactly...
Keith: Well, no - what’s powerful about this is that it’s the issue of the connection of the ark and the Name; meaning that the ark itself was called by the Name. But the idea of calling Yehovah... certainly here they didn’t say this: “Arise, Lord, arise Adonai, arise Hashem, arise, the title.” No. “Yehovah rise”.
And that to me… and I think it’s kind of cool, I’m actually looking in the Hebrew Bible here when Nehemia was speaking about this upside-down “nun”. And you’re reading and you’re going about your business and then there’s this... it’s there, it’s just like two of them, like between brackets.
But the idea being that this is something that Moses did each time, and I wonder if there’s not some significance to the fact that he’s speaking this in front of the people of Israel. I mean, how many times did this happen? How many times did he have the ark rise and bring back? I mean we don’t know exactly how many times, right?
Nehemia: Well, they wandered for 40 years, so it must’ve been a lot.
Jono: It must’ve been a lot, yeah…
Keith: It must’ve been a lot of times. I mean...
Keith: So, the people heard his name, they heard what it was that they were asking Yehovah to do, and that’s exactly what happened. Now, I will say something, and not to get into promotion, but one of the things that Nehemia’s speaking about, and we’ve talked about a bunch of different things, Jono, and that is that we now have available eighteen and a half hours of teaching on this Open Door series, which has been made available through A Rood Awakening.
And why is that important? Because there are so many things, like Nehemia says, he’ll share this teaching with you, or I’ll say, Nehemia, tell them about this... and the truth is there’s no way, and what we’ve already done on the radio, who knows, about six hours just on this Torah portion, there’s no way to spend all of the time talking about this...
Nehemia: Now, wait, what...
Jono: And we’re only halfway.
Keith: Listen, Nehemia wants us to read the entire...
Nehemia: So, you don’t have to give the whole teaching, Keith.
Keith: Oh, no...
Nehemia: You don’t have to give the whole teaching, Keith, but what is the name of that video that people can get?
Keith: That’s what I’m telling them right now, Nehemia, so the...
Nehemia: Because I don’t even know the name of the video, to be honest with you.
Keith: No, no. So, the Open Door series...
Nehemia: I know we did it over Shavuot or something, right?
Keith: It was done over Shavuot; it’s now an entire series that has all of this stuff that we talked about regarding the Name, regarding so many different things. The Open Door series is available, and you actually can get that. But I want to say, I know folks are listening, they’ve got to be thinking, we’re only in chapter 10, we’ve still got 2 more chapters, so…
Nehemia: There’s not really anything to talk about in 12, but because we did 12.
Keith: What are you talking about…
Jono: Hang on.
Keith: “…nothing in 12”?
Jono: Keith, Keith. Wait, you just talked about a video.
Nehemia: We did 12 - we talked about leprosy.
Jono: Hey! Just pull it back a little bit; you were talking about a video - where can people get that?
Keith: So, at this point, it’s available at A Rood Awakening, and you can get it, it’s the Open Door series; it’s the three-part DVD, eighteen and a half hours of teaching, myself and Nehemia. And it really is what I like to say, “they caught lightning in a bottle” - Shavuot, Yom Teruah and Hanukkah, where we got a chance to come and share. Listen, eighteen and a half hours, it really is powerful, and I appreciate them doing that, they put it, and it is specifically us. They’ve separated an opportunity for us to have just us teaching.
Jono: Brilliant.
Keith: So that’s really all that’s on the video, so it really is an awesome...
Jono: That’s one worth getting, no doubt. Excellent. Thank you for that.
Nehemia: I’ll tell you, that’s eighteen hours, and I guess I did something like nine of that, or maybe it was like eleven, I don’t know. But whatever it was nine or eleven, that was some of the best teaching I’ve done in my life, and some of the most moving. And I’ve been asked to come places and, “do what you did on Shavuot,” and I’m like, “I can’t. It just happened. I can’t reproduce that.”
Jono: Caught up in the moment.
Nehemia: One of the verses that Keith brought there, and it was very powerful, is 2 Samuel 6:2. I’ll just read some of it. It says, “And David arose and went with all the people,” etc., etc., “to bring up the ark of God, whose name is called by the name of Yehovah of Hosts, that dwells between the kruvim,” or literally, it sits between the kruvim. So, the ark is called by the name of Yehovah. That’s a powerful, powerful verse, and that references back to this passage here in Numbers; that’s where they got that idea.
Jono: Chapter 11, oh, my goodness, we’re going to have to fly through it, but there’s so much in here, let me just tell you in a nutshell what happens. Well, they start to whinge, they start to have a bit of a whine and they start to complain, and they make our Father angry, and that’s not a good thing to do, is it, Keith? I’ll tell you what, boy, “His anger was aroused.” And it says, “So the fire of Yehovah burned among them,” and it actually burned among them - I mean, we’re not talking about some sort of spiritual fire and He was there fuming away; it actually consumed some of the people in the outskirts of the camp. “And there was a fire, and Moses prayed, and the fire was quenched. And they called the place…” now what’s this, Nehemia, is it ‘Taverah’?
Nehemia: Taberah.
Jono: Taberah.
Nehemia: “Va-iba-er” which means “to burn”.
Jono: To burn, okay. Now, it’s almost like a disowning happens here in verse 4, “The mixed multitude,” it’s their fault, it wasn’t necessarily the mixed multitude...
Nehemia: Oh, wait, hold on, hold on. It doesn’t say, “the mixed multitude,” I’m sorry.
Jono: That’s what I’ve got here, Nehemia. It says here...
Nehemia: Are you kidding me? It doesn’t, I don’t believe you. It doesn’t say that.
Jono: I’m telling you what it says, it says, “Now the mixed multitude...”
Nehemia: Mixed multitude? What is mixed multitude?
Jono: Keith, what have you got? What do you got in verse 4?
Nehemia: Wow. That is libelous. That’s outright libelous to translate that…
Jono: Keith, what have you got in verse 4? What do you got?
Keith: It says, “The rabble with them...”
Nehemia: Okay. I’ll take “the rabble,” no problem. Now, I’m going to tell you what happened here. There’s a group called, “the mixed multitude,” who came up with Israel out of Egypt.
Nehemia: They were non-Israelites who were joining the people of Israel. They were the sojourners who were circumcised, and they partook of the Passover sacrifice, and then it said there was one Torah for the native-born and the sojourner. So, they were part of what’s called the congregation of Israel; they became part of Israel, even though they weren’t physical descendants of Jacob. That’s the mixed multitude.
In Numbers 11:4, the word in Hebrew is “erev rav,” which means “many mixed”; literally you could translate that, a mixed many. The word here is “asafsuf,” which means, literally, it’s from the word “asaf,” which means to gather, so you could really translate “asafsuf,” as the mob. It’s a group of people who had gathered together and through the pressure of their gathering, of being a large crowd, they’re essentially trying to put forward an agenda; that’s “asafsuf”. Now the person who decided to translate “asafsuf,” as “mixed multitude” is slandering the name of the mixed multitude, of the genuine mixed multitude who were righteous people. One of the mixed multitude was Caleb, who we’re told was a Kenizzite. The Kenizzites were originally one of the ten Canaanite tribes at the time of Abraham who had gone down to Egypt, been enslaved by the Egyptians, and decided to leave Egypt with the Israelites. So, Caleb was not a physical descendant of Jacob. Yet he was able...
Nehemia: …he was allowed to be the representative of the tribe of Judah when they went on the spying mission. We’ll read about that later in the book of Numbers. He was one of only two who was loyal to Yehovah, and the other one was Moses’ sidekick. So really, he’s the only genuine spy there who was being loyal to Yehovah, and he was one of the “erev rav,” the mixed multitude. He was not one of the “asafsuf,” one of the rabble; one of the mob, the rabble - that’s a completely different group.
Now I know where they got that translation, and where they got that translation, frankly, is from a rabbinical tradition that teaches that the “asafsuf,” the rabble, are the same as the “erev rav,” the mixed multitude. And why do they say that? Because they don’t want to take the blame of their ancestors being the ones who caused this problem in the desert. They want to say, “that’s the gentiles who joined us, that wasn’t really us.”
But that’s not what it says; it was us. We’ve got to take credit, we’ve got to own it, we sinned, we weren’t faithful, and what we need to do is repent, not try to blame somebody else. You know, the only thing we can say about some of the gentiles who joined us is, when we were sinning and not trusting Yehovah in the incident of the spy, one of them was loyal and faithful. And we should hold him up as a picture of what we want to strive for, just like the story of the Rechabites, rather than trying to put them down and slander them and say that they’re the ones who rebelled against God. So now, I’m done.
Jono: There it is. And so, the mob, then, let’s refer to them as the mob, “Now the mob who were among them yielded to intense craving; so, the children of Israel also wept again and said: ‘Oh, man, who will give us meat to eat? Because, remember the fish that we had, and oh, we ate freely and the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic, oh, great stuff that…’”
Nehemia: I’ve got to point out something ironic here. So, we’ve got the word “hinam;” say “hinam.”
Jono: Hinam.
Keith: Hinam
Nehemia: Hinam, which means free. It says, ‘we ate freely’, which means, we ate without money. So, they’re throwing out the word free here, but they’re slaves.
Jono: Right. Sure.
Nehemia: So, they’re eating for free, but they’re not free men, and that’s what they’re yearning for, “oh, the great days, and we ate for free in Egypt.” But now you’re free and so, you know what? As free men, there’s consequences to freedom.
Nehemia: The slave doesn’t have to worry about what he’s going to eat; he’s fed by his master. Now these are free men, they’ve got to stand up as men. Sometimes it’s not as comfortable as being a slave, but it’s worth the freedom.
Jono: And so, they...
Jono: They said, you know, all we have is this manna, and so they’re actually…in a sense, they’re mocking the provision of Yehovah, right?
Nehemia: Yep.
Jono: This is not a good thing. And it talks about the manna, you can read it there in verse 7, 8, and 9. “Then Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, everyone at the door of his tent and the anger of Yehovah was greatly aroused and Moses was displeased. So, Moses said to Yehovah, ‘Why have You afflicted Your servant?’” Oh, my goodness, these people! “And why have I not found favor in Your sight, that You have laid the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive these people? Did I beget them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a guardian carries a nursing child,’ and the land which You swore to their fathers? Where am I to get meat for all these people? They weep all over me, saying, ‘Give us meat, we may eat.’”
Poor Moses, I really feel for him. This is what he says, “I am not able to bear these people alone, because the burden is too heavy for me. If You treat me like this, please kill me, oh, kill me now, because if I have found favor in Your sight—and do not let me see my wretchedness!” And so, he’s at the end of his tether, and he’s saying, “oh, look, these people, honestly, too hard, please just kill me, it’s just I don’t want to do it anymore.”
Keith: Aha.
Jono: Keith?
Keith: That’s what he says.
Jono: That’s what he says, it’s that bad. And so Yehovah says, “look, I’ll tell you what, go get me seventy men of the elders, and I’m going to put that spirit, what you’ve just conveyed to me, I’m going to put that on them.” But the interesting thing that happens here, Nehemia, He says, “I’m going to give them so much meat by the way,” verse 19, “You shall eat, not one day, nor two, nor five nor ten nor twenty days, but for a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you, because you have despised Yehovah who is among you, and have wept before Him, saying, ‘Why did we ever come up out of Egypt?’” In any case…
Nehemia: So, you know what this reminds me of when I read this? I think this is from a movie, and I want to say it’s Brewster's Millions from like the 80s, I don’t remember.
Nehemia: But there’s this movie where he catches the boy smoking and instead of saying, don’t smoke, what he says is, “you want to smoke?” Okay. He locks him in a closet and gives him a box of cigars, and he says, “don’t come out until you’ve finished all the cigars.”
Jono: Oy.
Nehemia: And that’s what God did. He said, “you want meat? Okay. I’m going to give you some meat; you’re going to eat that meat until it’s coming out of your nose.”
Jono: And even Moses says to him, “how are you going to that? I mean how many people are there?” and verse 23, “And Yehovah said, ‘Has Yehovah’s arm been shortened?’” What are you talking about? “Now you shall see whether what I say will happen…”
Nehemia: I love that line.
Nehemia: I love that line. It literally says, “Has the hand of Yehovah become short?” I can do anything. I can reach out my hands and do whatever I want; I am the Creator of the universe.
Jono: There you are, sunshine. It’s going to happen, and believe me you’ll know when it happens. But in the meantime, the spirit that was on Moses is now put on the seventy elders and they’re prophesying. Keith, they’re prophesying!
Jono: What are they prophesying? What’s going on?
Keith: It says they’re prophesying.
Jono: Okay. So, they’re prophesying, they’re prophesying in the camp, and there’s a couple of guys that didn’t go to the Tabernacle, they’re still in the camp, they are prophesying. And it’s reported back to Moses, and Joshua says in verse 28, “these guys - they’re prophesying, Moses, forbid them from doing it.” And Moses says...now this rings a bell for me, and maybe it’ll ring a bell for you, Keith, and maybe we won’t go there, but it says, “Moses said to him, ‘Are you zealous for my sake? Oh, that all Yehovah’s people were prophets and that Yehovah would put His Spirit upon them!’ And Moses returned to the camp, he and the elders of Israel.”
Keith: Okay. So one thing that I think is interesting is we’re talking about the people… and this is what’s so cool about the Torah when I’m reading it… so you’re talking, originally the presenting problem is people are asking for meat and then while the presenting problem is still in existence, there’s another whole thing that happens. The other whole thing that happens, He says, “hey, real quick, I’m going to deal with that meat thing, but listen, go get 70 men, and the way you get the 70 men, I’m going to do this…”
Oh, and by the way, there’s another story within that story - two of the men don’t end up being there, who knows why they didn’t make the 70 trip, whatever it was, they were outside the camp, wherever they were, and the spirit fell upon them. Why? Because they were selected as the 70, so His word still is good there.
Then while that’s happening, we get back to the quail. So, it’s like you have two pieces of bread, and then the middle is the meat of the situation regarding the 70, then you get back to the other piece of the bread. And then of course the other piece of the bread - and I’m trying to be kind of cute here - is that he’s going to send bread from heaven. So, it’s like as you’re reading it this is why it’s hard to rush, because it’s such a powerful, creative way of communicating this information. Again, imagine you’re hearing this story...
Keith: … and as you’re hearing the story, you remember the quail, next thing you know, you’re in a discussion about the 70, then from the 70 you’re in a discussion about the 2, and then you got Joshua saying, “hey, this is not good,” and Moses saying “hey, don’t worry about me,” then we’re right back to the quail.
Jono: And finally, everyone prophesies. So here we are. And then there’s a wind that went out from Yehovah, “and it brought quail from the sea and left them fluttering near the camp, about a day’s journey,” and so what happens is, it says here about... Nehemia, what is a cubit?
Nehemia: That’s a good question because there are different cubits; there was the Egyptian cubit, and the Babylonian cubit, and the cubit of the Temple. But a cubit, roughly, the literal meaning of the word “amah,” cubit, is ‘forearm.’ We measure things in the western world, or I guess in America they do, they measure it in feet. And the Hebrews, they measured it in the size of a forearm.
Jono: So that’s vaguely the same, right?
Nehemia: So, I’m guessing different forearms are different sizes, just like different feet are different sizes.
Jono: Sure. Different feet are different sizes. But if we say a couple of feet, I think...
Nehemia: But it’s roughly…they say, I think, it’s something like 18 inches, or a half a meter, or something like that.
Jono: Okay. So maybe two and a half feet, but I mean there’s at least two feet above the surface of the ground of quail. Two feet of quail! Like, one quail isn’t even a foot. I mean - that’s a lot of quail.
Nehemia: Well, that’s a lot of quail.
Jono: That’s a lot of quail.
Keith: Well, one thing I just want to say is, again, and this idea of what’s happening in the story as we’re reading the narrative here is that the words that jump off that tie these things together - there’s one word that jumps off in both stories that ties the story together. So if you start with the issue of the need for the people that begin to complain, and He says, “I’m going to send this quail,” and in the middle of the quail you have the discussion about the Spirit falling on the men, and what’s the connector? It’s the “ruach”, it’s the wind, it’s the Spirit.
Jono: The ruach, Elohim, yeah.
Keith: So, the ruach falls upon the men and the ruach brings the quail. So, this wind... in the beginning, in Genesis, it says, ‘and the ruach was hovering over the face of the deep’, the Spirit. And so, what’s so cool about this is that if I’m reading it in my NIV, of course, I may not see the connection between the Spirit and the wind, but if I’m reading it in the Hebrew I definitely see the connection between the English word “spirit” and “wind” because it’s this idea of this breath, of this blowing-ness. And where does that come from? The one who sent it - the ruach and the wind, is Yehovah. So that’s a connector in the chapter.
Jono: And it adds to the... I mean, it’s deliberate, right?
Jono: And it says, in verse 33, “But while the meat was still between their teeth, before it was chewed, the wrath of Yehovah was aroused against the people, and Yehovah struck the people with a very great plague. So, he called the name of that place Kibroth Hattaavah.” Is that correct, Nehemia?
Nehemia: Kivoth Ha-taavah, which means, “the graves of lust”.
Jono: The graves of lust.
Nehemia: Because they were lusting for the meat.
Jono: Wow. How about that? I mean, what do you make of that? So, okay, I’m going to send you meat and just when you’re about to eat it, I’m going to knock you off.
Nehemia: Well, to me, this story is about being ungrateful. I mean, they literally had manna from heaven. I mean, not figuratively - they literally had manna from heaven. And they said, we’re sick and tired of this manna from heaven; we want some good old meat and potatoes. And you know, God is just like, “are you kidding me?”
Jono: And there it is. Chapter 12 - we’ve finally arrived at chapter 12, and here it is; Miriam. Now, straightaway there’s a question. Keith, there’s a “did I miss something” moment here in chapter 12 verse 1, “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman”.
Keith: Because of his Kushite wife.
Nehemia: It literally says, ‘the Kushite woman’. Kush was a kingdom in what, today, would, I think, be eastern Sudan and Northwestern Ethiopia. She was an African woman. The question this really raises is, what was their issue with her? It’s not exactly clear. They’re speaking against Moses because of the Kushite woman - well, what about her? And we don’t know. Was she…
Keith: Now, how many wives did Moses have, as far as we know?
Nehemia: Two that we know of. He had Tzipora, and now he’s got the Kushite woman.
Jono: And we don’t have her name, right? We don’t have her name here.
Nehemia: We don’t have her name. Now, some people have said, well, the Kushite woman was Tzipora, because Kush and Midian are near each other, but they’re actually not really near each other. They’re actually significant distances - one is in today’s Northwestern Saudi Arabia, and the other is in Northwestern Ethiopia…
Nehemia: …spilling over into Sudan, so it’s really two different parts of the Middle East.
Jono: Yeah. Sure. We don’t know what the complaint is, right?
Nehemia: We don’t know what the complaint is, but their response is very strange. They say, “Has Yehovah only spoken to Moses? Hasn’t He also spoken to us?” So, you’ve got to wonder - what was it about this Kushite woman that made them think, “Well, wait a minute, Yehovah has also spoken to us, not only to Moses”? Well, what was this issue? And it doesn’t tell us. Everyone at the time must’ve known what the gossip was, but I guess it’s not important for the story. What’s important is that there was gossip going on here, and God’s not pleased with the gossip.
Jono: Yeah, no, not at all. Not pleased at all. And that’s what they said, “And Yehovah heard it.” It says, and they said these things, “‘Has He not also spoken through us?’ And Yehovah heard it.” And, oh, my goodness, Keith, now, have you ever said…you’ve got three boys, right? I’m sure you can think of instances when in your household you have said, “right, my sons, you three boys, you come here and meet me in the lounge-room.” Have you ever said that?
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, “let’s talk.”
Jono: “Let’s talk,” and boy, do they know they’re in trouble, or what?
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, and what I think is just interesting is what He says, and I’ll just quickly read in the NIV if it’s okay?
Jono: Please.
Keith: It says, “When they stepped forward, He said, ‘Listen to my words.’” In other words, don’t turn your head from Me, listen to what I’m about to say. I’m just giving you the NIV version here. “When a prophet of the LORD is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. When I speak with him, I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles,” that’s what it says in the NIV. “He sees the form of Yehovah.”
Now, I think we should stop there, just to ask, what does it say in Hebrew? But He says, “Why then were you not afraid to speak against My servant Moses?” In other words, “you’re speaking against him, but listen, it’s a different category with him; he and I were face to face dialogue here. So, were you not nervous that you were speaking against him, knowing that he speaks directly to Me? Or, maybe you’re not afraid of Me.”
Keith: So.
Jono: Boy, I wouldn’t know what to do.
Nehemia: You know, I think this is a pretty important and amazing passage because Moses has...
Keith: Wait, wait, there’s nothing in chapter 12, you said, there was nothing in chapter 12.
Nehemia: Well, we’ve talked about this before, but now that we’re talking about it again, I’ve just got to reiterate. So, he says, literally, “mouth to mouth I will speak with him,” and then, “oe-mar-eh,” which means appearance, or vision. So, in “vision,” but not in “riddles,” and ‘the image of Yehovah he looks upon’. What does that mean? I don’t know what that means.
So, what this brings to mind for me is the last verses of Deuteronomy, chapter 34, which, really, I think, repeats this. It says in chapter 34, in verse 10 in the Hebrew, “And there never again arose a prophet in Israel like Moses, who knew Yehovah face to face.”
Nehemia: And what that means in plain old English is, Moses was unique in the entire history of prophecy.
Nehemia: A lot of scholars look at this and they say, “this is the prophetic past,” which is a thing in Hebrew when you want to say something that’s so certain as there’s no doubt about it, you say it in the past tense. I mean because think about it - Joshua’s writing, “and there never arose a prophet like Moses,” I mean, big deal.
But this is prophetic past. Really what it means is, “absolutely there never will arise a prophet in Israel like Moses, who will know Yehovah face to face. He knew Yehovah face to face.” We don’t even know exactly what that means, but it’s a unique form of prophecy. All the other prophets - it’s in visions and riddles, and we see how that works, we see some of the ways that the prophets received their revelation. Like, for example, Jeremiah talks about, and some of the other prophets talk about, how they would stand in the heavenly court, and they’d see Yehovah surrounded by His angels, and hear Yehovah speaking to the angels, and they’d be listening in on the counsel of Yehovah. With Moses, He’s not talking to the angels; it’s a one-on-one conversation directly with Moses.
Keith: Amen. Amen.
Jono: And yet Miriam and Aaron spoke against him in some capacity, “and the anger of Yehovah was aroused against them, and He departed, after He said this to them. And when the cloud had parted from above the Tabernacle, suddenly Miriam became leprous, as white as snow. And Aaron turned toward Miriam,” remember this is his sister, “and there she was, a leper. So, Aaron said to Moses, ‘Oh, my Lord! Please do not lay this sin on us, in which we have done foolishly and in which we have sinned. Please do not let her be as one dead, whose flesh is half consumed when he comes out of his mother’s womb!’ So, Moses cried out to Yehovah, saying, ‘Please heal her, O God, I pray!’”
Jono: “And then Yehovah said to Moses, “If her…” Now what does this...
Nehemia: Wait, hold on, we’ve got to stop here.
Jono: Okay, before we go on, this is verse 13. Yeah?
Nehemia: Oh my gosh.
Jono: “Please heal her…”
Nehemia: So, Moses is shouting out to Yehovah, saying, “el-na re-fana,” it’s four syllables. Then he says, “lah,” to her, five syllables, he shouts out, praying. What a beautiful prayer, what a short prayer. I mean, wow, what a short, beautiful prayer. And he’s shouting out, this is his visceral reaction, he’s praying to Yehovah, “el-na re-fana,” those four beautiful syllables, which means ‘O Please El’, mighty one, El is mighty one, ‘O Please mighty one, please heal’, “el-na re-fana.” I know we already had our prayer in this session, but I want to... can I have one more second just to pray?
Nehemia: Yehovah, for all those out there who are listening to this program who are going through some kind of illness or sickness, “el-na re-fana.” I love this prayer.
Jono: Thank you. And so, “Yehovah said to Moses, ‘If her father had spit in her face, would she not be shamed seven days?’” Now, what…is there some background to that statement?
Nehemia: Well, I think it’s the culture of... it’s kind of obvious.
Keith: Yeah, it’s seven days. I mean, he spit in her face…
Nehemia: She’d be ashamed at least seven days, maybe more than that.
Jono: Okay. “‘Let her be shut out of the camp seven days, and afterward she may be received again.’ So, Miriam was shut out of the camp seven days, and the people did not journey till Miriam was brought in again. And afterward the people moved from Hazeroth and camped in the Wilderness of Paran.” Wow.
Jono: Well, then you know, guys…
Keith: Well, this is something...
Jono: I’m just going to say, isn’t that just another example of the grace of Yehovah? He doesn’t leave her in that situation; He hears the prayer from Moses, and it’s only seven days, and then she’s restored.
Nehemia: Wow. Amen.
Keith: So, can I just say one little thing?
Keith: And this is just something for the people to think about. So, there were two that sinned, there was one that carried the leprosy. So, Aaron and Miriam both sinned, and Aaron himself said...
Jono: That’s right
Keith: “…we have sinned.” So, why is the leprosy on Miriam and not on Aaron?
Nehemia: I think Miriam was the instigator, and I think there’s evidence that...
Keith: “Anee” think, “anee” think, mah, I think. What are you talking about?
Nehemia: No. So, in the Hebrew, and I won’t get into a whole lecture about this, but Hebrew is very specific about gender when it comes to verbs; every verb has a gender and a number. What it literally says in verse 1 is, “and she, Miriam, and Aaron spoke.”
Keith: And see this is...
Nehemia: But she is the one who is the major speaker here, and Aaron is just kind of like joining in, and you know, he’s involved…
Nehemia: …but she’s the one who’s the main subject of the verb, grammatically. And hence, you know, she’s the instigator.
Keith: So, you see, you give him the softball; he’s supposed to hit it, and…
Nehemia: Oh, boy.
Keith: Okay. There it is. Alright, folks, let’s move on. Thank you so much. Now, let me say something to the group, this has got to break the record for Torah Pearls.
Jono: I think this has got to be...
Keith: And this is why I need people to send something to us and give a shout-out and say, “Shout-out to Keith, we appreciate the time that we’re spending,” and this will help support Torah Pearls, Truth2U, and everything that we’re doing. And I thank you in advance; I look forward to hearing from you.
Jono: Thank you, my friend. And listen, before we go, that does conclude our Torah portion, but while we have the opportunity, Keith, can you just remind everybody your website and your newsletter?
Keith: Yes, it’s hishallowedname.com, you can go there, there’s a bunch of stuff there, information, videos, all this stuff. A newsletter, I haven’t had much communication there because I’ve been working on this project, but soon you’re going to get updated in an amazing way. So, sign up for the newsletter hishallowedname.com. And of course, the books, the DVDs are there. And I appreciate your support.
Jono: Nehemia?
Nehemia: So, my main website is nehemiaswall.com, and you can sign up there for the free nehemiaswall newsletter, which is now, we’re actually pushing 15 years now on the newsletter, maybe we’ve actually broken that.
Nehemia: And have over nine thousand subscribers and come and join and find out, you get monthly information about the new moon sightings, and I send out all kind of other valuable information. Sign up to the nehemiaswall newsletter.
Keith: Awesome.
Nehemia: And come over to the nehemiaswall website, and you can also pop over to my Facebook page - Nehemia Gordon, the one where I’m wearing the suit, that page, and I’ve got all kinds of interesting information there, we’ve got the Israel Places, and all kinds of interesting things, so come over and visit.
Jono: So, there it is. And next week we are in Shlach, Numbers 13, verse 1, to 15 verse 41. And until then, dear listeners, be blessed and be set apart by the truth of our Father’s word. Shalom.
You have been listening to The Original Torah Pearls with Nehemia Gordon, Keith Johnson and Jono Vandor. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.
Prophet Pearls - Beha'alotecha (Zechariah 2:10[2:14]-4:7)
This entry was posted in Biblical Calendar, Podcast, Torah Pearls by Nehemia Gordon. Bookmark the permalink.
Ben Hofer says:
2 Chron 30
They celebrated both the Passover as well as the 7 day feast for 14 days.
These people decided to celebrate the feast not just Passover a month late when the instruction was only for the Passover not the feast which followed. They then decided to keep it an extra 7 days. The Israelite’s made this determination on their own ,clearly going against scriptural instruction yet they were not condemned.
In light of the different ways in which the calendar is determined,how do we see this chapter. How does God see us in our festival observance which in effect has different people keeping the feasts on different days and in some cases different months. What is Gods take on all of this and what does He value.
Is this intended to be instructive for us today?
Could Be Anonymous says:
Praise Yehovah! <3
Matt Gee says:
I agree with your information about those who are given leadership are to serve. I have come out the modern view, even of Torah Keeping groups, that the “church” is from the top down, and it goes down from there. I have found that this contradicts Ephesians 2: 19-20. The Greek word “foundation” there means “substructure” which is about what holds up the fellowship up. A modern view is that the fellowship holds up the ministry, but that is not what Ephesians 2:19-20 says.
Catherine Fassino Ozment says:
Just listened to this Torah Pearls and this spoke to me:
“what would you rather do – stay in the good spot when the cloud isn’t there, or move with the cloud?”
It always seems so attractive to stay in the “good spot”, but the best place to be is in the middle of the cloud even if you’re flying blind until you get there.
Debra Koch says:
Thank you so much for all you’ve done in this! What a blessing! Love all three of you! Debra
I prefer the sound of the Shofar, I mean aesthetically, comparing it to the church bells ringing at 4.00 or 5.00 a.m; or comparing it to the songs of the mosques at 3.00 or 4.00 a.m.
I pray the day of the public shofar blowing comes soon! I pray that the day when all the altars and the false ‘high places’ of Jerusalem will fall, shall come in our lifetime!
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Chanel continues Italian acquisition spree with footwear manufacturer Ballin
Nothing seems to be able to stop Chanel’s headlong forward progress, as the Parisian luxury giant continues to make multiple supply chain investments. Especially in Italy, where the luxury industry’s artisanal and manufacturing infrastructure has been much better preserved than in France. In summer, Chanel bought Italian tannery Conceria Gaiera Giovanni, and now Italian footwear producer Ballin has been snapped up by the French label.
Chanel has confirmed to FashionNetwork.com that it has “bought a majority stake in luxury footwear manufacturer Ballin,” of which the label is “one of the main clients.” Chanel and Ballin have been working together for a number of years and, according to Chanel, “this investment heralds a more durable collaboration, giving continuity to a well-established relationship.”
In a press release, Chanel said that “the decision was prompted by a convergence of interests: Ballin’s need to rely on a solid partner ensuring long-term visibility to the company, and Chanel’s desire to strengthen a supply chain that is essential for its business, especially it's luxury business as a whole.”
Ballin was founded in 1945 by the brother's Guido and Giorgio Ballin. It is based in the town of Fiesso D'Artico in the northern Italian region of Veneto, along the river Brenta, one of Italy’s main footwear production hubs. Besides being a third-party supplier, Ballin also develops and sells its eponymous brand. Over the years, Ballin has managed to preserve the traditional local production expertise, while also enhancing it through the use of modern technology.
Chanel, which recently staged a remarkable show at the Grand Palais in the Paris Fashion Week’s grand finale, said that “in accordance with Chanel’s approach for this type of operation, Ballin will continue to collaborate with all its other clients.”
Ballin is the fourth Italian company acquired by the Parisian luxury giant in the last two years. Last year Chanel bought Samanta, a tannery specialized in printed and embossed leather, then it bought Conceria Gaiera Giovanni, specialized in the transformation and treatment of goat, lamb, and calf hides. In early July, Chanel finalized the acquisition of Piedmont-based yarn producer Vimar 1991, now part of Paraffection, the Chanel subsidiary that comprises the label's specialist craft ateliers.
Labels: CHANEL
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How Lawmakers Will Shape the Future of Medicare
By Jason Hargraves
Medicare reform has been a topic on Capitol Hill for years. Senate and House members clash − mostly along party lines − as to what the the government-run health care program should look like in the near future.
Medicare was established in 1965 to provide affordable health care to people over the age of 65, but participation has nearly tripled to 55 million people since then, and the program now eats up a large chunk of the federal budget. Hence the conflicts as to how to continue to fund the massive program.
Most agree, however, that it's not going away.
"I think that Medicare will be an increasingly large component of how health care benefits are delivered in the future," says Robert Hartwig, past president of the Insurance Information Institute. "It's not going anywhere."
That said, Hartwig points on that changes must be made.
"If not, [Medicare] will eventually grow broke with the crushing impact of retiring baby boomers enrolled in the plan," he says, adding that it "will cause a strain on federal expenditures and so it will be under a lot of scrutiny."
Medicare doesn't even cover all the health care expenses of seniors. Most need supplemental Medicare insurance gaps to fill in the gaps where the federal program leaves off.
So, with all of its problems, what will Washington do to fix Medicare?
RELATED: How to Manage the Out-of-Pocket Costs of Medicare
In a nutshell, the GOP would like to privatize Medicare, while the Democratic Party is calling to expand the health care program to include people who are under the age of 65. The direction of Medicare will be shaped not only by the next president, but also by the outcome of the congressional races in November.
Let's take a closer look at each party's Medicare proposals.
Republican Party plans for Medicare
The GOP platform paints a doomsday scenario of Medicare, suggesting that it is “headed for a train wreck.”
“Medicare’s long-term debt is in the trillions, and it is funded by a workforce that is shrinking relative to the size of future beneficiaries,” the GOP says.
“To preserve Medicare and Medicaid, the financing of these important programs must be brought under control before they consume most of the federal budget, including national defense,” the party says. “The good news is that it can be done, and it can be done without endangering the elderly and the needy who depend on those programs. “
The GOP’s plan calls for a hybrid privatization of Medicare that Republicans refer to as a “premium-support model,” which is intended to give senior citizens more health care choices.
RELATED: Obamacare Premiums Jump 25 Percent: Do You Have Other Options?
Republicans believe the only way to rein in Medicare’s rising costs is to turn it over to the free market. The party would provide vouchers that Medicare recipients could either use to purchase traditional Medicare plans or private plans. The aim is to eliminate healthcare fraud.
These changes would only apply to people who are currently under the age of 55, who have more time to adjust.
The GOP platform also suggests lawmakers “set a more realistic age for eligibility in light of today’s longer life span.” While the party’s official platform does offer anymore specifics on this issue, some Republicans leaders have previously suggested raising the eligibility age to 67.
Republicans argue their Medicare plan will “improve health care, not just manage its costs.” They blame Obamacare for lowering Medicare payments to doctors, which in turn, has caused many to stop participating in the program and reduced access to doctors for elderly Americans.
“We reject the Democrats’ approach of rationing inherent in Obamacare,” the GOP platform says. “We will not accept that or any other approach which denies care — or lowers its quality — for America’s elderly."
Democratic Party plans for Medicare
The Democratic Party, by contrast, would lower the age of Medicare eligibility to 55-years-old, helping older Americans receive affordable healthcare coverage a decade sooner.
Democrats adamantly reject any notion of privatizing Medicare.
“Democrats will fight any attempts by Republicans in Congress to privatize, voucherize, or ‘phase out’ Medicare as we know it,” according to the party’s platform.
CHECK OUT: Can You Claim Dependent Parents on Your Insurance?
On this point, the court of public opinion agrees with the Democrats. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to the privatization of Medicare and believe the government should continue to provide health care for the elderly. That includes 64 percent of Republicans.
It seems Medicare privatization brings uncertainty to senior citizens who have spent decades paying into the healthcare system.
“We are proud to be the party that passed Medicare,” the party’s platform says. “Democrats believe that health care is a right, not a privilege, and our health care system should put people before profits.”
Given all the attention on the soaring cost of prescription drugs, Democrats are also demanding that Medicare be allowed to negotiate more affordable drug prices for beneficiaries.
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Forensic audit that capped leakage
Home Our Casebook Forensic audit that capped leakage
A wire manufacturing company contacted us to carry out forensic audit of its manufacturing plant. It used to manufacture wires for its own brand of automobile products. The manufacturing operations were doing well but it wanted a detailed audit carried out.
During the study that was carried out, the detailed audit revealed that the plant’s metrics were comparable to the industry standards. However, during the forensic investigation, it was observed that ‘normal loss limit’ was defined by the Plant Head and not according to the performance of the machine. There was also a variation found in the plant’s normal loss limit when compared to another. The actual efficient of the machine, it was then found out, was higher than the benchmark and losses during the process were minimised.
During physical monitoring of the manufacturing process, it was noted that the actual normal loss was much less than the prescribed limit. The daily normal loss of copper was also below the past year’s recorded data. The consumption of PVC was also less than the recorded consumption of the last one year.
It was confirmed with empirical data that there was more copper wire being produced than the reported quantity. The Plant Head along with a few people were managing normal losses in the books and selling the excess quantity in the market. The involvement of the Plant Head and some other employees was confirmed in the extended study that was carried out.
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Chili Peppers Book: Part Scrapbook, Part Love Letter After 25 years together, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have released their first book. The Red Hot Chili Peppers: An Oral/Visual History pays tribute to co-founder Hillel Slovak, who died in 1988, and chronicles the band's journey from the early days in Los Angeles.
Chili Peppers Book: Part Scrapbook, Part Love Letter
Chili Peppers Book: Part Scrapbook, Part Love Letter 9:42
January 15, 20114:58 PM ET
NPR Staff
The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been together for 25 years. Stephen Stickler/Courtesy of It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins publishers hide caption
Stephen Stickler/Courtesy of It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins publishers
The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been together for 25 years.
Over the 25 years they've been together, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have survived drug addictions, overdoses and the ever-fickle music scene. They still managed to record nine albums, including Grammy-award-winners Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Stadium Arcadium.
Their first book, The Red Hot Chili Peppers: An Oral/Visual History, is an inside look at their journey. The band's bassist, Michael Balzary, spoke to Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz about the early days and explains why his band spends so much time naked.
