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Trump's ghostwriter warns a Trump presidency would lead to 'end of civilization'
Published Mon, Jul 18 2016 10:30 AM EDT Updated Tue, Jul 19 2016 12:24 PM EDT
Ivan Levingston@IvanLevingston
Trump bankers question his portrayal of financial comeback
Tony Schwartz ghostwrote Donald Trump's 1987 memoir "The Art of the Deal," but years later he said he regrets his work.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Schwartz said he "put lipstick on a pig," and that if he were writing the book today it would be called by a very different title: "The Sociopath."
"I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is," Schwartz told the New Yorker regarding the GOP's presumptive presidential nominee. "I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."
Schwartz had a joint byline on the cover of "The Art of the Deal," and earned half of the book's $500,000 advance along with half of the royalties, according to the New Yorker. More than a million copies of the book have been sold, generating millions in royalties.
Read the New Yorker story
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Energy: A Human History (Hardcover)
By Richard Rhodes
Not in stock but usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time—wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond.
People have lived and died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself.
Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
In Energy, Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each breakthrough in energy production; from animal and waterpower to the steam engine, from internal-combustion to the electric motor. He addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He also addresses the specter of global warming, and a population hurtling towards ten billion by 2100.
Human beings have confronted the problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further challenges, and through such transformations, we arrived at where we are today. In Rhodes’s singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow.
Richard Rhodes is the author of numerous books and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He graduated from Yale University and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Appearing as host and correspondent for documentaries on public television’s Frontline and American Experience series, he has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Visit his website: RichardRhodes.com
"A magisterial history...a tour de force of popular science, which is no surprise from this author."—Kirkus, Starred Review
“Rhodes doesn’t minimize the downsides of advances, both human and environmental, yet, on the whole, this is a beautifully written, often inspiring saga of ingenuity and progress, ideal for general readers. Immensely engaging, trusted, and best-selling, Rhodes will attract the usual avid interest as he brings facts, context, and clarity to a key, often contentious subject.”—BOOKLIST, Starred Review
“Once again, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author Richard Rhodes takes on entangled issues around the use of science and technology and makes complicated matters more approachable. Rhodes’s study will appeal to many, not just technophiles. As always, he is an exceptionally engaging writer.”—Library Journal, Starred Review
“In this meticulously researched work, Rhodes brings his fascination with engineers, scientists and inventors along as he presents an often underappreciated history: four centuries through the evolution of energy and how we use it.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Riveting…Mr. Rhodes has scored another masterpiece.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Energy is both a work of history and a passionately written moral tale...Rhodes’s hope that a critical look at past energy technologies will benefit those of the future is heartening.”—Science Magazine
“Rhodes delivers brilliantly on the inner workings of steam engines and reactors, and his lively narrative takes readers on thrilling side trips... His fascinating tale will delight technology wonks and particularly appeal to inventors and discoverers.”—Publisher’s Weekly
“Energy is an excellent book that manages to be both entertaining and informative, and it's likely to appeal to both science fans and those of us who only passed physics by the skin of our teeth. It's also a powerful look at the importance of science.”—NPR.ORG
“Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance... This exceptional book is required reading for anyone concerned about the human impact on the future of the world.”—Bookpage
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: May 29th, 2018
History / Civilization
Business & Economics / Industries / Energy
Technology & Engineering / Power Resources / Electrical
Paperback (June 11th, 2019): $18.00
Compact Disc (May 29th, 2018): $39.99
Big Sky (Jackson Brodie #5) (Hardcover)
Published: Little, Brown and Company - June 25th, 2019
Turbulence: A Novel (Hardcover)
By David Szalay
Published: Scribner - July 16th, 2019
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Uber plans to sell around US$10B worth of stock in IPO
An IPO of this size would make Uber one of the biggest technology IPOs of all time, and the largest since that of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd in 2014.
Reuters (CIO New Zealand) 11 April, 2019 06:19
Uber Technologies Inc has decided it will seek to sell around $10 billion worth of stock in its initial public offering, and will make public the registration of the offering on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
Uber is seeking a valuation of between $90 billion and $100 billion, influenced by the poor performance of smaller rival Lyft Inc's shares following its IPO late last month, the sources said. Investment bankers previously told Uber it could be worth as much as $120 billion.
Uber most recently was valued at $76 billion in the private fundraising market.
Most of the shares sold would be issued by the company, while a smaller portion would be owned by Uber investors cashing out, one of the sources said.
Uber plans to make its IPO registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission publicly available on Thursday, and will kick of its investor roadshow during the week of April 29, putting it on track to price its IPO and begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in early May, the sources said.
The sources cautioned that the plans are still subject to change and market conditions, and asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.
A representative for Uber declined to comment.
Lyft's IPO priced at the top end of its upwardly revised range last month, assigning it a valuation of more than $24 billion in an offering that raised $2.34 billion. But the stock has traded poorly since debuting on the Nasdaq on March 29, as concerns about the startup's path to profitability have become more prominent. The shares ended trading on Tuesday at $67.44, well below their $72 IPO price.
Read more Worldwide public cloud revenue to grow 17.5% in 2019: Gartner
In moderating its valuation expectations, Uber is showing a realism that is being increasingly adopted by Silicon Valley unicorns, as stock market investors push back against some of the lofty price tags sought.
On Monday, Pinterest Inc set a price range for its IPO that values it below the $12 billion at which the online image-search company sourced its last private fundraising in 2017.
Uber operates in more than 70 countries. In addition to ride-hailing, its business includes bike and scooter rentals, freight hauling, food delivery, and an expensive self-driving car division.
During the IPO roadshow, Uber's chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, will be tasked with convincing investors that he has successfully changed the company’s culture and business practices after a series of embarrassing scandals over the last two years.
Read more How to keep the digital momentum going
Those have included sexual harassment allegations, a massive data breach that was concealed from regulators, use of illicit software to evade authorities and allegations of bribery overseas.
Uber last year had revenue of $11.3 billion, while gross bookings from rides was $50 billion. But the company lost $3.3 billion, excluding gains from the sale of its overseas business units in Russia and Southeast Asia.
(Reporting by Joshua Franklin and Carl O'Donnell in New York; Additional reporting by Liana B. Baker in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Tags silicon valleydisruptionAlibaba GroupIPOUberLyftDX
More about Securities and Exchange CommissionUber
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CUI-History and Quick Facts
CUI’s Rankings And Reputation
Principal Seat Offices
CUI’s Leadership
Pakistani Students
Housing/Hostels
Non-Academic Departments
Complaint Cell
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Online Complaint Registration
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Focal Person for Redressal of Public Complaints and Pension Matters":
Name Mr. Muhammad Naeem Akhtar, Deputy Treasurer
Contact Number: 051-90495160
Email: mnaeem@comsats.edu.pk
Fax Number: 051-9247001
Founder Rector
Dr. Syed Muhammad Junaid Zaidi, H.I., S.I.
Dr. S. M. Junaid Zaidi, H.I., S.I. is the Founder Rector of the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT), Pakistan’s first exclusive institute of information technology. The CIIT was awarded Charter by the Government of Pakistan in 2000 and in less than a decade, it has grown into a quality institution of higher learning under his able leadership. CIIT now has eight campuses in seven cities, a student population of more than 35,000 and faculty base of 2,887. In addition to Information Technology, the Institute offers several bachelor, master and doctoral programs in engineering, basic sciences, management sciences and architecture. Dr Zaidi’s professional experience spans 36 years in a diverse range of fields. The establishment of IT ventures and development of IT policies remains the epic highlight of his career.
His expertise ranges from devising Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) mechanisms to Technology Commercialization and Utilization, Project Planning & Management, Industrial Information Networking, Operations Research, System Designing, Technology Policy Analysis, Technology Monitoring & Forecasting and Technology Transfer.
Dr. Zaidi is an experienced educationist. In the early 1970s, he earned two master degrees in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Punjab. In the early 1980s he successfully completed another master degree in Operations Research from University of Birmingham, England (UK) and subsequently earned a doctorate from there, specializing in Optimization of Algorithms on Networking.
Before assuming the leadership of CIIT, Dr Zaidi served in many distinguished high profile positions at the United Nations (UN) and in the Government of Pakistan. During his association with the UN, Dr Zaidi served as Advisor to the Malaysian Government and developed the country’s Information Technology Policy. Later, he was appointed as full time advisor with the United Nations ESCAP Asia and Pacific Center for Transfer of Technology, where he contributed significantly to the enhancement of technology and information handling capabilities of developing countries of the region and also established a computerized on-line network of Asian and Pacific countries. During this period, Dr Zaidi undertook several advisory missions to countries like Fiji, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand and Vietnam as a UN-expert on IT and helped them establish their technology transfer and industrial technology information systems.
Dr. Zaidi introduced IT and Information Networking in the R&D organization of Pakistan as the Director General of the National Center for Technology Transfer, Government of Pakistan. The putting together the first ever draft on Pakistan’s IT Policy is one of his most notable achievements as the Scientific Secretary and Chief S&T with the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology. He also wrote two remarkable concept papers for the Government of Pakistan and COMSATS, which led to the establishment of the Virtual University (VU) and COMSATS Internet Services (CIS).
In addition to his pioneering role for the Commission on Science and Technology for the Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS), Dr Zaidi has participated as a resource person/consultant in many international seminars and workshops including the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok; the Asian Productivity Organization (APO), Tokyo; the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila; the OIC Standing Committee on Science and Technology (COMSTECH), Islamabad; the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), Bangkok; the Asian and Pacific Center for Transfer of Technology (APCTT), New Delhi; the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Vienna; and the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization (ISESCO), Rabat. He has also acted as the Workshop/Conference Chair at several international events in and outside Pakistan. These events were co-hosted in association with UNIDO; COMSATS; ISESCO; National Centre of Physics; Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited (PTCL); Board of Investment (BoI), Government of Pakistan; National Science Foundation, USA; University of Illinois, Chicago; Purdue University; etc.
Recently, in recognition of his commendable continued service to society, the Government of Pakistan has awarded Dr. Zaidi the prestigious national award “Hilal-i-Imtiaz” in 2014. He is already the recipient of another prestigious award “Sitara-i-Imtiaz” conferred in 2007. Besides, Lancaster University, United Kingdom awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science (D.Sc) degree to worthy Rector, Dr. S. M. Junaid Zaidi on July 19, 2012. Earlier, in 2001, he was awarded one of the highest IT awards, “IT Pioneer 1987-1995,” by NCR Corporation for his contribution to the promotion and development of IT.
Dr. S.M. Junaid Zaidi served as Rector of CIIT from year 1998 to 2017. Recently he has taken over the responsibility as the Executive Director of the COMSATS (Commission on Science and Technology for sustainable development in South).
Honorary Doctorate Degree from Lancaster University, UK
Receiving Hilal Imtiaz from President of Pakistan
Please visit http://www.comsats.org/index2.php?LinkID=9 for more details about Dr. S.M. Junaid Zaidi, Founder Rector of CIIT.
The CUI was established in 1998, as a project of the Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS), which is an inter-governmental organization with 21 member states in three continents...
Park Road, Tarlai Kalan,
Islamabad 45550, Pakistan
Tel: +92-51-9247000-9247002 and 9049802,
UAN: +92-51-111-001-007
CUI Official Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/cuiofficial
CUI Official Twitter Page:
https://twitter.com/CUIofficial
The above-mentioned social media links are official.
Other than these are unofficial and CUI has no responsibility for those links/pages.
© 2019 COMSATS University Islamabad,
Designed by: ITCenter Islamabad
ESTABLISHMENT OF PM-CJ FUND FOR DIAMER BASHA AND MOHMAND DAM
The Prime Minister of Pakistan has been pleased to call for the public donations for PM - CJ Fund for Diamer Basha And Mohmand Dam. The fund details are as under:
Bank: State Bank of Pakistan
Title: SUPREME COURT OF PAKISTAN
Account No. 03-593-299999-001-4
IBAN: PK06SBPP0035932999990014
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已发布
Sogemar signs the contract for the development of the new intermodal terminal in Gioia Tauro
Gioia Tauro, signed on Wednesday August 10 the contract for the development of the new intermodal terminal.
Green light for the new intermodal terminal at the port of Gioia Tauro, with the signing of the contract between the Special Commissioner Andrea Agostinelli and Sebastiano Grasso, Vice President of Contship Italia Group and Managing Director of Sogemar, the winner of the international tender for the construction and the thirty-year concession of the new rail gateway.
The tender is one of the works included in the Triennial Operational Plan, and foresees a total funding of €40 million. With the construction of the terminal, Gioia Tauro aims to develop the gateway traffic, integrating itself with the trans-European axis of the TEN-T Corridor number 5, which will unfold between Helsinki and La Valletta. The new infrastructure will have a strategic value: it will allow the port to intercept a portion of the traffic between the Far East and Europe (in many cases currently routed through the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp), further developing the Southern Gateway option, which offers the Italian ports as an alternative to the Northern European hubs for volumes directed in Switzerland and southern Germany. The goal is to increase the use of the railway, reducing transit times, transport costs and environmental pollution of the road transport system, maximizing at the same time the economic and territorial impact of the logistics system as a whole.
Great satisfaction has been expressed by the Special Commissioner Andrea Agostinelli: "Naturally it's just a happy coincidence - he said - but I like to think that my period as commissioner will conclude with the signing of such an important and awaited concession." Sebastiano Grasso, stressing the importance of the project, pointed out that the port of Gioia Tauro, already an important Transhipment center in the Mediterranean, is also intended to become a major hub for the land logistics, fully inserted into the sustainable transport circuit, and integrating maritime and railway connections, which represent the two most eco-sustainable and efficient transportation modes available to logistics operators.
The new rail gateway will take up an area of 325,000 square meters. Built between the towns of Gioia Tauro and San Ferdinando, it will partly develop inside of the port, inside the customs area in concession to Medcenter Container Terminal, and in the inland port area. The new tracks will be 3,825 meters long, 2,761m within the container terminal area and 1,064m within the intermodal terminal. A rail connection to the warehouses is also included in the project, to allow the loading and unloading of wagons, and the inclusion of switches on the three existing tracks, to enable the independent use of each individual track.
相关图片:
Sogemar
Intermodal terminal
Contship Italia Group
Ten-T corridor
联合新闻稿：意大利康世与TiL就控制MCT达成协议
新闻稿发布: 意大利康世与地中海航运洽谈出售集装箱码头
CS WINdow - December 2016
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On Wednesday, June 6, Lisa Stewart graduated with her Dogwood Diploma at the same time as her daughter, Colissa St. Louis, who received business administration diploma at the Northwest Community College in Prince Rupert. (Shannon Lough / The Northern View)
Mother in her fifties finishes high school, graduates with daughter
Recent graduate encourages other adults to get Dogwood Diploma using Adult Upgrading Grant
Shannon Lough
Grade 12 graduates can be 17, 18 or even 55 years of age.
On Wednesday, June 6, Lisa Stewart graduated at the same time as her daughter, Colissa St. Louis, at the Northwest Community College in Prince Rupert.
“I was in the fishing industry for a lot of years and when I tried looking for work I couldn’t help but notice that with everything you needed a Grade 12 diploma for this and that,” Stewart said, while sitting next to her daughter in cap and gown.
Before upgrading as an adult, Stewart had a Grade 8 education. As a young girl, her grandfather told her he was proud of her for getting a job at one of the fishing plants, but she remembers him telling her: “‘There’s going to come a time when you’re going to need Grade 12 to pick up garbage in the city,’ and he was absolutely right,” she said.