Balzary's not really sure where his nickname -- Flea -- came from. It might have originated with his longtime bandmate, Anthony Kiedis, or old friend and founding Chili Pepper Hillel Slovak, but it definitely fits.
"I was always jumping around a lot," he says, "and I am a little guy."
Ann Summa
Clay Patrick McBride
Tony Woolliscroft
Chris Cuffaro/JBG Photo
Courtesy of the author
Lynda Burdick
David Hermon
Sante D'Orazio
Stephen Stickler
His background is in jazz; Balzary was raised in a jazz household and started playing the trumpet in junior high. In high school he met Slovak, who played guitar in a rock band. He would watch the band rehearse and says he thought it looked really different.
"They were having so much fun, and it was so not regimented and not controlled," Balzary says. "It really felt good to me to get away from what my parents wanted and what they were teaching me in school."
When the band sacked their bass player, Balzary stepped in. Two weeks later he was on stage at a nightclub in Hollywood.
Slovak died of a heroin overdose in 1988, but not before co-founding the Chili Peppers and making a profound impression on Balzary.
"If it weren't for him, I never would have played the bass, never would have had the Chili Peppers," he says. "But more than that, he was a brother, a beloved friend."
Slovak, Kiedis and Balzary lived together for a time and could often be found undressed. Balzary says it all started as a joke between the roommates, but then they took it outside.
Right after signing with EMI Records, Balzary and Kiedis pulled a stunt that almost got them dropped. "We said we wanted to meet the president of the company," he says. Denied, they tracked him down in a high-level meeting, stripped, jumped on the table and danced around.
"The last thing it was was calculated," he says. "The expressions on their faces were something that I hold dear to my heart."
The band wasn't goofing off all the time, though. Of all their nine albums, a couple stand out for Balzary. "I felt like Californication really captured us as a band," he says. "It captured the feeling that the band gives me when we play. It was a real all-for-one, one-for-all feeling when we made it." He says their latest, Stadium Arcadium, encompassed all the band has done over their history.
After all their time together and success, Balzary says he still loves to hear his band's music on the radio, especially when he's in the car. "I wonder if the guy next to me can hear it!"
The Chili Peppers will have new songs on the radio soon. They're recording now, and the band shows no sign of slowing down.
"We love music," Balzary says. "We're willing to put in the work and we're willing to put in the time."
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"We do think the cost we were quoted is prohibitive," she told me later, arguing that releasing the emails is a matter of public accountability. "To know how our tax-paid servants talk about and what they think about citizens is in the public's interest."
After looking over the estimate Wagner forwarded, I also thought the cost was excessive, although for different reasons.
When it comes to granting access to government documents, Missouri's Sunshine Law favors citizens. Public agencies are encouraged to provide documents free of charge when it serves a public interest, but the law sets out some specific rules about what can be charged if they choose to require payment.
In general, government bodies can bill for staff time in three areas: Time spent looking for records, time spent making copies and (in the case of electronic records) time spent doing any computer programming "beyond the customary and usual level" to compile the records.
Time spent copying can be charged at a rate no higher than the average hourly rate for an agency's clerical staff. But research and programming time can be charged at "actual cost," which explains the charges Wagner noticed. Rather than just the staff members' hourly pay, the rates used in the city's estimate include the cost of providing the staffers' health insurance and retirement benefits.
For me, the real red flag in Wagner's email was the proposed charge for a paralegal to review the documents. The Sunshine Law doesn't include any language expressly allowing government agencies to charge for attorney time, but it doesn't stop some from trying.
In the wake of the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, I saw multiple news reports that the city of Ferguson was demanding exorbitant payments — up to $43,750 — to provide copies of emails and other records related to the shooting. Often, the bills included time a city attorney would spend reviewing documents before release.
The Sunshine Law itself, as well as state court rulings that have come after it, make clear that, while the law allows governments to withhold certain information, it doesn't require them to. If they want to redact information — and can cite a specific exemption — that's fine, but they can't, in my mind, turn around and charge more for the time they choose to spend providing less information.
I thought the city of Springfield was on the same page — in past conversations with City Attorney Dan Wichmer, the city has always backed off charging for redaction. But Wichmer said he thinks Wagner's request is a little different.
Wichmer said the review is to determine whether any of the emails contain information that would be protected by attorney-client privilege, which he said is a separate requirement outside the Sunshine Law.
Wichmer said Wagner's request for all emails mentioning Michael Ireland was so broad, "it makes it very hard to say" what might be found, justifying the 10-hour estimate.
"(The cost) is not being used to punish. I am tying up a staff person to research this," he said, noting that the paralegal who would do the work is the lowest-paid person qualified.
Wichmer said he thinks the legal review counts as "research time" under the Sunshine Law.
"I was told by (staff in) the Attorney General's Office in one of their seminars, you can bill for attorney-client privilege review," he said. "They were very specific about that."
That very well may have been the case. But whatever advice the state attorneys gave then, the office isn't standing behind it now.
When I inquired about the presentation Wichmer referenced, spokeswoman Nanci Gonder said the Attorney General's Office has not taken an official position on charging for legal review.
"I'm not aware of any official presentations that included that," she said. Gonder said that, when asked, "We basically say there's no direct legal interpretation."
Jean Maneke, the legal consultant for the Missouri Press Association, said she thinks it is clear that government bodies cannot charge for time attorneys spend reviewing and redacting records, although for a different reason than I had considered.
Maneke said that, when information is closed, the law requires governments to separate it out and release the rest. If emails are protected by attorney-client privilege, the city should have separated those records already, she said, rather than waiting until a citizen requests a copy.
"That's their job, that's not part of the search and duplication," she said. "They should have declared it closed already."
A 2012 circuit court decision from St. Louis County that Gonder provided further undermines the argument for attorney fees.
Unlike a court opinion from an appellate judge or the Missouri Supreme Court, the lower court judgment, in the case of Larry White vs. City of Ladue, isn't binding in other areas of the state. But the judge, Barbara Wallace, did a nice job of explaining why charging for legal review is a bad idea.
Wallace notes early on that "(t)here are no cases interpreting if the term 'research time' includes time spent by an attorney to review documents being supplied in response to a request." And in the specific case being dealt with, she thought that the amount the city of Ladue wanted to charge was not unreasonable.
"However, that being said, the Court is concerned that allowing governmental entities to charge for attorney review has serious potential to result in the negating of the purpose of the Sunshine Law by making it very difficult, if not impossible, for citizens to afford to exercise the rights given them under the Sunshine Law ...," Wallace wrote.
"Therefore, this Court determines that including attorney review time is not encompassed in research time under the statute."
Although she sided with the citizen, Wallace wrote that the city didn't appear to have purposefully violated the Sunshine Law and might have reasonably thought it could charge for the review — especially considering that some other jurisdictions were charging similar fees.
Wichmer made a similar argument. He said he's been told the Attorney General's Office also charges for attorney review when responding to Sunshine requests. He said he asked the Attorney General's Office to clarify its policy for both of us.
After I called the Attorney General's Office on Wednesday and asked specifically about the policy on charging for review, attorney Patricia Churchill, the chief counsel for the governmental affairs division, sent me an email saying the office "generally do(es) not charge requesters for responding to records requests."
When I copied the email to Wichmer, he noted that "use of the word 'generally' does not mean never" and said the city and the Attorney General's Office "have the same track record" when it comes to occasionally charging for review.
Whatever the case, "everybody else is doing it" doesn't seem to be a very compelling reason for charges that get in the way of public access, especially in a case that involves a police officer killing an unarmed man. (The News-Leader has filed its own request for additional police records in the Ireland investigation, but that's a story for another day).
Happily, the disagreement over Wagner's request for emails appears to have been resolved.
After my first conversation with Wichmer, I suggested that Wagner revise her request, limiting the date range to the time of Ireland's death and later and specifically excluding any emails sent by city legal staff, which would be the emails most likely to contain privileged material.
The change didn't immediately alter the estimate Wagner was getting from the police department. But when I called Wichmer again — he said he hadn't been told of the revised request — the confusion was quickly addressed.
"On her new request, there shouldn't be any attorney time required," he said.
I could quibble about whether the review ever was "required" — I'm sure it won't be the last time Wichmer and I debate the finer points of the Sunshine Law — but for now I'm content that Wagner can move ahead with her request at a reasonable cost.
And if anyone else runs into trouble gaining access to public records, give me a call. I'll review the law for you, free of charge.
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Back to former Maine governors
Gov. William Titcomb Cobb
Terms January 4, 1905 - January 6, 1909
Passed July 24, 1937
Birth State Maine
School Bowdoin College, University of Leipzig, University of Berlin, Harvard Law School
Family Married Lucy C. Banks; two children
WILLIAM T.COBB, the forty-sixth governor of Maine, was born in Rockland, Maine on July 23, 1857. His education was attained at Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 1877, and at the University of Leipzig and the University of Berlin, where he worked on an advanced degree. He studied law at Harvard University, was admitted to the bar in 1880, and established a successful legal career. Cobb entered politics in 1904, winning the Republican gubernatorial nomination. He went on to win the general election, and was reelected to a second term in 1906. During his tenure, harsher prohibition laws were supported, economic restructuring was endorsed, railroad growth was promoted, and a meat inspection law was advocated for, as well as a pure food and drug law. After completing his term, Cobb left office on January 6, 1909, and retired from political life. Governor William T. Cobb passed away on July 24, 1937 in Rockland, Maine.
Current Maine Governor
Janet Mills
Recent Maine Governors
Gov. Paul LePage
January 5, 2011 - January 1, 2019
Gov. John E. Baldacci
Gov. Angus S. King
Gov. John Rettie McKernan
Gov. Joseph Edward Brennan
Gov. James Bernard Longley
Gov. Kenneth Merwin Curtis
Gov. John Hathaway Reed
December 1, 1959 - January 1, 1967
Gov. Clinton Amos Clauson
January 7, 1959 - December 30, 1959
Gov. Robert N. Haskell
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Pionk has high expectations for Heritage Classic with Jets
Defenseman prepares for outdoor game against Flames with eye on childhood memories
by Tim Campbell @TimNHL / NHL.com Staff Writer
WINNIPEG -- Neal Pionk spent much of his childhood playing hockey on frozen ponds and backyard rinks, so he has high expectations for his first NHL outdoor game at the 2019 Tim Hortons NHL Heritage Classic between the Winnipeg Jets and Calgary Flames at Mosaic Stadium in Regina, Saskatchewan on Saturday (10 p.m. ET; NBCSN, CBC, SN1, CITY, TVAS2, NHL.TV).
"I've seen them on TV but never been to one, never attended one," the 24-year-old Jets defenseman said. "It should be good weather. I'm expecting it to bring back memories of my childhood, whether on the pond at Pike Lake or over at Hermantown (Minnesota), just skating outside and having fun with my friends."
Pionk is passionate about outdoor hockey memories. The early ones include the family's backyard rink, constructed by his dad Scott, filled with the garden hose, and his mom, Karen, dropping him and his brothers -- Corbin, now 30, Nate, 23, Joe, 20 and Aaron, 16 -- off at one of the five outdoor rinks in Hermantown for the entire day.
Video: Mosaic Stadium gets set for 2019 Heritage Classic
Another tradition evolved with Neal and Nate and two other hockey-mad families in the Duluth area, where Hermantown, a city of about 10,000, is considered a suburb.
He said it was 10 or 11 winters ago that they joined with members of the Aamodt and Koepke families for the annual Holiday Cup. Usually conducted on a day over the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays, it was an outdoor tournament that began with older brothers against younger brothers.
"We had the games at our house or one at an outdoor rink or at the Aamodts," Pionk said. "They lived on Pike Lake and we'd go there. A couple of winters it was too cold, so we went inside at the Hermantown Ice Arena. So, a couple of asterisks but for the most part it was outside."
Nate Pionk said the Holiday Cup began as serious competition.
"It started as a simple 3-on-3, shovel off [the lake] and then let me tell you, it was full contact," Nate said. "No destroying each other or knocking anybody out, but when we were younger, we liked to bump into each other. There would be a few high sticks, a black eye here and there, maybe a cut on the chin. Our parents weren't too happy about it."
Nate remembers the original teams: Himself, Travis Koepke, Wyatt Aamodt against Neal, Cole Koepke and Wade Aamodt. Today, Neal is an NHL defenseman, Wyatt is a 21-year-old defenseman at Minnesota State University Mankato and Cole is a 21-year-old forward at University of Minnesota Duluth.
"It was pretty even, and we'd just play a best-of-7, each game up to five goals," Nate said. "It was a blast. We eventually got a Cup for it and started calling it the Holiday Cup and we wrote our names on the side of it and would hoist it.
"So now what it's turned into is the three families and a buddy gets added every year or so and now it's up to 4-on-4, sometimes 5-on-5. It's always a fun event, always some laughs. It's a great time."
[RELATED: Rittich, Hellebuyck unveil Heritage Classic goalie equipment]
The youngest Pionk brothers, Joe and Aaron, joined the Holiday Cup in recent years.
"When we started, they were pretty young and physically smaller," Nate said. "Mom would be out there saying, 'Let them play,' but we're saying, 'Mom, we're trying to actually play for something here and we can't have Joe and Aaron in our way.' Now that Aaron's bigger, they're involved, and we loved that."
For Neal, who has six points (two goals, four assists) in 10 games this season and 46 points (nine goals, 37 assists) in 111 NHL games with the Jets and New York Rangers, the joy of playing outdoors in Hermantown remains strong.
"I know it's cliché, but it's the freedom," he said. "I look at it in the literal sense, that you don't have a roof over your head but it's also in the metaphorical sense, where you don't have a coach or a scout looking at you. You do whatever you want. Who cares if you make a mistake? Nobody cares. It's about fun.
"And you kind of get the symbolic sense of the breeze blowing in your face, the open space, the open sky. There's no coaches, no scouts, nobody's critiquing you, there's no systems. Do whatever you want. That appeals to me and that appeals to a lot of kids hopefully still today. I know that definitely did when I was a kid growing up with my brothers."
He hopes that joy will continue. The families missed playing the Holiday Cup last winter for the first time since it started -- in part there wasn't time for Neal, playing his first full season with the Rangers, to get home during a short holiday break.
It is, however, on the tentative agenda for this winter, Nate said.
"I'd say it's a pending thing," he said. "When we get older, it gets harder. Everyone's busy. What we've talked about doing it maybe during the [NHL] All-Star break or at Christmas."
Before the next Holiday Cup takes place, Nate will be able to watch his older brother experience a new kind of outdoor game at the Heritage Classic.
"It's awesome," he said. "It's once in a lifetime when you get to play on a stage that big, outside and at something that spectacular and cool. Most people don't get to do that. I know everyone here's going to be watching and my mom is going, so it's a big deal."
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Netherlands legislative overview
Global | Publication | February 2020
Cannabis, hemp, weed or marijuana?
Toleration Policy and recreational use
Legally permitted use of cannabis
Experiment Controlled Cannabis Supply Chain
Business appetite
The Netherlands has been known for its distinctively tolerant policy on drugs. Although many may (or may not) think that carrying drugs, selling drugs or even growing drugs is considered to be legal within the Netherlands, the Dutch Opium Act (Opiumwet) proves otherwise. All of the foregoing is prohibited save that in specific circumstances the use and sale of cannabis is tolerated. Yet, this might be about to change in the foreseeable future. As recently as November 2019, the Senate approved a piece of legislation allowing ten selected municipalities (one of which is Maastricht) to participate in an experiment enabling a limited number of entrepreneurs to legally grow and sell cannabis. This article aims to break down the Dutch policy on cannabis and to look ahead to future developments.
Before going into detail, the question may arise as to what exactly falls within the scope of the term ‘cannabis’. The Dutch legislator uses the terms ‘cannabis,’ ‘weed,’ ‘marijuana’ and ‘hemp’ interchangeably, as they all refer to the same plant: the cannabis sativa.
This does not mean, however, that all are the same. Weed (or marijuana) contains a high level of THC content. This is the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis, which makes weed both desired and forbidden. Hemp, on the other hand, is a term used to classify varieties of cannabis that contain close to no THC at all. Hemp serves industrial purposes, such as the making of rope, animal food or medicines (as a result of a high level of CBD content). This type of cannabis is referred to by Dutch law with the term ‘fiber hemp’ and does not fall within the scope of the Opium Act nor does it fall within the scope of this article, in which the term ‘cannabis’ is used to refer to the high level THC weed (or marijuana).
Pursuant to the Opium Act, it is illegal to grow, cultivate, sell, deliver, carry, and to transport drugs in or outside the Netherlands. Barring strict exemptions available to pharmacies, doctors and veterinarians, a violation could be followed by imprisonment or a fine. In this respect, a distinction has been made between ‘hard drugs’ and ‘soft drugs,’ the latter ought to be less harmful to public health. Heroin, cocaine and ecstasy are labeled hard drugs, cannabis a soft drug.
Not only does this distinction affect the severity of potential punishment, it is also relevant to the enforcement of the prohibitions of the Opium Act – which is less stringent on soft drugs. Moreover, with regard to recreational use of cannabis a ‘toleration policy’ is applied: no legal proceedings will be instituted against a person who carries up to 5 grams of cannabis for private use nor will legal proceedings commence against coffee shops that sell cannabis, provided certain criteria are met. This policy of toleration arose in the 1970s. At the time, no distinction was made between hard drugs and soft drugs. Following a significant increase in heroin addictions and in drug transactions, often in public, the renewed Opium Act 1976 introduced this distinction that is still being applied to this day. Bear in mind that it remains illegal to hold or sell cannabis but the law is simply not enforced if the criteria of the Toleration Policy are met.
Case study: Josemans v Mayor of Maastricht (ECLI:EU:C:2010:774)
Mr Josemans runs the ‘Easy Going’ coffee shop in Maastricht until the mayor of Maastricht declared the establishment temporarily closed. Reports attested that, contrary to (at that time local) rules, persons who were not resident in the Netherlands had been admitted to the coffee shop. According to the CJEU, in short, the prohibition to admit non-residents constituted a restriction on the freedom to provide services. This restriction, however, was held to be justified by the objective of combating drug tourism and the accompanying public nuisance.
To meet the criteria for the sale of cannabis, coffee shops may not advertise drugs other than by making brief statements, coffee shops are not allowed to sell hard drugs and a single transaction may not pass the threshold of 5 grams of cannabis. Also, no cannabis may be sold to minors and the coffee shops’ activities may not cause any nuisance. Lastly, as of January 1, 2013, only residents of the Netherlands, being those living and registered in a Dutch municipality, are permitted to visit coffee shops and purchase cannabis.
In addition, municipalities are able to develop further restrictions. An example is that the cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, which do not allow a coffee shop to be located within a distance of 250 meters from a secondary school. With regard to Amsterdam, this restriction is part of a deal with the Ministry of Justice that grants Amsterdam an exemption to the criterion that only residents of the Netherlands are allowed to enter a coffee shop. Local politicians feared public nuisance if tourists were to be prohibited from visiting coffee shops. As a result, tourists are still permitted to visit a coffee shop in Amsterdam.
In principle, when all criteria laid down in the Toleration Policy are met, the Opium Act will not be enforced. A local dialogue between the mayor, a public prosecutor and the chief of the police is qualified to compose an Enforcement Arrangement on the basis of which administrative and criminal proceedings are aligned. In case the criteria are no longer satisfied, the mayor can close the coffee shop, while the public prosecutor can start legal proceedings against the persons responsible. The Enforcement Arrangement, however, also prioritizes the various offenses under the Opium Act. As a result, although not all criteria of the Toleration Policy are met, a coffee shop may still stay open in a municipality that does not actively enforce the relevant parts of the Opium Law towards these coffee shops. For example, Amsterdam used to give little priority to enforcing the Opium Law in respect to coffee shops. Having said that, the newly appointed Mayor Halsema intends to change this practice into a stricter one.
While recreational use of cannabis is formally illegal, this is different for medicinal use. As of 2003, the Dutch Office of Medicinal Cannabis is the competent authority to grant exemptions to the Opium Act. These exemptions relate to public or animal health, scientific research or trading purposes (e.g. to Italy, Germany and Finland). It enables a professional party to legally grow and sell cannabis for medicinal purposes, albeit under strict regulations. In short, the producer of medicinal cannabis is obliged to sell its harvest to the Office of Medicinal Cannabis, which in turn is obliged to accept the producer’s offer. The Office of Medicinal Cannabis subsequently delivers the drugs to a distributor, who sells the drugs to, for example, a pharmacy.
Currently, medicinal cannabis does not in itself cure diseases but it can reduce the symptoms they cause. Medicinal cannabis may also reduce the dosage and side effects of other medicines. A notable limitation in the use of medicinal cannabis is the requirement of a physician’s prescription in order to make use of it.
Although the sale of cannabis is tolerated in accordance with the Toleration Policy, the cultivation and supply to coffee shops remains illegal. In the past, efforts to legalize the cultivation of cannabis for recreational use in the Netherlands, as opposed to medicinal use, had borne little fruit. A recent development may however change this (albeit not everyone seems convinced it will). On November 12, 2019, the Senate passed the Controlled Cannabis Supply Chain Experiment Act (the Act) by a convincing majority. Although a number of details will only become clear later this year, this Act creates a legal basis for an experiment with the objective to assess whether and to what extent it is possible to ‘decriminalize’ the supply of cannabis to coffee shops. The Act exempts up to ten entrepreneurs, in ten selected municipalities, from the prohibitions pursuant to the Opium Act, thus legally allowing coffee shops in the relevant municipality to buy their cannabis.
Those entrepreneurs interested in participating must, as part of their application, provide information on a variety of matters, for instance the testing process and the risks associated with it, the applicant’s experience and knowledge, a financial plan, measures (to be) taken to comply with quality requirements, and how the cannabis is to be distributed to the coffee shops. The application will be declined if it is unclear whether the applicant can cultivate cannabis under strict government restriction, or when a steady supply of quality cannabis cannot be guaranteed. Also, the cannabis has to be cultivated within the Netherlands (although not necessarily in one of the selected municipalities).
The duration of the experiment is at least four years, with a maximum of five and a half years. In case the experiment will not be renewed or replaced with definitive legislation, a transitional period of six months ought to be sufficient to return to the situation that existed prior to the experiment. The experiment is expected to start mid-2021.
None of the larger municipalities have, however, opted to participate in the experiment, stating that with the current requirements they do not believe the experiment will work. One of the main objections to the experiment is that all coffee shops in the participating municipality will have to acquire their cannabis from the selected suppliers. Coffee shops fear quality issues when being forced to purchase from a limited number of suppliers, whilst municipalities indicate this will be impossible to enforce.
In spite of municipalities and coffee shops having been reluctant to take part in the experiment, businesses have shown significantly more interest. Being involved in a ‘new’ business (in the sense that it is no longer illegal) offers lots of opportunities, especially competitive advantages when being involved in an early stage. The downside of being such an early adapter is the possible resistance one might experience when setting up the business.
One recent example concerns Project C. A lawyer, general practitioner and a former local politician started a business that would take part in the experiment, aiming for a net profit of €15 million. However, the company was refused a bank account multiple times as a result of economical, strategic and risk assessments. Project C decided to initiate legal proceedings against the relevant bank. It was held that the freedom of contract is not absolute for commercial banks, since having a bank account is, without a doubt, a necessity in order to do business in modern-day society and the bank was required to open the bank account for Project C.
Only the future will tell whether the Controlled Cannabis Supply Chain experiment will ultimately replace the current Toleration Policy, thus not only permitting the sale of cannabis to customers but also the cultivation and sale to the coffee shops. Currently, with all major municipalities refraining from participating, this does not seem very likely under the current terms. The experiment does however pose new business opportunities for those who cultivate cannabis. At the same time, they are facing the risk of the experiment not being continued.
Saskia Blokland
saskia.blokland@nortonrosefulbright.com
Food and agribusiness
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Online Highways Home > California > South Lake Tahoe
Search South Lake Tahoe California
The point where the California-Nevada border makes it bend is actually located in the deep waters of Lake Tahoe. So large and deep is the lake that its waters could cover the entire state of California to a depth of 14 inches.
The amazingly clear and pure waters attracted wealthy Californians, who built mansions along the shores at the turn of the century. As roads were constructed, the lake became less the exclusive preserve of the rich. Since the mid 70's, the Lake Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has been responsible for maintaining the environmental quality of the area during the process of responsible development.
There are two ways to reach the lake, via Interstate 80 to the North Shore and Hwy 50 to the South Shore.
Is a major snow and ski destination with 18 downhill ski resorts and 5 cross-country ski trail systems. Some of the area resorts include the Heavenly, Kirkwood and Sierra at Tahoe.
Location: 1156 Ski Run Blvd., South Lake Tahoe California 96150 Telephone 530-544-5050 Toll Free: 800-AT-TAHOE Fax 530-544-2386
(Camino) Apple Hill
(Carson City) Bailey's Hot Springs
(Carson City) Carson City Hot Springs
(Carson City) Fish Lake Hot Springs
(Carson City) Kyle Hot Springs
(South Lake Tahoe) Lake Tahoe
Request a Free copy of the Mile-by-Mile Guide to the Oregon Coast, which will be delivered to your USA postal address. Also request a free first issue of Oregon Coast magazine and sign up for coast deals.
01/19 Coming to The South Lake Tahoe area
Arden Fair Sacramento CA March30-April18 Open the doors to Arden Fair and step inside. Here you'll find contemporary fashions, jewelry, accessories and brand name merchandise at over 165 specialty stores, plus Nordstrom's, Macy's, Sears, and JC Penney. Arden Fair also has a number of terrific restaurants, everything from fast food to fine dining. And it's completely enclosed, so it's always a comfortable 70 degrees inside no matter what it's like outside.
California Exposition & State Fair Sacramento CA June12-28 The Cal Expo is the site of the California State Fair. All year Satellite Wagering, Waterworld USA, Paradise Island Fun Center and an RV Park are just a few of the features of the Cal Expo.The first State Fair was held in 1854 in San Francisco at the old Music Hall. The fair offered premiums (prizes) for its competitions and included such agricultural exhibits such as 2-inch-long peanuts, 72-pound beets and a 10-pound carrot that was longer than 3 feet. Horseracing was part of that first fair and has continued to be a part of the fair ever since.
The Rio Vista Bass Derby Festival Rio Vista CA October11-13 Rio Vista is proud to host the oldest fishing derby on the West Coast. The festival is a three-day derby for bass, catfish and sturgeon. The festival also boasts music, food and fun for fishermen and non-fishing children and adults as well. The events include a carnival, live music and dancing, classic car show, a pancake breakfast, parade and BBQ. A large fireworks display is also featured on Saturday night.
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Brexit update: UK Conformity Assessment (UKCA) process now confirmed
Rhian Greaves
The UKCA mark has something of a chequered history, with the previous guidance having been withdrawn and replaced by relative radio silence from Whitehall in terms of what January 2021 might bring. But as the end of the transition period rapidly approaches, the Government has now filled the void, confirming as it does so that we will indeed see a UKCA mark post-Brexit.
As an EU Member State, our businesses have long been accustomed to the rigours of the CE marking process; a scheme designed to ensure that certain products placed on the EU market demonstrably complied with specific laws relating to health, safety and the environment.
Following the UK’s departure from the EU, it is now confirmed that most CE marked products will require a UKCA mark if they are to be sold in England, Wales or Scotland. There will be separate rules relating to products to be sold in Northern Ireland.
Which products require a UKCA mark?
“Most” products which already require a CE mark will need a UKCA mark. The new rules also apply to aerosol products.
The UKCA mark should not be applied to any product in the absence of a legal requirement to do so.
What does the UKCA mark mean?
A product bearing the UKCA mark will have been subject to conformity assessment to confirm it complies with the relevant essential requirements. The Government guidance states that those technical requirements, as well as the routes to demonstrating conformity, will be “largely the same” as they are currently. That said, this is a change and so an additional administrative burden (at least initially) can be anticipated.
When will this change take place?
In most cases, the UKCA mark can be used from 1 January 2021. It must be used from 1 January 2022.
However, you must use the UKCA marking immediately from 1 January 2021 if your product:-
is covered by laws requiring a UKCA mark; and
it requires mandatory third party conformity assessment; and
that conformity assessment has been carried out by a UK conformity assessment body and you have not yet transferred your assessment files to an EU recognised body before 1 January 2021.
The changes do not apply to existing stock. Any items that are completely manufactured by 31 December 2020 can continue to bear the CE mark.
Where should the UKCA mark appear?
You must check the specific regulations that apply to your particular product(s). Generally, the mark will be applied to the product itself or its packaging. Sometimes, it may be acceptable to place it on the accompanying manual or supporting literature.
When affixing the UKCA mark, you should be aware that:-
in doing so, you take full responsibility for conformity of the product with the essential requirements;
you are only demonstrating compliance with UK law; and
you must not do anything that misconstrues or confuses the meaning or form of the UKCA marking or that impacts its visibility or legibility.
Can a product bear both marks?
Yes; indeed many businesses will need to affix both. The EU will not recognise the UKCA mark and so if you are selling on the continent, a CE mark will still be needed.
You can display both marks if:-
your product is to be placed on the market in both the UK and the EU; and
the product is compliant with both the CE and UKCA schemes.
Currently, the product requirements for each scheme are identical and it is widely reported that there are no plans for the UK to diverge from the EU on this point. However, history tells us we can never say never when it comes to Brexit and with that in mind, businesses ought to keep a watchful eye on their product specific requirements both domestically and on the continent to ensure ongoing compliance.
Looking ahead, businesses should bear in mind that UK bodies will only be able to carry out conformity assessments for CE marking purposes if the EU recognise their competence as part of any future trade agreement with the UK. As such, it may be necessary to make contingency plans now to deal with any future assessment requirements.
It is understood that the Government will implement a legal framework that will allow UK conformance assessment bodies to continue to operate for most products to be placed on the domestic market.
What should I do now?
Those involved in the supply chain should examine the guidance on a product by product basis so as to establish what the specific requirements will be at the conclusion of the transition period. Whilst it is anticipated that the majority of organisations can continue “as usual” until January 2022, the new requirements will increase the administrative burdens on businesses and so early preparation is advised.
Importantly, Authorised Representatives and Responsible Persons based in the EU will not be recognised at the end of the transition period. This applies immediately from 1 January 2021. If products are to be placed on the domestic market, they must be based in the UK.
You can find details of the new scheme here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-the-ukca-mark-from-1-january-2021. If you require any support in interpreting the new position as it applies to your business, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
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© 2021 Pannone Corporate LLP, Registered in England, registration number OC388393. VAT number 176336294. Registered office: Pannone Corporate LLP 378-380 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 4LY. SRA number:607323.
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Zolita Talks 'Big Dyke Energy' and Her Queer Heartbreak Banger
We hear a lot these days about the power of queer love stories, and the many young artists coloring in the dull mainstream narrative of queer life as one long exercise in struggle and trauma — brightening it with shades of love, infatuation, lust and bliss.
Lesbian pop songstress Zolita is among these artists. On tracks like "Holy," "Like Heaven," and "Come Home With Me," Zolita tells stories of flirty trysts and ecstatic obsessions, with a macabre, witchy edge.
But in her latest song and video combo, "Truth Tea," which PAPER premieres today, Zolita reminds us of the importance of stories that explore the idiosyncrasies of queer heartbreak.
Her most personal song to date, "Truth Tea" is a biting send-up of a cheating ex. The glossy, thumping pop banger tells the true story of a traumatizing betrayal that Zolita experienced when her girlfriend cheated on her with a man.
While that narrative, to some extent has become cliché, the situation remains a common ghost in queer romances, and Zolita's rage is a balm for anyone who's been made to feel "like an experiment."
We find Zolita furious rather than broken: seething with "big dyke energy," as a graphic T-shirt she wears in one scene of the video (which are now for sale on her website) reads, that has prompted fans to call the song a "a gay 'thank u, next.'"
The savage lyrics, inspired by a "classic diss-track" are mismatched with the tropical wind-chime beat, and light, danceable production, a whiplash that mimics the song's emotional cocktail of anger and hurt:
"I heard you went away for the summer/ Met a boy named Lars and fucked him in his car... I heard you met a three out of ten/ Called him Ben, took him home not once but twice," she sings mercilessly.
The video, full of Zolita's signature cinematic flare and provocative aesthetics, is a science fiction drama, set in a sterile white hospital room, where two nurses prescribe her a violently colored dose of "truth tea:" a metaphor for the harsh truths that friends and loved ones to serve us, when they're too painful to stomach.
PAPER chatted with Zolita about the heartbreak that inspired "Truth Tea," life as an independent artist, and her plans to found a "Big Dyke Energy" dance party in LA.
This video feels really personal. What inspired it?
I originally was supposed to release this song called "Black Magic" around this time. But I recently went through a pretty traumatizing betrayal in my life, which felt like something that I needed to express as an artist, in order to process and get through it. So I came up with this idea for a song and video called "truth tea." I knew I wanted it to be in a super sterile: this perfect white room where I would be in a daze and two nurses would help break me out of that daze by serving me "truth tea."
So you came up with the concept as well as you were coming up with the song?
Yeah, I wanted to make this video so badly. I told my manager (I had just moved from New York City to L.A.) that I needed to fly to New York City to make this video within two weeks. He was understandably on the fence us investing time and money into a video that didn't even have a song yet, but I was like "I swear song is going to be good," just trust me. I had the lyrics written and I went into the studio with Lee Newell, who does most of my production on all of my other songs and then this songwriter called Bekah Novi who's also a big collaborator and we made the song. But yeah. Sorry I went off on a huge tangent there. But thematically, I think "Truth Tea" is when you don't want to know something awful is going on, so you close your eyes to the signs and your own intuition.
Willful ignorance.
Exactly and I was definitely in a relationship where I did that for a very long time, and that struggle came up in the songs I was writing and releasing before I had consciously accepted it, like my new song "New You."
What was the "truth tea" in real life for you?
I needed outside forces to help me, I wasn't going to accept it without someone literally telling me what was going on so I had that. I had my own nurses in my life that served me the truth and the proof that I needed.
Is it scary to put out something so personal and angry?
Yes, but more than scary, I'm really excited because it's going to feel so cathartic. I'll finally be able to close that chapter of my life by putting this out. I've never really had a Taylor Swift "call them out" moment before, usually my songs usually come from a very vulnerable and sad point of view: this is the first time both in the song and the video that I really let myself to embrace anger and more of a crazy, manic energy.
There is really vibrant anger in the video.
Yeah! I'm really not an angry person, but this whole experience kind of awakened that energy inside of me because I've always been very forgiving, and kind of live with rose-colored glasses. I trust very easily. I've never felt anger like this in my life, so it was really nice to express that and I'm so grateful that I have music and art to be able to express that because I don't know how I would have been able get through this.
This song is about a very specific story of queer heartbreak, one that I think is an underlying anxiety for a lot of queer people and especially women: of a partner cheating with someone of the opposite sex.
Yeah one hundred percent. That was definitely an anxiety that I was expressing. I've been out for a good amount of time now and I feel very confident in my sexuality. When you're dating someone who is newly queer, obviously you want to trust them and I don't want to seem like I'm saying that everyone who is newly queer is going to do that....that's not what I want to say at all. But this was my experience: and no one wants to be an experiment. That's what this kind of felt like, I felt like a long experiment to this person.
I just told the story exactly as it happened, both in the lyrics and in the video. People can take what they want from it and I think even though it's such a specific story it's also one that obviously so many people experience. You see cheating and betrayal storylines all over T.V. and the movies. Everybody loves a good betrayal, cheating story.
Speaking of movies, I feel like a lot of your videos, especially this and "Holy," are told so cinematically. You're a filmmaker as well as a musician - who are your cinematic influences?
I love Steven Klein's video work and photography and then I love David Lynch of course, kind of like that eerie off-putting visuals and vibe and color and all of that. I'm definitely inspired by '90s fashion films and fashion shows.
I also loved the embrace of the grotesque and weird in this video.
Definitely. My past videos are very put together and I'm hyper-aware of myself and my body. In this video, I really wanted to let myself be a little bit more ugly and just try to embrace that craziness as much as possible.
Musically, this song really reminded me of Dua Lipa. Who in pop are you listening to right now and inspired this?
Definitely! I love Dua Lipa she's great. I love Kehlani, and Post Malone. I think people who have a dark R&B vibe and strong melodies are the artists that I gravitate towards a lot. For the sound of this song, I was listening to Nicki Minaj's new album a lot. She embraces anger better than anybody else that I know in the mainstream. One example is the song "Barbie Dreams," just like a classic diss track. Originally, I had hip-hop production and a classic diss track in mind, but when we went in the studio we decided to go for a more carefree and danceable and fun, just because that's what we were feeling and I thought that would be a nice contrast to the really savage lyrics.
How involved are you in the creative production of your videos?
I'm literally involved in everything –– like I made food for the set. I drive the van, I drop off the equipment. I'm an independent artist, no one's telling me I have to do anything. I'm doing it because I need to and I want to. But from the idea, to raising money, to producing and pulling together location I'm doing it all. And then bringing together all the people I collaborate, who I've been working with since my first video. I have this really symbiotic creative relationship now with a crew of people, and we all know each other so well, which is really important. When you're in front of the camera, when you're directing yourself you have to put so much trust in the people around you. There's no time to look at the footage, so I have to be like did you guys like that shot, do you think that that was a good one? And I have to trust that.
I feel like especially being so personal and sexually open in your work, you have to trust people around you, or that kind of vulnerability isn't possible.
Yeah I think that because all of my staff are 99% female and/or LGBTQ makes for such a good set energy and definitely translates in the video.
How do you self-motivate as an independent artist?
It's exhausting but it's what I'm choosing to do it and it makes me so happy, and it's so fun. There are so many stressful aspects of it, but at the end of the day when I get messages from young fans saying that one of my songs is helping them through some experience or helping them come out or helping them embrace their sexuality -- that's what I come back to when I get frustrated. When I come back to the core of why I do what I do, that's what motivates me.
What was your decision like to move to LA?
I loved living in New York and I made my whole group of collaborators they're all out in New York and it definitely shaped who I am as an artist but for music, pop music is all pretty much out in L.A. But I was coming out here every few months, so it made more sense and I'm glad I did. It's definitely easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing and like, "Oh I need to make a sound that sounds like everyone else so like Spotify will pick it up." Because there are so many incredible musicians doing similar things. So you want to stand out but also you want to have a sound that people are going to like and going to want to listen to. It's trying to strike that balance.
Are you trying to sign with a label?
Right now, being independent is working for me. I'm definitely not closed off to signing with a label, but it would have to be the right people and the right team.
Last thing, tell me about your "Big Dyke Energy" shirt in the video.
Yeah! So I was seeing big strap energy but I never say big dyke energy. I have this cult of girls symbol that I use in a lot of my work and I wanted to make another iconic piece that people could have from the video.
So we made shirts and on the same day that the video comes out we're launching the shirt as well so people can buy that. And also, me and my really good queer friend out in L.A. are actually talking about starting a party series called Big Dyke Energy.
That's amazing! Those spaces are really necessary.
Yeah! The fact that women don't even have a set bar to go to... I mean we have some events you know kind of like in New York, like in New York you have The Woods. And here there's a night at The Abbey on Wednesdays. But there's no set queer female space. It's very heavily gay male centric obviously in West Hollywood, so this would be for women and non-binary people.
That sounds like exactly what LA needs.
Yeah because there's a lot of amazing queer girls out here, we just have to get them all in the same space.
Photos by Victoria Brandt
"Evil Angel" Is Zolita's Queer, Witch-Pop Debut ›
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Submissions and contact
Breaking the law: How fantastic is too far?
by Richard Watson
Breaking the law: How fantastical is too far?
September 20, 2019 Richard Watson
Good stories invoke and involve the imagination of the audience. Whether we prefer magic, futuristic technology or the impossible and inexplicable power of something that came from the shadows, ultimately we, as readers, are accepting the narrative of the writer and escaping the real world to envisage the scenes of their fiction.
In order for the reader to maintain a suspension of disbelief, writers and designers behind fictional universes face many hurdles. In science fiction, one of the most important challenges is determining how things work. Often, this follows the Asimov method, with scientific rationalisation based on existing science and some ‘pseudoscience’ added on top. However, not everyone is a professional physicist before they start creating science fiction. Some decide to go a different way and blend in a little magic or a dose of the supernatural. This is called ‘science fantasy’.
How far is too far with mixing in the fantastic can be a subjective judgement call. After all, we are dealing with a varying threshold of an individual consumer’s escapism. What jars one person out of the story can be different than what another is happy to accept. For writers and designers, it can be a little harder to judge where the border is, particularly when dealing with prior knowledge their audience may bring to their reading or viewing experience.
As a trained scientist, I often find myself annoyed by knowing too much: ‘flux capacitor’ may be meaningless enough to a lay-person that it sounds right to power a time-travelling DeLorean, but to me, it’s a nonsensical mashup of unrelated jargon. The illusion is shattered (note: this doesn’t mean I disliked Back to the Future, only that I was the one jerk pointing out the problems with it).
It’s worth noting that this debate has been part of Science Fiction for decades. Arthur C. Clarke’s third law — ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ — has always been a rationale for writers and designers to make imaginative leaps when considering what might be possible in the future. For some this is made a bit more palatable when these leaps are rationalised as ‘novums’ — a term coined by renowned theorist Darko Suvin in 1979.
When relevant consultants are brought aboard a project, whether they be physicists, biologists or other specialists, the scientific basis for given premises is strengthened, meaning the pseudoscientific ‘leap’ or novum is based on established theories and the resulting story can be plausible for more people. Advice from an expert in the field you’re breaking the rules in can help you lie believably.
There is also an issue of trying to identify the border between science fiction and science fantasy. Few physicists took issue with Star Wars (except Neil deGrasse Tyson), because the franchise announces itself right from the start as being far from our reality — “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. Star Wars is clearly planted firmly in the science fantasy genre. The Force, lightsabres, and the Death Star are obviously ludicrous concepts, but we don’t mind. So why is it that so many people took issue with that one scene in the 2013 film, Gravity (spoilers ahead), where George Clooney is tragically ejected into space as the protagonists attempt to reach a space station?
The answer comes from the comparison. The premise of Gravity requires it to be real, or as close to our reality as possible. That association is part of its narrative. That means flaws in the premise also invoke greater criticism and a sharper focus on how its story works.
So, people don’t complain about Star Wars, because when it started, they jumped to ‘long ago’ and ‘far, far away’ — the film never tried to present itself as realistic. That illusion never even began. However, when Gravity bumped off George Clooney, it was a jarring shift from a movie attempting realism throughout its narrative, to breaking one of the most fundamental laws of physics. Of course, this was an issue primarily pointed out by scientists, and those unfamiliar with the behaviour of objects in a vacuum may not have even noticed.
Here’s a good parallel explanation. Remember those skin-crawling ‘realistic’ renders of Mario from the early 2000s? Despite the fact that those images were ‘more realistic’ than a collection of pixels, they were terrifying. Yet, when we watch an episode of The Simpsons, we don’t feel the same feeling — despite the fact that they have butter-yellow skin and weird bulging eyes. This is the ‘uncanny valley’, a measurement of where we draw the line in visual character representation between unreal acceptable, real/unreal repulsive, and real. The human mind is comfortable with either extreme of the realism scale. Hyper-realistic graphics of modern video games, such as 2018’s God of War, are okay. Absurdly unrealistic animations are okay. Somewhere on the spectrum between those two is an area of unnerving similarity.
It seems hard to place a firm border on when a story leaves science fiction and becomes science fantasy. When a work seems like it could be either, the only real way for a screenwriter or game developer to tell where they are on that scale is to simply test their work and see how it feels to audiences; there is no mathematical or scientific gauge of whether something is uncomfortable or unbelievable. However, the best books, games and films seem to get it right by establishing a few key assumptions ‘like dragons exist’ or ‘time travel is possible’ and then building internally-consistent worlds from there.
The level of attention to detail is important here. It’s easy to tell how much research has been put into something in a science fiction story. The video game Elite Dangerous’ ‘frame shift drive’ is a nice example. As a physicist, faster-than-light travel is a very tricky concept to tackle; it’s widely considered impossible, but much of science fiction rests on it as a premise.
In this case, even the name of the novum was clearly chosen carefully. ‘Frame shift drive’ is an obvious reference to the theories of relativity, closely intertwined with the universal speed limit. Further investigation into the game’s lore reveals references to the Alcubierre Drive, a real theoretical method of faster-than-light travel. Not only have the developers satisfied the killjoys like me, but also the casual player who simply wants to blow up some spaceships. The balance has been well struck.
The video game series Fallout achieves the rare goal of successfully mixing plausibility and fantasy, and coming out with an enjoyable result. The odd mixture of black-and-white television, nuclear-powered cars, and domestic robot servants is entirely acceptable in the world the developers have created because it’s internally consistent. The combination of the Cold War never really having ended with the transistor never being invented means that, when you look closely, a lot of the games’ world and its odd mix of technology actually makes sense. Radiation-diseased zombified humans? Sure, there are plausible avenues time could go down to give rise to that. Massive glowing mutated bipedal lizards? Fantastical, but fun.
Dredd from the Big Meg: the ‘I am the Law’ Judge Dredd starter game and The Graveyard Shift solo rules
In Tabletop Games
Review: The Crowman
Unearther
Review: Strange Ways by Gray Williams
Gamesmasterclass: they know more than me
Cosmic horror: the existential fiction we all need right now
April 27, 2020 - by Louis Calvert
AI alert
September 7, 2020 - by Ben Potts
Canon: exploring consistency in storytelling
July 17, 2020 - by Thomas Turnbull-Ross
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©2021 Parallel Worlds
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Online Betting in India
IPL Betting
How to Bet on Cricket
Home Cricket Teams Zimbabwe
A Test side since 1992, Zimbabwe have been playing cricket for more than 100 years and have played on the game’s biggest stages and against the best teams. They have produced many legendary players throughout the years, with many of these leaving to join other teams and some staying to create history with their birth nation.
As of late 2015, Zimbabwe have played in close to 100 Test matches and they have also competed in a number of International tournaments, including the ICC World Cup.
Zimbabwe were given Test status in 1992, but they had a cricket team long before this. They have been known as Zimbabwe since they achieved independence from the British in 1980. 15 years prior to that they were known as Rhodesia, and prior to that they were known as Southern Rhodesia.
Zimbabwe’s love of cricket comes from its connection to South Africa and Britain, with the game being played here for over 100 years. In 1904, they established the first official national team and participated in the Currie Cup, which they continued to enter, albeit sporadically, over the next few decades.
Cricket first began to take off in the country when they gained indolence, became known as Zimbabwe and then began to compete in several international tournaments. They won the ICC Trophy in 1992 and in their first ever World Cup they raised a few eyebrow when they beat Australia in the first match.
Because there was no professional domestic league within the country, and because they had yet to achieve Test status, many of their better players would later leave to play elsewhere, and this weakened what had been a rapidly improving team. This included Graeme Hick, who decided that he was better off playing in England for Worcestershire and then for the England national side, despite being born in Zimbabwe.
Biggest Players
There were a few players who began playing for Zimbabwe and then moved on to play for England. Mentioned above, Graeme Hick was one, but so was Alistair Campbell and Andy Flower, with the latter holding the record for the most career runs scored, at close to 5,000. Zimbabwe have produced may other big players, with the likes of Anthony Ireland, who retired to play county cricket in England, and his cousin, Guy Whittall, both doing enough to cement themselves in Zimbabwean history.
Eddo Brandes, Kevin Curran, Grant Flower (brother of Andy, who is just ahead of him on the Career Run Total table) and Murray Goodwin have also helped to improve the status of Zimbabwe cricket over the years and many have worked their way into the record books. Neil Johnson’s name can also be found in the record books. He opened for Zimbabwe during the 1999 World Cup, won a handful of Man-of-the-Match awards and helped his team to a few historic victories.
Biggest Wins
Zimbabwe did not play at the first two World Cups and didn’t make it past the group stage of the next two. They went one better in 1992 when they edged into the Round Robin stage, their best performance to date and one of their best ever. They have not advanced beyond the first round in the Twenty20, despite appearing in 4 competitions, and they also dropped out of the first round of the Commonwealth Games in 1998.
Their best results have come in the ICC Trophy, which they won in 1982, 1986 and 1990. This competition includes teams that many would expect Zimbabwe to have no trouble beating, including the Netherlands and Kenya, who are often two of the tournament’s best performers. However, it has also included Bangladesh, who are certainly no pushovers. In fact, in all three of their ICC Trophy successes, Zimbabwe found themselves facing Bangladesh, including the 1986 group stage, and both the 1990 and the 1982 semi-finals.
From 1992, when they were given their Test status, up the end of 2015, Zimbabwe had won just 11 of their 97 Test matches, drawing 26 and losing 60. They have yet to beat either Australia, New Zealand, West Indies, South Africa, Sri Lanka or England in Test matches, despite playing them a combination of 55 times. They have beaten India on more than one occasion though and they have also recorded multiple wins against Bangladesh and Pakistan.
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FT.com Wins Online Publishing Award
October 13, 2003, 11:00 , 11:00
FT Group
London - FT.com received the Chairman's Award at the UK Association of Online Publishers Awards on Tuesday night. It was chosen as the winner from over 170 entries.
The award, introduced for the first time this year, went to the entry that met the primary objectives and key challenges set out by the AOP. These were:
· To raise the profile and credibility of online publishing;
· To develop standards across all aspects of the online publishing industry including marketing, measurement, functionality and operation;
· To help online publishers drive revenue though a variety of means including online advertising, charging for content, sponsorships, services and new technologies;
· To facilitate the share of knowledge and cross-fertilisation of ideas.
Bill Murray, AOP Chairman commented: "FT.com has faced up to one of the AOP's key challenges head on: that of educating consumers that good content is worth money, and so generating revenue through content sale and subscription. During the last nine months, over 50,000 users have subscribed to this service yet despite this traffic figures and advertising revenues have continued to rise - proof that top quality content can and will justify consumers paying for it."
Tracy Corrigan, editor of FT.com said: "We are delighted to win this prestigious award in recognition of our success in building an online news website based on subscription and advertising revenues. We believe that we can continue to attract new subscribers by providing top quality news, comment and analysis on the big business and world stories."
The Financial Times Group, one of the world's leading business information companies, aims to provide a broad range of business information and services to the growing audience of internationally minded business people. The FT Group includes:
The Financial Times, one of the world's leading business newspapers, which is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Providing extensive news, comment and analysis, the newspaper is printed in 21 cities across the globe, has a daily circulation of over 480,000 and a readership of more than 1.6 million people worldwide.
FT.com, the newspaper's internet partner, combines agenda-setting editorial with relevant financial data and discussion groups, as well as a broad range of business tools including the largest search function on the internet. FT.com has more than 65 million monthly page views and over 3.8 million unique monthly visitors.
The FT Group's pan-European network of national business newspapers and online services including France's leading business newspaper and website, Les Echos and lesechos.fr, and Spain's leading business newspaper and website, Expansion and expansiondirecto.es. In February 2000, the FT launched a new German language newspaper, FT Deutschland, with a fully integrated online business news and data service.
Through FT Interactive Data, the FT Group is one of the world's leading sources of securities pricing and specialist financial information to global institutional, professional and individual investors. Its products include eSignal, an online realtime streaming quotation service for brokers and active traders.
FT Business which produces specialist information on the retail, personal and institutional finance industries. It publishes the UK's premier personal finance magazine, Investors Chronicle, and The Banker, Money Management and Financial Adviser for professional advisers.
The Financial Times Group also has a stake in a number of joint ventures, including;
FTSE International, a joint venture with the London Stock Exchange.
Vedomosti, Russia's leading business newspaper and a partnership venture with Dow Jones and Independent Media
A 50% stake in BDFM, publishers of South Africa's leading financial newspapers and websites.
A 50% stake in The Economist Group, which publishes the world's leading weekly business and current affairs journal.
The FT Group is part of Pearson plc, the international media group.
Alice Owen on tel 020 7873 3829 or Lucy Ellison on tel 020 7873 3119
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How book covers are designed
A book's cover design is the window into its story, and might be the reason a reader first picks it up.
The art of conveying an entire manuscript into a single image, and making sure it's targeting the right audience, is a task taken on not just by designers, but by editors and the marketing, sales and production teams. "Collaboration is part of the whole design process", says art director for Penguin Random House Children's, Anna Billson, "From working with different teams and illustrators outside the company, to sharing inspiration or unlocking a problem, it helps us create the best possible book covers."
The author is of course consulted towards the end of the process when a proposed cover has been developed, and their opinion is hugely valuable, but ultimately the art department will make the final decision. These teams have a huge amount of expertise on what readers are looking for and what is likely to make a book sell - and know exactly how to bring that to life visually.
So, how does a book cover go from brief to bookshelf? Here, designers from across Penguin Random House take you through the journey.
Receiving the brief and researching
Every month each art department are given briefs for upcoming titles from editors, which are then distributed among the team by the art director. They will decide who the best designer is to take on each project, and then work with that person quite closely throughout the process.
After getting the brief, the designer liaises with the editor to ensure they’ve got everything they need before getting started. Whether or not they read the whole text is down to the designer. Marianne Issa El-Khoury, junior designer at Transworld says, “This truly depends on the designer and how they prefer to work: some need to read the entire manuscript before starting, others need to sketch hundreds of ideas before developing them more on their computers and some jump right into it from the information on the brief. Personally, I like to dedicate the first couple of days to research. For me, this means needing to read at least part of the manuscript to pick up on small elements I can incorporate into the cover. The wider process can vary from book to book, but I always start this way.”
'I always read all of the manuscript – you really need to know the book, I don't like to think that I'm missing anything'
Suzanne Dean, art director at VINTAGE insists on reading the whole text, “I always read all of the manuscript – you really need to know the book, I don't like to think that I'm missing anything. After that comes the key part, research. If the book is a classic title I'll start by looking at any of the previous covers, as I don’t want to repeat anything someone has done before me. I make notes in the margins of the novel, and from there I go to my creative notes.”
Designers also have to keep audience at the forefront of their minds throughout their creative process. Anna explains, “When briefed, we ask, ‘Who is this for? Who's our target audience? Who are the target retailers? What's the competition?”
Creating the first visuals
'Some designers prefer to sketch straight onto the computer with a graphics tablet, and others are more traditional with simple pencil and paper'
"I then move on to roughly sketching my ideas" says Marianne. "I value when a cover has a strong concept that elevates the design, so the ground work from my days of research will influence this. Some designers prefer to sketch straight onto the computer with a graphics tablet, and others are more traditional with simple pencil and paper!"
Suzanne likes to create mood boards to help not only herself, but be able to get across to the editor what look or mood she’s trying to emulate in her cover. “As a designer, seeing these different sparks of inspiration really energises me and helps me find a direction in which to move forward. On a practical level, when you have a collection of images, it’s very easy to communicate to an editor the direction in which you want to take the cover.”
For children’s books, the process is the same. If the designer is creating the cover themselves, they sketch ideas to share with their Art Director before creating a full rough draft to take to a covers meeting. “If an illustrator will be doing the cover, we go with a sketch that shows the direction we want to take it in”, says deputy art director Ben Hughes. “The first covers meeting makes sure everyone's onboard before we properly tackle the design.“
The covers meeting(s)
'The editors play a huge role when it comes to the realisation of a cover'
“At this point we must have created several visuals for the books we have been assigned, which are then presented during the cover meeting in front of the editorial team, heads of departments and managing director”, says Marianne, “The editors play a huge role when it comes to the realisation of a cover. They spend so long going over the manuscripts that most know the book as well as the authors, and so know exactly who the audience are.” Alongside editorial, the sales team also have input in a covers meeting on which direction a concept should move in, as they have insights on the audience and what they respond to, plus where the book will primarily be sold.
'A cover is in cover meetings a minimum of three times, but sometimes it can be 20'
“When working with an illustrator, the first covers meeting for a title may have illustrator suggestions,” says Anna, “before coming back again with the rough draft from the illustrator. After this the typography is designed, because early on we'll just scribble things. A cover is in cover meetings a minimum of three times, but sometimes it can be 20, and each time there are often multiple routes and ideas being worked up.
"Sometimes you can come up with a brilliant concept, but actually, that concept doesn't translate into a decent book cover. So however good the concept, you have to let it go and try something else. But the covers meeting is also amazing, because there's a lot of times I will hold something up and the whole room will go, ‘Wow!’ And that's a great feeling for the designer."
After several cover meetings, when the design has been approved by all teams and sent to the author, the rest of the cover has to be put together, including spine, back cover and endpapers. All these aspects are very important – with the spine being the view of a book we see most often.
During all of this process, the design team will also work closely with the Production team, who turn the design onscreen into the physical book. Catherine Ngwong, head of production at Ebury explains more, “We can emboss a title, foil it, use spot UV and different laminates to make it feel and look really different.” The team have to be very detail oriented as they're working for the finished product. "We have to spot any mistakes, and crucially, fix them!" Watch the production team colour correcting in the video below before the book is sent to the printers.
Illustrating a children's book
How to find an illustration agent
How to become a book designer
What comes next after graduation? As part of the Student Design Award series of blogs, we share the best steps you can take to become a book designer.
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NewsBack to School
42% of NYC students opt for remote learning; up from 26%, DOE says
By: Lauren Cook
NEW YORK CITY — With one week to go until the start of the academic year, the number of New York City students opting for all-remote learning is on the rise.
According to Department of Education data released Monday, just over 42% of the city’s 1 million public school students have requested a remote learning curriculum — up from 26% on Aug. 10.
About 58% of students intend to return to classrooms next Monday for blended learning, which involves a mix of weekly in-person and remote learning. That’s down from 74% of students on Aug. 10.
The number of students choosing remote learning is expected to change, as parents can opt into the curriculum throughout the school year. Parents can also opt to bring their children over to blended learning at certain points during the academic year.
The shift in preference toward remote learning comes as the leader of the United Federation of Teachers union has repeatedly cast doubt on the DOE’s ability to reopen schools safely by next Monday.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew said Monday that Mayor Bill de Blasio and DOE officials have not made enough progress in establishing the safety protocols needed to reopen.
Mulgrew also said the city still has not provided enough teachers to cover a staffing shortage created by those who were granted reasonable accommodation to work from home.
"If you asked me if we were ready to open today, I would say we are not," he said.
Mulgrew suggested that the union would seek another delay in opening school buildings if safety protocols are not met on a widespread level.
De Blasio, however, insisted that schools will be ready to by next Monday.
The mayor announced the DOE will be adding 2,000 teachers to its ranks to help offset the staffing shortage as well as the launch of a “situation room” to monitor coronavirus outbreaks.
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Dictionary of Film Studies 2e companion weblinks
Dictionary of Chemistry 8e companion weblinks
Oxford Reference provides more than 58,000 concise definitions and in-depth, specialist encyclopedic entries on all aspects and disciplines within the field of the Performing Arts. Written by trusted experts for researchers at every level, entries are complemented by illustrative line drawings and images wherever useful.
International in scope, our coverage comprises authoritative, highly accessible information on the very latest terminology, genres, styles, time periods, concepts, theories, techniques, dramatists, performers, companies, and organizations relating to all areas of the performing arts—from ancient times and Shakespeare’s classics to twentieth-century theatre and dance.
Sample resources | Featured author | Featured blogs | More from OUP | How to subscribe
See all the Performing Arts books available on Oxford Reference >
Discover Performing Arts on Oxford Reference with the below sample content:
A timeline of performing arts: from the harp being used as a musical instrument in Mesopotamia to British pop group, the Spice Girls, breaking all previous UK records with their first album, Spice
Quotations about acting, cinema, and dance from Oxford Essential Quotations
An exploration of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Shakespearian production from The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
‘Ghost Dance’ defined in The International Encyclopedia of Dance
A look at operas from 1998 to 2008 in A Dictionary of Opera Characters
Back to top >
Michael Patterson
Michael Patterson has taught at universities in Oxford, Belfast, Bangor, Leeds, Coleraine, and Leicester, and is now Emeritus Professor of Theatre. He has published six books on German theatre and one on political theatre. He is also the author of The Oxford Dictionary of Plays.
What is the one term or concept that everyone—from students to everyday web users—should be familiar with? Why?
‘Realism’ is a term used in art, literature, film, television, and the theatre. It can easily be misunderstood. It does not mean that what is represented attempts to be real. In the theatre the action is framed by the beginning and end of the performance, by the physical limitations of the stage, and the audience can hear everything spoken, even whispered dialogue between two characters. In fact, ‘realism’ is merely a convention in which we are least aware of the convention.
Which historical events or figures featured in your dictionary have most influenced your study of your subject?
The First World War, in which traditional battle tactics were used in the face of modern technology, resulted in the deaths of millions. One can only guess how many brilliant potential writers and artists died in the mud of the battlefield. What we do know is that, especially in Germany, the shock of the war gave impetus to a radical revolution in theatre, which has been a major focus of my research (see e.g. The Revolution in German Theatre 1900-1933, 1981). Drawing-room theatre no longer offered an adequate response. The violent images of the war and the need to create a better world were transferred to the stage in the excesses of German Expressionism and in the political drama of Piscator and Brecht.
What do you think is the most commonly held misconception in your subject area?
Bertolt Brecht is unquestionably one of the most significant contributors to twentieth century theatre, but is frequently dismissed as being didactic, against emotion, and simply boring. This view has not been helped by the early and misleading English translation ‘alienation’, which Brecht defined simply as ‘making the familiar seem strange.’ It does not mean that he did not want his audience to be involved in the action; on the contrary, his theatre is lively, colourful, sometimes humorous, and, above all, challenges the spectator to reach his or her own conclusions.
How did Shakespeare originally sound?
Test your knowledge of common Shakespearean words with our quiz.
Twenty-first-century Shakespeare
Michael Dobson explores the extent of changes in the culture at large, and to Shakespeare’s place within it, within the last fifteen years.
The play's the thing!
Michael Patterson explains to work that went in to compiling The Oxford Dictionary of Plays.
For more theatre and dance blog posts delve in to the OUPblog archives >
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PHOTO: Neosiam on Pexels
Has China’s football transfer market sprung back to life?
Reading the tea leaves of China’s latest football world record
Trade and industry, Arts, culture & society | Asia, East Asia
Beijing football club Guoan has just broken the world transfer record for an African player. Simon Chadwick takes a look at whether China has once again moved the goalposts when it comes to the big money of the world game.
For all the usual hype circulating around the opening of Europe’s football player transfer window at the start of January, there was something drably inevitable about it. Following Brazilian international Neymar’s soft-power induced move from Spain’s FC Barcelona to France’s Paris Saint Germain (PSG) for a world record fee last August, we already knew considerable liquidity had been injected into the market for football players.
It was therefore entirely predictable that Barcelona, with money burning a hole in its pocket, would make a move for a high-valued star to replace Neymar. This came in the form of his fellow Brazilian international Philippe Coutinho, who joined the club from English Premier League (EPL) side Liverpool for £142 million (second only to Neymar’s fee in the list of most valuable transfers in history).
In the space of six months, France, Spain and Qatar (which owns PSG) have somehow conspired to fundamentally change the nature and scale of player transfers, perhaps forever. Yet twelve months ago, who would have predicted this? After all, this time last year many observers were aghast once more at China’s continuing forays into the transfer market.
Twelve months earlier, at the start of 2016, the likes of Costa Rican Jackson Martinez and Brazilian Ramires had grabbed headlines across the world by signing for Chinese Super League (CSL) sides Guangzhou Evergrande and Jiangsu Suning respectively.
At the start of 2017, Brazilian Oscar’s switch to Shanghai SIPG (from the EPL’s Chelsea) and Argentinian Carlos Tevez’s arrival at local rivals Shanghai Shenhua prompted frenzied speculation about the rapid inflation of a Chinese transfer bubble, as well as the potential for its eventual explosion.
In the end, China’s state authorities set about deflating the bubble by initially introducing a player quota ruling. This tightened what had previously been known as the ‘4+1 Rule’ so that it became the ‘3+1 Rule’. Essentially, the ruling meant CSL clubs could only have four overseas players involved in a match at any one time: three on the field, and one on the substitute’s bench.
Mid-2017, China’s transfer regulations were further strengthened following the surprise imposition of a 100 per cent tax on overseas player transfers (for clubs in debt). This meant that a player who might otherwise have cost £50 million would cost the signing club in China £100 million.
Significantly, the Chinese authorities’ rationale for the tax was that it would be paid into a domestic football development fund. In combination with ongoing government threats to shame irrational (overseas) investors, the summer player transfer window in China was a dull affair, the procession of overseas talent into the CSL having seemingly been choked-off.
At least, this was the assumption. Indeed, as the world’s attention has switched back westwards to Qatar and the like, few seem to have paid attention to the comings and goings of players in the CSL. Hence, as Coutinho has continued to smile nicely for photos in Spain, over in Beijing the world transfer record for an African player has just been broken. Cedric Bakambu, a striker with Spain’s Villareal, signed for the CSL’s Beijing Guoan for £65 million, of which approximately £30 million is reportedly being paid in tax.
The move is significant for several reasons, not least because it indicates that what many thought was a dormant Chinese transfer market has now sprung to life.
Clearly, record-breaking transfer deals are still possible for Chinese clubs, resulting in speculation that more big deals could be on the way. Whether this is the case remains to be seen, although the Bakambu deal could suggest China’s state authorities are adopting a more restrained approach to their transfer market interventions.
An alternative interpretation is that football clubs may have accepted that their player purchases will incur the 100 per cent tax, and have therefore incorporated the additional cost into their acquisition strategies.
Until there are further signings comparable to that of Bakambu, it will be difficult to make a definitive judgement about this, especially as Beijing Guoan (the only CSL club in the capital city) has a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the state. Last year, the club was involved in a rather opaque change of ownership that resulted in it becoming, literally overnight, one of the world’s most valuable clubs.
On the same day Bakambu swapped Catalonia for the Workers’ Stadium, a football website carried a story with the headline ‘The $40 million heist – how Tevez took China for the most expensive ride in history’. The story refers to Argentinian player Carlos Tevez, who is now back on home soil after 12 months signed with Shanghai Shenhua.
The timing of this story was ironic. After all, it is arguable that the exorbitant price of the Tezez transfer was behind the subsequent draconian, knee-jerk regulatory reactions of Chinese authorities. Without the Argentinian’s reported financial avarice, Bakambu might now be just another modestly priced African star heading east.
In this respect, we can only speculate. However, the fact the tax exists indicates that China read the Tevez deal correctly. Here was a player with a long history of being involved in turbulent transfers, which have seen him start and finish at Boca Juniors via spells in England and Italy. No surprise, then, that he is back at Boca for a third spell following his departure from Shenhua.
The heist reference in the piece about Tevez not only shines a light on the player’s financial appetite, but also that of his representatives, suggesting an initial degree of gullibility on the part of some Chinese sports investors.
And this is exactly why Chinese authorities moved last year to stem external currency flows by intervening in player transfers. Not only were these interventions intended to address concerns about risk and robustness in the Chinese financial system – they were also a tacit acknowledgement of state sensitivities around dealing with potentially unscrupulous foreigners who might take advantage of the country’s growing wealth.
For a government intent on putting China first, stuffing bundles of cash into an Argentinian’s back pocket was never going to be an acceptable outcome for anyone, from President Xi downwards.
This piece is published in partnership with the China Soccer Observatory at the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham.
Professor Simon Chadwick is a researcher, writer, academic, consultant and speaker with more than 25 years’ experience working across global sport.
The geopolitical economy of sport Simon Chadwick
The COVID-19 World Cup? Simon Chadwick
Show me the money SIMON CHADWICK
Make an impact with your expertise ASIA & THE PACIFIC POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL
China shines the spotlight on football... SIMON CHADWICK
Podcast: Building bridges between research... KIRSTY O’CONNELL
Podcast: Ghosts of policy past, present and... MARTYN PEARCE
Washington’s untapped influence in Myanmar HUNTER MARSTON
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Ansel Elgort says he wants an open relationship with his girlfriend Violetta Komyshan
By Sam Prance
@samprance
Ansel Elgort revealed that he wants to explore polyamory and mentioned Shailene Woodley in a new Times interview.
Ansel Elgort has opened up about his love life, polyamory and dating Violetta Komyshan in a new interview with the Times.
Fans of Ansel Elgort will already know that The Goldfinch star has been with his girlfriend Violetta Komyshan for seven years. Violetta is a famous ballerina but the couple actually met in high school. They briefly broke up in 2014, due to Ansel's career but they got back together in 2015 and since then have regularly been spotted being totally adorable with each other both on and off social media. Essentially, they are cute af and we've been shipping them ever since Ansel became famous.
READ MORE: Ansel Elgort just posted 17 shirtless selfies and the internet is living for it
Now, Ansel has revealed that his relationship with Violetta is changing and it's because he wants it to be open.
Ansel Elgort is now in an open relationship with his girlfriend Violetta Komyshan. Picture: VALERIE MACON / Contributor / Getty, @ansel via Instagram
Speaking to The Times about his relationship and turning 30, Ansel said: "I'd also like to find a lot more love. It doesn't need to be sexual. I could be done sexually with my girlfriend. I think we've been pretty clear that I want to feel free to fall in love with people and that [option] should be open, but sexually it can be closed off". So he wants an open relationship but it seems like he's unsure if he wants that to have sex with other people or even keep having sex with Violetta.
Ansel then explained: "I'm in love with a bunch of my male friends, who I'm not interested in having sex with, so why can't I put the desire to have sex with women aside and let myself have love with women? I love Shailene Woodley and we never had anything sexual and that was great. There will probably be some sort of chemical thing at some point that you can't help, but you just have to be disciplined and not be a fucker… We're primitive beings."
Happy Ansel.
A post shared by Ansel Elgort (@ansel) on Nov 26, 2017 at 1:04pm PST
Um okay?!! So it seems like Ansel wants to be able to fall in love with other people, where it's more than friends but without the sex, whilst still being in a relationship with Violetta. Ultimately, as long as Violetta is happy with their new arrangement, we are too.
In a previous interview with Details, Ansel opened up about their brief break-up by saying: "I knew something was missing, and I was like, 'Oh, that's love,'". In other words, it looks like he and Violetta are still very much in love and fans need not worry.
What do you think of Ansel's approach to love?
Noah Beck blasts Instagram for taking down his NSFW Calvin Klein photos 😳 popbuzz.co/35TI2b7 pic.twitter.com/PgmHkcNywv
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News May 14, 2008 update:May 15, 2008
One third of EU turkey flocks have salmonella
One third of EU turkey flocks bred for human consumption were found to contain some presence of salmonella between 2006 and 2007, says the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
According to the risk assessor, 30.7% of turkey farms tested* posed an infection risk. These results are expected to influence future policy initiatives with regards to reducing salmonella levels at farm level to protect humans against contamination.
According to EFSA, salmonella was the second most reported case of food-borne disease in the bloc during 2006, with 160,649 suffering infection from some strain of the pathogen.
While turkey meat flocks were found to hold a higher risk of carrying salmonella in the bloc, 13.6% of birds used for breeding also showed contamination, according to the study.
In terms of specific strains, Salmonella Enteritidis and Salmonella Typhimurium, which are most linked to food infections in humans, were detected in 3.8% of flocks assigned for human consumption. The same varieties were found in 1.7% of breeding stocks, according to the findings.
* The study took place between October 2006 and September 2007, with five environmental faeces samples taken from breeding turkey flocks within 9 weeks of their slaughter date and 3 weeks before meat birds were slaughtered. Over the study period, a total of 539 breeding turkey flocks and 3,769 fattening turkey flocks from the EU and Norway were tested, according to EFSA.
Click here to receive World Poultry's Free Newsletter
European Food Safety Authority
Call for stricter EU salmonella targets
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has said that setting stricter targets for salmonella in laying hens...
On Feb 25, 2019 In Health
Interventions reducing the risk of poultry meat...
Poultry farmers have a huge role to play in reducing the levels of food contaminated with campylobacter and...
On May 29, 2019 In Health
Poultry and eggs remain the major source of food...
Poultry and eggs continue to cause substantial foodborne illnesses in the United States. Findings published by...
Probiotics as a potential control for avian intestinal...
Brachyspira is a bacterium that causes a disease known as avian intestinal spirochaetosis in poultry, primarily...
On Mar 8, 2019 In Health
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Lifestyle / Health and Beauty
Live well with good hydration
Hydration, hydration, hydration… Many believe it’s the number one rule of wellness.
On a very basic level, we need water to survive (our bodies are made up of 60% water, it’s in our cells, in our blood, in our brain and spinal fluids) – but it’s only once you get into the habit of making a conscious effort to stay well hydrated that you truly realise the difference it can make.
Scientifically, opinions can be mixed as to whether we really do “need” at least six to eight daily glasses of straight-up H2O (more if you’re exercising/in a hot place), the amount so often bandied by nutritionists and wellness and lifestyle gurus, to reap the benefits.
Back in 2011, for example, Glasgow GP Dr Margaret McCartney published an article in the BMJ on how stating there is not actually strong evidence that we really need to drink this much, while according to the Tea Advisory Panel, recent studies have suggested that drinking tea can tick those hydration boxes just as well (those dehydrating diuretic effects might not be such a concern after all). Foods contain water too, and then there are all the other liquids we consume.
So if you really just don’t like plain water, and rely more on other types of drinks, then no, chances are, you’re not going to perish as a result and your body will keep functioning – but millions of water-glugging-devotees will still think you’re missing a trick.
Sometimes it’s not about scientific evidence; it’s about how you feel. Getting our water quota means fewer headaches, a clearer and more alert mind, perkier energy levels, not to mention brighter, healthier-looking skin.
For beauty and wellbeing entrepreneur Liz Earle, drinking water is as essential a part of skincare as the products you put on. – and she should know, as co-founder of one of Britain’s biggest independent beauty brands.
“Don’t forget that skincare starts from within,” she reiterates.
“Drinking loads of water is absolutely key for great skin; everyone should aim to drink at least one-and-a-half to two litres a day.”
If her own radiant complexion is anything to go by – she’s a mother-of-five and in her 50s – it’s advice worth listening to. But For Earle, beauty and overall health and wellbeing have always been intrinsically linked, in that they’re things that exist together, and deserve to be nurtured and cared for together.
It’s a philosophy she extends to the environment too: “Communicating issues about wellbeing is something I do every day, and I believe that protecting the environment is fundamental to the wellbeing of all of us in the UK,” she says.
Unfortunately, staying topped up with H2O and being kind to the planet don’t always go hand in hand.
Despite the fact our tap water is safe to drink, according to new research on behalf of BRITA, UK adults will get through 7.7billion single-use plastic water bottles a year. And it’s not just when we’re out and about: nearly a third (30%) admit to using bottled water at home too, and 22% of four to 18-year-olds drink mainly bottled water.
According to a Mintel report, sales of
bottled water grew by 25% from 2010-2015. This might be a good sign that those
healthy hydration messages are trickling through, but it’s not great news for the environment – even if the bottles you choose are recyclable.
The BRITA figures reveal 32% of us don’t believe our bottled water habits contribute to pollution because we recycle. However, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), which BRITA has partnered with on a campaign, explains that it’s not always that simple.
“It takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water to manufacture a single one-litre disposable PET bottle, which amounts to the release of 100g of carbon dioxide (CO2), a major greenhouse gas. This means single-use plastic bottles significantly contribute to pollution, even if they are subsequently recycled,” says Dr Sue Kinsey, senior pollution policy officer at the Marine Conservation Society.
Plus, they aren’t all recycled. More than 5billion plastic bottles a year end up as litter or in landfill, notes Richard McIlwain, deputy chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, and some end up in our oceans, where they’re “a menace to wildlife, particularly as they start to break down”, says Kinsey.