She tried to go back to school many times, but it was math that scared her. She would quit, walk away, try again, and repeat. It wasn’t until she was in her fifties that she clicked with the instructors at Northwest Community College. She attributes her success to her math teacher, Trudy Dolan, who, she said, adapted to her style of learning.
“She taught me to find different ways of explaining things in a way that she would understand. I’ve got to have a bunch of tricks in my pocket to explain math concepts,” Dolan said.
“It was a struggle at times just trying to convince her that she can do it and you have to put the time into it. Putting that regular time in at home. Toward the end it clicked.”
Since Stewart completed her Grade 12 English before math, she was able to tap into first year university courses, such as psychology and First Nations studies.
Upgrading her education took her four years, but with the bonus of taking university level credit courses. She now has 12 credits toward an associative arts degree. So what’s next for Stewart?
“I can’t believe I want more. For somebody who kept taking off and not wanting to go there, and now it’s like, role model right here [to her daughter] and it’s crazy that she’s like a role model to me,” she said with a big smile.
Her daughter, St. Louis, just completed her business administration diploma, and plans to continue her education by going for her human resource and labour relations degree, all while raising her young son and working at the grain terminal.
“I’ll do that part-time even if it takes me five years,” St. Louis said.
While convocation was a big day for St. Louis, she said she’s more excited for her mom.
The adult Dogwood Diploma is offered at the Northwest Community College for anyone who needs to upgrade their education. Students need to have a Grade 12 level English, Grade 11 math and three Grade 12 equivalent electives to graduate.
READ MORE: NDP eliminate tuition for adult education, will end interest on student loans
Courses are paid for by the provincial government.
“K-12 education is free, it doesn’t matter if you’re an adult,” said Mercedes de la Nuez, career college preparation coordinator at Northwest Community College.
Mature students can apply for the adult upgrading grant (AUG), and depending on their income, or how many dependents they have, they’re eligible for more funding that can go toward books, bus passes, even school supplies.
Stewart was sponsored by her band, Gingolx, and she was part of the AUG program. She encourages anyone who hasn’t graduated to go back to school to get their adult Dogwood for free.
Advisors are around all summer at the college to help students who want to upgrade their education in the fall and winter months.
READ MORE: Northwest Community College decides on a new name
shannon.lough@thenorthernview.com
VIDEO: Pacific Coastal Airlines golf tournament helps three B.C. charities
Feast of Fields settles in for the summer of 2018
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Chad Richison
Paycom Plans $11.8M Expansion of W. Memorial Rd. Headquarters
Paycom has recently announced plans to expand its operations in Oklahoma by adding an $11.8 million fully-equipped building adjacent to its current headquarters in Oklahoma City. The payroll and human capital management technology company is expected to house around 700 additional employees in the new building. A groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for March 2013.
South 17 February 2013 15:38
Pinterest Inks 490 KSF Lease in San Francisco
The popular website will be the anchor tenant at Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ 88 Bluxome St., in the SoMa neighborhood.
Taurus Sells Boston Burbs Office Building for $51M
A joint venture partnership is the new owner of One Newton Place, a four-story, 172,813-square-foot Class A property in Newton, Mass.
MN Retail Center Lands Financing
The borrower will use the three-year, floating-rate loan secured by HFF to redevelop the 137,000-square-foot retail center, which is anchored by Cub Foods.
World Class Adds Arboretum Crossing to Shopping List
The 191,760-square-foot retail center is situated on 20 acres at 9333 Research Blvd., at the intersection of three of Austin’s busiest thoroughfares.
JV Breaks Ground on Dual-Branded Marriott Hotel
Located in an opportunity zone, the 259-key hotel will include 295,000 square feet of space and 4,200 square feet of meeting space. The property is scheduled to open in 2021.
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/latest/2018/09/akon-thinks-it-s-foolish-not-to-invest-in-crypto/
Akon Thinks it's Foolish Not to Invest in Crypto
akon-thinks-it-s-foolish-not-to-invest-in-crypto
Elikem Kofi Attah
In #Bitcoin , #Business
Akon, the famous singer, songwriter, and producer has been spreading the word about cryptocurrencies since June when he announced plans to launch Akoin, his own cryptocurrency. The multi-millionaire recently discussed cryptocurrencies and the crypto world in an interview on Revolt TV’s Drink Champs podcast.
When the host of the podcast admitted that he did not understand what cryptocurrencies were, Akon replied, “nobody does” and went ahead to give an explanation by comparing cryptocurrencies to stocks:
It’s no different from the stock market... You buy shares of companies that are most trusted. You know they are going to make a profit. You know they’re going to yield an investment. You go there with your money because you know, these guys, in the next four, five or ten years, their projection said they are going to make triple what they are making now.
He concluded by saying:
When you look at cryptocurrency, it’s a little bit different but it’s kind of like the same concept, the way I understand it.
Akon added that he was still learning, as he keeps finding out more after getting involved with cryptocurrencies.
Akon later told his audience that an investment in Akoin was an “investment in the future of Africa.”
He also revealed that having witnessed a lot of things become digital overtime, he feels that crypto will be the future when it comes to currencies. He made mention of the move from cassettes to CDs, mp3 and streaming as examples from the music industry. In the music star’s opinion:
If you don’t invest in that (cryptocurrencies) now, if you don’t see that coming, you’re a fool.
Don’t Trust, Learn
The viewers of the podcast were also advised not to trust anything being said about cryptocurrencies but rather “learn the game” themselves. This comment was made after one of the hosts decided to invest $10,000 in Akoin, after he admitted that he didn’t know what he was doing but trusted Akon because he (Akon) was rich.
Akon also revealed that his cryptocurrency would be available for purchase in the upcoming month on various platforms. According to the hip-hop and R&B star, people would also be able to buy Akoin from ATM in the future.
Vitalik Buterin: 1000x Gains in Crypto Adoption and Real-World Usage ‘Are Very Much Possible’
Bitcoin , Altcoins , Markets
Financial Analyst Takes Aim at Smaller Cryptocurrencies, The Market Needs A "Mop-Up Operation"
Altcoins , Business , ICO
Rap and R&B Singer Akon Talks About His New Cryptocurrency ‘Akoin’
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Home Education Dorothy Calvin, EdD, Presented with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award...
Dorothy Calvin, EdD, Presented with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who
Dorothy Calvin is president of Ver Strate Press
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, September 13, 2018 — Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Dorothy Calvin, EdD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Calvin celebrates many years of experience in her professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes she has accrued in her field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
With more than 45 years of professional experience, Dr. Calvin has been the president of Ver Strate Press since 1986. Prior to obtaining her current role, she was the manager of applications development for Data Architects, Inc., from 1984 to 1986 and staff manager at Pacific Bell Information Systems from 1981 to 1984, having been a systems analyst and programmer with the firm from 1976 to 1981. Earlier in her career, Dr. Calvin was the director of Management Information Systems Institute for Professional Development from 1975 to 1976, and the manager of data processing of Behavioral Research Laboratories from 1972 to 1975.
Dr. Calvin began her career as a student at Michigan State University, obtaining a Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, in 1951. Later in her career, she returned to her studies at the University of San Francisco, earning a Master of Arts in 1988 and a Doctor of Education in 1991. Dr. Calvin is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society, the Association for Systems Management, the Association for Women in Computing and Phi Delta Kappa.
A respected voice in her community, Dr. Calvin has been affiliated with numerous organizations in her areas of expertise. She was an instructor with Skyline College, the City College of San Francisco and Cañada College. The former vice president of the League of Women Voters, Dr. Calvin was also president of Bulliss Purissima Parents Group, on the board of directors for Volunteers for Israel, and chief financial officer and deacon at Grace Community Church of San Francisco.
Throughout her career, Dr. Calvin has been recognized for her contributions. She has been featured in numerous honors publications, including multiple editions of Who's Who in Finance and Industry, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in the Media and Communication, Who's Who in the West, Who's Who in the World and Who's Who of American Women.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to her profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Dr. Calvin has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America®, Marquis Who's Who® has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America® remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis® now publishes many Who's Who titles, including Who's Who in America®, Who's Who in the World®, Who's Who in American Law®, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare®, Who's Who in Science and Engineering®, and Who's Who in Asia®. Marquis® publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who® website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
Previous articleRobert W. Gracey Presented with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who
Next articleDr. Madeleine Briskin Presented with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who
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‘Little Pompeii’ uncovered in France
A “little Pompeii” is how French archaeologists are describing an entire ancient Roman neighbourhood uncovered on the outskirts of the southeastern city of Vienne, featuring remarkably preserved remains of luxury homes and public buildings, reports AFP.
“We’re unbelievably lucky. This is undoubtedly the most exceptional excavation of a Roman site in 40 or 50 years,” said Benjamin Clement, the archaeologist leading the dig on the banks of the Rhone river, about 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of Lyon.
The city of Vienne—famous for its Roman theatre and temple—was an important hub on the route connecting northern Gaul with the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis in southern France.
The site unearthed on land awaiting construction of a housing complex covers an area of nearly 7,000 square metres (75,000 square feet) — an unusually large discovery in an urban area that has been labelled an “exceptional find” by the French culture ministry.
The neighbourhood, which contains homes dating to the 1st century AD, is believed to have been inhabited for around 300 years before being abandoned after a series of fires.
Many of the objects in place when the inhabitants fled were conserved, transforming the area into a “real little Pompeii in Vienne”, according to Clement, referring to the Roman city-state that was largely preserved after being buried by volcanic ash.
Among the structures to have partly survived are an imposing home dubbed the Bacchanalian House after a tiled floor depicting a procession of maenads (female followers of the god of wine, known variably as Dionysus or Bacchus) and joyful half-man, half-goat creatures known as satyrs.
A blaze consumed the first floor, roof and balcony of the sumptuous home, which boasted balustrades, marble tiling, expansive gardens and a water supply system, but parts of the collapsed structure survived.
The archaeologists believe the house belonged to a wealthy merchant.
“We will be able to restore this house from the floor to the ceiling,” Clement said.
In another house, an exquisite mosaic depicts a bare-bottomed Thalia, muse and patron of comedy, being kidnapped by a lustful Pan, god of the satyrs.
The mosaics are being removed with infinite care and taken away to be restored, with a view to being exhibited in Vienne’s museum of Gallo-Roman civilisation in 2019.
Among the other finds are a large public building with a fountain adorned by a statue of Hercules, built at the site of a former market.
Clement believes it may have housed a philosophy school.
The excavations, which began in April, had been due to end in mid-September but have been extended by the French state until the end of the year to allow time for more discoveries.
In the coming months Clement’s 20-strong team will dig down to older parts of the site and explore an area containing workshops.
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Mohammedan stun Abahani in derby
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The 14 best video games we played in 2015
Dennis Scimeca—
Games released this year to add to your backlog, if you haven’t played them already.
You played as many games in 2015 as you could. You really did. But you probably missed some good ones.
That’s because this year was jam-packed with some incredible titles. Now that the fall rush of new game releases is over, we can take a moment to look back at the entirety of 2015. With blockbusters like Fallout 4 and Metal Gear Solid V on the list, it would be really tough to pick a single favorite game of the year. It’s just as tough to try to provide a ranking. How do you measure something with the emotional impact of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture with something that’s as purely fun as Splatoon?
So, instead, we’re just going to give you a list of our favorites from 2015. The best will depend on your personal preferences, but all of them are worth adding to your playlist as we close out an incredible year in gaming.
No game in 2016 was hyped as much as Fallout 4. The game was announced only five months before it was released, which only helped to fuel the immediate excitement. After years of anticipation, beginning with the first rumors of developers from Bethesda Softworks visiting the nuclear reaction under M.I.T., Bethesda didn’t have to do much to sell this game.
It turned out that the confidence was warranted. Fallout 4 holds with Bethesda’s penchant for creating open-world games where the player is given tremendous freedom to do what they want, when they want. It had some marked differences from Fallout 3, like a voice protagonist and a new focus on narrative, that surely had something to do with a lack of karma system and not really being able to play a bad guy anymore.
What narrative freedom was removed from the player was offset by the ability to actually shape the world of Fallout 4 by building settlements, establishing trade routes, and helping the citizens of the Commonwealth rebuild their lives two centuries after the bombs dropped. The combat systems were improved, and a deep item crafting system was added. Fallout 4 is not precisely what everyone expected, but it still blew away lofty expectations.
Dejobann Games and Popcannibal
Elegy For A Dead World
Writing isn’t easy. Sometimes you just need a little push, like a spark of inspiration, or some structure to your idea. Elegy For A Dead World provides both. It’s a game about pretending to be an archeologist exploring a long dead, alien world, and telling the story of a civilization that used to live there. All you have to go on are the sights and sounds of the ruins you find.
It also helps, when you’re trying to write, to have a community of other writers around you, perhaps inspiring you with their ideas. Elegy not only delivers a rich canvas upon which to produce your own stories, it compiles stories from the rest of the Elegy community, and make it easy to find the best work out there.
The action-RPG Bloodborne borrows from the punishing design of the Dark Souls games. The people of Yharnam blame you for a mysterious illness destroying their world. While they are trying to kill you, you are hunting down the horrific monsters that may actually be responsible for Yharnam’s woes.
Dark, gothic art direction is paired with labyrinthine level design to create a game that is challenging to navigate and satisfying to conquer. Unlike in the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne rewards going on the offensive, which makes the combat fast and exciting. You still have to measure how many risks you take during a fight, however, because Bloodborne is an experience that sharply punishes failure.
Project Cars is a community-funded racing sim, developed with feedback from a former Top Gear driver, that gives you tremendous freedom in choosing what type of racing you’re interested in. Want to drive go-carts? Done. Want to skip the little stuff and go straight Formula One racing? Have at it. Project Cars isn’t concerned with progression schemes and point scoring. It wants you to have fun driving, and that’s it.
The flip-side of making a pure racing sim game is that it’s unforgiving. Games like Forza cater to a wide audience. Project Cars is made for people who love the challenge of driving, without any aid to fall back on. It may have a sharp learning curve, but the benefit of having to learn how to drive the hard way is the satisfaction of mastering the game, and learning how to handle racing games better than any watered-down arcade racing game could.
Nintendo’s strength as a company lies in innovation, and a rich stable of beloved characters. Splatoon therefore stuck out as an odd duck among the games Nintendo showed at E3 this year. It was a multiplayer shooter—a genre so saturated we can barely keep track of it. It also featured not a single recognizable character from Nintendo’s lineage.
What a wonderful surprise it was when Splatoon turned out to be one of the most enjoyable multiplayer games of the year. Two teams of four players face off to cover more of the map in their color of ink than the other team, using squirt guns, paint rollers, and exploding balloons, while racing against the clock. You can “splat” other players and knock them out of the game for a few moments, but killing the other team isn’t actually the point.
Weapon and skin unlocks, map rotations, ranked battles, it’s all the language of “serious” multiplayer shooters, but Splatoon is Nintendo’s way of tackling this genre, on its own terms. Splatoon perfectly represents the spirit of what Nintendo stands for.
Sony Computer Entertainment America
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is an adventure game about a quaint English village where everyone has gone missing. An alien entity that follows you everywhere as you explore the village seems responsible, and the only clues you have to discovering the truth are echoes in time where past events play out before you.
The developers of Dear Esther—the Source mod that helped establish the return of adventure games to the forefront of the industry—and the developers of Journey—one of the most emotionally engaging games ever—collaborated on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and produced an experience that’s accessible to anyone, not just experienced gamers.
The village is beautiful. What happened there is horrific. The experience of learning the truth is unforgettable.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain takes the venerable espionage series into the genre of open-world games. Infiltration is still the name of the game, but now you choose your own missions, where and when you want to execute them. Ambushing enemy convoys, destroying enemy bases, and gathering intel for new strikes are all activities set on huge maps to explore. Your enemies will learn from your tactics and adapt to counter them, which forces Metal Gear Solid V players to constantly evolve their approach.
The story also ties together all the previous titles in Hideo Kojima’s epic Metal Gear series. For long-time fans, The Phantom Pain wraps things up. For anyone new to the series, Metal Gear Solid V might become a motivation to explore earlier chapters in the story and delve deeper into Kojima’s strange and imaginative world of Metal Gear.
Dozens of Mario-themed games have been released since the lovable plumber was introduced in 1983, but Super Mario Maker is the first Mario game designed by you.
There may be no game designed perfectly for the Wii U GamePad than Super Mario Maker. The GamePad is like your canvas, and you use the stylus to drag and drop Mario course elements like pipes, blocks, and enemies, where you want them. It’s easy to edit and save your courses, and you have to access to pretty much every type of item and enemy you’ve ever found in a Super Mario game.
Designing and running your own courses is only half of the experience. Sharing your courses with the entire Super Mario Maker community, and running and rating other players’ courses, is ultimately what the game is about. There may never have been a more dynamic and engaging online community on a Nintendo game console, than that created by the legion of Super Mario Maker designers.
The Taken King felt like a de facto reboot for Destiny, even though technically it was an expansion for a year’s worth of previous content. Destiny started with a very rough launch in September, 2014, lacking content and featuring a very unpolished loot system that left players wanting. Two expansions shored up the game, but there was still something missing.
With The Taken King, developer Bungie provided the final piece of the puzzle that completes Destiny. The storyline of the Hive, an alien species that infested the Earth’s moon shortly after humanity was almost wiped out, is now complete. Quests with guaranteed, high-level rewards are part of the equation. It’s easier than ever to recommend Destiny to a new player because they finally have plenty of things to do, even if they still need to make sure they have plenty of friends to do them with.
Harominx
Harmonix Music Systems took Rock Band back to its roots with Rock Band 4, stripping away everything extraneous and focusing on what made the original game great: high-quality controllers and a rich music library.
There are so many genres of song represented, pulled from decades’ worth of music, that there has to be something on the track list for everyone. It’s easy to rotate new people into the next song without having to stop and restart the game. Rock Band 4 is the perfect party game for people who really don’t play video games.
Yoshi’s Wooly World
Yoshi’s Wooly World is the fifth game in which Mario’s sidekick Yoshi is given the starring role. This time Yoshi lives on Craft Island in a world full of amigurumi characters, and has to save his friends who’ve been unraveled and hidden among the game’s challenging platformer levels.
Novice players can turn on Mellow mode for an easier time, while more experienced players can focus on the challenge of finding all the myriad collectibles. Yoshi’s Wooly World is short, but it’s sweet, and belongs in the collection of everyone who owns a Wii U.
Tales from the Borderlands may be the finest game that Telltale Games has ever developed. It taps perfectly into the madcap humor of the Borderlands series, while adding meaningfully to the world of Vault Hunters, evil corporations, and backwater maniacs created by Gearbox Software. It may not have as many guns, but Tales from the Borderlands has all the spirit of the Borderlands games, and that’s the important part.
That such an unlikely pairing of a first-person shooter universe and an adventure game could be so successful just goes to show that Telltale’s magic can be applied to just about any kind of story. Anyone who doubts the value of the modern adventure game should try their hand at Tales from the Borderlands.
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate pleased franchise fans as much as last year’s Assassin’s Creed Unity let them down. The game design is more refined, sloughing off some of the bloating of game features introduced by annual sequels. This time the historical conflict between the Templars and the Assassins is set in 1860’s London and boils down to a confrontation between a wealthy English industrialist and a street-smart pair of killers named Jacob and Evie Frye.
Syndicate is about losing yourself in the moment. The city of London is a character in its own right, begging to be explored. Entry points for assassination missions are clearly marked, so you can enjoy the subtleties of planning. Being handed a pair of main characters means more opportunity to experiment with different techniques as you level up two different people.
The combat system is more intuitive and fluid than ever, and instead of depending on random passers-by for crowd distractions, you can recruit and run gangs to provide muscle. There’s no multiplayer component in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, but the depth of the single-player game will be more than enough to satisfying series fans who’ve been waiting for the next, great entry in the franchise.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is the second game in the reboot of this long-running game series. Archaeologist Lara Croft is still embarking on her historical adventures, but she’s presented in a more mature and, in many ways, a darker fashion that’s fit for modern audiences.
Both the main character and the game design are more complicated and satisfying this time around, as Croft follows her father’s trail in the search for an artifact that supposedly grants immortality. Collectibles add world-building context. Eavesdropping on conversations while infiltrating locations leads to valuable information. Relic-hunting locations are less about fantastical civilizations, and more about real, forgotten places.
Croft is vulnerable and therefore sympathetic. She’s not the perfect stealth operator, the perfect acrobat, the seasoned killer. Even if Croft is in better fighting form than in 2013’s Tomb Raider, she’s still learning and growing, which continues to make her an interesting character.
Illustration via Bethesda
Dennis Scimeca was the Daily Dot's gaming reporter until 2016. He loves first-person shooters, role-playing games, and massively multiplayer online games. His work has appeared in Salon, NPR, Ars Technica, Kotaku, Polygon, Gamasutra, GamesBeat, Paste, and Mic.
2015 In Review Gaming
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Columnists Home
Britain is now a one-party state
Last updated at 12:57 17 March 2007
Over recent years, it has become increasingly obvious that the labels 'Conservative' and 'Labour' have ceased to have any distinct meanings.
These once great political parties no longer represent different values, and their claim to stand in opposition to each other has become false.
The truth is that they now fundamentally agree on almost every one of the great issues of our time: foreign policy, the role of the state, the level of taxation and so forth. Where there still are disagreements, these tend to be artificial and largely rhetorical.
As a result, Conservative and Labour politicians have far more in common with each other than they do with the voters. They have become a single political class.
This phenomenon, which has emerged over the past ten years, has become particularly pronounced since David Cameron assumed the Tory leadership 15 months ago. Cameron has made no secret of his admiration for the Prime Minister and goes out of his way to stress the areas where he agrees with the Government.
This week has seen two very important examples of the way that this single political class shares a mutual agenda - one that has little connection with the views or concerns of ordinary Britons.
The first was the Commons vote on the renewal of Britain's Trident nuclear missiles. My guess is that the vast majority of the population is wholly bemused by this strange rush to maintain the British independent nuclear capability, some years before any decision was actually needed and when global circumstances tend to indicate we no longer need it.
I accept that there was a very strong argument for such a deterrent back in the days when Britain was threatened by Soviet Russia. But the views of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Margaret Beckett, Peter Hain and other ministers who supported CND in the 1980s but who now want to retain the bomb, are hopelessly contradictory.
And yet David Cameron's Tories were happy to rescue New Labour from this moral and intellectual confusion by voting to save Tony Blair from defeat.
This was not the first time that the Conservatives (who claim rather unconvincingly they want to see the back of the Prime Minister) have come to Tony Blair's assistance in this way. It happened three years ago when Parliament voted to despatch British troops to Iraq and over the hugely-contentious issue of university top-up fees.
There occasions draw attention to one of the golden rules of politics: when MPs from different parties find themselves in agreement, they are almost always wrong. Britain's calamitous entry to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1990 - a move which enjoyed resounding allparty support but led directly to the humiliating devaluation of the pound on Black Wednesday - demonstrated this very clearly.
This week's second example of bone-headed cross-party collaboration concerns the long-delayed report by former Whitehall mandarin Sir Hayden Phillips into the funding of British political parties. Yesterday's newspaper headlines suggested that his proposals (including a cap on party donations, reductions in campaign spending and a new system of state support) were unpopular with both Labour and the Tories.
However, this impression is largely misleading. The political class is, in fact, united around Sir Hayden's central idea: namely that taxpayers will be forced to contribute some £ 25million a year to the upkeep and maintenance of British political parties. Of course, all experience suggests that this £25million will merely be a first instalment, and it won't be long before we will be asked to contribute a great deal more.
Above all, I believe that the Phillips report will come to be seen as a very important turning point in British politics, the decisive moment when the vital connection between voters and parties snapped, and when politiciansfinally turned away from their proper task of representing the views and aspirations of their constituents.
This development was foreseen 20 years ago in a brilliant article by two political scientists, Peter Mair and Richard Katz, entitled the Emergence Of The Cartel Party. They described with elegant but brutal precision the wretched trajectory of events in western democracies since the end of World War II.
Britain, like many other countries, had emerged from the conflict with an extremely robust democracy. Political parties enjoyed an organic relationship with the nation and naturally articulated the concerns and outlook of ordinary people. In the early 1950s, the Conservative Party boasted 2.8 million paid up members, and Labour could probably claim even more.
Yet today, Labour Party membership has fallen below 200,000, while the Conservatives perhaps have 250,000. The collapse in membership has led to a financial crisis, particularlyfor Labour, and forced both partiesto use their access to the machinery-of the state as an alternative method of raising money.
One response has been to tailor specific government policies to client interests. It is very hard to believe, for example, that there is no connection between the tax breaks enjoyed by the private equity industry and the large donations given by leading businessmen to New Labour.
Indeed, the cash-for-honours scandal was another result of this financial predicament. All political parties (with New Labour particularly guilty of secretiveness, cynicism and unscrupulousness) have exchanged honours for hard cash.
Most worryingly, Westminster's reaction to this scandal has done great discredit to politicians of all the main parties. A smear campaign has been launched against the honest policeman John Yates as he conscientiously set about his investigation against corruption and wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, the political parties have turned to Sir Hayden (incidentally, how long can it be until this pillar of the Establishment is rewarded by elevation to the House of Lords?) to provide a legal way of extracting money from the taxpayers.
Sir Hayden's scrappy little report has one simple intention: it is designed to create an artificial lifesupport mechanism to keep alive a handful of undemocratic institutions.
Consequently, it looks as if the three main parties will not only ensure that state-funding keeps them alive, but that smaller and more dynamic rivals who might emerge to mend Britain's broken democracy will be kept out because of a lack of access to money.
But then, the past few days have seen another example of this sordid and self-serving new hegemony at the centre of British politics as it emerged that Sir Alistair Graham, the courageous commissioner for public standards, is likely to be kicked out of office. Like Mr Yates of Scotland Yard, he is being punished for carrying out his duties far too well and for casting his gaze in areas that the political class would rather were kept private.
Over the next few weeks, I will be taking a break from this column in order to complete a book in which I will explain in detail the tragic nature of the crisis which now faces British democracy, and argue that the current system cannot survive for long.
I plan to return in time to report on this May's elections. It is already possible to forecast the result. Voters will undoubtedly show disgust for Tony Blair's New Labour, but little enthusiasm for the LibDems or for David Cameron's Tories.
They will, however, find ways of demonstrating their anger at a political system of which Sir Hayden Phillips is a such an amenable and characteristic ornament.
Gordon's secret olive branch dinners
Information reaches me that Gordon Brown has launched what one might tentatively call a charm offensive. His aim is to make friends with, or at any rate neutralise, former enemies as he prepares to take over the premiership from Tony Blair.
This means there have been some surprising guests at a series of quiet dinner parties recently hosted by the Chancellor and his wife Sarah at No 11 Downing Street. Guests have included Tony Blair's former Press adviser Alastair Campbell and his partner, Fiona Millar, as well as Welfare Secretary John Hutton and his wife.
It must be remembered that Campbell was reportedly the Downing Street source who declared that Brown had 'psychological flaws', while Hutton is reputedly the Cabinet minister who told the BBC political editor, Nick Robinson, that the Chancellor would be an 'effing disaster' as Prime Minister.
Environment Secretary David Miliband, currently under heavy pressure from Blairites to challenge Brown for the leadership, is another who has enjoyed a discreet dinner with the Chancellor. At the end of these evenings, the Chancellor grasps his guest by the hand and says: 'I do hope that we can work together.' Don't bet on it.
DAILY MAIL COLUMNISTS
CRAIG BROWN
ALEX BRUMMER
STEPHEN GLOVER
EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE
SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
MAX HASTINGS
QUENTIN LETTS
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN
PETER MCKAY
JAN MOIR
BEL MOONEY
ANDREW PIERCE
AMANDA PLATELL
MARTIN SAMUEL
RUTH SUNDERLAND
TOM UTLEY
MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMNISTS
LIZ JONES
OLIVER HOLT
RIGHTMINDS BLOGGERS
CHAPMAN & CO
STEVE DOUGHTY
ADRIAN HILTON
MARY ELLEN SYNON
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Cartel gunmen execute two sons of prominent Mexican journalists while seven bodies are found near Mexico City on the same day
By Reuters Reporter
Gunmen executed two sons of two prominent Mexican journalists in the northern city of Chihuahua, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office said on Sunday, and police found seven bodies dumped in a Mexico City suburb.
Alfredo Paramo, 20, and Diego Paramo, 21, were shot dead in Chihuahua early on Saturday after being chased through the streets by gunmen in a car, said spokesman Carlos Gonzalez.
They are the sons of well-known Mexican financial journalist David Paramo, who hosts a radio show, appears on TV Azteca and has a national newspaper column, and Martha Gonzalez, the editor of the local El Peso newspaper.
Mainstream ties: The two victims are the sons of Mexican financial journalist David Paramo, who hosts a radio show, appears on TV Azteca and has a national newspaper column, and Martha Gonzalez, the editor of the local El Peso newspaper
‘We still don't know what they were doing there,’ Carlos Gonzalez said. ‘But this has nothing to do with the professional activities of their parents.’
Mexican journalists are often targeted and killed by drug cartels for reporting on their activities.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based advocacy group, says 25 journalists have been murdered in Mexico since 1992.
Stab, shot, burned and butchered: Horrifying images from... After the airstrikes: Scenes of devastation left by Israeli...
The great global food gap: Families around the world...
In a separate incident, authorities found seven bodies dumped in a car in a Mexico City suburb on Sunday morning, a local police official said.
Two of the men were found naked. Police have identified three of the men, who ranged in ages from 14 to 42, the official said.
It appeared all seven men, who were found in the suburb of Ecatepec, had been shot, the official said.
Mexican suburb: Ecatepec lies in the State of Mexico, which borders the capital to the north and where more than half the population of greater Mexico City lives
Separate incident: Seven men found in the Mexico City suburb Ecatepec appeared to have been shot
Home of the country's president: Until 2011, Enrique Pena Nieto, now the president of Mexico, was the governor of the State of Mexico
Last year, police discovered eight corpses dumped in the down-at-the-heels suburb of 2 million people.
Ecatepec lies in the State of Mexico, which borders the capital to the north and where more than half the population of greater Mexico City lives.
Until 2011, Enrique Pena Nieto, now the president of Mexico, was the governor of the State of Mexico.
He has vowed to take a different tack than his presidential predecessor, Felipe Calderon, who sent in the troops to tackle the warring drug cartels. Pena Nieto has focused instead on stopping kidnapping and extortion.
Roughly 70,000 people have died in drug-related killings since 2006, when Calderon launched his military-led campaign.