“They add to the microplastic load of the oceans and can be eaten by animals at all stages of the food chain,” adds Kinsey.
With harnessing the power of nature at the heart of her brand ethos, and having grown up with a long-lasting love for and fascination with the sea(“My father was in the Navy, and I’d always lived near the sea”), Earle is passionate about encouraging everybody to do their bit to help protect our oceans, and promote our own healthy habits in the meantime.
Switching to tap water is also, of course, far cheaper, and if you don’t like the idea of drinking straight from the tap, BRITA products make it simple to filter water, whether to keep in a jug in the fridge, or take out and about in a reusable bottle.
“I’ve always used a BRITA water filter; I was probably an early adopter,” says Earle.
“But what is really shocking for me is the number of single-use plastic bottles that are being used in this country. It’s a major concern.”
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) recommends an intake of 2.5 litres of water for men and 2 litres of water for women per day, via food and drink consumption. Of this, they suggest that 70-80% of the daily water intake should come from drinks, and the remaining 20-30% should come from food.
The British Nutrition Foundation gives guidelines for the types of fluid to drink, and water is the only fluid which they recommend drinking “plenty” of as it contains no sugar, calories or additives.
According to the National Hydration Council website – DEFRA’s Sustainability Road Map for Soft Drinks has shown that bottled water is the lowest impact packaged drink in the soft drinks sector. All packaging used by the bottled water industry is 100% recyclable and packaging weights have been reduced dramatically in recent years.
Water UK represents all major statutory water and wastewater service providers. It states that tap water can come from a wide range of sources and is chemically treated. It needs to contain chlorine, so it can travel safely from the water treatment works to the tap. Pharmaceutical residues may be found in very low quantities in water used as sources for drinking water mainly after being excreted by patients taking prescribed and non-prescribed medicines.
Everyone agrees water is essential for health and forms the basis of all reactions in the body. Everyone agrees we should recycle and reduce waste to preserve the environment. If individual people acted more responsibly and recycled, we would not have the levels of pollution and waste in the world today.
Deeside Mineral Water is one of the purest waters in the world, flowing naturally from an ancient spring in the Cairngorms National Park, a protected area of outstanding natural beauty. Only Deeside Mineral Water has been clinically proven to protect and nourish living cells in many human and laboratory studies. It is a living water with active properties that enhance vitality and well-being.
Deeside Water has been clinically proven to act like an anti-oxidant and has anti-inflammatory qualities, reducing inflammation in the joints. It has been proven to increase skin hydration by 23% and reduce wrinkles by 17% after a clinical trial with participants drinking only 1 litre per day for 12 weeks. Deeside Water is unique in world terms and is actively good for health at cell level unlike many waters.
We all have a choice about what we consume, with many possibilities along the purity scale.
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Car & Tracks
The Tracks
RaceGrid VR SimulatorsVirtual Racing Centre
AZURE COAST
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Azure Circuit Monaco is a street racing circuit in south of France
AZURE CIRCUIT
FERRARI IMOLA
Oulton Park Circuit is a motor racingtrack close to the village of Little Budworth, Cheshire, England
Aston Martin Vantage GTE 2015
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In 2012, Aston Martin unveiled a racing version of the V12 Vantage ….
ASTON MARTIN DBR1/300 1959
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Adjusting Status While In The United States
Tyler Louth
Maggie McDermott
Francesca Ramos
Things to know when seeking asylum in the US
Asylum/Refugee Status
– Things to know when seeking asylum in the US
On behalf of Ramos Immigration Law | May 18, 2018 | Asylum/Refugee Status
There was a man who told Customs and Border Protection officers that he’d rather spend his life in a United States prison than return to his country of origin because it was so dangerous to live amid the violence there. You may be able to relate to that man’s story because you too have come to Colorado seeking asylum in the United States. Leaving the community you have always known and coming to a place you may have never even visited can be stressful and scary.
Immigration officials have strict requirements for granting asylum. As with most immigration processes, there are eligibility factors to consider. There are also application forms to fill out and other legal steps you must take before you can work toward a new and happy future in America.
Others have recently requested asylum
You may have already heard about the large group of people who recently arrived at the U.S. side of the San Ysidro port at the Mexican border. The group designated a man who traveled with the group as their leader. He communicated with officials to try to get as many immigrants across the border and in line for asylum as possible.
The following list includes tips he gave to other immigrants that may be helpful in your situation:
It’s important to follow all instructions that immigration officials give you.
When waiting in line at the border or even for another type of process, never obstruct the path of those who have permission to move forward in the line ahead of you, such as people at the border who may have valid passports.
Be prepared to state your reasons for seeking asylum.
Also, be prepared to substantiate your claims. If you are afraid to return to your country of origin for a specific reason, you must be able to show evidence that supports your story.
Officials may place you in an immigration detention facility after asking for asylum. Officials often send asylum seekers to such locations while they await their interviews.
One of the women with the hundreds of people who planned to seek asylum at the San Ysidro border was a young mother who had her 2-year old child in tow. She said her husband had already crossed the border with their older child, and she hoped to reunite with her family. If immigrant officials detain you or your family member, you may want to tap into available resources to try to rectify the situation.
Asylum is available to those in need of protection from abject poverty, violence or persecution in their homelands. U.S. immigration law is complex and the government processes every case according to its own merits. If you understand your rights and know where to seek support, you stand a good chance of achieving your immigration goals.
As a victim of violence, can you self-petition for a green card?
Interview update for Adjustment of Status Applications
Important points to know about the citizenship test
Who qualifies for Temporary Protected Status?
Will you get deported if you’re charged with a DUI?
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Contact An Experienced Immigration Attorney Today
© 2021 Ramos Immigration Law. All Rights Reserved.
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IISRP: Rubber demand growing despite global market woes
HOUSTON—The global market for synthetic rubber is set to grow, helped by increasing demand in emerging markets, according to the International Institute of Synthetic Rubber Producers.
The growth is coming in spite of oil price volatility, environmental concerns, regulatory changes and trade actions, IISRP said in the 2018 edition of its Worldwide Rubber Statistics report. Rising prosperity from emerging countries should drive demand from the automotive, construction and manufacturing industries, an impact that will offset the negative effects the industry should experience.
The automotive industry, which represents about 75 percent of total rubber production services demand, remains one of the fastest growing industries in the world, according to Juan Ramon Salinas, the institute's MD and CEO noted in the WRS executive summary. Salinas also noted the auto industry's trend toward "eco-friendly rubbers" which are used to meet demand for fuel efficiency, light weighting and environmentally friendly components.
Regionally, IISRP identified a slowdown in growth of production capacity in China that is mainly "due to the over-investment during the last decade." Despite the issues facing China, Salinas said, 2018 global production capacity figures show "a positive balance in terms of production capacity."
The overall balance, he said, reflected annual capacity increases totaling around 200,000 metric tons elsewhere in Asia Pacific, expansions in Russia, production capacity rationalization in Africa and idle facilities still in place in China.
The report also includes an update on the short-term outlook for new projects and expansions. It expects to see "moderate growth" between 2019 and 2021 compared to previous estimations.
About 80 percent of forecast new production capacity and expansions will be for styrene-butadiene-based products, Salinas said, adding that "delays or cancellations are expected based on market performance."
The 2018 edition of the WRS includes revisions to elastomer plant capacities, and IISRP's China office has played a part in enhancing the intelligence on the Chinese market, according to an IISRP release.
The 85-page book, which has been published annually for more than 30 years, provides an analysis of capacity by elastomer type, geographical distribution and corporate ownership. Detailed marketed statistics, capacities of synthetic rubber production facilities worldwide and a section on planned and announced expansions are included in the report.
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200 EAST 38TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY, NY 10016
ARTS AND CULTURE EVENTS IN NORTH AMERICA
FERARU CONFERENCES
140 RO-U.S.
RCI USA
Star Singer Ruxandra Donose’s Gift to Her North-American Fans
Celebrated Romanian mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose, who has graced, with her mesmerizing presence and immense musical talent, the biggest lyrical stages of the world, has prepared a beautiful gift to all her American admirers. Part of her Enescu Soirees Online apparition, the acclaimed singer presents an entirely acapela program of Romanian music, a rare experience that, in her own words, exposes her as "…fragile, with just my voice and my soul for you." (Photo © Nicolae Alexa)
Tiberiu Brediceanu - Cine m-aude cântând (Whoever Hears Me Singing) and Bade, pentru ochii tăi (Darling, for Your Eyes)
Nicolae Bretan - Rea de plată (A Reluctant Debt Payer), Pe aceeași ulicioară (On the Same Lane), Și dacă ramuri bat în geam (And If...), and O, vin pe mare (Come Down to the Sea).
Born in Bucharest in a family of musicians, mezzo-soprano RUXANDRA DONOSE appeared on the concert stage as early as her childhood, but first as a pianist. A graduate of the Music University of Bucharest (the class of Georgeta Stoleriu), she further studied in Vienna with Carol Blaickner-Mayo. She has been awarded a great number of national and international prizes like, among others, laureate of the International Competition of Munich (1990) and of University of Maryland (1991). Soloist of the Opera Houses of Constanța (1989-1991), Basel (1991-1992) and Vienna (1992-1998), Ruxandra Donose has then started a very successful free lancing career on the most important opera stages as well as a very rich concert activity throughout the world, acquiring an impressive artistic record. Among the most renowned singers of her generation, she has captured critical and popular acclaim in leading opera houses and concert halls around the world. Particularly associated with the Mozart and French lyric repertoire, she has transitioned in recent years to the German dramatic repertoire, enjoying huge successes as Kundry in Parsifal, with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Sieglinde in Die Walküre with Vladimir Jurowski and London Philharmonic Orchestra, Elektra in Manfred Trojan’s Orest at Opernhaus Zurich and Vienna State Opera and Fricka in both Rheingold and Die Walküre at Grand Theatre de Geneve. Recent highlights of her career include Kundry in Parsifal in Baden-Baden; Norma at Opéra de Rouen; Jocasta in Enescu’s Oedipe at the Enescu Festival in Bucharest and the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski; Damnation de Faust in Shanghai and Beijing; Orest in Zurich and Vienna; Eboli in Don Carlo at Grange Park; Eduige in Rodelinda and Octavian in Rosenkavalier at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow; Arsace in Semiramide in Lyon and Paris; Komponist and Donna Elvira at Royal Opera House and Deutsche Oper Berlin; Carmen in the title role in the UK premiere of Calixto Bieito’s production at ENO and Cincinnati; the title role of La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein in Geneva, and Dorabella in Così fan Tutte for Los Angeles Opera and Spoleto.
THE ENESCU SOIREES ONLINE. Second Season
Diversity and Contrast at the Enescu Soirees
Pianist and Composer Paul Cartianu at the Enescu Soirees
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Romanian Cultural Institute in New York
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CONNECT WITH OTHER ROMANIAN INSTITUTIONS
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©2019 BY THE ROMANIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE
ROMANIAN CENTENNIAL
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Big Apple to host Formula E’s grand season finale
16/07/18 / Formula E / Warm-Up
Often labeled the “birthplace of cool”, it seems logical that Formula E is celebrating its 2017/2018 grand finale in Brooklyn, New York City, this weekend (July 14/15). Last season, di Grassi also started his comeback drive towards the title win in the Big Apple – a Herculean feat that he’s poised to repeat this year.
di Grassi and Abt: Victory within reach
Most recently, team Audi Sport ABT Schaeffler has delivered strong performances. In the past six rounds, at least one of the two drivers have gained a podium position – a run of success that culminated in first and second position during Schaeffler’s home round in Berlin. With the maximum of 94 points yet to be awarded, the duo has a realistic chance of making up its deficit of 33 points in the teams’ classification on the 2.373-kilometer Brooklyn Circuit. Just like the season’s kick-off round in Hong Kong, the event will involve two separate E-Prix races on Saturday and Sunday.
New York: A pioneer in future mobility
Interestingly, Formula E was the first single-seater series to bring motorsport to the 8.5 million people metropolis. It therefore doesn’t come as a surprise that e-mobility finds itself on fertile soil here. The East Coast hub offers a state-of-the-art mobility mix – with means of transportation ranging from buses, subways and the classic yellow cabs to digital ride-hailing services such as Uber. Even more importantly, mayor Bill de Blasio has shown to be a strong advocate of electric driving – supporting concepts that would make huge changes to the city’s infrastructure. The goal: One in five newly registered passenger cars will be electric by 2025.
Technology “made by Schaeffler”
Schaeffler has been engaged in Formula E for years, highlighting its position as a pioneer in e-mobility. Learn more about what drives us, our Formula E activities and the innovative technologies “made by Schaeffler” here.
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Featured, Local, Movie Reviews
Movie Review: ‘Liberal Arts’ Starring Josh Radnor, Elizabeth Olson, Richard Jenkins
Posted: September 28, 2012 at 1:11 pm / by Blake Fehl / comments (0)
tags: Allison Janney, Elizabeth Olson, Happythankyoumoreplease, Josh Radnor, liberal arts, Richard Jenkins
Who doesn’t yearn for the days of less responsibility and the possibility of a bright future. Age has the maddening ability to increase frustrations as time seems to be winding down. Jesse Fisher (Josh Radnor) knows these things very well, which is why he jumps at the chance to visit his alma mater, when his (2nd) favorite professor announces his retirement. Jesse’s future has been watered down by his career as an admissions counselor for a college in New York City. His reaction to being back at school is immediate and profound. Aiding him in his search into his past is college sophomore Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), who begins to coax him out of his introverted shell. What Jesse finds is that living life in the past might not be the best path forward.
Radnor’s second feature shares a lot of features with his first film, Happythankyoumoreplease. Once again Radnor writes, directs, and stars in the film. Just like his first film, it is bolstered by an impressive cast, this time that includes Richard Jenkins, Allison Janney, and Elizabeth Olson. It shares the same light airy tone that Radnor seems to be fond of, one that allows him to exhibit the charm that has made him popular on the CBS sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. This time around Radnor looks to be showing signs of improvement as a director. The film is tighter than his previous effort, and the story doesn’t seem so forced. He still has moments where his dialogue comes off as pretentious, and many might think that he is trying too hard to assert himself as an original and idealistic writer.
What impresses about Liberal Arts is the relationships created in the film, and the variety of the characters presented in the small cast. Radnor and Olson have an effortless chemistry that makes you root for them despite their age difference. It makes Jesse’s struggle that much more palpable in the end when you see the ease in which the characters connect. The real situations that occur, the mistakes that people make, make the film an enjoyable experience.
Radnor has qualities that make him easily relatable, and it’s these qualities that stand out across his film. Sometimes though there is a slight feeling the substance of the film isn’t as deep as it hopes to portray. The film tries so hard to have some deep meaning, that when it finally hits you across the head with it, it feels somewhat forced. This is a shame, because the struggle of realizing life isn’t heading quite the way you hoped is something everyone deals with, and Radnor could have created a moment that was profound without spelling it out.
There is no doubt that it will be hard for anyone to go into a film like Liberal Arts and not be entertained in some way. It’s filled with a lot of heart, some great characters, it just doesn’t have enough meat on its bones to really fill itself out as a great coming of age story. If you like Radnor in his other projects, you’ll most likely find a lot to like here.
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RHS People Awards
Royal Charter & bye-laws
RHS Council
The Council comprises the President, Treasurer, 15 members (all of whom are elected by the RHS membership) and up to two co-opted members (appointed by Council).
All Council members are Trustees of the RHS and the Society’s Charter provides for the President and Treasurer to serve as officers of the Society. Both of these office holders are elected annually by the membership at the Annual General Meeting and serve on the Council of the RHS as Trustees. The President also acts as the Chairman of Council.
President & Treasurer
President: Keith Weed
(Elected as President at the AGM in 2020)
As RHS President, Keith plays an active role in the governance of the RHS and is the Chairman of the Horticulture Board. He is also an ex-officio member of the Audit and Risk Committee, Council KIPs Group, Commercial Board, Investments Committee, Nominations, Appointments and Governance Committee and the People and Remuneration Committee.
Keith has gained broad experience in leading businesses in the public and charitable sectors as Chair, CEO and Director. He has experience in the key areas of developing and implementing strategy, supporting and guiding the CEO, fundraising and business delivery to fund charitable initiatives.
Keith is a regular visitor to the RHS Gardens and Shows and has a particular interest in the outreach of the Society to communities, its education programme and the positive impact gardening has on people’s physical and mental health.
Treasurer: Matthew Lindsey-Clark
(Elected to Council in 2016; elected as Treasurer at the AGM in 2019)
Matthew is Chairman of the Commercial Board, Investments Committee and the People and Remuneration Committee. He is an ex-officio member of the Audit and Risk Committee, Council KIPs Group, Council Technology Group, Horticulture Board, and the Nominations, Appointments and Governance Committee.
He is a Senior Managing Director in Evercore’s European Financial Institutions Group based in London. He has more than 30 years’ investment banking experience, specialising in advising financial services companies. He is also the Chief Operating Officer of Evercore’s European Advisory business.
Matthew takes great pleasure in gardens and gardening and has been a member of the RHS for many years.
Ordinary Members of Council
James Alexander-Sinclair
(Elected to Council in 2011. Re-elected in 2016; to retire at the AGM in 2021)
James is a member of the Horticulture Board. He is also Chairman of the Gardens Committee and the RHS/Three Counties Agricultural Society Joint Committee. He is an RHS Judge and sits on the Shows Advisory Group.
He is a garden designer working all over the country and writes for several magazines, newspapers and websites. He lectures at garden shows and clubs and is occasionally let loose on television. James has recently taken on a new garden in Oxfordshire.
Professor Mick Crawley FRS
Mick is a member of the RHS Science Committee and Vice Chairman of the Woody Plant Committee. He is Professor of Plant Ecology at Imperial College London and a member of the RHS since 1979. He is Chair of the Science Committee of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, Royal Society representative on the Advisory Committee of Chelsea Physic Garden, and has twice been a Trustee of Kew Gardens.
Mick’s horticultural specialities are trees and daffodils, and his research interests lie in the ecology of gardens – in the competitive relationships between crops and weeds, in the symbiotic effects of pollinators and mycorrhizal fungi, and the relations between plants and their pests and diseases.
Nick Dunn
(Elected to Council in 2019; to retire at the AGM in 2024)
Nick is a member of the Horticulture Board, the Gardens Committee and the Fruit, Vegetable and Herb Committee. He was Chairman of the Fruit, Vegetable and Herb Committee from 2014 to 2018. He has also been an RHS Judge and contributed to RHS Fruit Trials. In 2018, he was presented the Society’s highest award, the Victoria Medal of Honour.
Nick is a passionate fruit and ornamental tree nurseryman and runs a successful family horticultural business. His research in hardy nursery stock propagation for more than 40 years offers a valuable practical experience to the RHS Council.
Sarah Eberle
Sarah is a member of the Horticulture Board, the Nominations, Appointments and Governance Committee and the Gardens Committee. She has actively worked in the industry for 38 years on top of 5 years of full-time training. As a Garden Designer, Sarah has practical experience of projects both large and small and has a keen interest in plant health, engagement with young people and RHS Shows.
Dennis Espley
Dennis is a member of the Commercial Board, Horticulture Board, Investments Committee, Nominations, Appointments and Governance Committee and the People and Remuneration Committee.
A past student at Pershore College, Dennis worked in horticulture for 40 years, 30 of which were with Squire’s Garden Centres, where he became Managing Director. He is now non-executive chairman of the Horticulture Buying Group.
Dennis was Chairman of the UK Garden Centre Association in 2011, is Vice Chairman of Greenfingers, and is a member of The Worshipful Company of Gardeners.
Kate Lampard
(Elected to Council in 2018 having been co-opted from 2017–2018; to retire at the AGM in 2023)
Kate Lampard is a member of the Audit and Risk Committee and the People and Remuneration Committee. She is also Chair of the Responsible Gambling Trust, a Trustee of the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and an established Verita associate.
She has served on the Nominations, Appointments and Governance Committee and was also Director of RHS Enterprises from 2008 to 2011.
Kate is experienced in a wide range of sectors having been Chair of Kent and Medway and Southeast Strategic Health Authorities, Vice-Chair of the Financial Ombudsman Service, Chair of the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody, and a non-executive of the Royal Horticultural Society.
Her high-profile projects include leading the NHS investigations into Jimmy Savile by quality-assuring 34 independent investigations and producing an oversight report for the Secretary of State for Health. Serco published the report she produced alongside Verita’s managing partner following their review of the culture and treatment of detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre.
Kate’s work with Verita covers governance, organisational and system management, board and director development, investigations into organisational culture and management and service delivery.
Neil Lucas MI Hort
Neil is a member of the Horticulture Board and sits on the Shows Advisory Group and the Judging Review Group. He is also an RHS Judge.
He is a leading ornamental grass specialist, the owner of Dorset-based Knoll Gardens, an author and holder of 10 consecutive RHS Gold medals at RHS Chelsea Flower Show. He is founder and trustee of the Knoll Gardens Foundation, a charity which aims to promote garden practices to create sustainable, wildlife-friendly and aesthetically pleasing gardens.
Known for his work with grasses, Neil published his first book in 2011, Designing with Grasses. He does, however, retain a deep interest in trees and shrubs, which is one of the reasons why he bought Knoll Gardens.
Lorna Parker
(Elected to Council in 2014. Re-elected in 2019; to retire at AGM in 2024)
Lorna is Chairman of the Nominations, Appointments and Governance Committee and a member of the Commercial Board, Council KIPs Group, Investments Committee and the People and Remuneration Committee.
An RHS member since her mid-20s, Lorna has been a keen amateur hands-on gardener since this time and has developed and maintained a small central London garden and a larger garden in southwest France.
Lorna’s career has been largely spent in top-level executive search with Spencer Stuart, advising the boards of companies, small and large, private and public, on organisation structure, succession, recruitment and governance. Since retiring from full-time work, she has gained experience as a non-executive director (of Indivior plc), Trustee, School Governor, FTSE 100 board Effectiveness Consultant and an active fundraiser. She is based at CVC Capital Partners, a leading private equity firm, where she is a Senior Advisor.
Mark Porter
Mark is Chairman of the Audit and Risk Committee and the Council Technology Group and is a member of the Commercial Board and Council KIPs Group. He is also one of the nominated Council members advising Community Outreach and Online. Following a long and successful career in IT, he acts as an external advisor to the RHS on IT projects.
Mark is the Hampshire County Organiser for the National Garden Scheme. He has opened his own garden and vineyard under the scheme for the past 8 years. He is Chairman of the Itchen Valley Garden Society, Hampshire and gives lectures on designing winter gardens, establishing vineyards and winemaking.
Mark has been a member of the RHS for many years. He developed a passion for gardening since he grew vegetables on his first allotment in the 1970s.
Dr David Rae OBE FRSE
David is Chairman of the Science Committee, the Awards Committee and the Bursaries Committee, and a member of the Horticulture Board and the Science Committee. He is the Director of the Stanley Smith (UK) Horticultural Trust and Chairman of the Sibbald Trust. He sits on the Boards of National Tropical Botanical Garden, Hawaii, St Andrews Botanic Garden and Mount Stuart Trust, Isle of Bute. He also sits on advisory committees for the University of Dundee Botanic Garden, Little Sparta Trust and Borde Hill.
He graduated with a BSc in Horticulture from the University of Bath in 1978 and joined the staff of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as a lecturer, becoming Director of Horticulture and Learning 2000–2014.
David is a frequent conference speaker. He has undertaken fieldwork or projects in more than 20 countries and has published more than 50 papers. In 2008, he was awarded the Scottish Horticultural Medal and in 2014 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and awarded an OBE.
Dr Sarah Raven
Sarah has a degree in History and trained as a doctor at the University of London. She has written numerous books including The Cutting Garden, The Bold and the Brilliant Garden, The Great Vegetable Plot and Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook, which was named Cookery Book of the Year by the Guild of Food Writers in 2008.
In 2011, she published a book on Wild Flowers, which led to a BBC2 television series that she presented called Bees, Butterflies and Blooms, focusing on the national decline in pollinating insects and championing nectar-rich flowers as a way of saving them.
Sarah runs a cookery and gardening school at Perch Hill as well as a successful mail-order business in seeds and plants.
Lady (Xa) Tollemache
Xa is a member of the Horticulture Board. She is an RHS Judge and Garden Advisor for RHS Garden Hyde Hall.
Xa set up her own garden design business in 1996 and won an RHS Gold Medal at RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 1997 for the Evening Standard garden and Silver Gilt medals in 2001 and 2003.
She lectures on garden design at institutes around the world where she can share her passion with the next generation of gardeners and horticulturists.
Janet Walker
Janet has been a member of the Audit and Risk Committee since 2018. She has held a number of non-executive and executive roles in organisations with very different cultures and objectives and has a thorough knowledge of financial and corporate governance issues, both in respect of commercial companies and charities.
Janet has fulfilled the position of Bursar at Eton College for the last 9 years, having previously worked at Ascot Racecourse. She is a keen gardener and her garden at Eton is open annually on one of the National Garden Scheme days.
Jon Wheatley
Jon is a member of the Awards Committee, Education Committee, Horticultural Board, Tender Ornamental Plant Committee, Houseplants and Cut Flowers Advisory Group and RHS/Three Counties Agricultural Society Joint Committee.
He is committed to promoting gardening and UK horticulture in all its aspects and values. As Chairman of RHS South West in Bloom, he leads a valued and expansive Community Horticultural initiative aimed at improving the Environment and Volunteering with more than 600 groups in the South West.
Judging and showing are high on Jon’s list of interests and he has been involved in designing and building many successful exhibits at RHS Chelsea Flower Show and RHS Shows over the years.
Jon’s career started in commercial horticulture and, after training at RHS Garden Wisley, focused on urban parks, landscape design and management. He now runs a nursery and landscape management company. Jon feels that horticulture really matters and is committed to RHS values and the involvement of the widest community, particularly children and young people in the industry.
Ruth Willmott
Ruth has been a member of the Audit and Risk Committee, Commercial Board, the Council Technology Group and the Nominations, Appointments and Governance Committee. She studied Business Studies in Nottingham and a Masters in Management at Cambridge University before spending more than a decade in management consultancy. During this time, she gained valuable skills relevant across a wide range of disciplines as well as serving as a non-exec director for a small charity.
In 2008, after careful consideration, Ruth left consulting and followed her passion for gardening and design to train with the English Gardening School. She set up her garden design business in 2010 and has exhibited four gardens at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, winning an RHS Gold medal and has twice won the People’s Choice Award for Best Fresh Garden.
Ruth’s design portfolio covers residential, commercial and community spaces with extensive experience in managing small to very large-scale projects. In 2018, HRH The Duchess of Cambridge visited community projects Ruth and her practice colleagues designed for Westminster City Council and Sayers Croft Forest School. These were ‘nature’ spaces created for inner-city school children and they have informed The Duchess of Cambridge’s work on nature and the Early Years Agenda.
Charter and Bye-laws
Boards, Committees and Advisory Groups
RHS Membership
I enjoy a refreshing walk… my membership gives me free family days out as often as I like.
Mrs Giddings, RHS member
Plant trials & awards
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'); function happy(x, y){ var latlong = x +','+ y; //alert(latlong); jQuery.ajax({ type: "POST", url: '/ajax/setLocationCookie.cfm', data: 'lat='+x+'&long='+y+'&isGeoCode=true', cache: false, success : function(data){ }, error: function(xhr, status, error) { // handle error } }); } // GEO_LOCATION.getLocation(happy, 20000); })
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River Bend Alumni
607 N Sparta St STEELEVILLE, IL 62288
Tax History: $4455 - 2017
Estimated Payment: $782 Per Month*
Based on a 30-year fixed rate of 5.88% with 20% down. [ Change ]
Remember Listing
$165,000 , Located in , STEELEVILLE. ZIP Code: 62288
****HUGE PRICE REDUCTION**** POSSIBILITIES GALORE in this well built brick office building with full basement. Ceramic tile flooring throughout the main level with several rooms that can be used for different options; medical, exam, offices, retail, or more. In addition, the building offers a waiting room, reception area, kitchenette, 3 bathrooms, laundry room, dark room, physical therapy area, and lots of storage. More potential downstairs with 9 foot ceilings, 2 egress windows, zoned heating and air, 2-200 amp breaker boxes, and a full bath with shower. It is also plumbed for kitchens and more baths, so there could easily be 2 apartments. The income producing possibilities are here, upstairs or down. Schedule your tour quickly, and start making money asap.
Near By Listings
601 N Sparta St STEELEVILLE, IL 0.01 miles
0 Westwood Dr STEELEVILLE, IL 0.79 miles
869 State Route 4 WILLISVILLE, IL 4.53 miles
7007 State Rte 4 SPARTA, IL 4.58 miles
Master bedroom is N/A
Bedroom #2 is N/A
Living room is N/A
Familiy room is N/A
Kitchen is N/A
Dining room is N/A
Laundry room is N/A
Updated: 12 hours and 30 mins ago
Days on site: 45 days
Sharon Blackwell
* The Estimated Payment is offered as a tool for your convenience and is not an offer of credit. Actual mortgage rates and fees vary depending on your lender. Please check with your local lender for accurate mortgage rate information.
Note: Broker may not have reviewed or approved listing. All information that is provided by the listing agent/broker is deemed reliable but it is not guaranteed and should always be independently verified.
Copyright © 2021 , Mid America Regional Information Systems, Inc.(MARIS). All rights reserved. the publisher of this website does not display the entire IDX database of Mid America Regional Information Systems, Inc. (MARIS MLS) on this web site. Property listings of some REALTOR® brokerage firms have been excluded. Listings displaying the MARIS logo are courtesy of the participants of Mid America Regional Information Systems Internet Data Exchange. Information provided deemed to be reliable but is not guaranteed to be accurate. Buyers are advised to verify all facts before making a decision on purchasing a property. No warranties, expressed or implied, are provided for the data herein, or for their use or interpretation by the user. Mid America Regional information Systems, Inc. (MARIS) will not be held responsibility for the content of such records.
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$9,290,000 $9,300,000 $9,310,000 $9,320,000 $9,330,000 $9,340,000 $9,350,000 $9,360,000 $9,370,000 $9,380,000 $9,390,000 $9,400,000 $9,410,000 $9,420,000 $9,430,000 $9,440,000 $9,450,000 $9,460,000 $9,470,000 $9,480,000 $9,490,000 $9,500,000 $9,510,000 $9,520,000 $9,530,000 $9,540,000 $9,550,000 $9,560,000 $9,570,000 $9,580,000 $9,590,000 $9,600,000 $9,610,000 $9,620,000 $9,630,000 $9,640,000 $9,650,000 $9,660,000 $9,670,000 $9,680,000 $9,690,000 $9,700,000 $9,710,000 $9,720,000 $9,730,000 $9,740,000 $9,750,000 $9,760,000 $9,770,000 $9,780,000 $9,790,000 $9,800,000 $9,810,000 $9,820,000 $9,830,000 $9,840,000 $9,850,000 $9,860,000 $9,870,000 $9,880,000 $9,890,000 $9,900,000 $9,910,000 $9,920,000 $9,930,000 $9,940,000 $9,950,000 $9,960,000 $9,970,000 $9,980,000 $9,990,000 $10,000,000 to any $10,000 $20,000 $30,000 $40,000 $50,000 $60,000 $70,000 $80,000 $90,000 $100,000 $110,000 $120,000 $130,000 $140,000 $150,000 $160,000 $170,000 $180,000 $190,000 $200,000 $210,000 $220,000 $230,000 $240,000 $250,000 $260,000 $270,000 $280,000 $290,000 $300,000 $310,000 $320,000 $330,000 $340,000 $350,000 $360,000 $370,000 $380,000 $390,000 $400,000 $410,000 $420,000 $430,000 $440,000 $450,000 $460,000 $470,000 $480,000 $490,000 $500,000 $510,000 $520,000 $530,000 $540,000 $550,000 $560,000 $570,000 $580,000 $590,000 $600,000 $610,000 $620,000 $630,000 $640,000 $650,000 $660,000 $670,000 $680,000 $690,000 $700,000 $710,000 $720,000 $730,000 $740,000 $750,000 $760,000 $770,000 $780,000 $790,000 $800,000 $810,000 $820,000 $830,000 $840,000 $850,000 $860,000 $870,000 $880,000 $890,000 $900,000 $910,000 $920,000 $930,000 $940,000 $950,000 $960,000 $970,000 $980,000 $990,000 $1,000,000 $1,010,000 $1,020,000 $1,030,000 $1,040,000 $1,050,000 $1,060,000 $1,070,000 $1,080,000 $1,090,000 $1,100,000 $1,110,000 $1,120,000 $1,130,000 $1,140,000 $1,150,000 $1,160,000 $1,170,000 $1,180,000 $1,190,000 $1,200,000 $1,210,000 $1,220,000 $1,230,000 $1,240,000 $1,250,000 $1,260,000 $1,270,000 $1,280,000 $1,290,000 $1,300,000 $1,310,000 $1,320,000 $1,330,000 $1,340,000 $1,350,000 $1,360,000 $1,370,000 $1,380,000 $1,390,000 $1,400,000 $1,410,000 $1,420,000 $1,430,000 $1,440,000 $1,450,000 $1,460,000 $1,470,000 $1,480,000 $1,490,000 $1,500,000 $1,510,000 $1,520,000 $1,530,000 $1,540,000 $1,550,000 $1,560,000 $1,570,000 $1,580,000 $1,590,000 $1,600,000 $1,610,000 $1,620,000 $1,630,000 $1,640,000 $1,650,000 $1,660,000 $1,670,000 $1,680,000 $1,690,000 $1,700,000 $1,710,000 $1,720,000 $1,730,000 $1,740,000 $1,750,000 $1,760,000 $1,770,000 $1,780,000 $1,790,000 $1,800,000 $1,810,000 $1,820,000 $1,830,000 $1,840,000 $1,850,000 $1,860,000 $1,870,000 $1,880,000 $1,890,000 $1,900,000 $1,910,000 $1,920,000 $1,930,000 $1,940,000 $1,950,000 $1,960,000 $1,970,000 $1,980,000 $1,990,000 $2,000,000 $2,010,000 $2,020,000 $2,030,000 $2,040,000 $2,050,000 $2,060,000 $2,070,000 $2,080,000 $2,090,000 $2,100,000 $2,110,000 $2,120,000 $2,130,000 $2,140,000 $2,150,000 $2,160,000 $2,170,000 $2,180,000 $2,190,000 $2,200,000 $2,210,000 $2,220,000 $2,230,000 $2,240,000 $2,250,000 $2,260,000 $2,270,000 $2,280,000 $2,290,000 $2,300,000 $2,310,000 $2,320,000 $2,330,000 $2,340,000 $2,350,000 $2,360,000 $2,370,000 $2,380,000 $2,390,000 $2,400,000 $2,410,000 $2,420,000 $2,430,000 $2,440,000 $2,450,000 $2,460,000 $2,470,000 $2,480,000 $2,490,000 $2,500,000 $2,510,000 $2,520,000 $2,530,000 $2,540,000 $2,550,000 $2,560,000 $2,570,000 $2,580,000 $2,590,000 $2,600,000 $2,610,000 $2,620,000 $2,630,000 $2,640,000 $2,650,000 $2,660,000 $2,670,000 $2,680,000 $2,690,000 $2,700,000 $2,710,000 $2,720,000 $2,730,000 $2,740,000 $2,750,000 $2,760,000 $2,770,000 $2,780,000 $2,790,000 $2,800,000 $2,810,000 $2,820,000 $2,830,000 $2,840,000 $2,850,000 $2,860,000 $2,870,000 $2,880,000 $2,890,000 $2,900,000 $2,910,000 $2,920,000 $2,930,000 $2,940,000 $2,950,000 $2,960,000 $2,970,000 $2,980,000 $2,990,000 $3,000,000 $3,010,000 $3,020,000 $3,030,000 $3,040,000 $3,050,000 $3,060,000 $3,070,000 $3,080,000 $3,090,000 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Jon Patrick Brennan - Guitar, Bass, Voice & Piano
Jon Patrick Brennan has been active in the Southern New England music scene for two decades, as a performer, instructor, arranger, producer, engineer, studio player, and karaoke host. He graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Music and Theatre from Rhode Island College, and he has served as Resident Arranger / Composer at TRIAD-Normandy Sound in Warren since 2012. He has produced music of many different genres, including Rock, Hip-hop, Pop, Country, Dance, R&B, Celtic, Chiptune, and Orchestral, as well as composing original scores for cinematic projects. (Visit www.jpbarranger.com for more information and sample audio).
Jon provides keyboard and vocals for two local rock bands, the David Tessier All-Star Stars and Shryne, both of which have won awards from Motif Magazine. He regularly performs with other groups as well, such as the American Who tribute band and the Kari Tieger Ensemble. In addition to acting in about 70 theatrical productions, he has served as Musical Director for a dozen shows — most recently Jesus Christ Superstar at Mixed Magic Theatre — and has orchestrated for two world premiere musicals with the East Bay Players, both of which he directed. He also joined the ranks of King Richard’s Faire for three seasons as Village Music Director, wandering minstrel, and pit band musician.
Back to Our Teachers
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Stumbling toward the brink
Clinton's disintegrating foreign policy should be of much more concern to the White House -- and the country -- than Kenneth Starr's latest chess moves.
By Jonathan Broder
June 1, 1998 11:00PM (UTC)
In his 1982 memoir, "Years of Upheaval," former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger noted "how crucial a strong President is for the design and execution of a creative foreign policy." In deference to his boss, Richard Nixon, who spent considerable political capital to reopen relations with China, achieve ditente with the Soviet Union and craft interim accords in the Middle East, Kissinger humbly acknowledged, "My influence ... depended on presidential authority."
If only Madeleine Albright worked for a president willing to part with his political currency.