More than 4,200 have died in the first four months of Pena Nieto's term, a slower pace than early 2012.
Prior crime scene: Forensic personnel work at the scene of a crime where four people were shot dead, in a bar of Guadalajara, Mexico, on March 31, 2013
Prior crime scene: Relatives of a bus driver killed by gunmen inside a bus along with his two assistants, cry next to his body, in Acapulco's Cayaco neigborhood, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, on March 11, 2013
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Asian Innovation: A Unique Opportunity For The Pharmaceutical Industry
By Dr Yi Gu and William Shi
As the third-largest market for the pharmaceutical industry, the China/Asia region is becoming increasingly important. The AstraZeneca Innovation Center China (ICC) in Shanghai is perfectly positioned to benefit from close proximity to key opinion leaders, patients and hospitals, as it seeks to find solutions to diseases of high prevalence in Asia.
The ICC has built on its wealth of scientific knowledge by establishing an extensive network of collaborations complementing this core expertise by developing long-standing relationships with external researchers in the field to benefit translational science and drug discovery, allowing new medicines to be developed faster.
As a rapidly developing economy, China is an important emerging market that offers incredible new opportunities to pharmaceutical companies seeking to advance R&D and drug development productivity. A unique opportunity exists to build on China’s strong history of innovation by investing in research and development facilities that will keep the pharmaceutical industry at the forefront of scientific advances, today and in the future.
One particular company, AstraZeneca, recognised the potential of the Asian market several years ago, and has made significant investment in the region to position itself to benefit from this growth. The company’s Wuxi site, its largest manufacturing site in Asia, was established in 2001 at an initial cost of $134 million, followed by a further $35 million investment five years later to increase capacity at the site.
Since then, there has also been considerable additional investment in formulation – $50 million – as well as the establishment of a Regional Packing Centre and High-Tech Receiving Centre. In research and development, AstraZeneca is forging ahead with innovative drug discovery studies relating to the Asian population.
In addition to this significant financial investment, the importance of developing local research collaborations was recognised, and extensive efforts have been made to build strong relationships with biotech companies, contract research organisations (CROs), hospitals and academia, plus individual researchers and entrepreneurs. Today, the company employs more than 4,700 people in China who are actively involved in manufacturing, sales, clinical research and new product development.
At the forefront of drug discovery
In recent years, Asia has become one of the fastest growing markets for the pharma industry, yet innovative pharmaceutical research and development in China has been quite limited. However, this gives companies the advantage of starting with a blank canvas, leaving them free to pioneer new ways of conducting research, rather than duplicating Western R&D models.
In June 2006, AstraZeneca’s senior executive teams announced a $100 million strategic investment in China to establish a translational research centre, the AstraZeneca Innovation Center China. The ICC was initially set up as a function group focusing on translational science for oncology research, with an emphasis on diseases that are prevalent in the Asian population.
Liver, gastric and lung cancers are particularly common in the region; the World Health Organisation estimates that 78% of liver cancer patients and 74% of gastric cancer patients worldwide are in Asia, and that mortality rates are also higher in this area. As a global translational science centre, the ICC’s remit during the first three to four years was to explore the company’s portfolios – in particular, the oncology portfolio – and investigate disease indications in Asian patients that could be due to ethnic differences.
With the pharmaceutical market in China and Asia continuing to grow, further investment followed and, over the next few years, the ICC evolved into a drug discovery centre covering early drug discovery screening, pre clinical and early clinical development. Today, its mission is to deliver candidate drugs and proof of concepts, helping to produce new medicines to address the previously unmet medical needs of Asian patients.
By establishing the ICC in Shanghai, AstraZeneca has positioned itself to take advantage of China’s vast pool of scientific talent. Currently, around 80 scientists are employed at the ICC and with staff from a wide variety of scientific backgrounds – from academia to the pharma and biotech industries – the ICC benefits from an extensive range of experience in a wide range of different disciplines. While many of the ICC’s scientists have been trained in China, others have gained additional experience by working overseas, acquiring a different perspective on drug discovery. This introduces diversity and external know-how to the work of the ICC.
In addition to harnessing the talents of its own scientific staff, the ICC actively seeks innovative R&D partners throughout China and Asia. The formation of long-lasting relationships with key opinion leaders, hospitals, clinicians, CROs, industry and academia has enabled the ICC to build an established research network and embark on collaborations that benefit translational science and drug discovery worldwide. These collaborations allow the ICC to complement its own core expertise with external knowledge and capabilities, enhancing its efforts to make groundbreaking discoveries and develop new medicines faster.
Moving drug discovery forward
As a pioneering drug discovery centre, the ICC features a number of key departments including chemistry, bioscience, translational science and medical science, with each department subdivided according to its expertise and function. Like many other large pharmaceutical companies, the ICC relies on a matrix model, where departments combine their capabilities and expertise for effective project management.
A team comprising scientists from various departments is formed at the commencement of a study and a project leader – or sometimes two project leaders from different disciplines – is appointed to manage the team. This allows the project team to draw on a range of expertise for all the design, planning, experimental work, data interpretation and decision-making relating to the study.
Each department is responsible for the delivery of its daily workload and will select a protocol to meet its individual needs. The chemistry department relies on its core capability to design a study and implement quality control, and also frequently collaborates with contract research organisations, which are well placed to deliver the experimental data.
Bioscience and translational science provide data through a number of different inhouse laboratories, including in vitro and in vivo pharmacology, drug metabolism pharmacokinetics (DMPK) and histopathology, using state-ofthe- art equipment and technology platforms. High throughput screening can also be accommodated if the need arises.
The ICC’s drug discovery process centres on developing a detailed knowledge of the genetic mechanisms of disease, and the determination of clinically-relevant biomarkers and drug targets that are related to the Chinese and Asian populations. Once a disease area has been identified, the ICC works closely with hospitals and doctors, with the ultimate aim of developing therapies that are targeted to Asian patients.
The search for suitable drug targets begins with a detailed literature review that ensures the disease segment is fully understood. Collaborations with hospitals follow, which are crucial to surveying patient samples for the targets. In this respect, the ICC’s Shanghai location plays a key role, allowing vital relationships to be fostered with key opinion leaders in the field, as well as clinical centres, in the battle to understand a disease and to identify targets. Working in partnership with hospitals allows extensive disease profiling to be performed and, subsequently, a list of suitable drug targets to be identified.
Target validation is performed in-house and once the list has been reduced to just a couple of priority targets, the drug discovery screening process is launched. This approach has already seen success in the development of new therapies for gastric and liver cancer, with new compounds progressing into Phase I and II clinical trials, and the ICC plans to extend its research into other areas, such as metabolic and respiratory diseases.
Supporting drug discovery with innovative screening techniques
A critical part of the drug discovery process is candidate compound screening to identify novel drug candidates, and scientists at the ICC continually seek to develop original techniques – and to improve existing methods – to streamline this process. One such example is the development of an automated 3D cell-based assay. 3D cell-based assays have been used in academic cancer research for the past decade, and have the potential to provide a better model to simulate the growth and formation of tissues in the body.
However, the technique does have limitations for drug discovery screening due to low throughput and reproducibility issues. Scientists at the ICC successfully adapted a 3D cell culture assay to enable it to be carried out on an industrial scale, after automating assay plate preparation on a liquid handling platform. This allowed 3D cell-based assays to be performed in 96-well microplate format.
Matrigel™ (BD Biosciences) is a gelatinous protein mixture secreted by Engelbreth-Holm-Swarm (EHS) mouse sarcoma cells, which induces the growth of cell colonies in a different manner to the standard cell culture surface (Figure 1).
It contains structural proteins that provide the adhesive peptide sequences that cultured cells would encounter in their natural environment, as well as growth factors that promote cell differentiation and proliferation and, when used as a thick three-dimensional gel, induces cell migration from the surface to the interior of the gel.
Matrigel’s heterogeneous composition confers the ability to stimulate complex cell behaviour that would normally be difficult to observe under laboratory conditions. The production of colonies that mimic the growth and formation of tissues in the body, as well as the migratory behaviour, make it ideally suited to the study of tumour cell-cell contact, growth, migration and metastasis, aiding researchers in the identification of the right compound during early phase drug discovery.
Increased throughput and consistency with automation
Historically, the ICC has performed Matrigelbased 3D cell growth assays in six-well plates. Manual plate generation for the assay is both problematic and time-consuming because of the large volumes needed and the complex handling requirements of the Matrigel. As large volumes of reagents and candidate compounds are required, scaling up the assay is difficult to achieve, making this format poorly suited to drug screening; there was a clear need to optimise the assay for cost effectiveness.
A further problem is that Matrigel is extremely difficult to pipette in low volumes, as its heterogeneous composition leads to high surface tensions and uneven distribution across a well, making the analysis of results extremely difficult, and virtually impossible for 96-well plate format. The ICC resolved the issue by developing a protocol to pre-coat the microplate wells with a thin layer of soft agar prior to adding the Matrigel.
The challenge remained to introduce automation to enable medium throughput compound screening and improve consistency. Although the surface tension issues associated with the media had been resolved, the use of an agar layer complicated pipetting logistics; agar solidifies below 50°C, while Matrigel becomes too viscous to pipette above 4°C.
The Innovations Center decided to take advantage of the flexibility and modularity of Tecan’s Freedom EVO® 150 liquid handling platform, which was already used for compound serial dilutions and a number of other cell-based assays. Temperature-controlled carriers were added to the workstation to allow both the agar and Matrigel reservoirs to be kept at appropriate temperatures for pipetting. Because of the workstation’s modularity, it could be adapted quickly and economically without interfering with other applications, making it the obvious choice for automation of the Matrigel assay.
All pipetting is performed using a single channel on the system’s Liquid Handling (LiHa) Arm; the risk of blockages is avoided by pre-heating or precooling the tip by multiple aspiration and dispense cycles. Hot agar, at around 55°C, is pipetted into pre-warmed 96-well plates using the LiHa Arm’s multi dispense function. This minimises the risk of premature cooling of the media and allows small media reservoirs to be used, as well as helping to further reduce costs.
After allowing the plate to cool at room temperature on the deck of the instrument for 15 to 20 minutes, a Matrigel layer can be added to the now solid agar. The automated protocol enables the preparation of six complete plates in one and a half hours, compared with only three or four plates in an entire working day manually. The quality of the plates has also improved tremendously, eliminating the batch-tobatch, plate-to-plate and even well-to-well variation that often occurs with manual plate preparation, providing the consistency that is vital for drug screening applications.
But preparation of the Matrigel plates is just one stage of a procedure that also involves cell seeding, compound stamping and clone checking (Figure 2).
The Matrigel plates are transferred to a Matrix® WellMate® and Microplate Stacker (Thermo Scientific) for cell seeding and, after incubation, returned to the Freedom EVO for compound stamping using the MultiChannel Arm™ 96 (Tecan), taking advantage of the flexibility offered by advanced automated platforms. Further incubation is followed by the addition of reagents prior to performing readings with either a Safire2™ (Tecan) or an EnVision® Multilabel Reader (Perkin Elmer).
In addition, cell counting is performed using a Guava® cell counter (Merck Millipore), and an IX71 inverted microscope (Olympus) is used for cell observations such as clone checking. This streamlined process ensures that the ICC’s scientists obtain the high quality results required to help accelerate the drug discovery process, highlighting the importance of continued investment in state-ofthe- art laboratory solutions to keep the ICC at the forefront of research and development.
Conclusions - Asian Innovation: A Unique Opportunity For The Pharmaceutical Industry
For the ICC, location is the key and, geographically, it is important for the Center to be based in China. China is now the third-largest market for the pharma industry, and increasing numbers of pharmaceutical companies are opening centres in the China/Asia region. With its remit to focus on diseases with a high prevalence in Asia, it was vital for the ICC to be situated close to relevant patient populations, physicians and hospitals, enabling collaborative studies to be undertaken to understand each disease.
The ICC’s Shanghai location has allowed it to develop mutually beneficial relationships with other interested parties and provided access to key opinion leaders. This supports exploration of existing AstraZeneca compounds in the disease areas or patient segments of interest, as well as the identification of new targets, enabling innovative drug discovery programmes to be launched. With new and enhanced methods developed by talented scientists, the Innovation Center China is perfectly positioned to fulfil its mission, launching increasing numbers of targeted therapeutics specifically designed for the Chinese and Asian populations. DDW
This article originally featured in the DDW Fall 2012 Issue
William Shi, MS, is a Senior Automation Specialist at the ICC. He provides automation, instrumentation and assay support for compound management, HTS screening, cell panel screening and projects in drug discovery and translational sciences. Before joining the ICC in March 2008, he worked in academia and industry in China for seven years.
Dr Yi Gu is a Director of the AstraZeneca Innovation Center China (ICC) and leads the translational science group. Her group provides preclinical data and biomarker analysis to support personalised healthcare strategies for candidate drugs. Dr Gu is one of the founding members of the ICC, helping to established its scientific capabilities in 2006. She had 15 years of experience in translational research in the US before joining AstraZeneca in China.
The Chinese Biologics Drug Market: Demand and Execution READ MORE
> How Mergers and Acquisitions Will Drive Oncology Research in 2019
> Integrated Platform Drug Discovery and Development Companies - Part 2: comparative analysis
> Fostering Multidisciplinary Collaboration in Drug Discovery
> Good Laboratory Practice - To GLP or not to GLP?
> Integrated Platform Drug Discovery and Development Companies - Part 1
> Astrazeneca R&D - Improving Drug Development Productivity With Better Predictivity
> Disruptive Approaches To Accelerate Drug Discovery and Development (Part 2)
> Emerging Drug Discovery Alliance Models
> The Discoverome - Creative Destruction of Barriers for Faster to Patient Medicines R&D
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Concentrix scales back at Las Cruces facility
Up to 189 jobs could be lost with the impending closure of one program at Concentrix. But the company says it will seek to place affected employees.
Concentrix scales back at Las Cruces facility Up to 189 jobs could be lost with the impending closure of one program at Concentrix. But the company says it will seek to place affected employees. Check out this story on demingheadlight.com: https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/local/2019/05/14/concentrix-scales-back-las-cruces-facility/3672161002/
Diana Alba Soular, Las Cruces Sun-News Published 5:23 p.m. MT May 14, 2019
Concentrix in Las Cruces will close one unit, but its facility will remain open at 4201 Del Rey Blvd. (Photo: Diana Alba Soular/Sun-News)
LAS CRUCES - Concentrix CVG Corp. — formerly known as Convergys — notified the city this week that up to 189 employees could lose their jobs in July with the closure of one unit of its Las Cruces call support center.
But the overall Concentrix facility will remain open at its location, 4201 Del Rey Blvd.
A letter sent Monday to Mayor Ken Miyagishima by the company indicates the closure of the unit, or "program," is slated for July 19 and may affect up to 189 employees. Still, the company said it will work to find other jobs for the affected employees.
Concentrix provides call support for other companies. It has about 275 call centers worldwide.
Brooke Beiting, senior specialist for communications for Concentrix, said the affected program in Las Cruces is "exiting the site due to a change in our client's business requirements.
"It's not a full site closure," she said. "It's one program closure."
Beiting declined to say how many employees work in other programs at the center but said the numbers are "comparable in size" to the program that will end in July. Vacancies that are open in those programs can be filled by employees whose program is slated to end in July.
In addition, the company offers work-from-home opportunities. And employees will have the chance to take that kind of role.
"We support multiple clients as part as our work-at-home space," Beiting said.
Several businesses have announced closures in recent months in Las Cruces, including a number of restaurants. And one other call center, Volt, which announced it's closing in June.
Some residents have debated how much of a role the city's mandated increase in the minimum wage, which rose to $10.10 per hour in January, may have played in the closures.
When asked if the minimum wage hike was a factor in the ending of the Concentrix program, Beiting replied: "That's not a factor in this decision."
Miyagishima said local economic development representatives, either from the city or nonprofit, can contact Concentrix to see if there's any support that can be provided to help get a replacement client.
"We need to reach out and find out what exactly program they're closing and how could we find another substitute for that particular program," he said.
Asked if he has any concerns about several recent business closures in the city, Miyagishima said: "I do, as far as the closure of Concentrix and previous closures. I do know some are, for example, the Cutters are wanting to spend more time and retire."
The Cutter Gallery announced its closing its doors, as the longtime owners are seeking to retire.
Miyagishima also pointed out that, while some businesses are announcing closures, others are opening or relocating to Las Cruces. Last week, Virgin Galactic announced a long-awaited move of its operations from Mojave, California to southern New Mexico as part of its plan to launch tourists to suborbital space from Spaceport America. That move will bring 100 employees. In addition, Miyagishima said the city has several initiatives underway to boost economic development.
Miyagishima said he fully expects many Virgin Galactic employees will live in Las Cruces. And the company's presence will begin to increase the number of higher-wage jobs in the field of aerospace, as well as boosting the number of lower-wage jobs needed to support aerospace operations.
"I think there's going to be a shift from jobs that do pay minimum wage to jobs that pay $15 to $20 an hour," he said.
Diana Alba Soular may be reached at 575-541-5443, dalba@lcsun-news.com or @AlbaSoular on Twitter.
Read or Share this story: https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/local/2019/05/14/concentrix-scales-back-las-cruces-facility/3672161002/
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June 1998 ›
The Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, 1998: Short on Docs, Long on Moxie
When the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival closed its 1997 edition with the documentary Off the Menu: Last Night At Chasen's, doc fans went home happy that this wasn't just a Cinderella kinda year. In addition, Sick: The Life and Times of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist won the Audience Award for Best Feature; and Michele Ohayon's Colors Straight Up later received an Academy Award® nomination. The momentum continued at Sundance '98, when docu-giants Ken Burns, Barbara Kopple, Penelope Spheeris and Michael Moore weighed in with their latest, and such films as The Farm, Frat House, Divine Trash, Out of the Past and Moment of Impact created the sort of buzz normally reserved for the goatee-and-cell-phone set.
And then came the 1998 LAIFF. In its fourth year, the festival has carved out its own niche on the Los Angeles social and cultural calendar-and that of the indieworld—as a place to discover and be discovered. The festival had grown enough in popularity to warrant a move from its previous sites at Raleigh Studios and Paramount Studios to the more accessible and convenient Sunset Strip, where screening facilities abound within walking distance of one another.
But the documentary offerings declined this year to a precious two feature-length films, with short films preceding them, and five additional short films for the Documentary Shorts program. To be fair, the 1997 fest screened three feature length docs, but all at high-profile times. This year's fare was relegated to the creaky morning hour of 10:30 a.m., with one feature actually going head to head with the Documentary Shorts program.
"I don't think there were as many [documentaries] to choose from this year,"Robert Faust, the festival's founder and indefatigable director maintained. "The numbers that we had in the past far exceeded what we saw this year, and what we ended up seeing this year was a lot of stuff that had played in other venues. What we try to do is keep our programming as fresh as possible. So between those two factors, there's what we programmed. It was disappointing because we had made sure we hit the places where the docs really came in from, and they just weren't coming in."
The dynamic duo of docs were The Cruise, by Bennett Miller, and City at Peace, by Susan and Christopher Koch. The Cruise is a vérité portrait of Timothy "Speed" Levitch, a New York City poet and philosopher toiling as a New York City bus tour guide. Making the best of his situation, Speed delivers long impressionistic monologues on and off the job-about his city, about his life, about the eroticism and spirituality of buildings and flowers and the Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Center, about the tragedy of civilization and structure—all to the bewilderment or indifference of his passengers, and the howling delight of this viewer. If Oscar Wilde were to return today, he might just be this cruise director, waxing rhapsodic about the Big Questions that the Big Apple inspires in him.
Director Bennett Miller shot The Cruise in black and white—first in digital video, then transferred to 35mm—and wisely stepped aside for the irrepressible Speed to provide the color. And when he stops talking and lets the city wash over him, the images are stunning: his whirling dance at the foot of the World Trade Center Towers; his rare moment of uncertainty at the door of the roof before he opens the door to a burst of sunshine, and Schubert at the end of the film. These are the Dionysian moments that Speed Levitch lives for every day. By the end of the film, we don't know much about Speed's history, save a wild kvetch on the Brooklyn Bridge at all who dissed him in his life, and the mention (without circumstantial explanation) of a brief period of incarceration. Nor do we know for sure if Speed has a home. But we've enjoyed the company of a fascinating man, one who deems his double decker tour "a loop to my death and a search for perfection."
City at Peace chronicles the creation of an original musical based on the real life experiences of 60 Washington , D.C. teenagers. The teenagers come from different races, classes and neighborhoods, and struggle through their salient and substantive differences to try to work together on the common ground of artistic creation. For filmmakers Susan and Christopher Koch , award-winning veterans of broadcast television, City at Peace is their first independently made documentary.
The Koch duo spent a year filming the process and followed various stories throughout the film. We meet teen mothers, ex-convicts, rape victims, private school students, a student with an HIV+ brother, and students with one parent. The teenagers open up to the camera and open up on stage-over the course of a year, they explore and test one another, with the encouragement of their mentors. The real life substance of their stories doesn't stop at the stage door: two of the teenagers are victims of shootings during the course of the filming, but they survive and recover in time to make their theatrical debuts. Nor is the experience the apotheosis of a perfect democracy: even after four months of working together, the black and white students mingle separately. But a year after they first meet, students are unanimous in declaring, "We're not just a cast." Observed one student, "At the end, you see the ghetto and the bourgeoisie transformed." City at Peace focuses on the most important domestic issues in American life today—race and class relations, the breakdown of the family, living with AIDS, and violence among inner-city teens. These are the issues that are important to the teenagers in the film, and while we may get only a hint of the adolescent undercurrents of dating and sexuality among the teens, what the filmmakers aimed for was to show the possibilities of a working community, whether in dialogue or on stage.
IDA member Elise Pearlstein's short documentary Pink's Famous Chili Dogs preceded The Cruise. A charming valentine to the Los Angeles eatery and long-time institution of the same name, Pink's Famous Chili Dogs traces its history through interviews with members of the Pink family, as well as with happy customers, ranging from working stiffs to once and former celebrities. In a town with a short attention span for endearing watering holes and eateries, Los Angeles—as the film testifies has embraced this humble one-time hot dog stand just inches away from the glitter and glimmer of Melrose Avenue.
All the films on the Documentary Shorts program embraced the theme of Pink's Famous Chili Dogs surviving—and not surviving—personal trauma. Elie's Lee's Repetition Compulsion is an animated film, made with her charcoal drawings, about battered and homeless women's struggles to live through the terror of their past. Ms. Lee, who worked in shelters in the Boston area, chose an imation to protect the anonymity of her subjects and to render the terror of their stories. Her drawings, evocative of Edvard Munch, made for a compelling means of telling an all—too familiar story.
Two Weddings, by Harvey Wang and Edward Rosenstein, tells the story of a couple married during World War II and subsequently placed in separate concentration camps. Against all odds, they not only survived but reunited after being liberated. The second of the "two weddings" in the film is that of their grandson.
IDA member Jan Krawitz's In Harm's Way examines the trauma of rape—her own—in the context of growing up in an America that had conditioned her about fear and threat, but had never prepared her for this chance encounter with terror. Through archival footage of Cold War America and recurring imagery that bespeaks Krawitz's lyrical narration, In Harm's Way articulates the challenge of living your life as you had before the trauma.
In Where Did Forever Go?, Michael Dwass chronicles the long and painful decline of his mother to Alzheimer's Disease. Made up almost entirely of 8mm and 16mm films of his family, dating from his parents' wedding to his mother's death, Where Did Forever Go? captures the devastating effect of this disease on everyone concerned. The narration, however, which the filmmaker drew from a typical neurologist's assessment of a patient with Alzheimer's, suffers at times from overwrought poesy and often serves to stultify the flow of the film. The voiceovers from the family members are powerful enough.
The least successful film of the group was the last one Dance With Me, by Cassandra Nicolaou. Dealing at once with issues of her Greek heritage, her mother's illness, and her own struggles with being a good daughter, Dance With Me is presented as a choreographed piece—a strategy which left this viewer ill equipped to know whether to engage this work as a filmed dance piece or as a documentary. In either case, its emotional ambivalence about an emotional subject made me indifferent about the film and the filmmaker.
THOMAS W. WHITE is Assistant Editor of International Documentary, where he is responsible for the many department columns in the magazine, including the sometimes whimsical "Short Takes."
Doc Hollywood: Nonfiction Debuts as a Sidebar at Festival
A Trove of Docs in the Treasure State: Big Sky Fest Draws Droves to Montana
Doubletake Goes Full Frame: But Nonfiction is Still the Name of the Game
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Adrian Mutu is set to join Indian Super League side FC Pune City after leaving Petrolul
Adrian Mutu's contract was terminated by Petrolul Ploiesti
Mutu is set to join Anelka, Pires and Trezeguet in the Indian Super League
The 35-year-old could join FC Pune City and is free to join any team
Published: 09:04 EDT, 26 September 2014 | Updated: 09:04 EDT, 26 September 2014
Former Chelsea striker Adrian Mutu left Romanian club Petrolul Ploiesti on Friday and is poised to join FC Pune City in the inaugural Indian Super League (ISL).
'Petrolul decided to terminate Mutu's contract and the 35-year-old player is free to join any team he wants,' the Ploiesti-based club said in a statement.
Much-travelled Mutu is set to join the likes of Frenchmen Nicolas Anelka, Robert Pires and David Trezeguet as well as World Cup winning Italian duo of Alessandro Del Piero and Marco Materazzi in the ISL.
Adrian Mutu is set to join the Indian Premier League after featuring for the Romanian national team
Co-owned by Bollywood actor Salman Khan, Pune, who also have a technical partnership with Mutu's former club Fiorentina, have confirmed their ongoing negotiation with the Romanian player.
Mutu, who has played for a host of Italian clubs including Inter Milan and Juventus, returned to his homeland in the January transfer window after agreeing to leave French Ligue 1 club Ajaccio for Petrolul.
Mutu celebrates scoring in Serie A for Fiorentina with his teammate Franco Semioli
Chelsea signed Adrian Mutu from Parma for £15.8m before they eventually released the Romanian
Mutu is Romania's joint top international goal-scorer after netting 35 times in 77 internationals, the same goal tally as the great Gheorghe Hagi.
The controversial striker has served two doping bans and broke his contract with Italy's Cesena in 2012 to join modest Corsican club Ajaccio, saying he would score more goals in Ligue 1 than Paris St Germain's Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
The eight-team ISL is scheduled to run from Oct. 12 to Dec. 20.
Diego Costa's explosive start to life with Chelsea in the... Adrian Mutu films scenes for latest Snoop Dogg music... Diego Costa can lift curse of the Chelsea striker...... Ex-Chelsea striker Mutu lined up to star in Snoop Dogg rap...
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Residents relieved no one injured by military jet
Published: 17:34 EDT, 5 June 2014 | Updated: 17:35 EDT, 5 June 2014
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Military crews on Thursday mopped up the debris of an exploded fighter jet that struck a Southern California neighborhood, as authorities launched an investigation into the latest crash of the Cold War aircraft with a history of problems.
The Harrier AV-8B had taken off from the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma and was almost at his destination at Naval Air Facility El Centro when it went down Wednesday afternoon, going up in flames and destroying two homes and badly damaging a third. The pilot who was ejected landed in a nearby field and suffered only scrapes and bruises.
There were no injuries in the neighborhood, which is near a county airport and the El Centro training facility.
This photo shows the site of a military jet that crashed on a residential street in the desert community of Imperial, Calif., Wednesday, June 4, 2014. Witnesses say two houses caught fire after the crash. (AP Photo/The Imperial Valley Press, Chelcey Adami)
"We have air traffic every day from big military helicopters to Osprey to Blue Angels flying over us," said resident Leonardo Olmeda, 25, who was racing remote-controlled cars in a street where children were playing when they saw the pilot eject and the jet ignite. "Everybody seems relieved and thankful that the outcome of this was not worse."
Two of the displaced families in the newer neighborhood of Imperial — a small desert city of about 15,000 people about 90 miles east of San Diego — went to stay with friends or relatives, while the Red Cross put up one couple in a hotel Wednesday night. Officials were assessing whether any of the families would need longer term help, such as rental assistance or other items, said Red Cross spokeswoman Courtney Pendleton.
Marine Capt. Anton Semelroth said the military was investigating to determine whether human error, a mechanical failure or some other reason caused the jet to crash. The probe could take months to complete.
It was the second crash in a month of a Harrier jet from the Yuma air base. On May 9, a pilot was able to eject safely before his jet crashed in a remote desert area near the Gila River Indian Community, south of Phoenix. No one was injured.
In July 2012, another AV-8B Harrier crashed in an unpopulated area 15 miles from the air base, which is among the busiest training aviation centers in the world for the Marine Corps.
The Harrier, built by McDonnell Douglas, is a single-engine attack jet that can land and takeoff vertically — hence its nickname, Jump Jet. Military officials say the aircraft is being replaced by the F-35 because it has been in use for more than 40 years and has reached the end of its life cycle.
It also has had a problematic safety record over the years.
In 1999, the planes were grounded after a series of crashes, and in 2003 the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports that found the Harrier was the most accident-prone aircraft in the military at that time.
"Every time we take off, safety is our biggest concern," Semelroth said. "I'm sure after the previous mishaps we've got a better process now and will take this investigation and do the same thing. We constantly try to improve the process and make it safer."
In 2011, a federal judge ordered the U.S. government to pay $17.8 million to a family that lost four members when a Marine Corps F-18 fighter jet crashed into their San Diego home in 2008.
The Marine Corps has said the plane suffered a mechanical failure and a series of bad decisions led the pilot — a student — to bypass a potentially safe landing at a coastal Navy base.
A few hours after the jet crashed in Imperial on Wednesday, a Navy Hornet went into the sea off San Diego as it prepared to make a late-night landing on an aircraft carrier. The pilot was listed in stable condition after being ejected.
Hamilton reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Bob Jablon and Andrew Dalton also contributed to this report from Los Angeles, and Elliot Spagat from San Diego.