Over the past two weeks, President Clinton's reluctant and ineffectual stewardship of American foreign policy burst apart with all the force of a nuclear blast. As many as 11 blasts, actually. First India tested two atomic bombs in the Rajistan desert, catching Clinton and his intelligence services entirely by surprise. Despite Clinton's call for the new nationalist Hindu government in New Delhi to refrain from further tests, the Indians ignored his appeal and detonated three more devices. Thursday, Pakistan, India's regional rival, also dismissed Clinton's vehement appeals for restraint and tested possibly five of its own nuclear bombs, following this with yet another blast on Saturday. With the U.S. now punishing both countries with economic sanctions, American influence in the region has reached a historic low.
Could the United States have done anything to avert the dangerous new nuclear arms race on the subcontinent? Administration officials say no way. "It just goes to show that the United States, despite its might and influence, does not control everything that goes on in the world," shrugged White House spokesman Michael McCurry after the Pakistani tests. Other officials note that it was America's determination to prevent nuclear proliferation that brought on the new nuclear tests. Several years ago, the U.S officials showed their Indian counterparts American satellite photos of their preparations for a nuclear test, thus preventing the test from going forward. But the photos tipped off the Indians on how better to conceal their preparations this time.
Other analysts, however, say the problem goes far deeper than a high-tech game of hide-and-seek. When the new Indian government took power two months ago, it openly declared its intention to join the nuclear club. In response to American requests for clarification, India's new government then played down the remarks, saying they were meant for internal consumption only. The Clinton administration bought this explanation and relaxed its satellite surveillance. Critics charge it is that inattention, that willingness to trust but not verify, that lies at the heart of Clinton's foreign policy woes.
"You can't have an effective foreign policy by being a nice guy," says Edward Luttwak, a strategic consultant to several administrations and now a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies. "To have dealt with India effectively, Clinton would had to have sent some big-time, nasty secretary of state or defense secretary to New Delhi and covered them with all kinds of sinister threats. This person would have had to say, in effect, 'If you conduct these tests, we'll make life so miserable for you, your government will collapse.' In other words, you need a real son of a bitch out there and a president who is willing to back him up. And that's not Bill Clinton."
In the rough-and-tumble world of foreign affairs, Bill Clinton has tried to be a conciliator. In Africa earlier this year, he apologized to Rwandans for misguided U.S. policies that failed to prevent the genocide of 500,000 Tutsis. Clinton's nice-guy image was bolstered by the recent peace agreement in Northern Ireland, helped along by his special envoy, Sen. George Mitchell. Perhaps Clinton's most enduring image as a statesman is the picture of his encompassing embrace as the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993.
But Clinton's primary focus in foreign policy has been economic. If there has been one theme that he has stressed over and over, it is the importance of globalization and free trade and the use of those tools to grow the American economy. This is the side of foreign policy where Clinton really has been hands-on. And it is in this area of international trade -- as it relates to technology transfers to China -- where Clinton is now facing his worst foreign policy headache.
According to his Republican critics, Clinton permitted two U.S. aerospace companies to provide China with sensitive missile technology, which could then be diverted for military use, because the companies made generous contributions to the Democratic Party. The administration denies any political quid pro quo. Officials argue there wasn't sufficient evidence of diversion to hold up the transfer, which the administration defends as an example of its efforts on behalf of U.S. global competitiveness. The Republican-controlled Congress is now preparing to investigate the administration's China policy amid familiar cries of political pandering and partisanship.
But the real problem with Clinton's China policy goes far deeper than campaign finance chicanery. It's how this administration has consistently put global commerce ahead of global security. As Salon reported Friday, the Clinton administration did not press the issue when China, despite agreements with the United States, refused to allow inspections to ensure that U.S. exports of missile technology were not being used for military purposes. No inspections, no evidence of diversion.
The evidence of diversion, however, was
apparently clear to India. In a New York Times op-ed piece Friday, Indian journalist Prem Shankar Jha observed that what pushed New Delhi toward testing its nuclear weapons was intelligence information showing that after 1993, China began helping Pakistan develop long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear devices small enough to mount on a warhead. "But what tipped India over the brink," Jha wrote, "was the blind eye the United States turned to the danger that Pakistan posed to India. Intent on constructive engagement with China and Pakistan, the Americans have simply disregarded India's fears."
Clinton also appears to have disregarded Russian insecurities with his policy of expanding NATO eastward to include Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Veteran Russia hands like George Kennan, the architect of American's Cold War policy of containment of the Soviet Union, say Clinton's NATO policy simply makes no strategic sense. The Soviet Union has disappeared, Russia is now democratic, so, they ask, Where's the threat? The threat, these critics answer, now lies in Russia's reaction to the NATO expansion. Wary of Western intentions, the Russian parliament has yet to ratify the START II nuclear treaty. Meanwhile, Russian exports of nuclear and missile technology to Iran continue, despite U.S. protests.
If Clinton has mishandled his China and Russia policies, he also has left himself open to charges of a dangerous drift in his Middle East policy. From Israel to Iraq to the moderate Arab regimes, Clinton has frittered away the enormous influence and respect for the United States that his predecessor, George Bush, established by waging and winning the Gulf War.
To her credit, Albright tried to inject some life
-- and some backbone -- into the Arab-Israeli peace process by giving hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an ultimatum: Either agree to a further 13 percent withdrawal from the West Bank to restart negotiations with the Palestinians, or face a "re-examination" of U.S. policy toward the peace process. Netanyahu offered 9 percent and refused to go any further.
And what did Clinton do? Ever mindful of domestic criticism and the uninterrupted flow of Jewish contributions to the Democratic Party, he ordered Albright to retreat. Now U.S. officials are talking about giving Netanyahu more time, of creative ways to make the 13 percent demand more palatable. In short, Netanyahu has the Clinton administration exactly where he wants it -- slogging through percentages and thickets of technical detail instead of aggressively brokering a peace settlement. For extra measure, Netanyahu has enlisted House Speaker Newt Gingrich to hammer Albright as "an agent for the Palestinians." Her spokesman, Jamie Rubin, says Gingrich is undermining American interests, but the fact is Clinton is doing pretty well on that score all by himself.
The proof lies throughout the Middle East, where the coalition of moderate Arab states that Bush put together against Iraq has quietly disintegrated. For months, Arab leaders complained that Clinton's reluctance to confront Netanyahu was eroding his credibility in the region -- and exposing the leaders themselves to the harsh judgments of the Arab street. The coalition's real test came earlier this year when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein defied the United Nations over weapons inspections. Rattling his sabre, Clinton found himself virtually alone; no one, save Britain, was willing to take military action to enforce the inspections. When U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan fashioned a compromise, Clinton grabbed it, which allowed him to climb back from the exposed limb where he had placed himself.
"In foreign affairs, it is important to be respected and feared, and that usually means the certainty that if you're pushed, you will use some kind of military force," says Peter Rodman, a former member of the National Security Council during the Reagan and Bush administration. "I don't think Saddam Hussein fears Bill Clinton."
As Clinton struggles with already existing foreign policy dilemmas, new problems are looming. Tensions between Serbians and ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslavian city of Kosovo threaten to ignite a wider conflict that could spread throughout the Balkans and draw in Greece and Turkey, both members of NATO. In Indonesia, economic problems continue to fester, threatening the stability of East Asia.
President Clinton, of course, cannot be expected to resolve all of the world's problems, but he can be expected not to make them worse. While campaigning for his first term, he made it clear that domestic policy, not foreign affairs, would be his most serious concern. This strategy produced results at home, where the American people are enjoying a long spell of peace and prosperity. But overseas there are gathering storm clouds that could shatter our tranquility if the U.S. government does not become a more effective player in the global arena. While Washington's political caste has become increasingly absorbed in its own intrigues and melodramas, the world has become a more dangerous place.
Jonathan Broder
Jonathan Broder is Salon's Washington correspondent.
MORE FROM Jonathan Broder
Bill Clinton India Middle East Pakistan Russia
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GOP's Jeff Flake on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh: "I don’t know if I believed him either"
"Is that not enough reason to take a break and say, 'Maybe we need to get a different candidate?'” Flake was asked
By Travis Gettys
U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (Getty/Alex Wong)
This article originally appeared on Raw Story
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) visited “The View,” where he faced some tough questions about his vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The Arizona Republican helped reopen a background check into sexual assault claims against Kavanaugh by a former teenage acquaintance, Christine Blasey Ford, and “View” co-host Sunny Hostin pointed out that she had prosecuted cases with similar evidence.
“As a former sex crimes prosecutor, I prosecuted many cases with just a woman’s testimony,” Hostin said. “Because with sex crimes, there typically are no witnesses in the room, and I’ve convicted every single person based on a woman’s testimony.”
She asked the senator point blank whether he believed Ford’s testimony under oath, but Flake said he could not answer.
“You know, she was very compelling, he was very persuasive,” Flake said. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I wish I had the certitude that some of my colleagues expressed, but I said on the floor before that hearing, we’re likely to leave the hearing with as much doubt as certainty, and that’s how I felt afterwards.”
Co-host Joy Behar then put Flake on the spot.
“If there was some ambiguity as you describe it, why not find another person?” Behar said. “There are many judges out there who are quite capable for the job — why him?”
Flake said he understood her concerns, but the senator indicated he was more concerned about setting a precedent for future nominees than gambling on putting a credibly accused sexual offender on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“That’s a valid view,” Flake said. “On the flip side, people would say with some justification that if the mere allegation with no corroboration is sufficient to disqualify someone, we have entered a new phase that we probably don’t want to enter.”
Hostin again asked whether Flake believed Kavanaugh’s accuser, but he couldn’t say.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Flake said. “I don’t know if I believed him either.”
Conservative co-hosts Abby Huntsman and Meghan McCain applauded Flake for admitting he wasn’t sure, but host Whoopi Goldberg wasn’t satisfied.
“If there is a modicum of doubt, because it’s not just what she was saying,” Goldberg said.
She said the nominee’s testimony seemed incomplete or inconsistent, and she pointed out that Flake himself had doubts about Kavanaugh.
“When you have all of that, is that not enough reason to take a break and say maybe we need to get a different candidate?” she said.
Travis Gettys
MORE FROM Travis Gettys
Abby Huntsman Brett Kavanaugh Christine Blasey Ford Jeff Flake Meghan Mccain Sunny Hostin Supreme Court "the View"
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A Letter To Supporters From The Chairman
A letter to supporters from the Chairman...
After much soul searching, the time has come to announce that I intend to retire as Chairman of Rochdale Football Club at the end of the year.
I have always regarded myself as a custodian of the club and now that the club has enjoyed their League One status for a number of seasons, is in a stable financial position, as well as once again having full ownership of the ground and of the pub next door, I am confident that I leave the club in a far stronger position than when I took the helm. I feel the time is now right for me to leave the club in the capable hands of the remaining board to develop for the future and take our fantastic club to the next level.
I am proud to have had the opportunity to serve the club that I have supported since I was a child, for over 30 years both as a director and the Chairman - it has seen me through births, deaths and even a couple of marriages! So I would like to thank the club for the fantastic memories it has given me and all of you for the support you have given me throughout the years.
Chris Dunphy
The Chairman’s last game will be on December 29th against Bradford City at the Crown Oil Arena.
The Club will make a further announcement in due course.
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Home city guide chaudhary bansi lal cricket stadium rohtak
Lahli in Rohtak, is a picturesque place in the lap of the Himalayas in the state of Haryana. The Chaudhary Bansi Lal Cricket Stadium is situated here.
The stadium is one of the main cricket stadiums in Haryana. All the main first class matches are held here. The capacity of the stadium is not much as compared to the big stadiums of the country. About 8000 spectators can be accommodated in the stadium.
One of the key features of the ground is that it has a lively pitch. The weather of the area is very much suitable for swing bowling. This is why it is a sought after venue for the bowlers. The fast bowlers are able to get a lot of purchase from the wicket. This is a rare sight in today’s cricket where most pitches are flat and suit the batsmen.
The key reason for the pitch being so lively is that Rohtak has a very high water level. The water is only a few feet below the ground. This is why the grass is able to grow so easily on the pitch. The outfield is absolutely lush green. The ground has the ideal conditions for cricket as the climate is cool throughout the year.
The Haryana state cricket team uses the stadium as its home ground and plays all its home matches here. A lot of important matches have been played at this venue over the years. The stadium had its share of limelight and media attention when Sachin Tendulkar played in his last Ranji Trophy match here in October, last year. The match was broadcast live all over the world. The stadium was packed to the brim to see the ‘Little Master’ in action.
Matches played at Chaudhari Bansilal Stadium
A lot of important matches have been played at this venue over the years, mostly involving the Haryana team.
The stadium hosted its first Ranji Trophy match in the 2006-07 season between Haryana and Andhra Pradesh. Since then there have been 27more Ranji Trophy matches played here.
In the 2009-10 season, the very important Quarter Final match between Haryana and Mumbai was played here. Mumbai won the match by virtue of a first innings lead. Ajinkya Rahane, one of the premier batsmen in India today, was adjudged the Man of the Match for his brilliant century.
The following year again, Haryana played the Quarter Finals against Tamil Nadu.
In the 2011-12 season the very important Semi Final between Haryana and Rajasthan was held here.
The home team, Haryana has displayed some good cricket at this venue over the years. They have really performed very well at the various domestic tournaments.
Apart from the Ranji Trophy matches, a lot of other domestic tournaments have been played at the Chaudhary Bansi Lal Cricket Stadium as well. Haryana has played a lot of matches in the Vijay Hazare Trophy at this ground. This trophy is played in the 50 over one day format. In the 20 over version of the game, Haryana has clashed with other teams in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy. All teams have enjoyed playing at this beautiful venue.
Records at the Bansilal Stadium in Rohtak
As a lot of matches have played at this venue over the past 8 years or so, naturally a lot of records have also been created. Some of the notable records are mentioned below:
The highest score at this venue by a team in first class cricket was 500-9d by Haryana against Jharkhand in the 2008-09 season. Sunny Singh and N. Saini scored two scintillating centuries for the home team.
The lowest team total at this ground was also scored by the home team, Haryana against Vidarbha in the 2012-13 season. Umesh Yadav, picked up a 5 wicket haul to bowl out the home side for such a paltry score. He was adjudged the Man of the Match as well, as his efforts fuelled a victory for the visitors.
A lot of centuries have been scored at Rohtak over the years even though the bowlers have found it suitable for their exploits. 27 centuries have been scored so far.
The highest score by an individual was scored by Yusuf Pathan, for Baroda against Haryana, the home team. He scored an outstanding 195 in the 2010-11 season. He displayed an outstanding stroke play to get to his score. The fact that the ball comes on to the bat really well on this wicket aided his cause in a great way as well. He dispatched the Haryana bowlers to all parts of the ground.
Sunny Singh, S. Rana and N. Saini have scored multiple centuries at this ground over the years. They represent the home side, Haryana. Their efforts have played a vital role in the success that the home team has received at this venue.
Sourav Ganguly scored a brilliant 135 against Haryana on a green pitch at this venue in the 2011-12 season for Bengal. His efforts were very crucial for the Bengal side as it helped them to garner crucial points from the match.
The bowlers have been successful at this ground as the conditions have really suited them over the years. V. Mallik of Himachal Pradesh has the best figures at this ground. He took 13-72 against the home side in the 2008-09 season. R.R. Singh of the Rajasthan team also has a very good figure of 12-82 at this ground against Haryana.
In general, Haryana is a very good place for the sportsters of all kinds of sports. The administration has been really supportive of them. The infrastructure for various sports in the state is very good. Like the Chaudhary Bansi Lal Cricket Stadium in Lahli which is located in the Rohtak district, there are a lot of other very good grounds in the state. The maintenance of the grounds are done really well. The state government has taken a lot of measures to promote sports in the state. The local people of Haryana are very much interested in their sports. Most of them take active part in one sport or the other.
Comments / Discussion Board - Chaudhary Bansi Lal Cricket Stadium Rohtak
Pardeep from Sonipat 1194 Days ago
Pardreepbhatt@gmail.com
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Parallel Lives by Plutarchus
Fabius, Chapter 19: Fabius and Marcellus[216 BC]
When word was brought to Rome that Hannibal, after the fight, had marched with his army into other parts of Italy, the hearts of the Romans began to revive, and they proceeded to send out generals and armies. The most distinguished commands were held by Fabius Maximus and Claudius Marcellus, both generals of great fame, though upon opposite grounds. For Marcellus, as we have set forth in his life, was a man of action and high spirit, ready and bold with his own hand, and, as Homer describes his warriors, fierce, and delighting in fights. Boldness, enterprise, and daring, to match those of Hannibal, constituted his tactics, and marked his engagements. But Fabius adhered to his former principles, still persuaded that, by following close and not fighting him, Hannibal and his army would at last be tired out and consumed, like a wrestler in too high condition, whose very excess of strength makes him the more likely suddenly to give way and lose it. Posidonius tells us that the Romans called Marcellus their sword, and Fabius their buckler; and that the vigor of the one, mixed with the steadiness of the other, made a happy compound that proved the salvation of Rome. So that Hannibal found by experience that, encountering the one, he met with a rapid, impetuous river, which drove him back, and still made some breach upon him; and by the other, though silently and quietly passing by him, he was insensibly washed away and consumed; and, at last, was brought to this, that he dreaded Marcellus when he was in motion, and Fabius when he sat still. During the whole course of this war, he had still to do with one or both of these generals; for each of them was five times consul, and, as praetors or proconsuls or consuls, they had always a part in the government of the army, till, at last, Marcellus fell into the trap which Hannibal had laid for him, and was killed in his fifth consulship. But all his craft and subtlety were unsuccessful upon Fabius, who only once was in some danger of being caught, when counterfeit letters came to him from the principal inhabitants of Metapontum, with promises to deliver up their town if he would come before it with his army, and intimations that they should expect him. This train had almost drawn him in; he resolved to march to them with part of his army, and was diverted only by consulting the omens of the birds, which he found to be inauspicious; and not long after it was discovered that the letters had been forged by Hannibal, who, for his reception, had laid an ambush to entertain him. This, perhaps, we must rather attribute to the favor of the gods than to the prudence of Fabius.
Event: Actions in Italy in 216 BC. Battle of Cannae
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Labour holds seat in council election
Labour candidate Annie McMahon won the Longholme ward by-election with 43 per cent of thevote, while Conservative candidate Mischa Mockett finished second on 33 per cent and UKIP’s Gary Barnes came third with 22 per cent.
Annie McMahon Labour councillor for the Longholme ward in Rossendale
Rossendale's ruling Labour group defeated the Tories and UKIP to hold on to their council seat in a three way by-election battle.
The Rawtenstall poll took place on Thursday as a result of the departure of Liz McInnes, who resigned her seat in October after winning election to Parliament in the Heywood and Middleton by-election.
The by-election saw the vote share for all political parties slashed as the turnout fell from 40 percent in May to 28 percent, with the Conservative vote in the ward down from 554 to 390, Labour’s vote was cut from 715 to 505 and UKIP fell from 396 to 258.
Despite the low turnout, new councillor Annie McMahon said she was ‘delighted’ to have the opportunity to represent the ward.She said: “I am delighted, I am still in a bit of a daze really, it has not fully settled in.”
The 68-year-old said she would be drawing on her experiences as a social worker to help in her council work.
She said: “I am retired but I was a social worker and worked closely with local authorities and the NHS and I will be using that experience to help.
“I have come across a number of issues on the doorstep, things like bins or trees may sound likesmall issues but they are massive for residents and I will try to help.
“Getting out into the ward and talking to residents was really nice, everyone was brilliant.“I want to represent everyone, not just the people who voted for me.
“I have never done this before, so I would like to thank all those who have helped and offeredadvice.“My friends and family are all really delighted, they are very happy.”
The result leaves the state of the parties on the council as Labour 24, Conservative 10, Community First 1 and Independent 1.
Conservative group leader councillor Darryl Smith said he was pleased at the inroads the party made into the Labour share of the vote.
He said: “At the end of the day you do want to win every election you go into, but we have not lost,Labour have held a safe seat. We have chipped away at their vote a little more and we have narrowed the majority, the direction of travel is good. We will get ready for next year now."
Coun Smith added: “As for the turnout, the timing of this election has not helped, people’s focus ison Christmas in December and it is long dark nights these days.”
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Pig guts and punches: Taiwan lawmakers brawl…
Pig guts and punches: Taiwan lawmakers brawl over trade
A plan to allow beef, pork imports from US sparked the confrontation
In this image made from video, lawmakers fight during a parliament session in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Nov. 27, 2020. Taiwan’s lawmakers got into a fist fight and threw pig guts at each other Friday over a soon-to-be enacted policy that would allow imports of U.S. pork and beef. A blue banner at right reads: “Protest against ractopamine pork, We want a referendum.” (FTV via AP)
PUBLISHED: November 27, 2020 at 10:48 a.m. | UPDATED: November 28, 2020 at 6:41 a.m.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Lawmakers in Taiwan got into a fist fight and threw pig guts at each other Friday over a soon-to-be enacted policy that would allow imports of U.S. pork and beef.
Premier Su Tseng-chang was due to give a regularly scheduled policy report to lawmakers on Friday morning about the pork policy when opposition party lawmakers from the Nationalist party, also known as the KMT, blocked his attempt to speak by dumping bags of pig organs. Legislators from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party attempted to stop them, resulting in chaos and an exchange of punches.
A DPP lawmaker wrestled a KMT lawmaker to the floor in the scuffle.
President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration lifted a longstanding ban on imports of U.S. pork and beef in August, in a move seen as one of the first steps toward possibly negotiating a bilateral trade agreement with the U.S. The ban is due to be lifted in January.
That decision has met with fierce opposition, both from the KMT and individual citizens. The new policy allows imports of pork with acceptable residues of ractopamine, a drug that some farmers add to animal feed that promotes the growth of lean meat.
On Sunday, thousands of people marched in Taipei to protest the imports.
U.S. pork would account for a small percentage of the island’s consumption, but the Nationalist party has seized on the issue in an effort to mobilize support following successive failures at the polls.
“When you were in the opposition, you were against U.S. pork, now that you’re in power, you’ve become a supporter of U.S. pork,” said KMT legislator Lin Wei-chou, who led the group of lawmakers protesting the policy on Friday. They wore black T-shirts that read “oppose ractopamine-pork.”
DPP lawmakers called for peace. “You have blocked Premier Su from reposting to the parliament for 12 times, ” said Hsu Sheng-chieh, a DPP legislative member. “Please return to reason.”
midday-wire
Leaders from some of the nation's top historically Black colleges and universities are meeting virtually with Google CEO Sundar Pichai next week to discuss the future of their schools' relationships with the tech giant in the wake of racism and sexism allegations made by two Black former employees.
Parler, the free-speech social network, reappeared with the help of a Russian-owned web security service as the website hunts for a way around bans that took it offline earlier this month.
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State Department Cable on Unlawful Presence – 1997
The following is the text of a December 17, 1997 State Department cable (no. 97-State-235245) sent to all diplomatic and consular posts:
Subject: P.L. 104-208 Update No. 34-
212(a)(9)(B)
Ref: (A) State 62420, (B) 96 State 239978
1. A detailed draft ALDAC on the interpretation and application of new INA 212(a)(9)(B) is currently in the clearance process. Pending clearance of that cable, Department provides the following interim guidance, which supplements guidance already provided in refs A and B.
2. Under INA 212(a)(9)(B)(I)(I), aliens who were unlawfully present in the U.S. for over 180 days but less than one year, and who subsequently depart the U.S. voluntarily prior to commencement of removal proceedings, are inadmissable for three years. Under INA 212(a)(9)(B)(i)(II), aliens who were unlawfully present in the U.S. for one year or more, and who subsequently depart the U.S., are inadmissible for ten years.
3. INS had advised that the following general rules should be applied in determining whether an alien is considered to be unlawfully present for purposes of 212(a)(9)(B):
A. Per ref A, no period of time prior to April 1, 1997, counts toward unlawful presence for purposes of 212(a)(9)(B).
B. Entrants without inspection: In the case of EWIs, unlawful presence begins to accrue as of the date the alien entered the U.S. without admission or parole.
C. Duration of status cases: An alien admitted for duration of status (such as a student or exchange visitor) will only begin to accrue unlawful presence if either:
– an immigration judge (IJ) finds the alien has violated status and is excludable/deportable/removable, or
– the INS, in the course of adjudicating an application for a benefit (e.g., extension of stay or change of status), determines that a status violation has occurred.
Legal Guru in All Things Immigration
“Mr. Shusterman and his law firm have represented my family and me very successfully. He is not only a legal guru in all things immigration but even more so he is an exceptional human being because he empathizes with his clients and cares that justice is done.”
- Maria Davari Knapp, Chicago, Illinois
D. Aliens admitted until a date certain: In general, an alien admitted until a specified date will begin to accrue unlawful presence either:
– when the date on the I-94 (or any extension) has passed, or
– if INS or an IJ makes a finding of a status violation, whichever comes first.
E. Except in cases where the alien either entered without inspection (EWI) or stayed beyond the date specified on the I-94 (overstay), conoffs may not refuse an alien under 9B unless INS or an IJ has made a formal finding that the alien violated status. Other than in overstay and EWI cases, a conoff s belief that a particular alien violated status is not/not in itself a sufficient basis for a 9B refusal. Even if the alien admits to an apparent status violation (other than an overstay or EWI), that would not be a basis for a 9B finding, absent a prior INS or IJ finding of a status violation. On the other hand, a finding by conoff that the alien entered without inspection or overstayed a specified date on the I-94 may be a proper basis, in and of itself, for a 9B refusal, assuming the alien had accrued the requisite period of unlawful presence, no prior INS or IJ finding is required in such cases.
F. In cases where the unlawful presence determination is based on an INS or IJ finding of a status violation, the clock starts to run from the date of the INS or IJ determination, not/not from the date on which the alien actually began violating status. For example, if an alien enters on an F visa on September 1, 1997, drops out of school on October 1, 1997, and fails to depart, and if the INS or an IJ subsequently makes a finding of a status violation on, say, February 1, 1999, the unlawful presence clock begins to run on February 1, 1999, not on October 1, 1997, and the alien would not be subject to 9B unless he remained in the U.S. without authorization for an additional 101 (sic – This number should be “181”.) days or more after the February 1, 1999, determination.
G. INS has decided that a grant of voluntary departure (V/D) constitutes a period of authorized stay for 9B purposes. Thus, the period between the date of the V/D order and the date by which the alien must depart does not/not count toward any period of unlawful presence. However, if the alien fails to depart by the date specified in the V/D order, the clock starts running.
H. Periods of unlawful presence under 9B are not/not counted in the aggregate. For example, the three-year bar of 9B1 would not apply to an alien who made two prior visits to the United States, accrued 4 months of unlawful presence during each visit, and is now applying for a nonimmigrant visa to make a third visit to the U.S.
4. In determining whether an alien has been unlawfully present for 9B purposes, post should normally consider information available from the visa application process, post records, and the CLASS lookout system. Posts should not make routine requests for record checks from INS or the Department, as arrival/departure records and records of authorized extensions or changes of status are not always complete or readily accessible.
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Giving Feeling to Robots & Prosthetics: Researchers at UT Dallas develop artificial touch-sense whiskers
Home » Giving Feeling to Robots & Prosthetics: Researchers at UT Dallas develop artificial touch-sense whiskers
By jnickerson
In Recent News, Texas
Whiskers are arguably the cutest feature on a dog or cat:
Need we say more? Those pleasant-looking features are used as touch sensors that send information to an animal’s brain. It’s one way that an animal makes sense of their surroundings. This is why it’s important to not trim Fido’s or Tom’s whiskers. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas realized this importance and have created artificial whiskers, appropriately called ‘e-whiskers’.
“We’ve created some of the highest density of e-whiskers to date,” said Dr. Walter Voit, an associate professor of materials science engineering and mechanical engineering at UT Dallas. “When you have a lot of sensors like this that can be dragged over a surface, you can then use them to measure many interesting properties. Our e-whiskers were able to detect force, pressure, proximity, temperature, stiffness and topography. As they brush up against—or whisk across—various materials, they mimic the sensing capabilities of human skin.” The development of e-whiskers is a significant step in the advancement of electronic human skin, which could be used in the fields of robotics and even prosthetics.
E-whiskers were developed by using shape-memory polymers that react to heat. A flexible strain sensor, which has the same diameter as a human hair, was attached to the top of a polymer pattern. Researchers then blew hot air through the bottom of the polymer cutouts, thus making the material soft. This allowed the e-whiskers to rise and become 3D. Any disturbance induced changes that interacts with the strain sensor is then tracked, thus giving ‘life’ to the polymer cutouts.
“In robotics, e-whiskers could replicate the functionalities of human skin by determining what’s hard and soft, hot and cold, smooth and rough. They could allow the robot to identify objects and interact with them safely, making robots more ‘human friendly’,” said Jonathan Reeder, lead author who conducted the research.
This concept may seem like something straight out of a sci-fi novel, but it’s not that far off from becoming a reality. “Integrating electronic sensors directly with biology is the most compelling application but presents a set of tough challenges. Namely, how to translate electronic signals generated by the sensor into the ‘language’ of the nervous system, and how to form a stable mechanical and electrical coupling between the flexible electronic and the soft tissue.” Reeder also mentioned that the sensitivity of the e-whiskers, such as changes in topology and temperature, as well as the sensors’ response time, all exceed the capabilities of human skin “by at least an order of magnitude.” “It’s not impossible for a person with a prosthetic to actually have better sensitivity than with the human hand,” Reeder added.
This development offers hope to the 2 million Americans who are living with a prosthetic limb. For more information on this impressive advancement, please click here.
Are you developing a technology so robots and prosthetics can have more human-like qualities? Did you know that you can receive up to 14% back on your research expenses with the R&D Tax Credit? To find out more, please contact a Swanson Reed R&D Specialist today or check out our free online eligibility test.
Swanson Reed is a Specialist R&D tax advisory firm, offering tax credibility assessments, claim preparation, and advisory services to the state of Texas. We manage all facets of the R&D tax credit program in Texas, from claim prep & audit compliance to claim disputes.
Swanson Reed regularly hosts free webinars and provides free IRS CE and CPE credits for CPAs. For more information please visit us at www.swansonreed.com/webinars or contact your usual Swanson Reed representative.
America, Dallas, Development, Financial Incentive, Grant Program, innovation, Medical, Prosthetic, Prosthetics, R&D Tax, research and development, Technology, Texas, United States
jnickerson
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Versatility key as Nicolas Roche looks to keep racing until 40
Nicolas Roche has no ambitions of calling time on his career despite turning 37 next year. The versatile Irishman heads into the final year of his current deal with Team DSM in 2021 but is keen to race on until he is 40.
This year Roche raced as Sunweb’s road captain and was instrumental in several Tour de France breaks – from which his Sunweb teammates won three stages.
Roche believes that his long career, which has seen him ride as a leader, domestique, and leadout rider has helped provide him with the necessary experience to help the younger riders on Sunweb and he has relished the role of road captain on a team that enjoyed their best season in years.
‘The experience, it’s key. I think that one of the reasons as to why I fit in that role is because I’ve done it,” he told Cyclingnews in a recent interview.
“You know what you expect. When you bring up a sprinter it’s different than if you want to bring up a GC guy. With a sprinter, you do a bit of a sprint with him but with a GC rider, you have to take your time and do it gradually because they hate that change of rhythm.
“So all those little things, I understand how they work because I’ve been in those situations before. It was key, me being a young rider and learning from the bigger riders, like when I was helping to lead out Thor Hushovd for a couple of years in the Giro in 2007 and 2008. Then afterwards, being a team leader myself, and then going to work for bigger team leaders in GC but also in Classics. I think that everything that I’ve learned, I’m trying to think about how I can give that back.”
Despite a depleted 2020 race calendar Roche still managed to rack up 34 race days. The bedrock of his season was based around the Tour de France, and although his year was cut short by illness, the former Team Sky and Tinkoff rider was content with his year.
“I was quite happy with my role of riding aggressively and giving a hand to the younger guys, helping out in the sprint and doing a bit of everything. That was quite challenging and exciting. It worked out really well,” he said.
“I was planned for the Vuelta but unfortunately after the Tour I started to feel pain in my forearm and after my crash in the Tour I had started to get tendonitis in my wrist and forearm and that took me out of the Vuelta and was the end of my season after the Irish championships. Relative speaking it was a good season and a brilliant season for the team. It was a really good season for me as a road captain and I think that took on that role and did well. The young guys delivered and that was great.”
Sunweb has signed Romain Bardet for 2021 but the German-registered team – which is set to race as Team DSM next season after securing new sponsorship – have continued their faith in their young roster. Marc Hirschi and Jai Hindley had standout seasons and although Roche has adapted his racing style, he very much sees himself as an important player within the roster.
“It’s another page that turning in my career. I’ve gone from a helper to someone to a leader, to a helper in GC, and now I’m there and around the young guys. I’m helping them with my knowledge but also on the bike when it comes to things that you just don’t learn in meeting rooms. It’s important to help some of the young guys with some of the small details like positioning and tactics in how to manage a finish.
“It’s quite exciting. Sometimes it a bit difficult for your ego when you’re not in the spotlight anymore and not attacking without thinking but I still get my chances. This year in the Tour I was also in the breakaway three times and I think there’s a great balance for me. I think that there’s a need for that spot on this team and I’m happy to fill that spot and play my part.”
With the racing calendar set to return to something more traditional in 2021, Roche is likely to target Tour de France selection once again.
The Irishman has no ambitions of slowing down just yet and hopes to extend his career beyond his current contract.
“I want to continue. My ultimate goal is to get to 40. When I was 30 I said that I wanted to do a couple more years and it’s getting harder and harder between COVID, team restrictions, rider numbers going down on teams, and it’s getting harder and harder but I’m motivated to train, stay fit and continue for as long as I can. Ideally, I’d like to until the end of 2021 and then two more years, and then a fourth-year after that would be a bonus.”
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Buffalo Bill's house of horrors from Silence of the Lambs is up for sale
Oct 6, 2020 11:12 AM
Buffalo Bill's on-screen residence from 1991 Oscar-winning thriller Silence of The Lambs is now on sale again.
Perryopolis, Pennsylvania - Not for the faint-hearted: the house which served as a set for the classic thriller Silence of the Lambs is now up for sale. And it's just as creepy as you'd imagine.
The creepy house in Pennsylvania served as Buffalo Bill's on-screen residence. © AP Photo/Keith Srakocic
The Queen Anne-style home, located at 8 Circle Street in Perryopolis, Pennsylvania, is on the market for $298,500, Yahoo reported. A fair price for a four-bedroom, one-bath Victorian that also comes with 1.76 acres of land.
"Most of America has probably seen this house but now you have a chance to buy it," the agents selling the property, Pennsylvania-based The Sisters, say in a video tour.
The house was made famous by one of cinema's all-time creepiest villains, Buffalo Bill. In the thriller, the home serves as a den of horrors for the serial killer, who starves his female victims before skinning them. FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) confronts him in the house with the help of the sociopath and cannibal, Hannibal Lector.
While the house has a lot of the original features of the Oscar-winning 1991 movie, there is no dungeon-like basement and definitely no deep pit to lower lotion into.
The house has been on sale before
The movie Silence of the Lambs won an academy award and has since become a classic in the film business. © Archive
However, the cold cellar section, the hall and dining room are all recognizable from the production.
"It actually is kind of creepy in here," one of the agents admitted.
Scott and Bara Lloyd, the former owners of the house, already tried to sell their house for $300,000 in 2015. The couple bought the property in 1977 and got married in the foyer.
After they couldn't find anyone who wanted to buy the horror house, they dropped the price to $250,000. Apparently, the remote location of the villa in Layton, Pennsylvania, which only has about 50 inhabitants, made it less attractive for potential buyers.
“You hear the mantra: Location, location, location. Even though it's got notoriety, location still is a big deal,” Erik Gunther, a senior editor at realtor.com, told the Telegraph in 2016.
Whether the new realtors will be successful in selling the house of horrors remains to be seen. But whoever dares to buy the creepy property will end up live inside an iconic piece of film history.
Cover photo: AP Photo/Keith Srakocic
More on the topic Entertainment:
Woman gets furious note complaining about her late-night sex noises
Jimmy Fallon makes fun of Harry Style's latest music video in hilarious skit
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London Bridge attack - statement from Archbishop John
Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by the terrorist attack at London Bridge on Friday. Archbishop John has made a statement, available here:
Statement on the London Bridge Terror Attack
by Archbishop John Wilson
It was deeply shocked and saddened to hear of the attack that took place on London Bridge on Friday evening, causing loss of life and injury. On behalf of the Catholic Community in the Archdiocese of Southwark I assure all those affected of our prayers, those who have died and those who suffered injuries, remembering also their families and loved ones.
We also offer our sincere gratitude to the emergency services for their decisive action and we thank members of the public who moved swiftly and courageously to protect others without thought for themselves.
London is home to people from so many different countries, cultures and religions. We must never allow incidents such as this to divide us. Violence never solves anything. In the wake of such an awful assault on human life and dignity, we remain committed to sustaining our common life together in respectful tolerance and peace, working always for the common good of every person and our society as a whole.
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What We Do at STAR
Careers & Volunteers
The Arc of the United States News & Updates
To stay abreast of stories, Capitol Insider, legislative and lobbying news, visit The Arc of the US.
Information about The Arc of the United States, including mission and program information, is available HERE.
The Arc Celebrates the ADA’s 25th Anniversary
Blaze a Trail to Future Planning
Posted on May 27, 2016 by The Arc
In the spirit of this year’s Older Americans Month theme, “Blaze a Trail,” The Arc recognizes the many parents of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) who fought for decades to raise their children at home, to realize their rights to free and appropriate public education, and for recognition as valued contributors to the community. The Arc is committed to supporting these aging caregivers and their adult sons and daughters with I/DD to develop a roadmap for the future.
Future planning is important for all families, but it can be especially challenging for the almost 1 million families in which adults with I/DD are living with aging caregivers. In two-thirds of these families, there is no plan in place for the future. Many of these families have no connection to the disability community or the disability service system. It is our role to support them to overcome the fear of planning and provide them the information and resources they need to create future plans.
To support these trailblazing families, The Arc of the United States launched the Center for Future Planning™ in 2014. Discussing these major life transitions and putting a plan in place may actually alleviate some of the stress experienced by aging caregivers, their adult sons and daughters, and other family members and supporters.
The Center’s website provides reliable information and assistance to individuals with I/DD, their family members and friends, staff at chapters of The Arc, and other disability professionals on:
supported decision-making and guardianship
financial planning (including public benefits, special needs trusts, and ABLE accounts)
employment and daily activities
making social connections
providing information if an urgent need arises
During Older Americans Month, here are some ways you can access more help:
Read more information about future planning and see how other families have planned.
View The Arc’s webinar on supports and services for aging caregivers.
Visit The Arc’s new Build Your Plan™ online tool that enables families to create accounts and begin to build their plans within the Center for Future Planning™. Check out the demonstration webinar to learn more about how to navigate Build Your Plan and encourage families to begin creating plans.
Encourage families you know to start the process and to get support in their communities. Chapters of The Arc around the country can provide guidance and information about local resources. Families can also identify professionals in their communities to help them create and implement future plans through The Arc’sProfessional Services Directory.
In addition, Area Agencies on Aging (AAA) can help with accessing services and support available to seniors. AAAs offer a variety of home and community-based services such as respite, meals on wheels, and transportation. Visit ncoa.org for more information about additional benefits available to seniors.
Supporting aging caregivers and adults with I/DD is an ongoing process and is possible with the help of other family members, friends, the community and professionals. It’s important to work together to develop a plan that will ease the stress of future transitions. You can contact The Arc’s national office at (202) 202-617-3268
orfutureplanning@thearc.org
for more help.
Sign up today for the Disability Advocacy Network! Join the Disability Advocacy Network as we build a larger, stronger movement of people with disabilities, parents, siblings, and allies to advocate for the disability movement..
Click HERE to register at The Arc of The United States.
The Arc of the United States Celebrates 25 Years of the ADA
July 16, 2015 by The Arc
On July 26th we will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA affirms the rights of citizens with disabilities by prohibiting discrimination in employment, public services, public accommodations and services operated by private entities, and telecommunications. It is a wide-ranging law intended to make our society accessible to people with disabilities.
The Arc played a leadership role in the passage of the ADA. Our volunteer leadership, state chapters, local chapters, and public policy staff worked closely with others in the disability community to make the ADA a reality. The bottom line is that the passage of this transformative legislation would not have been possible without the hard work of Congressional leaders and disability advocates, like you! As we celebrate this monumental achievement and the 25 years of implementation of this law, we can’t help but reflect on what the ADA really means to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their loves ones.
To commemorate this special anniversary, we asked members of The Arc’s National Staff to share with us what the ADA means to them. You can read a few of the responses below.
We invite you to visit our social media channels, on Facebook (The Arc US) and Twitter (@TheArcUS) and share with us what the ADA means to you. We want you to be part of the larger conversation so be sure to use the hashtag #ADA25.
“I have been a participant in so many meaningful opportunities. I attended two very highly respected universities; I have travelled extensively, from Kauai to Istanbul to Moscow. And I interned and worked for a prestigious corporation on Wall Street. Each of these experiences has been the product of public policy, for I am an individual with a physical disability. It was through the National Business and Disability Council (NBDC) that I secured a summer internship in New York City. In light of these life events, is it any surprise that I am totally convinced of the power of ADA to transform lives?” – Taylor Woodard, Paul Marchand Intern, The Arc
“I have the ADA to thank for bringing me to The Arc, and introducing me to what has become a life-long commitment to advocating with and for people with disabilities. About 20 years ago, I was hired to direct an ADA project that created materials for criminal justice professionals about accommodations people with intellectual and developmental disabilities need in order to receive fair treatment in the system. This seed money from the Department of Justice eventually led to the creation of a national center in 2013 (seehttp://www.thearc.org/NCCJD). It’s frightening to think how the lives of people with disabilities would be different today without the passage of the ADA. It’s equally exciting to dream about what the next 25 years may hold!” – Leigh Ann Davis, Program Manager, The Arc’s National Center on Criminal Justice and Disability
“I’ve had the honor of supporting individuals with disabilities and their families since 1978. Back then professionals were taught that we knew best. The idea that a professional would ask a parent, let alone a person with a disability, what they wanted out of life was unheard of. Once the ADA was enacted many professionals were slow to support the paradigm shift from institutionalization to specialized services to full community membership. I’m grateful that my world opened. I count myself as a supporter, listener, and friend. I’m a follower and not a leader. I join in celebrating the fact that more and more people with intellectual disabilities are living full lives in their communities. However, we still have a very long way to go since so many remain ignored and unfilled. So as we celebrate, let’s not forget the 1980 battle cry from Senator Ted Kennedy, ‘For all those whose cares have been our concerns, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.’” – Karen Wolf-Branigin, Senior Executive Officer, National Initiatives, The Arc
“Having two siblings with I/DD and working as a disability rights attorney, I see the profound value of the ADA in both my personal and professional life. While there is still so much more work that needs to be done to make our systems work better for people with disabilities, much of the progress we have achieved and continue to work towards every day at The Arc and throughout the disability advocacy community would simply not be possible without the vital protections and enforcement mechanisms the ADA provides. I am eager to see what we will achieve over the next 25 years as we continue to use the ADA as a fundamental tool to protect and enforce the civil rights of individuals with disabilities!”- Shira T. Wakschlag, Staff Attorney, The Arc
“The ADA certainly transforms lives, as I can attest to. It has helped me to reach my goals and enabled me to be a trailblazer and set the way for individuals with autism and other developmental or intellectual disabilities. I have had numerous opportunities, one being able to participate in my DD council’s Partners in Policy Making program where I learned how to be a self-advocate and stand up for myself and others. It has also helped me to be employed at one of the most wonderful places to work, The Arc of the U.S.” – Amy Goodman, Director Autism Now, The Arc
Southbury Training School Too Costly To Keep
To read the editorial in the Hartford Courant, click HERE.
“Autism Cares” Signed into Law
As Congress winds down its work for the year, it recently passed and President Obama signed into law the “Autism Collaboration, Accountability, Research, Education, and Support (CARES) Act of 2014.” This law reauthorizes the Combating Autism Act of 2011 for five years and makes a number of improvements to it. Since its original enactment in 2006, the law has significantly advanced the science and practice in the disability field by increasing the number, scope, pace, and coordination of research, surveillance, public awareness, and professional training efforts. Among its many notable achievements are an increase in the proportion of infants screened for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), an increase in the proportion of children diagnosed by the age of three, and continuing improvements to decrease the time between diagnosis and intervention. The Arc thanks advocates across the country for helping to secure approval of this important law!
The U.S. Supreme Court Reaffirms Commitment to Ensure Justice For Individuals With Intellectual Disabilities
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Freddie Lee Hall in Hall v. Florida, a death penalty case concerning the definition of intellectual disability (ID) that Florida uses in deciding whether an individual with that disability is protected by the Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Hall. The justices stated that Florida cannot rely solely on an IQ score to determine whether an inmate has ID. Justice Anthony Kennedy stated that IQ tests have a margin of error and those inmates whose scores fall within the margin must be allowed to present other evidence.
Additionally, Justice Kennedy modified the 2002 Atkins decision by adopting the term “intellectually disabled” and abandoning “mentally retarded,” which was previously used by the court in its opinions.
To read The Arc’s full statement, visit our BLOG
The Arc’s “New and Improved” National Convention
PBATS and The Arc Join Forces to Promote Inclusion
An Inspirational Champion!
Thank you to the hundreds of past attendees of The Arc’s National Convention who shared their thoughts on how we could improve our annual event. We learned from all of the survey responses what you really want from this important event, and this year you can expect a fresh and exciting program in New Orleans from September 30 - October 2.
We are thrilled to announce Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author will be one of our keynote speakers. His latest work, Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes and Autism, chronicles his family’s twenty year struggle with their youngest son’s autism. Ron will be attending convention with his son Owen and his wife Cornelia. Plus, Fred Maahs, Director of National Partnerships for Comcast Corporation and Vice President of Comcast Foundation, will speak about his personal experience as a person with a disability, his commitment to community service, and the benefits of corporate/nonprofit partnerships.
Visit our newly redesigned Convention website and register today! Click HERE.
Last month, The Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society (PBATS) and The Arc announced at Yankee Stadium a partnership to promote the inclusion of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) in sporting activities nationwide. The Arc will participate in PBATS’ PLAY (Promoting a Lifetime of Activity for Youth) Campaign events at stadiums across the country throughout this season.
The first event took place at Camden Yards with trainers and players from the Baltimore Orioles and participants from The Arc of Baltimore and The Arc of Central Chesapeake. During the event, kids received advice from the Baltimore Orioles nutritionist and worked with their professional trainers before meeting outfielder David Lough.
This is the first of at least 12 events chapters of The Arc will participate in. Keep an eye on The Arc’s Facebook page and blog for updates about this exciting new program.
We continue to dedicate this year to the champions that work tirelessly enabling The Arc to continue its important mission.
Kimberly Resh is one of those champions, a mother, an activist, and an advocate. Not only is Kim a champion for The Arc, but she has made it her life’s mission to spread the word about inclusion for people with I/DD in communities first in New Jersey, and now throughout Pennsylvania. And, she seeks to empower others nationwide to do so as well.
Read Kim’s extraordinary story on our website.
Do you know someone who is a champion for individuals with I/DD?
Show them you appreciate their efforts by making a gift in honor of them today! Your gift will help us continue our work no matter how small or large the donation.
Your gift is acknowledged with a card sent to the recipient or their family letting them know that a donation has been made in their honor.
Thank you for your continued support. You are a true champion of The Arc.
How Mercer Can Help Members of The Arc
The Arc is committed to support the full inclusion and participation of persons with I/DD. This includes the right to the financial protection of life insurance.
Members of The Arc and caregivers can secure $5,000 or $10,000 in coverage through Mercer Consumer, a nationally regarded insurance broker and administrator. The coverage is underwritten by The Hartford Life and Accident Insurance Company.
There are no health questions or physical exams required. Acceptance is guaranteed as long as you are under age 60; a U.S. resident who is not hospitalized or living in an institution; and not physically disabled due to illness or injury.
You can download a brochure and enrollment form online. Or call 1-800-503-9230.
AR Ins. Lic. #303439
CA Ins. Lic. #0G39709
In CA d/b/a Mercer Health & Benefits Insurance Services LLC
HealthMeet® Promoting Heathy Lives!
Being healthy is a challenge for everyone. We all may need help learning how to maintain a healthy weight, recovering from surgery, seeing a dentist, or using a walker or cane to help us keep our balance as we get older. People with ID often face additional barriers when attempting to access appropriate health services. A comprehensive analysis of HealthMeet’s first year of assessments revealed some of the challenges people with ID face including:
Access to coordinated care;
Discrimination from health care professionals who sometimes provide inadequate or inappropriate interventions and treatments or deny appropriate care for people with I/DD;
Affordability due to a lack of public or private insurance;
Communication with health care professionals and personal decision making.
To learn more check out The Arc’s website, a full report on HealthMeet® will be available in the near future.
Sprout Film Festivals Promoting Inclusion
The Arc has long partnered with Sprout, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing innovative programming to people with I/DD, to create a national film festival. Participating chapters are scheduling events across the country featuring films for, about and by people with I/DD.
In 2014, chapters with The Arc have hosted film festivals in Maryland, Massachusetts, Idaho, New York, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. The film festival in Pennsylvania was unique because students from local schools joined with The Arc of Lehigh and Northampton Counties to host an inclusive and inspirational event.
"The mission of the festival is to use film as a tool for advocacy to change the perception of mainstream kids toward their disabled peers," says Bruce Seidel, Director of Development for The Arc of Lehigh and Northampton Counties in an interview with The Morning Call.
To learn more about The Arc & Sprout National Film Festival visit our website.
New Resource on the Medicaid Home and Community Based Services Final Rule Available
The National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities, the National Disability Rights Network, and the Association of University Centers on Disabilities announced a new resource for advocates to follow implementation of the Medicaid Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) final rule. The rule set forth new requirements for several Medicaid authorities under which states may provide home and community-based long term services and supports. The website provides both state and federal resources to help track what states are doing to comply with the rule and educates advocates about the important provisions.
If you like The Arc E-newsletter, you'll love Empower, our quarterly member newsletter. Not a member of The Arc yet? Sign up on our website. Share this with your friends and family. Let's get even more people involved in the movement for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities! If someone you know would like to be added to the distribution list for The Arc E-newsletter, please have them send an e-mail to communications@thearc.org.
If you do not want to receive The Arc E-newsletter, please e-mail us with the words "unsubscribe from The Arc E-News" in the subject line.
The Arc 1825 K Street, NW, Suite 1200, Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 800.433.5255 | Contact Us
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© 2014 The Arc
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Covid vaccines must not be sold privately, warns Van-Tam
Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor
Thursday November 12 2020, 12.00am, The Times
Jonathan Van-Tam said that he would urge his elderly mother to be vaccinated as regulators insisted that there was “no chance” of compromising safety despite the speed of the programme.
The deputy chief medical officer for England has said that he would be at the front of the queue if he could but argued it was right to vaccinate more vulnerable people first.
He also insisted that any jab would pass the “mum test”.
Professor Van-Tam gave a briefing at Downing Street on vaccination plans and told manufacturers that any jab must not be sold privately.
“One of the things I like about the NHS is that it’s there for everybody, irrespective of their wealth or who they are,” he said. “As a clinician, I
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Search for "Member of Parliament"
Displaying 1-20 of 321 results
FILTER BY CONTENT TYPEArticles (224)Authors (0)Timelines (0)Collections (0)Education Guides (0)Quizzes (10)Primary Sources (0)Videos (0)
Political Party Financing in Canada
The financial activities of political parties in Canada were largely unregulated until the Election Expenses Act was passed in 1974. Canada now has an extensive regime regulating federal political party financing; both during and outside of election periods. Such regulation encourages greater transparency of political party activities. It also ensures a fair electoral arena that limits the advantages of those with more money. Political parties and candidates are funded both privately and publicly. Election finance laws govern how parties and candidates are funded; as well as the ways in which they can spend money. (See also Canadian Electoral System.)
Agnes Macphail
Agnes Campbell Macphail, politician, reformer (born 24 March 1890 in Proton Township, Grey County, ON; died 13 February 1954 in Toronto, ON). Agnes Macphail was the first woman elected to the House of Commons (1921–40) and was one of the first two women elected to the Ontario legislature (1943–45, 1948–51). She was also the first female member of a Canadian delegation to the League of Nations. Macphail was a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the New Democratic Party). She was a noted pacifist and an advocate for prison reform. As a member of the Ontario legislature, she championed Ontario’s first equal pay legislation (1951).
Member of Parliament (MP)
The term Member of Parliament (MP) refers to individuals elected to represent a single federal electoral district (or “riding”) in the House of Commons. As elected representatives, MPs have three main duties: legislating in Parliament, representing their riding and political party, and serving their constituents’ needs. MPs occupy different roles and levels of influence in government. They hold office until Parliament is dissolved — typically four year terms — and can serve infinite mandates, so long as they are re-elected. Any Canadian citizen who is at least 18 years old on election day can run for office. Most MPs are elected as a member of a political party, but some may campaign and sit as independents. There are 338 seats for Members of Parliament in the House of Commons.
Editorial: The Canadian Flag, Distinctively Our Own
On 15 February 1965, at hundreds of ceremonies across the country and around the world, the red and white Maple Leaf Flag was raised for the first time. In Ottawa, 10,000 people gathered on a chilly, snow-covered Parliament Hill. At precisely noon, the guns on nearby Nepean Point sounded as the sun broke through the clouds. An RCMP constable, 26-year-old Joseph Secours, hoisted the National Flag of Canada to the top of a specially-erected white staff. A sudden breeze snapped it to attention.
Stornoway is the official residence of Canada’s federal leader of the Opposition. It is located at 541 Acacia Ave in the village of Rockcliffe Park in Ottawa. Purchased in 1950 by a private trust, Stornoway has been owned by the Government of Canada since 1970 and managed by the National Capital Commission since 1986.
In Canada, the leader of the Opposition is the leader of the largest political party sitting in opposition to the federal government (in other words, the party with the second-largest number of seats in the House of Commons). The formal title is “Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.” This title reflects the Westminster system of government found in many Commonwealth countries whose political roots can be traced to the United Kingdom.
NDP MP Paul Dewar Dies
Former teacher and union leader Paul Dewar died at age 56 after a year-long battle with brain cancer. He served as the MP for Ottawa Centre from 2006 to 2015 and was the NDP’s foreign affairs critic for many years.
Criminal Code of Canada
Canada’s Criminal Code is a federal statute. It was enacted by Parliament in accordance with section 91(27) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which gives the federal government exclusive jurisdiction to legislate criminal offences in Canada. The Criminal Code contains most of the criminal offences that have been created by Parliament. Other criminal offences have been incorporated into other federal statutes. The Code defines the types of conduct that constitute criminal offences. It establishes the kind and degree of punishment that may be imposed for an offence, as well as the procedures to be followed for prosecution.
Jagmeet Singh Wins Burnaby South Byelection
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh secured a seat in the House of Commons by winning a byelection in Burnaby South with 39 per cent of the vote, besting Liberal candidate Richard T. Lee’s (26 per cent) and Conservative candidate Jay Shin (22 per cent). Singh had accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of delaying the hotly contested election, which Singh needed to win in order to lead his party from within Parliament.
Speech from the Throne
The Speech from the Throne declares a government’s agenda for a new session of the legislature. The speech contains comments on the state of the country or province and outlines the matters on which the government will seek action. The monarch or their representative — the governor general federally and the lieutenant-governor provincially — delivers the speech; but it is entirely the work of the Cabinet ministers.
Parliament Passes Back-to-Work Bill for Striking Canada Post Workers
With rotating strikes by Canada Post workers entering their sixth week, Parliament gave royal assent to Bill C-89, forcing them back to work. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers began striking on 22 October after negotiating for almost a year for better pay and job security and equality between rural, suburban and urban carriers.
The derivation of the three Christian holidays needs no explanation. New Year's Day, January 1, marks the beginning of the new year.
Senate of Canada
The Senate is the Upper House of Canada's Parliament. Its 105 members are appointed and hold their seats until age 75. The Senate's purpose is to consider and revise legislation, investigate national issues, and most crucially according to the Constitution — give the regions of Canada an equal voice in Parliament. Long regarded by many Canadians as a place of unfair patronage and privilege, the Senate is a controversial institution; an unresolved debate continues about whether it should be reformed into an elected body accountable to the voters, or abolished.
Jason Kenney
Jason Kenney, politician, leader of the United Conservative Party of Alberta, premier of Alberta (born 30 May 1968 in Oakville, ON). Jason Kenney is the leader of the United Conservative Party in Alberta and the Leader of the Opposition in that province. From 1997 to 2016, he was Member of Parliament for Calgary Southeast. He held several Cabinet positions in the Conservative government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, including minister for citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, minister of employment and social development and minister of national defence. Kenney resigned his seat in Parliament in 2016, following the defeat of the Conservative government in the previous year’s election. In 2017, he was elected leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservative party, which then merged with the Wildrose Party. After the merger, Kenney was elected leader of the United Conservative Party. On 16 April 2019, Kenney and the UCP won a majority government in the Alberta general election.
The National Capital Region contains the cities of Ottawa, Ontario, and Gatineau, Quebec, as well as parts of their surrounding municipalities. In total, the region covers approximately 4,715 km2. While Ottawa is the capital of Canada by law, the National Capital Region is recognized as the seat of the federal government. A federal agency called the National Capital Commission represents the government for most planning matters in the region, in cooperation with provincial and municipal governments. The entire region is located within the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin people.
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is a board of the British Privy Council. It was formed in 1833. In 1844, it was given jurisdiction over all of Britain’s colonial courts. People who had been judges in high courts in Britain served on the Judicial Committee, along with a sprinkling of judges from the Commonwealth. Their decisions were often criticized for favouring provincial powers over federal authority, especially in fields such as trade and commerce. The Judicial Committee served as the court of final appeal for Canada until 1949, when that role was given to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Editorial: Baldwin, LaFontaine and Responsible Government
The Baldwin–LaFontaine government of 1848 has been called the “great ministry.” In addition to establishing responsible government, it had an incomparable record of legislation. It established a public school system and finalized the founding of the University of Toronto. It set up municipal governments and pacified French-Canadian nationalism after a period of unrest. Responsible government did not transform Canada overnight into a fully developed democracy. But it was an important milestone along the road to political autonomy. Most importantly, it provided an opportunity for French Canadians to find a means for their survival through the British Constitution. The partnership and friendship between Baldwin and LaFontaine were brilliant examples of collaboration that have been all too rare in Canadian history.
Emergencies Act
In July 1988, the War Measures Act was repealed and replaced by the Emergencies Act. The Emergencies Act authorizes “the taking of special temporary measures to ensure safety and security during national emergencies and to amend other Acts in consequence thereof.” In contrast to the sweeping powers and violation of civil liberties authorized by the War Measures Act, the Emergencies Act created more limited and specific powers for the federal government to deal with security emergencies of five different types: national emergencies; public welfare emergencies; public order emergencies; international emergencies; and war emergencies. Under the Act, Cabinet orders and regulations must be reviewed by Parliament, meaning the Cabinet cannot act on its own, unlike under the War Measures Act. The Emergencies Act outlines how people affected by government actions during emergencies are to be compensated. It also notes that government actions are subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights.
Statute of Westminster, 1931
The Statute of Westminster is a British law that was passed on 11 December 1931. It was Canada’s all-but-final achievement of independence from Britain. It enacted recommendations from the Balfour Report of 1926, which had declared that Britain and its Dominions were constitutionally “equal in status.” The Statute of Westminster gave Canada and the other Commonwealth Dominions legislative equality with Britain. They now had full legal freedom except in areas of their choosing. The Statute also clarified the powers of Canada’s Parliament and those of the other Dominions. (See also Editorial: The Statute of Westminster, Canada’s Declaration of Independence.)
Eric Lindros Testifies to Parliamentary Committee on Concussions
Hockey Hall of Famer Eric Lindros, whose playing career was cut short by multiple concussions, urged a Parliamentary health committee to create a national protocol for preventing and treating sports-related concussions. He recommended banning hitting in hockey until players are in their mid-teens, ensuring players have months of recovery time every year, and consolidating various protocols across different sports and regions into a unified approach.
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A&E/Music
Benjamin Benne explores immigration in his play ‘#nowall’ at the O'Neill
Benjamin Benne (Isaak Berliner/Eugene O'Neill Theater Center)
Published July 04. 2018 12:20PM | Updated July 04. 2018 3:17PM
Benjamin Benne’s play “#nowall” — about immigration in America — could not be more timely.
And yet it’s not a brand-new piece. Benne began working on it back in the spring 2016.
He recalls, “At that time, the election hadn’t even happened, but just the xenophobic rhetoric of Trump’s campaign and the beginning of alternative facts, with the concept of the anchor babies, already just the fear around immigrants who are supposedly not supposed to be able to be in the country and the pathways they had available to become citizens was enough for me to already begin writing. And, yeah, (the situation) just feels like it’s escalated and gotten worse, sadly.”
Indeed, he began to dig deeper into this work in 2017.
“Especially after the election, it felt necessary that I pursue this play and really make it a priority,” he says.
His mother was an immigrant from Guatemala, so, he says, as he was crafting the storyline for the play, it wasn’t difficult for him to consider: What if the conditions were different for her, and she hadn’t come into this country under the opportunities for amnesty in the 1980s, which allowed her to find a path to citizenship? What if she had been completely undocumented and was living in the U.S. with a child who was born here and thus was a citizen?
Benne’s “#nowall” focuses on a mother and daughter. The mother is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who came into America 18 years ago, knowing she was pregnant and wanting to give her child a better life. Now, that daughter — a citizen because she was born on U.S. soil — is 17 and is scheduled to take her SATs the next day.
“The piece really follows the barriers that are in place for individuals who are undocumented, with children who are legal citizens. It sort of stemmed from research about the myth of the anchor baby, as the Right was calling it, and how this idea of parents who have a child who is a U.S. citizen having a pathway to citizenship is totally a lie and how there are catch-22s within the system for individuals who are in that situation,” he says. “The play also explores systemic inequality for the children who are U.S. citizens as first generation living in this country.”
“#nowall” is one of eight plays chosen for this year’s National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford. Those works competed with more than 1,400 other submissions for inclusion in the conference.
This is the first time that Benne — who grew up in Los Angeles County and has been living in Minneapolis, where he has been on fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center — has been to the O’Neill.
“The thing about the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill is it is sort of the ultimate pipe dream of every playwright. It’s the most competitive new play program in the country, so it’s something that, even as a very young playwright, I knew existed and I knew I was almost obligated to apply to it every single year,” he says.
“The more I learned about the industry and the longer that I’ve been in it, the more I’ve realized the O’Neill is something most playwrights never get (into) in their lifetime or in their career. It was just this pipe dream, so I was absolutely thrilled and a little shocked when I found out from Wendy (C. Goldberg, the conference’s artistic director) that I had been invited to be a part of it this year.”
Not only did Benne see his play selected for the National Playwrights Conference, but he also was accepted into the Yale School of Drama, where he starts pursuing an MFA in playwriting this fall.
“It feels like, this year, a lot of dreams that I’ve had for myself that I’ve really been taking seriously, particularly over the last two, three years, are suddenly coming to fruition," says Benne, who is 30. "They are things I’ve always hoped and dreamed for but never actually expected. So I’m really excited to have these opportunities ahead of me, for sure."
Benne was always interested in storytelling. As a child, he recalls, storytime was a big deal for him. He loved when his parents would take him to the library on Tuesdays for storytime.
“I just found that the more and more that happened, the more and more I fancied myself a storyteller and liked to retell the stories I had heard,” he says.
He had an “incredible” creative writing teacher in fourth and fifth grades who asked the students to write their own stories, starting with personal narratives and eventually moving into fiction. So Benne wrote his first short book with illustrations in fifth grade; with that piece, he placed in a county-wide competition.
“So I think I always had a little bit of a writer’s bug, and once I caught the theater bug, it felt like it was only natural that the two collided,” he says.
He started doing theater in high school because it was unlike anything he had tried before. He came into it as an actor, but the more he was in that collaborative setting, the more he realized he wanted to direct; he liked to develop how a piece would be presented in terms of its atmosphere and style. When he was an undergraduate student at Cal State Fullerton in Orange County, his first playwriting teacher said she thought he was truly a writer and that was a path he should pursue.”
“I listened to her and have never looked back,” he says.
“#nowall” is a little different from Benne’s usually work, which is sprawling, with lots of locations and characters and elements of magic. This work, on the other hand, is very streamlined and mostly realistic, with just hints of magic.
Benne has worked on “#nowall” at the Playwrights’ Center, where he has been a fellow, and at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, where Benne did a workshop of the piece.
Not many audiences, though, have seen the play, and Benne is very curious how theatergoers at the O’Neill will respond.
“#nowall,” 7:15 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, 305 Great Neck Road, Waterford; $30; (860) 443-1238, www.theoneill.org.
National Playwrights Conference schedule
The National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford starts its public staged readings tonight with a new work by Beth Henley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her play “Crimes of the Heart” in 1981. And it continues through the end of the month, culminating in Sarah Tuft’s memorably titled “Marvel-ous Monica; In Which Monica Lewinsky Is a Superhero Hell-Bent On Revenge.”
In between are readings of an array of intriguing plays listed below.
Tickets are $30. Call (860) 443-1238 or visit www.theoneill.org. The O’Neill is located at 305 Great Neck Road, Waterford.
“Lightning” by Beth Henley, 8:15 p.m. Thursday
“#nowall” by Benjamin Benne, 7:15 p.m. Friday and Saturday
“Lockdown” by Cori Thomas, 8:15 p.m. July 11 and 12
“Ruth” by Enid Graham, 7:15 p.m. July 13 and 14
“Endlings” by Celine Song, 8:15 p.m. July 18 and 19
“The Forest” by Lia Romeo, 7:15 p.m. July 20 and 3:15 p.m. July 21
“Slave Play” by Jeremy O. Harris, 8:15 p.m. July 25 and 26
“Marvel-ous Monica; In Which Monica Lewinsky Is a Superhero Hell-Bent On Revenge” by Sarah Tuft, 7:15 p.m. July 27 and 28
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The highly successful New London-based nonprofit, formed in 2003, empowers young people through performing and creative arts — typically focused on serious social and cultural issues.
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"Murder in Old Bombay" by Nev March; Minotaur (400 pages, $26.99) — — —
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Cory Bush Missouri’s First Black Congresswoman Has Blacks Lives Matter as Top Agenda Item
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks with media gathered outside Mercado Central in Minneapolis, Minn on Aug. 11, 2020. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Ilhan Omar’s Campaign Paid Nearly $2.8 Million to Her Husband’s Firm
By GQ Pan
November 11, 2020 Updated: November 11, 2020
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) re-election campaign paid nearly $2.8 million to a political consultancy firm owned by Omar’s husband in just two years, according to government data.
Campaign finance records from the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) website suggest that the Democrat congresswoman paid husband Timothy Mynett’s eStreet Group $1.6 million between 2019 and July 2020, before giving another $1.1 million in the third quarter this year.
The $1.1 million paid by Omar’s campaign in the third quarter was close to 70 percent of the $1.6 million it spent over that period, per Fox News, which first reported the figures on Tuesday.
Most of the campaign expenses stemmed from digital advertising, which typically cost five figures, the FEC records show. The two largest payments in recent months were $404,338.75 paid on July 7 for digital advertising, and another $289,759.58 on July 24 for cable advertising.
Other payments covered services such as video production, fundraising consulting, campaign merchandise, and travel expenses ranging from less than $200 to over $15,000.
Under scrutiny for her campaign finance irregularities, Omar won her re-election in Minnesota’s fifth congressional district last week by 65 percent. After divorcing her then-husband in November 2019, Omar married Mynett, whose firm had received about $586,000 from Omar’s campaign by that point.
Shortly after Omar announced her new marriage in March, The Washington Post published an article, in which conservative critics raised concerns about payments by Omar’s campaign to eStreet Group.
“Taxpayers funded her campaign. Now they’re funding her marriage. How is this not an FEC violation?” conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote on Twitter at that time.
Omar responded to the article, saying that her campaign was funded by “grassroots donors” rather than the government, and that everything they spent was “used for a legitimate expense and paid at fair market value.”
“E Street isn’t just a consulting company to our campaign, they specialize in MN and are essential to the work we and other campaigns do every day,” she wrote, adding that her relationship with Mynett “began long after this work started” and they “consulted with a top FEC campaign attorney to ensure there were no possible legal issues with our relationship.”
The FEC, which is tasked to regulate money spent on elections, has faced dysfunction since former Republican Commissioner Caroline Hunter resigned in June, leaving three members—one Republican, one Democrat, and one independent—and three vacant seats. The commission currently can’t act, since every enforcement action needs at least four votes.
President Donald Trump in late October said he might nominate Sean Cooksey, general counsel to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Shana Broussard, counsel to current FEC Vice Chair Steven Walther (I), to fill two of the three vacancies on the commission.
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60% of Americans say that they would get a COVID-19 vaccine amid growing confidence in the development process, new data show
December 5, 2020 Inyoung Choi Uncategorized Comments Off on 60% of Americans say that they would get a COVID-19 vaccine amid growing confidence in the development process, new data show
60% of American adults said they are willing to get vaccinated if a "vaccine to prevent COVID-19 were available today," a Pew Research Center survey from November found.
Carol Smiljan/NurPhoto via Getty Images
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in November found 60% of American adult respondents said they are willing to get vaccinated if a "vaccine to prevent COVID-19 were available today."
American adult respondents who said that they have confidence that the "research and development process will yield a safe and effective" coronavirus vaccine rose from 65% to 75% between September and November, according to Pew.
Even so, 39% of respondents said they would not get a coronavirus vaccine, and willingness to get a vaccine varies widely among different racial and ethnic groups.
As a supply of vaccines is expected to arrive soon, leaders around the world, including three former US presidents, have publicly emphasized the safety of vaccines.
The American public is more willing to be vaccinated to prevent coronavirus than a few months before, according to a new survey.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in November and published last week found 60% of American adults said they would definitely or probably get vaccinated if a "vaccine to prevent COVID-19 were available today." This response is a little short of a 10% increase from answers published by Pew in September when 51% of respondents said they would get a vaccine.
At the same time, public confidence in the vaccine has appeared to have grown as well, according to data from Pew. American adult respondents who said that they have confidence that the "research and development process will yield a safe and effective" coronavirus vaccine rose from 65% to 75% between September and November, according to Pew.
Even so, 39% of respondents said they would definitely or probably not get a coronavirus vaccine, according to Pew. Experts warned that persistent hesitations about a coronavirus vaccine could prolong the fight against disease spread, Business Insider's Kelly McLaughlin and Yelena Dzhanova previously reported. Amid confusing factors like widespread misinformation that has spread through online communities since the beginning of the pandemic, experts emphasized that authorities should prioritize providing clear information for the public to trust the safety of the vaccines.
Information could play a significant role in Americans receiving the vaccine, as 18% of respondents in the Pew survey said "it's possible they would decide to get vaccinated once people start getting a vaccine and more information becomes available." The other 21% of respondents who said they don't intend to be vaccinated "are 'pretty certain' more information will not change their mind."
The survey also showed a significant gap between how different racial and ethnic groups feel about getting vaccinated against the coronavirus. According to Pew, 42% of Black Americans said they intended to get a vaccine, contrasting with the 61% and 63% of white and Hispanic survey respondents who said they would likely or definitely receive the vaccine. English-speaking Asian Americans were by far the most likely group to be vaccinated with 83% of respondents answering they would do so, according to Pew.
The Black community has been cautious about partaking in vaccine trials. This expressed skepticism is rooted in a level of mistrust in the American healthcare system, where history shows many Black Americans have been exploited for medical research, Business Insider's Taylor Ardrey previously reported.
In November, Moderna and Pfizer both filed for emergency-use authorization of their vaccines to the Food and Drug Administration. Moderna and Pfizer reported a 94.5% and 95% efficacy in its late-stage clinical trial, respectively.
As a supply of approed vaccines is expected to arrive soon, leaders around the world are working to build public trust in the vaccine. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, former President Barack Obama, former President George Bush, and former President Bill Clinton have all volunteered to get their coronavirus vaccine in public, to encourage public confidence in the vaccine.
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Originating from the remote highlands of Uttar Pradesh in India, the Gulabi Gang is a grassroots organisation that promotes the importance of women’s education, seeks to combat domestic violence and aims to empower women with economic independence. Established in 2006 by Sampat Pal Davi, a victim of domestic violence herself, the movement has grown from just six women to an estimated following of 200,000. Whilst their success at a local level demonstrates the power of grassroots initiatives, it has been their partnership with filmmakers, writers and photographers that has seen their message reach an international audience.
Challenging the entrenched caste system in India is no mean feat. Whilst the roots of this are often found at the broader socio-cultural level, the means by which they impact upon women as individuals occurs within the family unit. It is in this environment where the violence and intimidation that characterises the cyclic oppression of women within India plays out. In recognition of this, and indeed having lived the reality, the founders of the Gulabi gang focussed upon practical measures to combat abuse. Through self-defence classes for local women, as well as the public, and sometimes violent, shaming of sexual offenders, the Gulabi gang built a reputation as truly representative of the plight of local women.
Aside from their work within the local community, it is how they have been able to communicate their message with an international audience that has proved the source of both their legitimacy and funding. The Gulabi Gang have featured in films, documentaries and magazines around the globe. They inspired a British feature film in 2010, a Bollywood hit in 2011 and an American documentary in 2012. Embracing the power of video, the Gulabi Gang have permitted dozens of filmmakers to tell their story through short film, as seen above. Their leader Sampat Pal Davi, has been the focus of books and biographies and, in 2012, was named one of the ten most influential women in the world by the Guardian Newspaper. The recognition that development is both an art and a business is thus not lost on the Gulabi Gang, nor their partners that support them.
The Gulabi Gang have been granted a level of international attention rarely afforded grassroots organisations in developing contexts. Undeniably, this has resulted from a blend of opportunism and circumstance on behalf of both the global media and the organisation itself. The international film-makers and writers are given the opportunity to tell the story of pink clad vigilante women stalking the streets of India, an opportunity that has proven beneficial to both their careers and salaries. Yet the organisation has benefited from international recognition and a global donor pool that they would otherwise have never accessed. No matter how you look at it, and we'll call it mutual beneficence, the results have been truly remarkable. Thus, whilst it can be hard for organisations to rely upon, or even attempt to source this type of recognition from the media, its capacity to assist a local organisation is incredibly powerful and
The Gulabi Gangs success has thus been the result of both effective community mobilisation at the local level, as well as partnerships with global popular media at the international one. Through identification with women not only within their own community, but also around the world, the Gulabi Gang has been legitimised, allowing them to continue their work into the future. Through art and media, grassroots organisation can connect with wider communities, communicating their message, accessing sponsorship and inspiring others.
The Gulabi Gang - The Power of Popular Media
The capacity for grassroots organisations to collaborate with film-makers, photographers and writers is an incredible opportunity to communicate stories of development and connect audiences from around the world. This short film produced by Orlando von Einsiedel and Franklin Dow is an amazing example of the power that can found when this unique relationship is cultivated.
A learning center for development practitioners
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Lavrov Slams NATO Response to Ukraine
By Yekaterina Kravtsova
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (left) shaking hands with NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
BRUSSELS — At a meeting with NATO counterparts on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slammed NATO's response to recent protests in Ukraine and said last month's deal on Iran's nuclear program renders the need for missile defense in Europe obsolete.
In response to a joint resolution issued by NATO on Tuesday condemning the "excessive use of force" by Ukrainian police against anti-government protesters over the weekend, Lavrov said, "I do not understand why NATO adopts such statements."