Smoke and flames rise after a Marine jet crashed into a residential area in the desert community of Imperial, Calif., setting two homes on fire Wednesday, June 4, 2014. The pilot ejected safely, and there was no immediate word of any injuries on the ground. The Harrier AV-8B went down at 4:20 p.m. in Imperial, a city of about 15,000 near the U.S.-Mexico border about 90 miles east of San Diego. (AP Photo/Imperial Valley Press, Chelcey Adami)
Officials stand outside a home in which the roof is burnt off after a Marine Harrier jet crashed into the neighborhood Wednesday, June 4, 2014, in Imperial, Calif. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)
This photo provided by Isaac Ramos shows firefighters putting out a fire caused when a military jet crashed in residential neighborhood in Imperial, Calif., Wednesday, June 4, 2014. Witnesses say two houses caught fire after the crash. (AP Photo/Issac Ramos)
This frame grab made from video provided by Isaac Ramos shows firefighters putting out a fire caused when a military jet crashed in a residential neighborhood in Imperial, Calif., Wednesday, June 4, 2014. Witnesses say two houses caught fire after the crash. (AP Photo/Issac Ramos)
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Press Release: Speaking at IICA, the winner of the 2018 World Food Prize analyzed the challenges in feeding the world sustainably
by: - February 13, 2019
The researcher is recognized for his work in maternal-child nutrition and food security.San José, 12 February 2019 (IICA). Lawrence Haddad, British scientist and winner of the 2018 World Food Prize, visited the Headquarters of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), in Costa Rica, where he analyzed the trade, policy and cultural challenges involved in feeding the world sustainably.
The award-winning scientist spoke to the trends and emerging challenges in sustainable nutrition, in an address to 150 specialists from the public and private sectors, in which he explored, in-depth, issues such as nutrition, the food trade, health risks, legal measures and multinational initiatives to strengthen agriculture.
“We are faced with a massive environmental problem, because what we eat affects what we produce and this has an overall impact on the environment”, said Haddad, emphasizing the carbon footprint, nitrogen, water, greenhouse gases and cropland.
Haddad was participating in the II Global Conference of the Sustainable Food Systems Program, where he indicated that, “currently, there are 821 million people in the world who are suffering from hunger, while 1.9 billion are overweight and obese”, a contrast that reflects the disparities in consumption and access to food.
He continued by pointing out that, “Consumption of inadequate amounts of food is a common denominator in all forms of poor nutrition, and leads to anemia, overweight, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and food waste”.
According to the expert, one of the major trade-related factors that hampers sustainable nutrition is people’s ability to access nutritious food. He stated that, “It is extremely difficult to ensure that healthy food reaches those who need it, at the appropriate time, and under conditions that are in keeping with sanitary and phytosanitary standards, which is a situation that leads to poor nutrition in one of every three persons in the world”.
Added to this problem, explained the specialist, is the fact that, “The more nutritious foods that we would wish to produce and that are commercially and nutritionally high-quality, are too expensive, which is a predicament that endangers food security”.
His presentation highlighted the socioeconomic problem inherent in recommending a balanced diet to populations with lower income levels, in which the daily intake of five fruits and five vegetables would be ideal from a standard perspective, but would require 52% of the total income of the average household.
Lawrence Haddad remarked that resolving this dilemma calls for the expertise of the private sector, given that this sector has a wealth of experience in creating and satisfying the demand for food.
Hadded argued that, “Business is an important part of the problem, but business can also play a major role in the solution. Offering healthy food to people with less spending power is a profitable business, but it is essential that incentives be provided to both producers and consumers to make this a more prosperous market. Healthy food must be delicious and visually appealing in order to compete with nutrient-poor foods”.
The British scientist maintained that it is critical that we connect producers to markets, underscoring the importance of nutrition and its impact on health. Most of all, we must stop talking about feeding the world, because the primary challenge is “to feed the world and provide nutrition, while ensuring sustainability”.
Haddad closed by saying that the involvement of the public sector will be critical to this process, since governments have the power to influence this transformation through policies, incentives, and taxes, among other initiatives, and that safety could also serve as a platform to encourage the transition towards a more nutritious diet.
2018 World Food Prize
Lawrence Haddad is the Executive Director of Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), which was launched at the UN in 2002 to tackle the human suffering caused by malnutrition. GAIN aims to make healthier food choices more affordable, more available, and more desirable.
Last year, Haddad was awarded by the World Food Prize Foundation for his extraordinary intellectual and political leadership in bringing the issues of maternal and child nutrition to the forefront of the world food security agenda, and significantly reducing delayed growth in children.
About IICAIICA is the specialized agency for agriculture in the Inter-American system, with a mission to encourage, promote and support its 34 Member States in their efforts to achieve agricultural development and rural well-being through international technical cooperation of excellence.
Institutional Communication Divisioncomunicacion.institucional@iica.int
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"You Ruined My Reputation:" Karen"
"A man I rejected started a rumor that I was born a man," says Karen. "When I first heard the rumor, I was very
shocked. I tried to blow it off, but now, here it is seven years later, and they're still talking about it. The gossip has ruined my reputation." She has avoided people and reported people, but nothing has stopped the rumor from spreading. Karen has even lost a third of her income because of this problem. "People that don't even know me have been talking about me behind my back. I'm very angry."
Karen has created a Web site to dispel the rumors. It has photos of her as a little girl and her birth certificate. "Proof that yes, I was born a
female," she says.
"They're crazy for thinking that Karen's a man because she's not. People are just cruel," says Brenda, Karen's friend. "I know it hurts Karen." Brenda acknowledges that Karen has gone to extreme measures to resolve the problem, but nothing ever ends the rumors. "The Web site calls more attention to Karen than what is already out there. That's giving people more of a reason to talk about it ... When Karen stays away from work,
people know that it's bothering her, so they spread the rumor even more. Karen has lost friends because of this."
Karen's boyfriend, Bob, is angry. "I went up to one of the guys, and I said, 'This has got to stop,'" explains Bob. "Karen is a beautiful woman " inside and out."
Karen admits that she's always been more of a tomboy, but now she wears makeup and her hair down to look more feminine. "I want to start over again, somewhere new," she says, turning to Dr. Phil for help. "How do I get my reputation back?"
"Do you think you teach people how to treat you?" Dr. Phil asks Karen.
"To a certain extent, yes," Karen says. "I first ignored the rumor when I
first heard about it seven years ago, and I thought it was over and done with, but [people at work] were still saying it behind my back."
Referring to the Web site she created, Dr. Phil says, "You might have given it legs when you did that." He explains that in his book Self Matters, he stresses the importance of knowing your authentic self " what your God-given gifts, skills, talents, abilities, traits and characteristics are. "If you know who that is, and you are secure in that, then what other people think doesn't really matter, does it?" he asks her. "Doesn't it matter much less if you truly know who you are?
Because there's no doubt. You don't feel vulnerable."
Karen agrees. "I just have a hard time not letting it bother me," she says. "Because to me, they could say anything else in the world, anything except to question my gender. That just seems like the worst thing, and that's why it's hard for me to deal with … That people would actually think that I'm a man, I mean, that's just horrible."
"They might have fun talking about it, but I'm a pretty good judge of horse flesh girl, and you're no man," Dr. Phil tells her. "Nobody's going to look at you and think you're a man. I mean it's just outrageous!"
"Well, thank you, and that's why I can't believe it's gone on for so long," Karen says.
"If you decide to start defending yourself, that will become your full time job. If you answer every story, every piece of gossip, every allegation in your life, that's all you will ever do," Dr. Phil warns her. "If you stop being who you are to start defending who somebody says you are, that becomes your full-time job."
"You're so right," Karen agrees.
"My dad said it really well. He said, ‘You wouldn't worry so much about what people thought of you, if you knew how
seldom they did,'" Dr. Phil tells her. "You need to take down the Web site. You don't owe these people an explanation. You need to get rid of that, and you need to give yourself permission to just live your life. And, if there are people out there who think something about you that you don't like, then those won't be your friends. But there will be a whole bunch of other people who will be your friends."
Dr. Phil reiterates that she can't give the people spreading the rumors power over her. "You have to decide that you believe in who you are, what you stand for, and what you do, and you just need to go forth and do it," he says. "And you have to give yourself permission to do that."
"And like you say, they may never stop anyhow, because that's just the type of people they are," Karen says.
"You cannot control them, all you can do is control you. Do not invest in this further," Dr. Phil says.
"Thank you for helping me set the record straight," Karen says.
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Sep 10, 2018 - 05:19 pm
Autonomous 2-in-1 electric van by Daimler (video)
Daimler is looking to get ready for future urban transport – in any form. Their latest concept is double-sided, and not “just” autonomous and electric. The “Vision Urbanetic” can be transformed from minibus to delivery van in less than two minutes.
First technical specs to the new hybrid truck from Scania (Video)
Scania is planning on presenting their new plug-in hybrid truck at the IAA Commercial Vehicles in Hannover, and has announced that the HEV version without a plug will likely be presented in November, before they open the books next year.
Jul 10, 2018 - 02:46 pm
Mercedes-Benz premiers eCitaro electric bus (video)
Finally, Mercedes-Benz has taken the wraps of its all-electric bus, the eCitaro. At the world premiere in Germany, the firm said battery-electric vehicles mark only the start of a large family of zero emission buses. Next generations with fuel cells and solid-state batteries are to allow for ranges hitherto unthinkable in the bus business.
https://www.electrive.com/2018/09/10/autonomous-2-in-1-electric-van-by-daimler-video/
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Subscribe Subscribe to Elsevier Connect
Comments on viral Facebook post shed light on pro- and anti-vaccination beliefs
Language analysis of responses to Mark Zuckerberg post reveals crucial information on what people think – and whether they are persuasive
By Eileen Leahy
This post by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg sparked more than 83,000 comments. Researchers analyzed many of them using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program, publishing their findings in the journal Vaccine.
One of the challenges to understanding vaccine hesitancy is that vaccine advocates and people with worries about vaccines are rarely in the same space, especially online. Both groups gravitate towards internet “echo chambers,” only communicating with other likeminded individuals.
In January, however, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo of himself holding his baby daughter with the caption “Doctor’s visit – time for vaccines!” With his undeniable reach and the ability of anyone to comment, the post presented a unique opportunity to analyze the language used to express pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination viewpoints and understand how people on both sides of the debate perceive the risks of vaccination.
While the internet has revolutionized the dissemination of information, misinformation about vaccines has been linked to anti-vaccination viewpoints, contributing to reduced vaccination rates and outbreaks of previously controlled diseases. Many public health initiatives aimed at trying to reduce vaccine hesitancy have had poor results. In an attempt to better understand the discussion surrounding vaccines, researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia and La Sierra University in Riverside, California, looked at the language people used in an open online forum on Facebook discussing vaccines. They found important clues that may help shape more effective pro-vaccination communications.
Who uses language more persuasively?
Researchers analyzed approximately 1,400 comments on the Zuckerberg post using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program. The software sorts words into psychologically meaningful categories and then outputs a percentage of words belonging to each category. They found that while the anti-vaccine viewpoint is often seen as highly anxious about the issue, it was the pro-vaccination comments that expressed greater anxiety – especially around family and broader social processes (e.g. herd immunity). In contrast, the anti-vaccination comments were more logically structured, and tended to emphasize topics related to health and biology, as well as talking about research and science.
“This concerns us because the scientific evidence is very clear in demonstrating the safety and benefits of vaccines,” noted Kate Faasse, PhD, Lecturer in Health Psychology at UNSW. “Because these skeptical comments appear on the surface to be quite logical and, because they focus on health, biology, and research, they may be particularly compelling for parents who are uncertain about what decision to make about childhood vaccination and are seeking more information.”
Other studies have shown the persuasive power of anti-vaccination websites, and according to this new study, the lower use of anxiety words from the anti-vaccination comments may reflect a lack of understanding about the potential risks of the diseases that vaccinations prevent. Leslie R. Martin, PhD, of the Department of Psychology at La Sierra University, said: “The findings from this research suggest that providing better information about how vaccinations work and how they improve health, as well as increasing public understanding of science and the scientific process, may be particularly important when encouraging vaccination.”
Who’s at risk when people opt out?
While vaccines are safe and effective for most of the population, there are people who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate health reasons, including very young children and the immunocompromised. These populations become vulnerable when large numbers of people opt-out of being vaccinated, because it decreases herd immunity. In 2014, the US experienced a record number of measles cases; in developed countries, a large proportion of these infections occur among the intentionally unvaccinated.
“Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases related to vaccine refusal are on the increase,” explained Dr. Faasse. “It’s important to find ways to better understand what people’s concerns are and why they make the decisions they do about vaccination – in particular, the decision not to vaccinate. Research using social media can give us a different perspective on the types of concerns that people have – and can help researchers and public health officials understand what sorts of information might be useful for addressing these concerns for people who are making decisions about vaccination.”
These data, gathered from responses to one high profile Facebook post, suggest that pro- and anti-vaccination viewpoints see the risks of vaccination in very different ways and often seem to communicate at cross-purposes. Pro-vaccination comments expressed a lot of anxiety about the risks to families, and to society as a whole, of choosing not to vaccinate. In contrast, anti-vaccination comments talked much more about vaccination decisions in terms of biology, health, science and research. Dr. Faasse concluded that this information is particularly useful because “greater insight about the specific worries people have about vaccination and decisions not to vaccinate can help us provide accurate information to better address these concerns.”
Read the study
Elsevier has made this article freely available until January 20, 2017:
Kate Faasse, PhD; Casey J. Chatman, BA; Leslie R. Martin, PhD: A comparison of language use in pro- and anti-vaccination comments in response to a high profile Facebook post, Vaccine (October 2016)
Vaccine, the official journal of the Edward Jenner Society and the Japanese Society for Vaccinology, is the pre-eminent journal for those interested in vaccines and vaccination. The journal covers a wide range of vaccine-related topics, including human and veterinary vaccines for infectious and non-infectious diseases, production and manufacturing, and regulatory, societal and legislation aspects. It is published by Elsevier.
Quick question for you
Which terms do you most associate with Elsevier? (check all that apply)
Decision support tools
Healthcare content
How face-to-face peer review can benefit authors and journals alike
Introducing COPE’s short guide to ethical editing for new editors
Helping you towards the right choice for your next paper
#DataDive London: changing the world one data scientist at a time
Tackling the university ranking challenge in Taiwan
science-communication,healthcare,health-science
Eileen Leahy
Eileen Leahy has handled media outreach for 14 years for a portfolio of Elsevier Health Sciences journals, including the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Mayo Clinic Proceedings and The American Journal of Medicine. An experienced STM journal marketer, Eileen was responsible for the launches of numerous journals while on staff at Elsevier, most notably, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and Gastroenterology. She continues working as an independent consultant specializing in the development and marketing of innovative online full-text publications.
Using drones to deliver vaccines could save money in developing countries
By Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Comments Elsevier Connect
Debunking Zika virus pseudoscience: we need to respond fast, say researchers
By Lucy Goodchild van Hilten
Anti-vaccine posts are going ‘under the radar’ on Pinterest
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Home » Books » A Mind at Sea
A Mind at Sea
Henry Fry and the Glorious Era of Quebec’s Sailing Ships
John Fry
The trials and tribulations of a Canadian business titan during a fascinating period in 19th-century Quebec.
A Mind at Sea is an intimate window into a vanished time when Canada was among the world’s great maritime countries. Between 1856 and 1877, Henry Fry was the Lloyd’s agent for the St. Lawrence River, east of Montreal. The harbour coves below his home in Quebec were crammed with immense rafts of cut wood, the river’s shoreline sprawled with yards where giant square-rigged ships – many owned by Fry – were built.
As the president of Canada’s Dominion Board of Trade, Fry was at the epicentre of wealth and influence. His home city of Quebec served as the capital of the province of Canada, while its port was often the scene of raw criminality. He fought vigorously against the kidnapping of sailors and the dangerous practice of deck loading. He also battled against and overcame his personal demon – mental depression – going on to write many ship histories and essays on U.S.-Canada relations.