"We encourage everybody not to interfere" in the situation in Ukraine, he told a news conference after talks with NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, adding that statements in defense of the anti-government protesters in Kiev could create a distorted impression of what is taking place there.
Kiev has witnessed the largest protests since the 2004 Orange Revolution after President Viktor Yanukovych opted not to sign an association agreement with the European Union last month in favor of closer ties with Russia. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest Yanukovych's decision, and Kiev's city hall has been occupied since Sunday.
Russia's position over the matter has pitted it against NATO members, with Lavrov urging the international community to let the Ukrainian government handle the crisis on its own.
"This is the internal business of Ukrainian authorities [whether to sign an agreement or not]," Lavrov said, noting that the Ukrainian opposition had acted violently at recent protests. His words echoed that of President Vladimir Putin, who said earlier this week that what was happening in Ukraine "was not a revolution, but a pogrom."
Lavrov's statements come in sharp contrast to accusations by European leaders last week that Russia had pressured Ukraine into backing out of the EU deal.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt wrote on his Twitter account that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Leonid Kozhara admitted during talks ahead of the summit in Vilnius that Kiev had been forced to give in to "Russia's harsh economic pressure."
Russia made a similar accusation against the EU, with Putin saying the planned Association Agreement would only "choke off whole sectors" of Ukraine's economy "just to please" European leaders.
At Wednesday's meeting in Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen reassured Lavrov that Russia's concerns over NATO's influence in the former Soviet republics were baseless, pointing out that Ukraine had already made it clear that it did not intend to become a member of NATO.
Rasmussen's comments come a month after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu named NATO expansion as one of Russia's biggest security threats.
Georgia's newly elected authorities who met with NATO as part of the NATO-Georgia Commission on Wednesday confirmed the intentions of their government to be a full-fledged NATO member, however, highlighting Russia's fears of NATO dominating the former Soviet republics.
Rasmussen said that within the five years since the NATO-Georgia Commission was established, Georgia had moved closer to NATO and become a unique and highly valued partner, an example for other countries in the region. He added that NATO's enlargement could make the Euro-Atlantic region more secure, which would benefit Russia as well.
Georgia contributes to NATO's mission in Afghanistan and intends to continue to assist Afghan forces after 2014.
Lavrov called the organization's expansion to Eastern Europe a violation of commitments to security and integrity made by NATO members at the highest level.
"We are convinced that NATO's expansion, particularly regarding Georgia, is a continuation of the old logic of the Cold War; it not only preserves the division lines that we all pledged to eliminate but also moves these lines further to the east," Lavrov said.
There was some progress at Wednesday's meeting, however.
Foreign ministers agreed on a plan of chemical weapons disposal in Syria, marking a step forward in NATO-Russia Council work.
"We have had a pretty good meeting, exchanged our views on the current situation in the world, expressed our satisfaction with positive shifts on chemical weapons disposal in Syria and the convening of the Geneva-2 peace conference," Lavrov said.
He said Russia believed that the U.S. in particular and NATO in general "would abide by international norms" regarding Syria in the future.
The agreement is designed to ensure the implementation of the joint mission by the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to oversee the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles and production facilities, as well as the U.S.-Russia deal on the elimination of Syrian chemical weapons reached in September.
The NATO-Russia Council has also agreed to continue joint activities in the fight against drug trafficking, terrorism and piracy. In addition, the council decided to launch a project to dispose of obsolete ammunition in Russia's Kaliningrad region, which would cost some 50 million euros and take five years.
Rasmussen also said NATO and Russia would begin cooperating in new areas next year, such as mine disposal in Afghanistan, which would "promote stability in Afghanistan and thus in the Euro-Atlantic region."
Lavrov made it clear, however, that Russia would strongly oppose NATO's missile defense plans in Europe. The deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program concluded last month should make a missile defense system in Europe unnecessary, he said.
"Our [NATO] colleagues said the Iran nuclear deal was a breakthrough, so if the deal is fully implemented, this problem is fully resolved, and the Iran nuclear program is put under tight control of the International Atomic Energy Agency, those arguments that are currently cited as a reason for setting up a missile defense system in Europe will be baseless," Lavrov said.
The missile defense issue is an ongoing bone of contention between Russia and NATO, with Russia saying the system could be used against it and NATO saying it is purely meant as a defense against possible threats.
Contact the author at e.kravtsova@imedia.ru
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10 Most Hardcore Gangsta Rappers
Music, People
Gangsta rap was, at its peak in the 1990’s, a musical force to be reckoned with. Coming from the streets of the inner-cities in America in the mid-1980s, early stars like Ice T gave way to true music icons like 2Pac and Snoop. Origination on the West coats of America, where it was famous for the laidback G-Funk style, it soon spread to the East Coast too although in a harder, more aggressive form. Seen as a golden age in rap music, it was a great time for music as well in general.
We take a look at ten of the most hardcore gangsta rappers who were around at its peak.
10 – Lady of Rage
Lady of Rage
Gangsta rap was infamous for its sometimes sexist attitudes towards women but Lady of Rage was one chick that was fully accepted. Most notable for her cameo on many fine Death Row tracks and her 1997 album, Necessary Roughness, she had a fast, strong flow and an eye-catching image. Although later leaving music to focus on acting, she left a real legacy behind as a strong female role model for female rappers to follow and some great rhymes.
09 – Slick Rick
Slick Rick – By Mika Väisänen [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons
An early exponent of what would become Gangsta rap was Slick Rick. Originally born in England, he moved to America later in life and joined the Get Fresh Crew. Finding fame as part of the crew, Slick Rick would also go onto great solo acclaim. His ‘Great Adventures of Slick Rick’ opus of 1988 had many of the things that would become classic Gangsta rap elements, most notably his vivid storytelling of street life. Possessing a unique flow, it was always easy to spot a Slick Rick track when it came on. Probably the biggest accolade you can give is that Snoop Dogg is a massive fan!
08 – Schoolly D
Schoolly D
Many people feel that this rapper was THE first Gangsta rapper and so he needs to be in here. His 1985 album Schoolly D and 1987 follow-up, Saturday Night – The Album showcased all what he and Gangsta rap was about. Sexual bragging, guns, violence, gangs and what it was like to live in the inner-cities in those times were all rapped about by Schoolly D when no-one else was. Of course, others soon followed but it is often said that he was the first one. As a rapper he had a distinctive style and was very inventive in both his lyrical flow and story-telling. Interestingly, he also claims to have invented snowboarding by sliding down the hills of Philadelphia on a piece of lino.
07 – Ice T
Ice T – By David Shankbone (David Shankbone) [CC BY 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons
Along with Schoolly D and then a little later NWA, Ice T was one of Gangsta rap’s original founding fathers. He released a string of albums from the early 1980’s onwards that set the benchmark for the genre and the parameters it would operate in musically. Although more abrasive than the G-Funk sound of later Gangsta rap, Ice T’s early forays into this area were amazing. Probably his most (in)famous release was 1988’s ‘The Power’, with its highly provocative artwork and songs. Ice T now mainly works in TV and films as an actor but will always be remembered for his unique flow and hard-hitting tales of street life by rap fans.
06 – Ice Cube
Ice Cube – Eva Rinaldi [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Another West coast Gangsta rap king was Ice Cube. Coming out of mega-successful group NWA, he went on to establish a stellar solo career before moving into acting. Widely known as the lyrical genius behind NWA, he wrote many of the lyrics for Eazy-E and Dr Dre at the time. After falling out with NWA over money, he left in 1989 and went on to gather great acclaim on his own. Albums like ‘Death Certificate’ and ‘Amerikaz Mot Wanted’ confirmed him not only as a great rapper with hard-hitting lyrics but also someone who was outspoken in his own views. All this added up to make him a true Gangsta rap great.
05 – Dr Dre
Dr Dre – By Jason Persse [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Dr Dre is probably the most important artist and producer in all of Gangsta rap’s history. However, although great to listen to, his actual rapping was not as good as some others so he falls lower in this particular list. His amazing career takes in Gangsta rap OG’s NWA, which he produced all the songs for as well as rapping on many. Following their split, he signed with premier label Death Row where he became in-house producer of choice for the label’s artists. This saw him work on the celebrated Snoop Dogg album ‘Doggystyle, and his own smash hit ‘The Chronic’ amongst others. Leaving Death Row, he then went on to discover Eminem and 50 Cent. His guidance saw them hit the big time with his production helping in no small part. When you consider all this and his mellow, smooth flow on the mic, he is definitely worth a place here.
04 – Biggie Smalls
Also known as The Notorious B.I.G, Biggie Smalls was easily the best and most well-known gangsta rapper from the East coast. Gangsta rap was mainly associated with the West Coast of America with major artists like Dre and Snoop coming from California and Death Row being based there too. The amazing success saw the East coast rapper from New York getting in on the action though, and Biggie Smalls was their leader. Like all the best Gangsta rappers Biggie talked with real authority in his songs as he had led a criminal life on the streets before turning to music. With around 20 million records sold worldwide thanks to albums like ‘Ready to Die’, he is still one of the most loved rappers around today. Unfortunately, like Tupac, he was a victim of the East coast/West coast rivalry when he was shot in retaliation for Pac’s death.
03 – Eazy E
Eazy E
Before Death Row records and Suge Knight become the embodiment of this genre, Eazy-E was the original gangsta rap impresario. Running Ruthless Records, he was the driving force behind the group that invented the whole Gangsta rap scene with NWA. His running of Ruthless and subsequent tracks when NWA split, warrant him an additional mention here though. Many point to albums like ‘Eazy Duz it’ and ‘It’s on (Dr Dre) 187um Killa’ as the very definition of gangsta rap. The funky, smoothed out tracks with deep bass and high synths had all the hallmarks gangsta rap songs were known for. When you added in Eazy’s distinctive yet funky flow, you had gangsta rap gold.
02 – Snoop Dogg
Who can forget the impact a young Snoop Dogg made when he first burst onto the scene? First album ‘Doggystyle’ did much to establish Gangsta rap as a credible force, both in the charts and on the streets. His laid-back flow and hard-hitting lyrics were a perfect mix – combined with the beats Dr Dre provided behind them, it was a recipe for success. He also got a lot of credit for his superb cameo raps on Dr Dre’s stunning ‘The Chronic’ album round the same time. Growing up in Long Beach, Snoop saw plnety of the streets to make his raps authentic and respected. Since bursting to stardom, his laid back yet banging songs have seen him continue to succeed in the music business, even when he left Death Row records.
01 – 2Pac
Top of the list is Tupac Amaru Shakur. Widely regarded by both critics and the public alike as one of the greatest artists the music industry has ever seen, his fame and charisma crossed boundaries. This made him a truly ground-breaking artist who appealed to people who normally didn’t listen to hip-hop. The reason for this a potent mix of outspoken views, magnetic personality, a killer flow, awesome lyrical content and some of the best songs rap has seen in its history. Tracks like ‘California Lovin’ and ‘Hit Em Up’ are rightly lauded as classics while albums like ‘The 7 Day Theory’ and ‘All Eyez on Me’ made him a true artist, rather just than a singles rapper. With around 75 million album sales to date and a legacy that will go on forever, Tupac really was the greatest Gangsta rapper ever.
The rappers on this list weren’t just the most hardcore gangsta rappers, they are some of the most iconic rappers of all time, period. The mix all had of distinct flow, superb lyrics, catchy songs and charisma, made them true superstars. While some rappers since like 50 Cent have tried to match their success, none have quite caught the hearts and mind of people in the same way.
hiphophiphop legendsrap
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Indonesian children who joined suicide attacks kept isolated by parents
Police said that the fathers of the families involved in the church bombing and the apartment in Sidoarjo where bombs were found were also friend
Anti-terror policemen walk during a raid of a house of a suspected terrorist at Medokan Ayu area in Surabaya, Indonesia May 15, 2018. Sigit Pamungkas / Reuters
The parents of Indonesian children and young adults who took part in deadly suicide bombings in Surabaya had isolated them within a tightly knit circle of militants, police said on Tuesday.
A family of six killed at least 13 people, including themselves, by bombing three churches in Surabaya on Sunday in the worst militant attack in the world's biggest Muslim-majority country since the bombing of restaurants in Bali in 2005.
On Monday, another militant family of five riding two motorbikes blew themselves up at a police checkpoint in the city, wounding 10 people and killing four of the family and two others. An eight-year-old daughter survived.
"These children have been indoctrinated by their parents. It seems they did not interact much with others," East Java Police Chief Machfud Arifin told reporters.
The eight-year-old daughter who survived did not have explosives strapped to her, but was thrown three metres into the air by the blast and was receiving intensive care in hospital, police said.
"She’s conscious. She will be accompanied by relatives and social workers when questioned by police," said Mr Arifin.
Police in Sidoarjo, near Surabaya, recovered pipe bombs at an apartment where a blast on Sunday killed three members of a family alleged to have been making bombs.
Three children survived and in interviews with police described how they had interacted only with parents and adults of similar ideology.
Every Sunday evening they were made to attend a prayer circle with these adults, said Mr Arifin, adding that the families behind the two sets of suicide attacks had attended.
Police said that the fathers of the families involved in the church bombing and the apartment in Sidoarjo where bombs were found were also friends.
After some major successes tackling Islamist militancy since 2001, there has been a resurgence in recent years, including in January 2016 when four suicide bombers and gunmen attacked a shopping area in the capital, Jakarta.
One family carried out deadly Indonesia church bombings
Indonesia terror: suicide attackers hit police HQ
Police suspect the attacks on the churches were carried out by a cell of the ISIS-inspired group Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an umbrella organisation on a US State Department terrorist list that is reckoned to have drawn hundreds of Indonesian sympathisers of ISIS.
The family involved in those attacks lived in a middle class housing complex in the city and police said the father was the head of a local JAD cell.
"I think the family setting and the isolation from the outside world … were perfect settings for him to indoctrinate the rest of his family," said Alexander Raymond Arifianto, an Indonesia expert at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini was quoted as saying by news portal Tempo.co that one of the sons had also refused to attend flag raising ceremonies or go to classes on Indonesia's state ideology Pancasila, which enshrines religious diversity under an officially secular system.
Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla urged the public to provide information that could help stop attacks.
"Please be the government’s eyes and ears so these things won't happen in the future," Mr Kalla told a conference in Jakarta.
In all, around 30 people have been killed since Sunday in attacks, including 13 suspected perpetrators, police said.
Sidney Jones, of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, said in a commentary for the Lowy Institute that the attacks showed how urgent it was for authorities to learn more about family networks.
"If three families can be involved in two days' worth of terrorist attacks in Surabaya, surely there are more ready to act," he said.
Published: May 15, 2018 05:03 PM
Capitol rioter 'hoped to sell Pelosi's laptop to Russia'
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Iraqi people fighting for dignity (Guest editorial)
Garda Ghista
Regarding the short “Terrorists No. 1 Threat to Troops”, under your National Briefs Section (Aug. 27 issue), the mass media leads the American public to blindly believe what is reported daily.
The so-called war ended over three months ago, but the US troops still did not provide electricity, clean water or salaries and jobs for millions of people who had salaries and jobs before the U.S. attack.
It is convenient for our government to blame anything and everything on ‘terrorists.’
As many Democratic presidential contenders have stated, (1) there was no connection between Saddam and 9-11, and (2) there were no WMD in Iraq.
Iraqis do not want to be occupied by a foreign power any more than Americans do. Let us imagine, just for a minute: suppose a country – any country – dropped 30,000 bombs on America, killed thousands of people (more than 20,000), and took over the country.
Suppose they destroyed the electrical system, cut off water supplies (causing widespread cholera, dysentery and other diseases) and removed all incoming sources of basic necessities.
Suppose they began a dictatorial rule of our country. Then, suppose they began to go after the natural resources of America (oil, coal, etc) and export them to their own country via private corporations equivalent to Exxon.
What would we do? Would we lie down and take it, or would we fight for our freedom from brutal occupation by a foreign power?
Iraqis are not terrorists.
They are people like you and me, and they will never tolerate occupation by another country – any more than we would.
Iraqis are fighting for their freedom, for their culture and their dignity.
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Fan Club Newsletters
Hosting Donations
Rolling Stone #381 - October 28, 1982
Whisky a Go Go, legendary L.A. rock club, closes
Rolling Stone #381 -- October 28, 1982
"I think you know this guy," said Plimsouls bassist Dave Pahoa as Tom Petty ambled onstage to join the L.A. band on closing night at the Whisky a Go Go, the seminal Sunset Strip club that spawned bands from the Doors and Buffalo Springfield to the Go-Go's and X. Petty and trhe Heartbreakers' keyboardist Ben Tench pumped the Plimsouls through "Route 66," "She's About a Mover," and Gary U.S. Bonds' "New Orleans." The venue is slated to reopen as a dance club; spokesmen assert that the live rock & roll can't make money in the Whisky's smallish 300-seat configuration.
The Petty Archives is not in any way knowingly affiliated, associated, or endorsed by the Tom Petty estate, any of the Heartbreakers, and/or any of their current or previous management. This site is nonprofit, but is not a registered nonprofit organization or entity.
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Being Human: The Elephant Man on 4K UHD Blu-ray
Joseph Merrick was the Elephant Man, born in 1862, who became renowned in the Victorian era for his physical deformities which as well as being severe are still a mystery to this day as to their cause, despite belated medical investigations into them. He was only twenty-seven when he died and had become a celebrity of sorts, though this was boosted by his treatment and subsequent memoirs from Frederick Treves, the doctor who looked after him in the latter stage of his life, and some would say, made his own name by association with Joseph, who he called John. It was from these memoirs that the 1980 film biography took from.
The film started out as a spec script from Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren, who happened to have their work read by producer Jonathan Sanger, who then proposed he produce it under the tutelage of screen funnyman Mel Brooks' Brooksfilms company. Brooks kept his name off the credits lest people thought it was a comedy (he did the same with David Cronenberg's The Fly), but was instrumental in bringing in director David Lynch to the project; he had been building a reputation as a unique talent since his feature debut Eraserhead became a midnight movie favourite, but had had trouble getting anything else made.
Lynch loved the script and worked with De Vore and Bergren to tailor it more to his liking, and once everything was set in place, Anthony Hopkins hired as Treves and John Hurt as Merrick, filming began with a group of British thespians (and Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft in a key role), everyone believing they were onto something good here. And so it was, it was Oscar-nominated, won the BAFTA for Best Picture, and went on to be a cult classic, even declared as a masterpiece in many quarters, though an example of how fickle the film industry can be saw Lynch follow it up with science fiction epic Dune in 1984, which tanked.
He was never put in charge of a potential blockbuster ever again, and frankly did not seem too bothered about that if it meant he could continue to follow his muse in his own particular way, but The Elephant Man is sometimes regarded as an odd man out in his filmography, much as the comparatively mild The Straight Story would be in 1999. Yet the holdovers from Eraserhead were assuredly there, with Freddie Francis's rich black and white cinematography, frequent interludes to emphasise the alien quality of the Victorian landscape with its industrial progress which could equally be a nightmare, and an air of the grotesque.
What The Elephant Man had that Eraserhead did not was an enormous humanity. The question of whether Treves, Merrick's evil manager Bites (Freddie Jones) - an invented character - or even the film itself were exploiting Merrick is one that presses hard on the story, even bringing in the audience. Are we here to feel sympathy for a man blighted with misfortune, or do we wish to gawp at him for being, in Bites' parlance, a "freak"? Is the truth somewhere in the middle, and is there a human need to seek out the different to either abuse it or use it to boost our own sense of self, an ego that could get a little stroking when we feel we have done the right thing in being kind?
Some accused this film of being excessively maudlin, pushing the viewer's emotions to elicit tears in the most cynical fashion, yet it goes far deeper than that in searching for the motivation in this sort of empathy. However, it is never academic, and though it invents occurrences for dramatic purposes, those purposes are wholly to serve the theme. In Hurt's performance there was a remarkable degree of an actor completely lost in the character, and not simply because of his extraordinary makeup, he interprets Merrick as nothing else in his filmography and renders Merrick as far more than some sideshow exhibit with pretensions to make us guilty or tearful.
Although Hopkins was not so keen on his role, he is just as impressive, bringing a focus to the deceptively complex conclusions running through the film. But really, Merrick himself was too large a personality to be contained by this work, and he went on to crop up across pop culture for decades after this reminded us of him. In Richard Curtis' romantic comedy The Tall Guy, Jeff Goldblum has a hit playing Merrick in a musical, a spoof of the successful Broadway play where David Bowie took the lead. Singer Michael Jackson spread a rumour he had bought the bones of Merrick, and referenced him in his Leave Me Alone video, whereas Merrick as a cameo appeared in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's comic From Hell, as well as a camp version in the Matt Berry sitcom Year of the Rabbit. Merrick holds such fascination that his biopic became a lightning rod for all sorts of attention, and finally, you like to believe he would have appreciated all its efforts.
[Studiocanal release The Elephant Man in fully restored 4K in a variety of editions, UHD, Blu-ray, DVD and download, looking and sounding terrific if you get to see it in its highest definition. The extras are an interview with the film's stills photographer, an interview with producer Sanger and a special booklet and art cards if you get the collector's edition.]
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Gilbreath had an incredible junior season as he recorded 179 tackles from his linebacker position, but his production on the field is only a small part of what he brings to the defense.
"He studies the game; he knows where everybody should be on the field and he understands how the whole defense works,” Farmer said.
The film study and all the time on the sidelines have paid huge dividends for the Panthers as Gilbreath is responsible for reading the opposing offense and making appropriate adjustments to the defensive line along with making calls on coverages.
"He's a heckuva team leader and very intelligent. One of the smartest kids you'll meet,” Farmer said. “He's a fun kid to coach and a fun kid to talk to."
Gilbreath is receiving plenty of preseason attention entering his senior season as he was named to Dave Campbell’s Texas Football Class 2A Preseason All-State team.
Spend five minutes around Gilbreath and you would not have a clue he is one of the top football players in the state of Texas. He has stayed grounded and humble thanks in large part to his father who is an assistant football coach and the Panther head basketball coach.
"You would never know he’s received so much preseason attention. He's the same every day. He works hard and does his job,” Farmer said. "I asked him about that and told him it was a great honor and he just kind of smiled. He's not going around patting himself on the back."
Seymour was the beneficiary of dropping to 6-2A DII following realignment and that has led to even higher expectations for the 2020 Panthers squad. However, the key to a playoff run this season is the same as many small Texas schools.
"The main key is staying healthy because we're so thin as everyone at this level is and we have to play physical. We have to take control of the game in the fourth quarter."
Farmer believes his team could make another playoff run this season if they can remain healthy. However, he stopped short of giving an idea of how far he expects his Panthers to go this year.
"I think we'll be where we need to be in the end but how far that takes us is something we'll find out."
Caden Gilbreath may be joined on the field by his younger brother on offense as freshman Keegan will compete for the starting quarterback job along with senior Jacob Wilden.
The Panthers should be able to move the ball regardless of who lines up under center thanks to an incredibly talented offensive line along with talented wide receivers Grant Wright and Jordan Dixon.
"Our strength will be our offensive line. It will be as good as it has been since I've been here. I'm super proud of the work those kids have done."
Seymour has plenty of talent around Gilbreath on defense this season as they will have a solid defensive line led by Joseph Trepanier, Michael Strickland and Calan Peters.
The key to the Panthers success on defense will depend on how quick a young group of defensive backs can mature and adjust to the speed of high school football.
"Our front seven is going to be as good as it's been but we're going to be super young in our secondary. Those kids are going to have to grow up in a hurry."
The Panthers went 6-6 last season, making it just the second time in the past 13 seasons they didn't finish above .500. The Panthers went 2-8 in 2014, which was the only time in that span they didn't advance to the playoffs.
Seymour Panthers
Head Coach: Hugh Farmer (seventh year)
Last year’s record: 6-6
Returning starters: 5 offense, 6 defense
Base offense/defense: Spread/3-3
Last playoff appearance: 2019 (Lost to WT Stinnett in area round)
Last district title: 2018
Aug. 28 vs. Clarendon 7 p.m.
Sept. 4 at Chico 7 p.m.
Sept. 11 vs. City View 7 p.m.
Sept. 18 vs. Windthorst (H) 7 p.m.
Sept. 25 at De Leon 7 p.m.
Oct. 9 at Electra* 7 p.m.
Oct. 16 vs. Olney* 7 p.m.
Oct. 23 at Quanah* 7 p.m.
Oct. 30 vs. Munday* 7 p.m.
Nov. 6 at Archer City* 7 p.m.
PLAYER TO WATCH: OL/DL Joseph Trepanier (Sr.) – With the Panthers breaking in a new quarterback this fall, the 255-pounder, who also made 129 tackles last year, will provide crucial trench experience.
GAME TO WATCH: Oct. 23 at Quanah – The Panthers have won four straight meetings against the Indians. A fifth consecutive victory could set up a district title showdown in Week 11.
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News VIC International students changing the rental market in Melbourne CBD: HTW residential
International students changing the rental market in Melbourne CBD: HTW residential
| Oct 21,2019
Living close to tertiary education institutions is one of the largest forces that drive rental demand in the Melbourne CBD and CBD fringe areas, according to the latest Herron Todd White (HTW) residential report.
The valuation firm took a look at rental yields across the nation to dissect where to find the best returns in residential markets.
With a population of 170,000 people and growing, the CBD is home to people coming from all ages and backgrounds.
Residents range from international students, young professionals and older couples. Melbourne has something to offer everyone
"With two of the most prominent universities located in and near the heart of Melbourne, University of Melbourne and RMIT, international students make up the largest portion of enrolments each year, resulting in a high demand for apartments in the CBD and neighbouring suburbs, ultimately changing the rental market within the area," the valuation firm said.
These latest statistics show that apartments in the CBD are priced at an average of $435,000 and generate $530 per week in rent, earning a 5% to 6% rental yield for investors.
Latest statistics show that apartments in Carlton are priced at an average of $347,000, generating an average of $470 per week in rent, providing investors a rental yield of 7%.
"Previously known as the world’s most liveable city for seven years running, Melbourne is an attractive city for tourists and investors," the valuation firm added.
"Whether it be a short or long-term arrangement, investors are thinking outside the box and finding ways to increase their rental property returns by taking advantage of accommodation hosting platforms such as Airbnb, where most property listings are heavily concentrated in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, particularly within the CBD areas."
The HTW report suggests secondary hot spots for Airbnb listings include areas in St Kilda, South Yarra, Port Melbourne and Brunswick.
The average cost to rent an apartment via the Airbnb platform within the CBD and fringe areas can range from $120 to $190 a night.
"If we can assume that the weekly gross rent that can be collected via Airbnb is applied to the CBD’s medium price for apartments ($435,000), this would generate an upward yield of an incredible 10%.
"With the correct marketing, property and location, there are many different ways an investor can strategically maximise their property in the CBD and fringe suburbs as Melbourne is the destination for tourists, young professionals and international students."
Melbourne CBD Rental Yields
Victoria's median house price records largest increase since 2000
Light Edge is a stunning residence in Richmond, complete and ready to move in
Urban's tour of the Sandy Hill Penthouse display suite
Sandy Hill Penthouse: What's within walking distance from this Sandringham property?
Six sleek new apartments in Melbourne
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Parallelhandel
Einwände
Politikbriefe
Pharmaceutical Dialogue
Ausgabe 61 (April 2018)
Hier PDF-Datei herunterladen
With the beginning of 2018, the Bulgarian Presidency has taken over the Presidency to the Council of the EU for the first time. Parallel distribution of pharmaceuticals appears to be one of the most viable options for better access to medicines also in Bulgaria.
Affordability and availability of medicines remain in the spotlight as Member States have been reacting to the excessive medicines´ prices and the artificial shortages caused by the Big Pharma. In the meantime, the European Commission has urged Member States to apply the Public Service Obligation in order to ensure availability of medicines across the supply chain.
The UK´s pending exit from the EU has led to the creation of various scenarios regarding the free movement of pharmaceuticals and the availability of medicines through parallel import (see page 2). Moreover, British community pharmacies react against the high medicines´ prices.
VAD is ready to contribute to the dialogue with the Member States and the upcoming Presidencies in order to ensure access to innovative and affordable medicines for all patients.
Prof. Edwin Kohl
Chairman of COSTEFF and the VAD
Pharmaceutical & Health Care Politics
EU to step up against excessive pricing and lack of medicines
© European Union 2013
EP Louise WEISS building © Architecture Studio
2018 is already underway, promising decisive developments in the EU´s health policies. In the meantime, the Member States are still struggling under the burden of excessive pricing of medicines which is imposed by some Big Pharma companies. The availability of medicines remains a key topic on the EU´s agenda and the European Commission warns that shortages of pharmaceuticals can have negative consequences for the health of patients.
European Commission urges Member States to apply the Public Service Obligation
The European Commission has reacted to the increased phenomena of artificial shortages caused by the malpractices of the manufacturers. The Commission has requested from Member States to discuss the implementation of Article 81 of Directive 2001/83/EC of the pharmaceutical legislation which introduces the Public Service Obligation (PSO), a principle that obliges manufacturers and wholesalers to provide a continuous supply of medicinal products on the market. The European Commission wishes to take stock of the measures implemented by the Member States with the aim of finding examples of best practices which could be shared with the rest of the Member States.
Manufacturers still enjoy strong negotiation position in the price-setting as EU pharmaceutical markets are separated. The recent “Aspen case” has triggered the European Commission´s interest in investigating further the anti-competitive practices followed by the pharmaceutical industry. Excessive pricing on life-saving medicines is a big issue for a number of Member States that see shortages in their stock or even the complete withdrawal of such products from the market. Such practices could ultimately affect the public health safety and for that reason Member States are more and more sensible to this topic.
EU focuses on the high prices of pharmaceuticals
The Member States are reacting against excessive pricing and the artificial shortages caused by the Big Pharma. 2018 has proved so far that it is the year when the European Commission and the Member States unite in order to build up pressure on the Pharmaceutical Industry to accept fair pricing of medicines and cease artificial shortages which threaten the access to medicines and ultimately patients´ lives.
Post-Brexit scenarios for Parallel Distribution of medicines
Photo: istock/ miriam-doerr
The UK´s exit from the EU will bring many changes in healthcare and health policies which will affect all the stakeholders across the supply chain. UK has been so far one of the most important parallel importing countries in the EU with 9% parallel imports of pharmacy market sales at consumer prices in 2015. Parallel distribution has led to direct savings of 986.2 million euros for the National Healthcare System (NHS) in the period 2004-2009. The suggested indirect savings indicate that the prices of medicines in the UK are at least 3% cheaper than they would have been without the practice of parallel distribution.
Exhaustion of patent rights within the EU/EAA
Among the scenarios that are presented by the British Association of European Pharmaceutical Distributors regarding the impact of Brexit on the British market, the first one highlights the danger in case the UK loses the benefit of rights within the EU/EEA. If that were the case, the prices would rise as the only competition to the monopoly of the manufacturers would be lost. Since wholesalers and retail pharmacies would not have access to cheaper products through parallel distribution, the level of clawback would become unsustainable. The loss of parallel imports could ultimately lead to the loss of community pharmacists. Moreover, the prices of medicines could rise also for the EU citizens due to the change in parallel import law conditions.
International Exhaustion of Intellectual Property rights
An alternative scenario would be for the UK to adopt an international exhaustion for the Intellectual Property (IP) rights. This scenario could compromise the relationship within the EU regarding the parallel exports from UK into the EEA. Moreover, the need to align measures in order to secure patient safety and prevent counterfeit medicines would create regulatory issues which could make the exhaustion of rights with non-EEA countries difficult.
Protecting patients´ rights for access to life-saving medicines
The ultimate goal in the bilateral negotiations between the EU and the UK should be the patients´ interests and their right to have access to medicines. For this reason the existing benefits should remain as it appears to be the most viable option in order to ensure that the competition created by the parallel distribution of pharmaceuticals which leads to direct and indirect savings will not be compromised and that patients´ access to life-saving medicines is secured.
Access to medicines for UK pharmacies in disarray
Photo: istock/ AmandaLewis
The fear of medicines´ shortages in the UK has forced pharmacists to pay heavy prices for generic medicines, while the British Department of Health is delaying the reimbursement of contractors. Community pharmacies are in danger of being emptied. Many reasons have been suggested in order to explain the increase in the prices, including the UK´s imminent exit from the EU. Supply issues are another reason, following the withdrawal of manufacturing licences by certain manufacturers that did not comply with the manufacturing practices as laid down by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
The Healthcare Distribution Association (HDA), alongside the British Generic Manufacturers believe that certain wholesalers and independent pharmacist wholesalers are stockpiling excessive quantities of generic medicines, in order to create artificial shortages and release the medicines on the market once the prices rise due to the excessive demand. Certain proposed government regulations can act as the remedy for this situation requiring manufacturers, importers and wholesalers to provide more information regarding sales and purchases of generic medicines on a quarterly basis.
Bulgaria: Parallel Imports benefit Patients’ Interests
Photo: istock/ Anton Donev
Amidst the Bulgarian Presidency to the Council of the European Union, the Bulgarian parallel distributors´ association has published an opinion, highlighting the benefits that parallel import of pharmaceuticals can bring to patients in Bulgaria.
First and foremost, parallel distribution allows low-income patients to purchase high quality medicines in reasonable prices. Moreover, parallel distribution acts as the competition to the monopoly created by the pharmaceutical industry, thus making the price effect beneficial for the consumers. The Ministry of Health however is encouraged to continue the checks and controls over the activities of wholesalers. More precisely, the competent authorities are encouraged to penalise illegal medicine trade as wholesalers are obliged to export only the surplus quantities. The Bulgarian parallel distributors endorse the fight against bad practices and encourage the Ministry of Health to follow the successful paradigm of many other Member States that have benefited from parallel imports of pharmaceuticals.
25 year of European Internal Market: Mission (not yet) accomplished
by Jo Leinen
Photo: Jo Leinen
Citizen’s support for the European project might not always be the strongest, since – as a wise man said – it is hard to fall in love with an internal market. However, citizens do appreciate the fundamental freedoms of the EU’s internal market. In fact, free movement is the advantage of a united Europe that people often experience first-hand, through traveling, buying goods abroad, using a single currency or visiting a doctor who comes from a different EU country. 25 years since the “official” birth of the internal market on the 1st of January 1993 with the treaty of Maastrich it is still at the heart of European Integration. After 60 years of the existence of the European project starting with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, it is often the loss or restriction of obvious achievements, which brings back to memory the value of free movement.
After a quarter of a decade, the internal market has matured, but constraints are still visible. An EU internal market for medicines is not yet a reality. The development in this sector has not been linear, but characterised by setbacks due to lack of enforcement by the Commission and due to trends of national protectionism by the Member States. The Commission has attempted to abolish bureaucratic hurdles to an EU-wide trade of pharmaceuticals. Its 1998 Communication on the internal market in pharmaceuticals and the 2008 Communication on “Safe, Innovative and Accessible Medicines: a Renewed Vision for the Pharmaceutical Sector” argueing for a free market. It is stressed that an internal market for medicines should be completed despite the specific characteristics of the pharmaceutical sector. Member States should implement measures to remove obstacles that restrict EU-wide imports and exports. Ten years later, an internal market has still not become a reality.
Several Member States obviously fear shortages on their own pharmaceutical markets and want to prevent their lower-priced products from being exported to Member States with higher prices. Of course, in the sensitive health sector, a careful balance is needed between safeguarding a functioning European market with free movement of goods on the one hand and ensuring sufficient supply of important medicines to the consumers on the other. In theory, the EU’s public service obligation from 2001 could strike exactly this balance, ensuring sufficient supply in a Member State while allowing for competition thereby offering attractive prices to consumers. Again, Member States have not been consequent in implementing the obligation while the Commission has been cautious in its enforcement. As the Commission is currently looking into the degree of implementation to draw consequences, the European Parliament should become more outspoken on this issue. The Parliament has been an advocate not only for citizens’ rights but also for a functioning internal market without undue barriers. A clear follow up of the Commission’s survey could be a suitable starting point for a new discussion on the free movement of medicines. After 25 years, completing the internal market is still at the heart of European Integration, but also a mission yet to be accomplished.
Jo Leinen is member of the European Parliament within the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.
Vaccination and vaccine hesitancy at the centre of EU´s health policies
Recent communicable-disease outbreaks, such as measles, in various EU Member States have indicated the need for coordinated pan-European vaccination policies and the increase of vaccine uptake by the European Citizens.
The European Commission has published a roadmap and a public Consultation requesting from Member States to strengthen their cooperation against vaccine preventable diseases. DG Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) is reinforcing its support to national vaccination policies in order to increase coverage, through the preparation of a Joint Action on vaccination.
The Joint Action will attempt to address vaccine hesitancy and enhance the cooperation of national immunisation advisory groups (NITAGs) with a view to increasing transparency and trust in the decision-making process regarding the introduction of new vaccines and the availability of vaccines.
Commission launches Health Technology Assessment proposal
The Commission has published a proposal for a Regulation on Health Technology Assessment (HTA) aiming to increase cooperation among EU Member States for assessing health technology. The Commission believes that more assessments will allow innovative, therapeutic tools reach patients faster.
Moreover, the national authorities will be able to craft their healthcare policies on solid evidence and easier procedures for the pharmaceutical industry. This proposal will cover further innovative medicines and medical devices allowing the cooperation at EU level for joint clinical assessments.
Member States will be able to use HTA tools not only for joint clinical assessments, but also for joint scientific consultations. The aim is to enhance the identification of emerging health technologies and lastly deepen voluntary cooperation between Member States.
International Exhaustion of Intellectual Property rights explained
Before the UK joined the EU, English law permitted a degree of international exhaustion since parallel distribution was viewed as a positive influence for the market by creating competition, lowering prices and benefiting the consumer. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) Agreement on Trade Relating Aspects of International Property Rights (TRIPS) allows each Member State the freedom to address exhaustion of intellectual property (IP) rights.
The UK could adopt international exhaustion for some or all IP rights, thus allowing into the British market all products and services incorporating IP rights provided that the IP rights have been placed on a market by the IP owner or with his consent. In such a case the presence of significant intra brand competition from imports would still guarantee that UK consumers pay the lowest prices.
Joint Action Plan on Vaccine Hesitancy
The European Commission will increase its financial support regarding the national vaccination efforts in an attempt to increase coverage through the launch of a Joint Action on vaccination, which will be co-funded by the Health Programme (€3 million). The Joint Action will focus on vaccine hesitancy and will be coordinated by INSERM in France with 24 other countries acting as partners. The aim of the Joint Action Plan is to reinforce the interaction of Immunisation Information Systems (IIS) in order to increase vaccine coverage.
Moreover, it will assess the European reminder and recall systems and elaborate procedures in order to establish vaccine procurement as well as analyse the financing mechanisms for sustainable purchase. In addition to this, the Joint Action will create sustainable mechanisms for analysing barriers to low vaccine coverage. Future EU incentives on vaccination will focus on tackling vaccine hesitancy in social media, by using vaccines as the case study for combating fake news in the EU. The Joint Action will run for three years with the possibility of extension depending on its success.
Global level
World Immunization Week 2018
The goal of World Immunization Week 2018 is to exert pressure on greater action regarding immunization around the world, and focus on the role that everyone can play in this effort, from donors to individuals. The 2018 campaign will highlight the value of vaccines to certain donor countries and the significance of investing in immunisation programmes.
For further information please see:
who.int/campaigns/
immunization-week/2018/
campaign-essentials/en/
Parallel Distribution of Pharmaceuticals in Germany
This seminar will focus on the regulatory requirements of parallel import and distribution and will provide information on how to properly label and repackage medicines. Amongst the topics that will be discussed are the free movement of pharmaceuticals, the current challenges in the registration maintenance, e-submission, requirements for the pharmacovigilance system and implementation of the Falsified Medicines Directive. This seminar is aimed at specialists and executives involved in parallel imports /exports, approvals, repackaging and labelling.
forum-institut.de/seminar/
1804945-parallelhandel-von-
arzneimitteln-in-deutschland
27th Annual EU Pharmaceutical Law Forum 2018
This conference brings together senior legal professionals from private practice and in-house counsel in order to exchange views on topics such as the clinical trials regulation, key regulatory challenges, the benefits of the Unified Patent Court and Competition Law.
lifesciences.knect365.com/
pharmalaw/parallel-trade-2018/
VAD e.V. German Association of Pharmaceutical Parallel Distributor
Prof. Edwin Kohl President of VAD
Im Holzhau 8
D-66663 Merzig
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18 months – 8th grade
Inspired to Learn. Empowered for Life
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ROBERT CRAMER
Toddler: 18 Months – 3 Years
Primary: 3–6 Years
Lower Elementary: Grades 1–3
Upper Elementary: Grades 4–5
Middle School: Grades 6-8
Valley Montessori School
1273 North Livermore Avenue,
Office Hours: 8:30am - 5:30pm
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Valley Montessori School is the largest not-for-profit, and only triple accredited school in California. We are fully accredited by the American Montessori Society (AMS) with non-traditional Montessori age groupings at the Upper Elementary and Middle School Levels, the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). VMS is a certified California Green Business making us the only school in the Tri-Valley and just one of four Montessori schools in the state of California with this distinguished honor. Valley Montessori is a nationally recognized model of Montessori education, attracting the best and brightest educators and staff.
NOTICE OF NONDISCRIMINATORY POLICY: Valley Montessori School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.
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Philippine Church calls for support for accused prelates
Sedition charge proceedings expected to start against them this week
Joe Torres, Manila
Updated: August 05, 2019 07:35 AM GMT
One of the accused prelates, Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of Kalookan leads a 'prayer vigil' in his diocese on Aug. 2. (Photo by Vincent Go)
Philippine church leaders have appealed to Catholics to pray for four bishops facing a preliminary investigation this week for sedition.
In a statement signed by Archbishop Romulo Valles of Davao, the Catholic bishops' conference called for "solidarity ... in prayer."
He said prayers are imperative as the four bishops were "now facing difficult days ahead".
"The processes related to the sedition charges have now started to move .... We ask ourselves as brother bishops, what can we do for them?" said Bishop Valles.
Philippine authorities have filed charges of inciting sedition, cyber libel, libel, and obstruction of justice against Bishop Honesto Ongtioco of Cubao, Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of Kalookan, retired prelate Teodoro Bacani Jr., and Archbishop Socrates Villegas of Lingayen-Dagupan.
The charges stem from the release of a video that went viral on several social media platforms early this year that linked President Rodrigo Duterte and his family to the illegal drug trade.
Also facing the same charges were former education secretary Brother Armin Luistro, Divine Word priest Flaviano Villanueva, Jesuit priest Albert Alejo and Father Robert Reyes.
Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila also asked priests and Catholics to recite a "prayer for the nation" for "persecuted" bishops and priests during the entire month of August.
Outpouring of support
The four accused bishops have expressed their gratitude to what they described was an "outpouring of support" from the people.
Duterte about-face on priest threats won't last
Philippine priests told to take threats seriously
Sedition rap against Philippine clergymen 'beyond belief'
"I would like to see in it a stand, not just for us bishops, priests and religious, but for all others who suffer the consequence of being on the side of truth, justice and human dignity," said Bishop David.
Retired Bishop Bacani said he knows he is "completely innocent, and so are my fellow bishops," adding that, "prayer is our best weapon to fight evil."
During a "prayer vigil" on Aug. 2, Bishop David stressed that he is "a bishop and a shepherd" who respects the democratically elected government.
"We respect the democracy in our country and the mandate of our authorities," he said, adding that he hopes authorities will also respect the "rule of law."
"Our plea is for the law to be upheld, for human rights and dignity to be respected, for lives to be preserved, and for the sick and victims to be given aid," said Bishop David.
The prelate has been vocal in his criticism of President Rodrigo Duterte's "war on drugs" that has reportedly resulted in the death of thousands of suspected drug users and dealers.
"Ideology of death"
In a separate statement, the Ecumenical Bishops Forum (EBF) condemned what it described was an "ideology of death" within the country.
The Catholic and Protestant prelates said the "ideology" is responsible for the threats, harassment and killing of church people.
The bishops issued the statement following the killing on Aug. 2 of Pastor Ernesto Javier Estrella of United Church of Christ in the Philippines in the southern Philippines.
"The number of violent attacks against Christian human rights defenders has increased alarmingly in the three year’s of Duterte’s government," read the EBF statement.
"His avowed contempt for human rights has provided the institutional framework of this violence being committed against those who uphold the sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human person," it added.
They called on Christian communities to "defeat the ideology of death and culture of impunity by re-appropriating and living-out the prophetic heritage of their faith."
"Christians must act together for the defense of justice, human rights, democracy and the common good," read the statement.
"Let us fight against the systematic design to undermine the participation and contributions of church people in the people’s struggle for equality, dignity and the common good," it added.
The ecumenical bishops' group said that "now is the Gospel moment to speak out and stand together in the name of Christ in upholding the God-given value of human life, dignity and rights."
The EBF is a fellowship of Catholic bishops and leaders of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines, the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, and the United Methodist Church.
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Kingston: A Closer Look at Devon House
By VisitJamaica on Jun. 21, 2018
Jamaica’s ‘Heartbeat’: Kingston, the hub of the hustle and bustle is the ideal place for the adventurous visitor! The activities in this city are unmatched, and show a different side to the island, quite unlike those found in Jamaica’s tourism capital Montego Bay.. Of all the things to do in Kingston however, visiting Devon House is one of the most iconic!
Devon House went through a series of buying, selling, subdividing and constructing to become the national treasure it is today. King Charles II awarded 600 acres of glebe (a piece of land belonging to a clergyman that provided income) to Rev Zellers, the glebe included the area ‘Devon Penn’. A Rectory (Church of England owned by a rector) was built on the Devon Penn by the St. Andrew Parish Church and was occupied by the Church’s rectors for the next 128 years. The rectory was then sold to Jamaica’s first black millionaire George Stiebel who built the Devon House Mansion. Stiebel then sold this mansion to Reginald Melhado, but only sold 11 of the 51 acres of the land, subdividing the remaining 40 acres to form the roadways Waterloo Road and Devon Road.
The next owner of the Mansion was Cecil Lindo a smart and savvy businessman with investments in the alcohol industry. When he died in 1960, his wife Agnes moved to New York, leaving the mansion empty. She was approached by developers in 1965 regarding the sale of the mansion in favour of building condominiums, however the then Minister of Welfare and Development the Honourable Edward Seaga caught wind of this plan to demolish the mansion and purposed in his heart that this beautiful house, with such rich history an architecture, could not be removed. So in swift judgement, he placed a restriction on the property under the National Trust Act which ceased the demolition of the mansion. The National Trust became the proprietors and began an extensive and careful restoration process which was led by a well-known English Architect Tom Concannon, with matter of urgency. Devon House was officially opened on January 23, 1968 and became an official National Monument by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust in 1990. The mansion has had visits from royalty since it opened its doors, from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1983 and in more recent years His Royal Highness Prince Charles of Wales in 2008 and his Royal Highness Prince Harry of Wales in 2012. Apart from its historical and cultural richness, it was deemed Jamaica’s first gastronomy centre by the Honourable Edmund Bartlett, Minister of Tourism in 2017.
The grand mansion has not only provided historical significance but is now home to over 20 shops where you can get Jamaican souvenirs, authentic Jamaican cuisine and even a spa, as well as the world famous Devon house ice-cream. The mansion offers packaged tours such as a tour of the mansion and a sample of the products from the shops on site.
Devon House also offers venue rentals, and with its expansive,immaculate lawns and picturesque backdrops, it’s no wonder that the property is a favourite for wedding photos and elegant events. They offer the North, South and East lawns (the East lawns have a multipurpose gazebo) for rental, as well as the formal gardens, the mansion itself and a kids zone.
Devon House has something for everyone, you can spend the entire day at this location and experience it all, history, culture and food, all with an idyllic backdrop – an oasis in the hustle and bustle of Kingston.
Categories: Kingston
Tags: history, heritage, food
VisitJamaica
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Gina Osterloh &
Latipa (née Michelle Dizon)
July 2020 / Columbus, OH &
Riverside, CA / Transcript
at land’s edge
http://www.atlandsedge.com/research/
at land’s edge was an autonomous and unaffiliated pedagogical platform based in East and South Los Angeles that centered people of color, immigrants, the poor, the undocumented, and the indigenous. It was founded in 2015 and active until 2018. During this time, dozens of artists, scholars, and activists collaborated to mentor, support and develop cultural production that focused on radical political imagination and solidarity.
at land’s edge was founded by Latipa (née Michelle Dizon), and its co-organizers over the years included: Irina Contreras, Sandra de la Loza, Yasmine Diaz, Latipa (née Michelle Dizon), Gloria Galvez, Jen Hofer, Andre Keichian, Gelare Khosgozaran, B. Neimeth, Shruti Purkayastha, Rose G. Salseda, Weng San Sit, Penelope Uribe-Abee, Yajaira Villareal, and Suné Woods.
Capital, Empire, War
You gave them your songs and your speeches, and what did you get? A generation of parrots singing your America and The Star-Spangled Banner, thinking it’s their country they are singing about. . . . Watch out when they get their independence after this war. They’ll drive all of us away. They’ll try to unlearn everything, almost everything, you have taught them, even the language you have tried to force down their throats.
From Bienvenido N. Santos, The Volcano, published by New Day Publishers, Quezon City, Philippines (1986)
Every time [Imelda] said East she turned her head one way and every time she said West she turned the other East, West, East, West, and then we turned ours with hers, until we were dizzy, and stifling yawns. “The Philippines,” she said, “was ideally positioned to play the go-between for the East and the West, because it was neither one nor the other, but both.” She often used “I” when she meant the Philippines, and “the Philippines” when she meant I.
Excerpt of “Chapter 27: Imelda,” from Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, published by HarperCollins, New York (1990).
Catholic nuns from the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception help form the first line of defense against Marcos troops on EDSA Boulevard, two miles from the headquarters of anti-Marcos leaders. Religious leaders were a key part of the “People Power” revolt that brought down Marcos on February 24, 1986. (Photo: © Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley/Kim Komenich)
U.S. Imperialism
The history of U.S. imperialism constitutes a particularly important site for understanding the subjectivity and self-activity of Filipinos. It created cultural, military, economic, and political ties between the United States and the Philippines, inaugurating, in E. San Juan, Jr.’s words, “this long, weary, torturous exodus from the periphery to the metropolis with no end in sight.” U.S. imperialism also transformed the Philippines into a major source of cheap labor and raw materials, paving the way for the incorporation of Filipinos within circuits of global capital. In short, U.S. imperialism set in motion a process that structures the lives of Filipinos today, a process that reaches into their lives, “not so much like a shadow as like a chain.”
The historical amnesia surrounding U.S. imperialism has proven to be deeply consequential not just for the United States but also for those colonized by the nation. For Filipinos, it has come to mean grappling with the “spectre of invisibility” themselves, precisely because a full accounting of their presence necessitates a full accounting of a largely unthinkable history. Just as the notion of the United States as an empire has not fared well in dominant U.S. historiography, neither has the notion of Filipinos as colonized subjects. Within standard historical accounts, for example, Filipinos have all but disappeared, as evidenced by the erasure of the Philippine-American War and Filipino insurgency against U.S. imperial rule; if Filipinos appear at all, it is usually as objects of derision—savages unfit for self-government, economic threats displacing white labor, sexual deviants obsessed with white women, or ungrateful recipients of U.S. beneficence.
Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr., “Introduction, Critical Considerations,” in Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse, published by Temple University Press, Philadelphia (2006).
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Excerpted lecture by Trinh T. Minh-ha (with an introduction by Litia Perta) at 356 Mission, Los Angeles, CA, April 21, 2016. Presented in conjunction with a screening of Trinh’s film Reassemblage (1982, 40 min), the program opened Just Speak Nearby: The Politics & Practices of Art Writing, a two-day series of dialogues, lectures, performances, and screenings that explored the possibilities of art writing. Participants included Latipa (née Michelle Dizon), Simon Leung, Tisa Bryant, among others. Organized by Litia Perta.
Sarita Echavez See
“The ideal mentorship relationship is for there to be no mentorship relationship.”
Untitled (Lesbian Bed #7), 2002, Tammy Rae Carland
Tammy Rae lived in Durham, North Carolina (where I met her) and taught at UNC Chapel Hill before moving to California in 2002 to teach at CCA, where she met Gina Osterloh. Both Gina and I attended UC Irvine for graduate school at the advice of Tammy Rae, where we met.
-Hồng-Ân Trương
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Wells College History
The rich and enthralling history of Wells College begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the dreams and ambition of Henry Wells - a pioneering businessman who founded the American Express Company and Wells, Fargo & Company.
Inauguration Schedule of Events
A Culture of Belonging
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Alumnae/Alumni Network
For additional information about Wells and its history, contact the Wells College Communications Office at communications@wells.edu.
Rejecting an offer to merge his institution with Ezra Cornell’s nearby fledgling college, Henry Wells insisted in a 1866 letter that his goal was “to promote a higher standard of moral and intellectual culture that has yet been obtained by the ordinary village and town institutions” more commonly available to women at the time. He described this lofty plan as “the dream of my life” and - with the support of benefactor E.B. Morgan and other prominent Finger Lakes businessmen, politicians, and educators - saw it come to fruition on the plot of land across from his still-standing villa, Glen Park. Wells Seminary, as it was originally called, was inaugurated on July 23, 1868.
In its early years, the women’s college offered instruction in language, music, history, mathematics, and science in a homey atmosphere. The original goal - to educate women who would further society’s “intellectual culture” as wives and mothers - evolved as the campus grew. More students were recruited, increasing enrollment from 34 to 170 students in the college’s first decade, and new buildings were built even in the face of adversity, as the young institute resiliently survived a campus fire that burned the original Main Building to the ground 20 years after its completion.
Wells College has since graduated many generations of curious intellectuals, humane citizens, and confident leaders - many incredibly successful, some famous, and a few infamous. Alumnae and alumni have gone onto successful careers in academia, medicine, politics, and the performing arts - each becoming leaders in their respective fields after seizing the opportunity for leadership and involvement in student organizations at Wells that still thrive today. These include The Chronicle, a literary magazine first published in 1873, and the Collegiate Association, an autonomous student government founded by the Wells women of 1897 over two decades before women were granted the right to vote. Since this early period, traditions - from the Odd-Even rivalry (dating back to the 1890s) to singing of the Alma Mater around the sycamore - have also remained a fundamental part of student life.
The college, of course, underwent many changes through its history - surviving an influenza epidemic, a devastating economic depression and two world wars. Under the leadership of 18 presidents, Wells has grown from a small seminary catering to the young women of New York to a nationally-recognized college drawing a diverse student body from many states and several countries. In 2004, after 136 years of leadership in women’s education, the college opened its doors to students of all genders. Since then, current and past Wells College students continue to bond over a shared and enduring tradition of scholarship and community.
Researched and written by Judith Lavelle ’14.
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Whitney & Murphy Funeral Home
4800 East Indian School Rd.
info@whitneymurphyfuneralhome.com
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REAVES, MARGARET
February 21, 2020 4 Condolences
Margaret Reaves was born on December 12, 1926 in Duquesne, Pennsylvania. She passed away peacefully with her family in Scottsdale, Arizona on February 17, 2020. Margaret is survived by her sons, William and David, her daughter, Susan, her daughter in-law, Denise, son-in-law, Bjorn, and her grandchildren, Kendall, Erik, Alex, Katrina, Courteney, Marissa, Lilly, as well as numerous relatives in Pennsylvania and Texas.
Margaret served in the US Air Force as a First Lieutenant and Registered Nurse. While serving in Japan, she met her beloved husband, Billy H. Reaves. Margaret and Billy were married in Tokyo, Japan on August 13, 1960 and remained married for 52 years, until Billy’s death in 2012.
Margaret and her family lived in Asia (Japan, Korea, Philippines, Guam) for over 20 years, and upon returning to the USA, lived in San Diego, Sacramento and Scottsdale. She loved to travel and toured with Billy and family throughout Asia and across the US, as well as a very memorable cruise in Europe.
In addition to raising her family, Margaret’s passion was as a Registered Nurse. She graduated from Duquesne High School in 1944 with scholarship honors and went on to Mercy Nursing School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After completing the Pennsylvania State Board Examinations, she started her career as a Registered Nurse in 1948. Margaret worked at the VA Hospital in the Bronx, NY and Mercy Hospital in San Francisco, CA, prior to joining the US Air Force as a staff nurse in 1958. After starting a family, she was a school nurse at Clark AFB, Philippines and volunteered as a nurse in San Diego in the 1980’s.
Margaret was known as a person with a strong will and a strong Catholic faith.
Memorial Mass for Margaret will be held on Monday, March 9, 2020 at 10:30 A.M. at The Franciscan Renewal Center at the Conventual Church of Our Lady of the Angels, 5802 E. Lincoln Drive, Scottsdale.
In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the Parkinson’s Foundation or American Parkinson Disease Association.
Condolences may be expressed at www.whitneymurphyfuneralhome.com
Offer Condolence for the family of REAVES, MARGARET
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susan stiles
Bill, David and Susan,
We are so sorry for your loss. We’ll miss Aunt margaret very much.
We made a donation to the Parkinson’s Foundation instead of flowers.
cousins Sue and Norm Stiles
Denise Perhats
I am saddened to hear of the loss of your mother. I always thought highly of both your parents. The world is a lesser place without them.
cousin Denise Perhats
Pamela Burgman
Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill will always have a special place in my heart. Your Mother was a very considerate and wonderful person.
Dee Parker
Sincerest condolences to the family of a trailblazer from the Women’s Army Corp (WAC) Phoenix Chap #68
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Contact | Directions | Obituaries | Funeral Pre-Planning | Site Map | Phoenix AZ: Funeral Home & Cremation Services | Website by FRM Websites
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Wildlife Natural
Insects in U.K.
Birds in UK
Insects in Spain
Birds in Spain
Vespula germanica
Vespula germanica, (Fabricius,1793) “worker” Commonly known as “German wasp” and also “yellow jacket”
Adult workers 13–20 mm in length. (Slightly larger than Vespula vulgaris).
Flight season (UK) (V. germanica worker) May to early November. In some nests, colonies may survive winter. If this occurs, the nest becomes polygynous and will reach a much larger size than in the previous year.
In warmer climates, for example in Australia; V. germanica nests can continue to grow over a number of seasons. This results in giant and a potentially dangerous nest with a population of well over 100,000 wasps.
V. germanica is a social “eusocial” ( the highest level of organisation of animal sociality) belonging to the Vespidae family. Nests are mostly underground and usually have more than one entrance, nesting sites are constructed as early as mid-April and can be found in a used mouse nest or mole hill. The nest is made from chewed wood fibre, mixed with saliva and is greyish in colour reaching a diameter of 30cm (12in). In most cases, V. germanica nests contain over 10,000 individual wasps. The workers rarely fly further than 1000m from their nest site and because of this intense invasion they dominate and out compete many other animals for food. This causes substantial harm, particularly in “newly invaded places” where native species of arthropods are established.
The workers prey on many species of insects: mostly flies are captured, but also: mosquitoes, caterpillars and spiders are all regularly taken and fed to the wasp larvae. In the summertime workers are also attracted to the sweet nectar of flowers, doing their part as pollinators; but not as efficient as bees. So arguably V. germanica could be regarded as beneficial to man, because many insects collected are considered as pests. Unfortunately, they have a taste for sugary foods. Because of this they are frequently attracted to homes, gardens and picnic areas, where they can become serious pests. They can also cause serious damage to some fruit crops.
Flowers visited:
A vast range of flowers are visited to collect pollen and nectar.
Parasites:
Female Bee Moths (Aphomia sociella) are one of the main parasites and have been known to lay their eggs in the nests of V. germanica. The hatched larvae begin by spinning a silk around themselves for protection, then will proceed to feed on the eggs, larvae, and pupae left unprotected by the wasp, sometimes destroying large parts of the nest as they tunnel throughout searching for food.
V. Germanica like V. Vulgaris were imported by humans into New Zealand and Australia. They are now classed as pests because they have impacted the ecosystem in these countries, also causing damage to fruit crops.
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Improving patient safety and quality of care
RMA Online
Improving patient safety and quality of care is an ongoing journey supported by the efforts of the entire health sector. In the Victorian system there is an increased focus on recognising and supporting users of the health system as active participants in improving their own outcomes and improving systems and delivery of care to benefit others as well.
A number of resources are available below to support your organisation in building a culture of listening, particularly in improving governance of health services.
In accordance with VMIA's Copyright Licence, the tools and videos are intended for information purposes only. VMIA encourages the free transfer, copying, alteration and printing of these tools and templates if the activities support the purpose and intent for which they were developed.
Patient stories toolkit
The In their shoes: building a culture of listening toolkit is designed to support organisations increase the role of the patient voice in improving service delivery. Download the toolkit here.
In their shoes: building a culture of listening [PDF, 467KB]
In their shoes
The In their shoes video series features three patient stories:
It could be me follows a typical patient journey through the health system from consultation to surgery and rehabilitation. At each step of the journey the healthcare clinician becomes the patient in the subsequent step, reinforcing the concept of caring for others as you would wish to be cared for yourself.
Experienced general practitioner Dr Philip Worboys shares his story of survival in It was me. Dr Worboys was riding a bicycle when he was hit by a car at high-speed, leaving him in the complete care of healthcare workers to save him from his critical condition. He offers rare insight into what it is like to be a patient from the perspective of a doctor.
Dr Rachel Rosler shares her story in It was my daughter, as she considers the patient experience from a mother’s perspective. Dr Rosler’s daughter was born prematurely at 26 weeks, resulting in a range of ongoing health issues. The importance of caring for patient families as well as patients is highlighted in this story.
James Titcombe webinar
James Titcombe is a consumer and patient safety specialist from the United Kingdom, who shares his personal story of losing his newborn son in 2008. Since his son’s death James has been a tireless campaigner to improve the healthcare system and is an excellent example of the power of the patient’s voice to influence widespread change.
#hellomynameis
The #hellomynameis campaign was introduced at Mildura Base Hospital as a direct result of a patient sharing their story at the health service. A series of videos examines the reason for the campaign and the practical aspects of using patient stories to influence systemic and cultural change.
ISBAR scenarios
Insights and articles
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Is Christmas really over? European security in the age of Trump, Brexit, and rising global instability
Dr. Angela Kane
Dr. Angela Kane, former UN High Representative Office for Disarmament Affairs and Under-Secretary-General for Management in the United Nations, opened the 14th CEO Roundtable of United Europe on a “Common EU Security and Defense policy” at the Austrian Embassy Paris on September 24, 2019. Please find below her full speech:
Following the Cold War when European states were trapped in the middle of a nuclear superpower stand-off, Europe enjoyed 30 years of peace and political stability. We are surrounded by friendly allies – or maybe we still think so, being lulled into a false sense of security after three decades.
The main threat to European security is not tanks or missiles – or nuclear weapons. Nor is there agreement what the threats are. Some may believe it is uncontrolled migration, Islam, cyber-attacks, autonomous weapons – there is no consensus in European countries.
Security has political, economic and social dimensions. It is both public and it is private. It implies active agency and is now recognized as a broader term aimed at securing the well-being of individuals and their communities.
Europe has been shaken by several political and economic calamities since the 2008 financial crisis: Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbass, the migration crisis of 2015, the groundswell of anti-establishment populism and the accompanying rise of far-right populist parties. Then of course Brexit. In May, the EU Parliament elections deepened political fragmentation. There is more navel-gazing in Europe, more inward-looking scrutiny.
Let us look at the various factors that contributed to instability. Foremost: the election of President Trump in the US. He has shown that he believes that anything that strengthens another part of the world threatens US supremacy – hence a strong Europe is negative. His preference is not to work cooperatively with and through allies, but through economic coercion as a substitute for military force.
He has shown a deep aversion – I would even call it contempt – of Europe. We all know his constant demands for an increase in European financial contributions to the NATO budget, his characterization of European states as “freeloaders” who benefited from the US superior military protection. His take on alliances is narrow and transactional.
He abrogated the INF, he left the JCPOA – all actions that were taken unilaterally without apparent consultation with those affected most: Europe. He readily imposes economic and political sanctions (US programs have grown from 17 in 2004 to 30 this year) which are not subject to international rules – yet his actions – and threatened actions by tweet – are often impulsive and just as easily reversed as they are announced. This reveals a problematic pattern: he takes maximalist positions but does not appear to have a plan to carry it through.
The good news: the US has not left NATO, nor the WTO, nor the UN, despite US Secretary of State Pompeo’s criticism of a host of international organizations (including the EU) as “antithetical” to national sovereignty. Let me mention that he made this speech in Brussels in December, where he stated that “international bodies” that constrain national sovereignty “must be reformed or eliminated”.
For Europe, decoupling from international bodies, from globalization, is simply not an option, nor is the decoupling from the US. If Europe did, it would empower Putin and Xi Jinping additional leverage over Europe. Yet Trump gave a wake-up call to Europe: take leadership, take more responsibility for your security – you can no longer rely on the United States.
Europe’s security is intrinsically linked with NATO
Let us first look at NATO. After Brexit, 80% of NATO’s spending will be delivered by non-EU countries. This means that the EU cannot replace NATO and the combined power it represents. Until a few years ago, the focus was primarily on projecting stability outside Europe’s borders, focusing on crisis prevention, post-conflict stabilization, anti-piracy missions. Defence cooperation was not a priority, yet Putin’s annexation of Crimea meant that Russia was no longer interested in a strategic alliance with Europe. Trump’s arrival was a game-changer: if Europe would need to call on the US for military assistance, would it be given? (despite Article 5 of the Washington Treaty).
NATO’s Strategic Concept dates from 2010 and is clearly outdated. It states that “the Euro-Atlantic area is at peace” and that NATO-Russian cooperation “contributes to creating a common space of peace, stability and security” – no one would sign onto such language now.
No work on a new Concept has begun. It is feared that such discussions would open a Pandora’s Box, clearly exposing rifts among the Alliance. NATO is content with Summit communiques which give some direction for NATO. The latest, from July 2018, has 79 hefty paragraphs (10% dedicated to Russia alone) and many paragraphs that deal with political issues that overlap with the EU agenda. The lines between internal and external security challenges are blurred.
The Summit Communique also raises the question of the continued enemy posture of NATO. Realistically, there are few enemies that could seriously harm Europe and ultimately the world. Do we really need to protect ourselves from Russia – our largest trading partner for oil and gas?
While this latest document is heavy on achievements and self-congratulation, one cannot help but wonder whether increased military capabilities and hardware (presumably bought from the US in order to be NATO-compatible) would indeed counter current threats, as stated in the Summit Declaration:new threats from cruise missiles and the proliferation of related technology as well as from new challenges, such as unmanned aerial vehicles. Other threats that NATO will address are in outer space, while cyber and hybrid threats that are becoming more frequent, complex, destructive, and coercive. These new threats will be addressed in elaborating new NATO Policies, while intelligence build-up “with strong political oversight” is also included.
Let me mention one additional aspect: NATO’s enlargement. For some years, there was a pause in enlargement, then Montenegro joined in 2017. Now that Macedonia’s name issue is solved, that country will be next. Will this indeed be beneficial to NATO? To the EU? Again, the overlap with EU membership is evident. And the lines between allies and partners is blurred: partners like Finland and Sweden moved closer to NATO in recent years, and Sweden decided not to sign the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, citing closeness to its NATO neighbors.
Will the election of the new president of the European Commission, former German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, have more of a focus on security issues than her predecessors? The five-year plan she outlined is ambitious: it focused on the environment (a Green Deal for Europe), leadership in the digital world, a Social Market Economy for the people, protecting Europe’s values and the Rule of Law, a new push for democracy in Europe. She also called for Europe being a responsible leader in the world (with NATO as the cornerstone of our collective security), but contrary to other focus areas, no detail is provided.
The five-year plan is ambitious and with the final result of the vote being a close shave — she won by a margin of just nine votes out of 757 — she will face resistance in the implementation.
Some words about the European Defence Union, the possibility of which was enshrined in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty (art. 42). In 2016, Commission President Juncker proposed a number of initiatives in defense (creation of a European Defence Fund, single HQ for operations, implementation of permanent structured cooperation, move towards common military assets). Full complementarity with NATO.
June 2016: Mogherini presented the global strategy for the EU’s foreign and security policy (EUSG). In November 2016, HR and NATO SG presented a package of 42 proposals. June 2017: launch of European Defence Fund and 2018 establishment of the EDF. PESCO: Permanent structured cooperation.
Question: how much overlap with NATO? What about EU member states that are not NATO members? Even PESCO was signed by neutral EU members: Ireland, Finland, Austria, Sweden). Would this become a “European NATO”?
Another difficult issue: Brexit
The UK is NATO’s second most capable military power. It also participates in the Five Eyes military intelligence. What will be lost to European security when the UK leaves? French President Macron has called for a treaty on defence and security (defining our fundamental obligations in association with NATO) and suggested the creation of a European security council to prepare collective decisions – a council in which the UK should be included, after Brexit.
UK possessor of nuclear weapons, a strong proponent of nuclear deterrence, a strong partner in defense. Also a strong ally of the US. Their departure from EU structures will be keenly felt, in substance but also financial matters. Increased vulnerability? How will the EU cope and fill the gaps?
What is the structure of international relations?
We need to widen the lens and look beyond Europe, beyond the transatlantic alliance. My generation was formed – and informed – by the Cold War. The bipolar system was stable: we knew the parameters and reactions. What we have now is a system in flux: maybe we could call it “emerging bipolarity”, meaning China and the US, with rest lagging far behind.
Do we call China a super-power already or is it on the way to becoming one? It is clear that this new bipolar system is not focused on the military and confrontation, but on the economy, trade and technology. And irrespective of whether China is not yet on a par with the US, the gap between these two nations and the rest of the world is getting larger.
In military expenditures, the US remains far ahead (nominal defense spending in 2018 was $649 billion, compared to $250 billion for China). The US accounted for 36% of total global defense spending (China for 14%). But the situation is changing: Chinese military expenditures grew by 83% between 2009 and 2018 – US spending declined by 17%.
Still, I strongly believe that competition is not in the military sphere. Look at China’s Road and Belt initiative, at locking in natural resources all around the world, at giving generous loans and acquiring important assets in countries around the world, particularly in Africa and Asia. Look at the strategy to become the leader in technology, in artificial intelligence.
Europe, closely allied with the US, is clearly on one side. At the (German Marshall Fund’s) Brussels Forum in June, Federica Mogherini was asked if Europe was “betting on the wrong horse” with regard to improving military cooperation in Europe instead of economic power? She replied that Europe was not betting on military power, but that it made sense to use the economies of scale of combined European defense capacities. Yet she also pointed out that this was not an alternative to neglecting the European role in global issues: one of the key challenges for Europe was to better use economic tools in the global landscape.
So the question is: is the EU focused enough on its global responsibilities? Is relying on soft power, on its exemplary engagement as a multilateral player, committed to the rule of law, human rights, international organizations and collaboration, enough at a time of rising global instability? Can an “Alliance of Multilateralism” which will be proposed by France and Germany at the UN General Assembly this month, overcome levels of friction and risk? The EU sees great value in international stability and wants to protect bedrock principles of the post-war international order developed over seven decades. Supporting multilateralism is in the European DNA, according to Mogherini.
Supporting multilateralism is not enough, in my opinion. More activism is necessary. Europe needs to get its mojo back, it is punching below its weight. Needs to focus on the horizon.
This happened with the JCPOA which was the first truly international agreement that the E3+3 spearheaded and negotiated with China, Russia and the US. It was truly far-sighted, but was enough done to shore it up after it was abrogated by the US?
The equilibrium is shifting: uncontrolled escalation and accidental wars happen. What happens in the Middle East affects Europe immediately. The escalating situation in Iran due to the US abrogation of the JCPOA and the imposition of sanctions by Washington, the start-up of uranium enrichment in Iran, the reaction by Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium ostensibly for use in nuclear power plants, the wars raging in Syria and Yemen: there is more.
The recent escalation in South Asia between India and Pakistan, the instability on the Korean peninsula, with the DPRK further honing its missile capabilities; the upcoming Review Conference of the Nonproliferation Treaty in 2020, which will lay bare the deep divisions among the nuclear haves and the nuclear have-nots pressing for disarmament measures under Art. VI, and finally, while not in the military sphere: the escalating spiral of the US-China trade war which has strong repercussions in Europe.
This is the rising global instability that the title of this lecture points to. It confronts Europe at a time of looming economic downturn, of internal political pressures due to populism, a splintering of the political internal landscapes and also of the impending Brexit, with or without a negotiated deal.
Security is not measured in military terms alone, and while NATO and EU defense structures are indispensable for member States, other security threats are equally prominent.
Sixty-two prominent members of the European Commission for Foreign Relations recently sent a letter, with four points that are worth repeating here:
Quest for strategic sovereignty of Europe
Re-operationalize European security and defense
Build stronger links between EU institutions in Brussels and national governments on foreign policy.
These are sound ideas – let us hope that vision, strategy and new policies will follow.
Fernando Primo de Rivera: Europe and the road to the Eurobond
It is time to call attention to Europe’s security
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„Europe has patiently succeeded at achieving peace and unprecedented prosperity.“
Senior Vice President EMEA, Steelcase
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Earth’s Atmosphere Collapsed
Due to low sunspot activity – The Earth’s atmosphere has collapsed. New discoveries show that it rises and falls in tandem with the Sun’s cycle, and the sunspot cycle has been unusually weak lately (although it appears to be reactivating–or is it?).
Sunspots are set off by a magnetic field, and despite recent signs of them starting up again, they seem to be continuing their decline. Some scientists predict that by 2016 there may be NO more sunspots, and that this condition may last for 20 years. The last time this happened was in the 17th and 18th century, during what has come to be known as the Little Ice Age. Solar minimums usually last for around 16 months, but the current one has already lasted 26 months, making it the longest one in 100 years.
Space.com quotes astronomer Stanley Solomon as saying, “Our work demonstrates that the solar cycle not only varies on the typical 11-year time scale, but also can vary from one solar minimum to another. All solar minima are not equal.”
During an atmospheric collapse, the layer in the upper atmosphere known as the thermosphere shrinks and is less dense, meaning that satellites can more easily maintain their orbits. But space debris, which is a hazard to satellites and the International Space Station (ISS), may last longer in this type of thermosphere.
Space.com quotes astronomer Thomas Woods as saying, “With lower thermospheric density, our satellites will have a longer life in orbit. This is good news for those satellites that are actually operating, but it is also bad because of the thousands of non-operating objects remaining in space that could potentially have collisions with our working satellites. If it is indeed similar to certain patterns in the past, then we expect to have low solar cycles for the next 10 to 30 years.”
A team of scientists discovered an unexpectedly abrupt cooling event that occurred between roughly 1968 and 1972 in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures. This cooling played a key role in the different rates of warming seen in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in the middle 20th century. Atmospheric scientist David W.J. Thompson says, “We knew that the Northern Hemisphere oceans cooled during the mid-20th century, but the sudden nature of that cooling surprised us.”
Researcher John M. Wallace says, “We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean.”
Meanwhile, when it comes to the current cooling cycle, PhysOrg.com, Lin Edwards quotes astronomer William Livingston as saying, “Only the passage of time will tell whether the solar cycle will pick up.”
“Mankind is trapped. I want to help you spring the trap.””The veil between the worlds can fall. The undiscovered country can become your backyard.””Your destiny, each of you, is to become all of God.”Find out who said these provocative words and first alerted Whitley to the facts about global warming, which he then wrote about in his book which became the hit film The Day After Tomorrow.
To learn more, click here, here and here.
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The Unseen Podcast
Laura London, UFOs, and Carl Gustav Jung
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