Fry was a colourful figure and a reformer who interacted with the famous figures of the day, including Lord and Lady Dufferin, Sir John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir Narcisse-Fortunat Belleau, Quebec’s lieutenant-governor.
" The first book in English to tell the little-known story of Quebec City's shipbuilding era since.. 1995."
Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph
John Fry worked for more than 40 years as a magazine editor at the Times Mirror Company and at the New York Times Company, retiring in 1999. Fry has published many articles on travel, skiing, health, and religion. He is a citizen of Canada as well as the United States, and lives in Katonah, New York.
Read more about John Fry
Running Away to Sea
George Fetherling
Read more about Running Away to Sea
White Ensign Flying
Roger Litwiller
Read more about White Ensign Flying
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Search results for tag "Interview" - 7 answer(s)
Six testimonials on prayer. What about you?
By Editorial Board - Feb 12, 2014 - Category Interviews
Tags : Abdennour Bidar, Attention, God, Guy Gilbert, Interview, Jérémie Bélingard, Michael Lonsdale, Poll, Prayer, Roland Giraud, Thierry Bizot, Video
What is prayer? What function does it have in our lives and how do we practice it? E-ostadelahi.com drew a few questions on this theme from interviews conducted with six public figures. From the actor to the priest, to the intellectual, to the dancer, all answer these questions in their own words.
Following this video, you too will have the opportunity to define the personal meaning you give to prayer by participating in a short poll.
12 comments | Permanent link
Consciousness and near-death experiences – Pim van Lommel, M.D.
By Editorial Board - Jul 25, 2011 - Category Interviews
Tags : Hereafter, Interview, NDE, Soul, Video
What can we learn from near-death experiences (NDEs)?
According to cardiologist Pim van Lommel, MD, author of Consciousness Beyond Life, the main difficulty is to understand what it means to be the witness of one’s own clinical death – a phenomenon that challenges ordinary logic.
Yet NDEs are not only a scientific enigma: their far-reaching ethical and spiritual implications remain to be spelled out.
Ostad Elahi: a spiritual heritage
By Editorial Board - May 9, 2011 - Category Interviews
Tags : Interview, Iran, Malek Jan Nemati, Mysticism, Orientalism, Ostad Elahi, Video
This is a short excerpt from the French TV program “Les Chemins de la Foi” (The Routes of Faith) broadcasted on March 27, 2011. The significance of Ostad Elahi and Malek Jân Nemati’s spiritual heritage is discussed during an interview of two specialists of the mystical traditions of Iran: Leili Anvar, Associate Professor of Persian […]
7 comments | Permanent link
The relevance of Ostad Elahi’s Knowing the Spirit
By Editorial Board - Mar 12, 2011 - Category Interviews
Tags : Interview, Knowing the Spirit, Metaphysics, Ostad Elahi, Philosophy, Soul, Theology, Video
James Morris, Ph. D., is professor of Theology at Boston College. A specialist of islamic philosophy, he has written authoritative studies on Ibn ’Arabi and Mulla Sadra’s metaphysics. His most recent publications include a translation of Ostad Elahi’s Knowing the Spirit (SUNY, 2006), a book which he also prefaced and annotated.
In first part of this video interview published by ostadelahi-indepth.com, Prof. Morris discusses the reasons that led him to study this particular work. He emphasises its relevance and place in today’s modern world by explaining how Ostad Elahi invites his readers to relate the arguments developed in his study to their own personal spiritual experience.
What happens between our lives ?
By Editorial Board - Sep 17, 2010 - Category Interviews
Tags : Hereafter, Interview, Interworld, NDE, Soul, Successive lives, Video
Michael Newton, Ph.D., started as a California state-certified Master Hypnotherapist. He is the renowned author of several groundbreaking books on the subject of past life regression: Journey of Souls (1994), Destiny of Souls (2000), and more recently, Life between lives (2004). He is also the editor of Memories of the Afterlife (2009), which includes a […]
1987 Vote
Altruism: an interview with Bahram Elahi, M.D.
By Editorial Board - Nov 22, 2009 - Category Interviews
Tags : Altruism, Bahram Elahi, Ethical practice, Intention, Interview
The e-ostadelahi.com editorial board has asked Prof. Bahram Elahi for an interview on the theme of altruism. Having spent more than forty years delving deeper into the philosophy and thought of his father while carrying out his own research and experimentation, he has made Ostad Elahi’s philosophical and spiritual work known to a wider public through his numerous publications. In this interview, he explains the meaning of altruism for those who are striving towards perfection and provides us with some keys to its reasoned practice.
Music and spirituality
By Jean-Claude Marti - Jul 30, 2009 - Category Interviews
Tags : Interview, Jean During, Music, Ostad Elahi, Video
Jean During, a specialist in Central Asia and author of numerous books, here describes the particular characteristics of Ostad Elahi’s music, putting it in relation with his spiritual teachings. The questions examined are the following: Why is Ostad Elahi recognized as the “master” of tanbur? To what extent and how did he reinvent its musical […]
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The Evolution of Amber Riley
By Jarett Wieselman 11:42 AM PST, November 15, 2012
Last night, Amber Riley made her New York City Center debut in their limited run production of Cotton Club Parade, which is returning for seven performances through November 18. In the show, which is a Broadway-style revue that celebrates Duke Ellington's years at the famed Harlem nightclub in the 1920s, Riley gets to showcase the simply sublime skillset she's been honing since birth.
ETonline caught up with Riley this morning to find out how opening night went, what it means to be part of this iconic production and how it will inform the hotly anticipated next phase of her career!
ETonline: How are you feeling after last night's debut?
Amber Riley: Amazing! This has been a life changing experience. I had no idea how much I really loved the stage. I've been bit by the Broadway bug.
ETonline: Why did you want to be a part of this production?
Riley: First, having Wynton Marsalis' [musical director] name attached to it and getting the opportunity to meet him was number one. I am obsessed with The Cotton Club era, Duke Ellington's music and everything that happened there. Dianna [Agron] actually got me a record player for my birthday, and all I listen to it is Duke Ellington, Lena Waters, Lena Horn and Dorothy Dandridge. All those wonderful singers. I'm just obsessed with that era – even the costumes, it was such a glamorous time.
PHOTOS - Celebrities Who Were In Glee Club
ETonline: What's your favorite part of the show?
Riley: I actually get to do Sunny Side of the Street! Ella Fitzgerald did my favorite version of that particular song. But I didn't expect it would be so hard to learn. That style of music isn't exactly my forte, and it's a lot harder because everything is so intentional in the way they wrote this music. The notes, the intervals and the places I would naturally go to are not in there, but it's important to the music to sing those notes. I actually get to dance and I'm just living on that stage when I do that number. During that song, I feel like I am really doing something.
ETonline: How does this compare to the Glee tour?
Riley: It's almost the same thing. Once you're out there, there's no "cut!" The tour was on a larger scale, but I've never danced as hard as I do in this. I break it down a little bit. People are going to be really surprised. I heard people in the audience go, "Oh?!?" It was hilarious.
RELATED - Chris Colfer Talks About Klaine's Breakup
ETonline: Is that the goal with this next phase of your career; to show them there's more to you than just Mercedes?
Riley: Yeah. I loved playing Mercedes on Glee; she's a fun character to play and I got to sing the diva songs, but I get to play an adult here. Even though I'm just singing in Cotton Club, I'm also acting in it. There's a story with my character. I feel completely different from Mercedes when I'm doing this. I feel like a woman and it's amazing.
ETonline: You're also working on your debut album, how has that process been?
Riley: It's been really fun. I've been recording since I was 10 years old, so when I started Glee, I think I was the most experienced in the recording world, so to be doing my own album now is like home. I'm working with producers and writers I've admired for such a long time. My dream was to have people see my life point of view through my writing so I'm really excited for everybody to hear what I'm doing.
ETonline: How do you describe the album?
Riley: It's not done yet. I found my sound, but in the middle of doing Glee and everything else, you have to pick up and stop [recording]. It's a classic R&B album. There’s a pop sensibility to it, there are some easy listening songs, but I want to take it back to that old school R&B sound. We've lost that a little bit in music today. Everything has been pop, which is great too -- I love listening to a great pop song I can just snap my fingers and dance to in the club, but R&B is where my heart is.
RELATED - 5 Best Glee Mash Ups
ETonline: You have two more episodes of Glee that have yet to air, and whether or not Mercedes continues to pop up, what will it have meant to you to have been a part of this show?
Riley: It sparked my love for music and gave me a thirst to understand different genres of music more. Not just be in a box as to what I can sing, what I can listen to and what I enjoy. Glee gave me such a thirst for music knowledge. It was a catapult for my career and it's shown me in so many different lights, it's given me the avenue to go anywhere I want in my career. Not a lot of people get that opportunity on TV. A lot of people get pigeonholed because they play one particular thing. I think people see me as an actress on the show, they see me as a singer on the show, they see me as a dancer on the show, so they can see me on Broadway and they can see me as a solo artist. Glee gave me the opportunity to show all the different parts of myself.
For more information on Cotton Club Parade, click here!
Amber Riley
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Interoperability of content-rich emergency calling solutions
Sophia Antipolis, 10 March 2017
NG112 Communications Plugtests event - Optimizing interoperability of emergency communications!
The 2nd edition of 'Next Generation 112 (NG112) Emergency Communications PlugtestsTM event in Europe' has been completed in ETSI.
Twenty companies from the emergency communications sector worked on validating the interoperability and conformity of market solutions using different scenarios and test cases.
“Next Generation technology is ready for us to use. More importantly, it is future-proof as it can continuously integrate new features.” said Cristina Lumbreras, EENA Technical Director. “Emergency services need to adopt NG112 solutions, one of the best investments they can make to provide the highest quality of services to their citizens.”
While the 2016 event edition focused on voice and geo-localization solutions, the 2017 scope was extended to content-rich emergency calling, such as video calling, instant messaging and file transfers. Participants put their products to the test, gaining valuable insights from experiencing a variety of scenarios. Tested technologies included Advanced Mobile Location, PEMEA (the Pan-European Mobile Emergency Application) and more.
We would like to thank Com4Innov who supported the Plugtest by providing the access to their 4G/IMS network as well as the support of the Emergency Call over IMS to manage this testing campaign.
ETSI and EENA would like to thank all participants for joining. The event’s outcomes, and mainly the lessons learned, will contribute significantly to the further development of Next Generation solutions and, as a result, to the improvement of emergency response in Europe and the world.
Claire Boyer, ETSI Communications Manager +33 (0)6 87 60 84 40, claire.boyer@etsi.org
Cristina Lumbreras, EENA Technical Director +32 (0)2 534 97 89, cl@eena.org
About the NG112 Communications Plugtest event
The concept of 'Next Generation 112' (NG112) has been identified as a potential answer to the increasing requirements and demands of content-rich emergency calling. The NG112 Communications PlugtestsTM event was organized by ETSI and its Emergency Telecommunications special committee (EMTEL), and EENA (the European Emergency Number Association), and saw a testing campaign based on the use cases developed by ETSI and EENA.
The event is supported by the European Commission.
About EENA
EENA is a Brussels-based NGO dedicated to contributing to high-quality emergency services. EENA serves as a discussion platform for emergency services, public authorities, decision makers, researchers, associations and solution providers with a view to improving the emergency response in accordance with citizens' requirements. EENA is also promoting the establishment of an efficient system for alerting citizens about imminent or developing emergencies. EENA memberships include more than 1300 emergency services representatives from over 80 countries world-wide, 80 solution providers, 15 international associations/organizations, more than 200 Members of the European Parliament and more than 90 researchers.
www.eena.org
About ETSI
ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization. ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose over 800 member companies and organizations, drawn from 67 countries, determine its work programme and participate directly in its work.
www.etsi.org
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Andrew Fithian #8 D Endicott
Apr 16 Roger Williams W, 12-8
Apr 19 Salve Regina W, 11-5
Apr 24 at U. of New England W, 15-9
Apr 27 Wentworth W, 20-4
Apr 30 Roger Williams W, 12-11
May 3 at Western New Eng. L, 9-8
Caused turnovers 24 9
Shooting percentage - -
Shots on goal percentage - -
Feb 23 at No. 12 Stevens L, 17-6 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0-0 0 - 0 -
Feb 27 Union (N.Y.) L, 15-7 0 0 0 0 0 6 2 2 0-0 0 - 0 -
Mar 9 at Skidmore W, 11-4 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 0-0 0 - 0 -
Mar 12 at No. 3 Tufts L, 13-5 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0-0 0 - 0 -
Mar 16 Springfield L, 8-4 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0-0 0 - 0 -
Mar 19 at No. 2 Amherst L, 12-10 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 0-0 0 - 0 -
Mar 23 Curry W, 14-5 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 3 0-0 0 - 0 -
Mar 27 at Bowdoin L, 8-7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0 - 0 -
Mar 30 at Gordon W, 18-7 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 3 Babson W, 11-5 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 1 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 6 at Wentworth W, 18-8 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 2 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 10 Nichols W, 18-3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 13 at Western New Eng. L, 10-7 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 16 Roger Williams W, 12-8 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 19 Salve Regina W, 11-5 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 1 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 24 at U. of New England W, 15-9 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 27 Wentworth W, 20-4 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 3 0-0 0 - 0 -
Apr 30 Roger Williams W, 12-11 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 4 0-0 0 - 0 -
May 3 at Western New Eng. L, 9-8 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 0-0 0 - 0 -
2017-18 15 13 0 0 0 0 0 12 5 15 0-0 0 - 0 -
2018-19 19 19 0 0 0 0 0 28 11 24 0-0 0 - 0 -
Total 34 32 0 0 0 0 0 40 16 39 0-0 0 - 0 -
Conference 8 8 0 0 0 0 0 9 5 9 0-0 0 - 0 -
Home 9 9 0 0 0 0 0 19 6 17 0-0 0 - 0 -
Away 10 10 0 0 0 0 0 9 5 7 0-0 0 - 0 -
Neutral - - - - 0 - - - - - 0-0 - - - -
Wins 11 11 0 0 0 0 0 17 6 19 0-0 0 - 0 -
Losses 8 8 0 0 0 0 0 11 5 5 0-0 0 - 0 -
February 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 6 3 2 0-0 0 - 0 -
March 7 7 0 0 0 0 0 7 3 6 0-0 0 - 0 -
April 9 9 0 0 0 0 0 14 5 14 0-0 0 - 0 -
May 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 0-0 0 - 0 -
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USDOS – US Department of State
2018 Report on International Religious Freedom: Sudan
The Interim National Constitution provides for freedom of religious creed and the rights to worship, assemble, and maintain places of worship. Some laws and government practices are based on the government’s interpretation of a sharia system of jurisprudence, which human rights groups state does not provide protections for some religious minorities, including minority Muslim groups. The law criminalizes apostasy, blasphemy, conversion from Islam to another religion, and questioning or criticizing the Quran, the Sahaba (the Companions of the Prophet), or the wives of the Prophet. While the law does not specifically address proselytizing, the government has criminally defined and prosecuted proselytizing as a form of apostasy. According to international reports, on October 13, a group of security agents raided the private home of Tajedin Yousif in South Darfur and arrested 13 Christian men who were participating in a series of prayer meetings. Nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports stated that of the 13 persons arrested, 10 were of Darfuri origin and converts from Islam. The reports said the individuals were abused in detention, threatened with apostasy charges, and forced to denounce Christianity. Authorities released the detainees within two weeks and dropped the charges against them. Human rights groups continued to accuse the government of interfering in internal religious community disputes over the sale of church lands to investors, including on cases related to the Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church (SPEC) and the Sudan Church of Christ (SCOC), and to highlight the inability of these Christian groups to seek legal recourse. According to church leaders, authorities continued to influence the internal affairs of churches through intimidation, harassment, and arrests of those opposed to government interference within evangelical Christian churches. In February authorities demolished a church belonging to the SCOC in the Haj Youssef neighborhood of Khartoum North and confiscated the property of the church, including Bibles and pews. As of year’s end, the government had not provided compensation for the damage nor provided an alternative space for worshipping, according to church leaders. While the law does not prohibit the practice of Shia Islam, authorities took actions against Shia Muslims. Some Shia Muslims reported authorities continued to prevent them from publishing articles about Shia beliefs. According to multiple sources, authorities again regularly charged and convicted Christian and Muslim women with “indecent dress” for wearing pants and fined and lashed them. The Ministry of Education for Khartoum State continued to mandate that Christian schools operate on Sundays in order to meet minimum required instruction hours.
Muslims and non-Muslims said a small and sometimes vocal minority of Salafist groups that advocated violence continued to be a concern. Some Christian leaders noted the lack of representation of minority religious groups within government offices and the lack of a strong Council of Churches to advocate for the legal rights of churches and their members.
In high-level discussions with the government, U.S. officials encouraged respect for religious freedom and the protection of minority religious groups. The Charge d’Affaires and other U.S. embassy officials raised specific cases of demolitions of houses of worship and court cases against religious leaders with government officials, including officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They also emphasized the government’s need to take concrete steps to improve religious. Embassy officials stressed that respect for religious freedom is crucial to improved relations with the United States and a precursor to peace in the country. In meetings with the minister of foreign affairs, the Charge d’Affaires raised the denial of licenses for new churches, the demolition of houses of worship without an alternative, the harassment of Muslim religious minorities, government interference in internal church affairs, and enforcement of “indecent dress” laws. The embassy maintained close contact with religious leaders, faith-based groups, and NGOs, and embassy representatives monitored and attended many of the legal proceedings for those prosecuted in connection with their religious beliefs. In May the embassy cohosted a workshop on interreligious dialogue with the Canadian embassy in Khartoum and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In his opening remarks, the Charge d’Affaires stressed the importance of leaders from different faith backgrounds and professions ensuring that their laws and actions are in line with international guiding principles of religious freedom.
Since 1999, Sudan has been designated as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. On November 28, 2018, the Secretary of State redesignated Sudan as a CPC and identified the following sanction that accompanied the designation: the restriction in the annual Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act on making certain appropriated funds available for assistance to the Government of Sudan, currently set forth in section 7042(i) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2018 (Div. K, P. L. 115-141), and any provision of law that is the same or substantially the same as this provision, pursuant to section 402(c)(5) of the Act.
Section I. Religious Demography
The U.S. government estimates the total population at 43.1 million (July 2018 estimate). According to the Sudanese government, approximately 97 percent of the population is Muslim. It is unclear whether government estimates include South Sudanese (predominantly Christian or animist) who did not leave after the 2011 separation of South Sudan or returned after conflict erupted in South Sudan in 2013, or other non-South Sudanese, non-Muslim groups. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports more than 927,000 refugees and asylum seekers in the country, including 768,819 South Sudanese refugees. Some religious advocacy groups estimate non-Muslims make up more than 20 percent of the population.
Almost all Muslims are Sunni, although there are significant distinctions among followers of different Sunni traditions, particularly among Sufi orders. Small Shia Muslim communities are based predominantly in Khartoum. At least one Jewish family remains in the Khartoum area.
The government reports the presence of 36 Christian denominations in the country. Christians reside throughout the country, primarily in major cities such as Khartoum, Port Sudan, Kassala, Gedaref, El Obeid, and El Fasher. Christians also are concentrated in some parts of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State.
Relatively small but long-established groups of Coptic Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Christians are located in Khartoum, El Obeid in North Kordofan, River Nile and Gezira States, and eastern parts of the country. Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox communities, largely made up of refugees and migrants, are located in Khartoum and the eastern part of the country. Other larger Christian groups include the Roman Catholic Church, Episcopal Anglican Church, Sudan Church of Christ, Sudan Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and Presbyterian Church of the Sudan. Smaller Christian groups include the Africa Inland Church, Armenian Apostolic Church, Sudan Interior Church, Sudan Pentecostal Church, Seventh-day Adventist Church, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Government statistics indicate less than 1 percent of the population, primarily in Blue Nile and South Kordofan States, adheres to traditional African religious beliefs. Some Christians and Muslims incorporate aspects of these traditional beliefs into their religious practice. A small Baha’i community primarily operates underground.
Section II. Status of Government Respect for Religious Freedom
The Interim National Constitution, passed in 2004, provides for freedom of religious creed and worship, and grants individuals the right to declare their religious beliefs and manifest them through worship, education, practice, or performance, subject to requirements of laws and public order. The constitution prohibits the coercion of individuals to adopt a faith they do not believe in or to engage in rites or services without consent. The constitution also states that nationally enacted legislation shall be based on sharia. The government has not amended the constitution to reflect the 2011 independence of South Sudan.
The law does not permit Shia Muslims to hold worship services; however, they are allowed to enter Sunni mosques to pray.
The constitution allows religious groups to establish and maintain humanitarian and charitable institutions, acquire property and materials related to their religious rites and customs, write and disseminate religious publications, teach religion, solicit public and private contributions, select their own leaders, observe days of rest, celebrate religious holidays, and communicate with constituents on matters of religion.
The constitution denies recognition to any political party that discriminates based on religion and specifically prohibits religious discrimination against candidates for the national civil service. Constitutional violations of freedom of religion may be pursued in the Constitutional Court; however, cases of discrimination often originate and are addressed in lower courts.
National laws are based on a sharia system of jurisprudence. The criminal code states the law, including at the state and local level, shall be based on sharia sources and include hudood, qisas, and diyah principles (specific serious crimes and related restitution and punishment). The criminal code takes into consideration multiple sharia schools of jurisprudence (madhahib). The Islamic Panel of Scholars and Preachers (Fiqh Council) determines under which conditions a particular school of thought will apply. Other criminal and civil laws, including public order laws, are determined at the state and local level.
The president appoints the Fiqh Council, an official body of 40 Muslim religious scholars responsible for explaining and interpreting Islamic jurisprudence, to four-year renewable terms. The council advises the government and issues fatwas on religious matters, including levying customs duties on the importation of religious materials, payment of interest on loans for public infrastructure, and determination of government-allotted annual leave for Islamic holidays. The council’s opinions are not legally binding. Muslim religious scholars may present differing religious and political viewpoints in public.
The criminal code does not explicitly mention proselytizing, but it criminalizes both conversion from Islam to any other faith (apostasy) and acts that encourage conversion from Islam. Those who convert from Islam to another religion as well as any Muslim who questions or criticizes the teachings of the Quran, the Sahaba (the Companions of the Prophet), or the wives of the Prophet may also be considered guilty of apostasy and sentenced to death. Those charged with apostasy are allowed to repent within a period decided by the court but may still face up to five years in prison. The law does not prohibit individuals from converting to Islam from another religion.
The criminal code’s section on “religious offenses” criminalizes various acts committed against any religion. These include insulting religion, blasphemy, disturbing places of worship, and trespassing upon places of burial. The criminal code states, “whoever insults any religion, their rights or beliefs or sanctifications or seeks to excite feelings of contempt and disrespect against the believers thereof” shall be punished with up to six months in prison, flogging of up to 40 lashes, and/or a fine. The article includes provisions that prescribe penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment and 40 lashes for any non-Muslim who curses the Prophet Muhammad, his wives, or members of his respective households.
The Ministry of Guidance and Endowments (MGE) regulated Islamic religious practice, including activities such as reviewing Friday sermons at mosques, supervised churches, and was responsible for guaranteeing equal treatment for all religious groups. The MGE also provided recommendations to relevant ministries regarding religious issues government ministries encounter. In September President Omar al-Bashir dissolved the previous government and established a restructured government that eliminated the MGE. The next month Bashir created a Higher Council for Guidance and Endowments (HCGE) and appointed the former minister of the MGE to be the council’s chairperson. The HCGE maintains the same mandate as the former ministry.
In October the government formed a new interagency committee to discuss religious coexistence and religious issues more broadly with a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs chairing the committee and members from the security services, HCGE, Human Rights Commission, Ministry of Education, and other bodies.
To gain official recognition by the government, religious groups must register at the state level with the HCGE, or a related ministry such as the Ministry of Culture, or the Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC), depending on the nature of the group and its activities. The HAC oversees NGOs and nonprofit organizations. Religious groups that also engage in humanitarian or development activities must register as nonprofit NGOs by filing a standard application required by the HAC for both local and international NGOs. Only religious groups that register are eligible to apply for other administrative benefits, including land ownership, tax exemptions, and work permits.
The state-mandated education curriculum requires that all students receive religious instruction. The curriculum further mandates that all schools, including international schools and private schools operated by Christian groups, provide Islamic education classes to Muslim students, from preschool through the second year of university. The law does not require non-Muslims to attend Islamic education classes, and it mandates that public schools provide Christian students with other religious instruction if there are at least 15 Christian students in a class. According to the Ministry of Education, following the separation of South Sudan, this number was not reached in most schools. Non-Muslim students therefore normally attend religious study classes of their own religion outside of regular school hours to fulfill the religious instruction requirement.
The Ministry of Education is responsible for determining the religious education curriculum. According to the ministry, the Islamic curriculum must follow the Sunni tradition.
The HCGE determines, along with the state-level entities responsible for land grants and planning, whether to provide authorization or permits to build new houses of worship, taking into account zoning concerns such as the distance between religious institutions and population density (the allocation of land to religious entities is determined at the state level). The HCGE is mandated to assist both mosques and churches in obtaining tax exemptions and duty-free permits to import items such as furniture and religious items for houses of worship; the HCGE also assists visitors attending meetings sponsored by religious groups and activities to obtain tourist visas through the Ministry of Interior. The HCGE coordinates travel for the Hajj and Umra.
Public order laws, based largely on the government’s interpretation of sharia, vary by state. These laws prohibit “indecent” dress and other “offenses of honor, reputation, and public morality.” Authorities primarily enforce such laws in large cities and enforce laws governing indecent dress against both Muslims and non-Muslims. The criminal code states that an act is contrary to public decency if it violates another person’s modesty. In practice, the special Public Order Police and courts, which derive their authority from the Ministry of Interior, have wide latitude in interpreting what dress or behaviors are indecent and in arresting and passing sentence on accused offenders.
Some aspects of the criminal code specify punishments for Muslims based on government interpretation of sharia punishment principles. For example, the criminal code stipulates 40 lashes for a Muslim who drinks, possesses, or sells alcohol; no punishment is prescribed for a non-Muslim who drinks or possesses alcohol in private. The criminal code stipulates if a non-Muslim is arrested for public drinking, or possessing or selling alcohol, he or she is subject to trial, but the punishment will not be based on hudood principles. The penalty for adultery with a married person is hanging and for an unmarried person is 100 lashes. An unmarried man could additionally be punished with expatriation for up to one year. These penalties apply to both Muslims and non-Muslims. Adultery is defined as sexual activity outside of marriage, prior to marriage, or in a marriage that is determined to be void.
Under the law, the justice minister may release any prisoner who memorizes the Quran during his or her prison term. The release requires a recommendation for parole from the prison’s director general, a religious committee composed of the Sudan Scholars Organization, and members of the Fiqh Council, which consults with the MGE to ensure decisions, comply with Islamic legal regulations.
Under the law, a Muslim man may marry a non-Muslim woman (although most Sudanese sharia schools of thought advise that the non-Muslim women must be “people of the book,” i.e., either Christian or Jewish). A Muslim woman, however, legally may marry only a Muslim man. A Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man could be charged with adultery.
Separate family courts exist for Muslims and non-Muslims to address personal status issues such as marriage, divorce, and child custody, according to their religion. By law, in custody dispute cases where one parent is Muslim and the other is Christian, courts grant custody to the Muslim parent if there is any concern that the non-Muslim parent would raise the child in a religion other than Islam.
According to Islamic personal status laws, Christians (including children) may not inherit assets from a Muslim.
Government offices and businesses are closed on Friday for prayers and follow an Islamic workweek of Sunday to Thursday. The law requires employers to give Christian employees two hours off on Sundays for religious activity. Leave from work is also granted to celebrate Orthodox Christmas, an official state holiday, along with several key Islamic holidays.
An interministerial committee, which includes the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS), and in some cases Military Intelligence, must approve foreign clergy and other foreigners seeking a residency permit.
The constitution’s bill of rights says all rights and freedoms enshrined in international human rights treaties, covenants, and instruments ratified by the country are integral parts of the constitution’s bill of rights.
The country is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Government Practices
According to international reports, on October 13, a group of security agents raided the private home of Tajedin Yousifa, a Christian pastor, in South Darfur and arrested 13 Christian men who were there for a series of prayer meetings. Of those arrested, reports stated 10 were of Darfuri origin and converts from Islam. NISS was reportedly monitoring the home and had two pickup trucks parked outside the home. NISS agents reportedly took the individuals to an unknown NISS facility in Nyala, where they were interrogated. NISS then transferred the detainees to a Nyala police station on October 18. Authorities initially charged the men with disturbing public peace but released 12 of the detainees on October 21 with no charges. All detainees were reportedly in poor health upon release and required medical attention for injuries sustained in police detention. Authorities kept the pastor in detention for additional questioning. Initial reports indicated that authorities also charged him with apostasy and crimes against the state, which carry a death sentence if convicted. Authorities released the pastor on October 23 and dropped all charges. Authorities stated they also considered the group to be supporters of the leader of an armed Darfuri rebel movement.
In August the Omdurman Criminal Court convicted Samson Hamad Al-Haras, a member of the government-backed Presbyterian Evangelical Community Committee (ECC), of murder in the killing of SPEC elder Yonan Abdullah during an April 2017 altercation between ECC supporters and opponents within SPEC over control of the SPEC-operated Omdurman Evangelical Church School. Al-Haras was sentenced to death. The other 60 or more SPEC leaders arrested in opposition to the ECC’s efforts to sell the school remained in various stages of prosecution.
On December 28, government security forces fired tear gas and stun grenades at a group of 300-400 worshippers leaving a mosque associated with the opposition National Umma Party in Omdurman following Friday prayers. The incident occurred on the 10th day of antigovernment demonstrations and protests of rising food prices, and activists had urged protesters to gather in large numbers following Friday prayers.
According to reports, the Public Order Police frequently charged women with “indecent dress” and “indecent behavior,” and there were numerous court convictions. Religious leaders and government officials again reported the Public Order Police fined and lashed Muslim and Christian women on a daily basis in Khartoum for wearing pants and other dress the police considered indecent. In November the Public Order Police arrested a Coptic singer after she performed at a concert for which the organizer had not received the proper permit. The police searched the singer’s private phone while she was in custody and charged her with indecent behavior because of photographs they found on her phone. A judge convicted her and sentenced her to 10 lashes and a fine of 5,000 Sudanese pounds ($110). Authorities lashed her immediately following the conviction.
Minority religious groups, including Muslim minority groups and especially Shia Muslims, expressed concern they could be convicted of apostasy if they expressed beliefs or discussed religious practices that differed from those of the Sunni majority group. Some Shia reported they remained prohibited from writing articles about their beliefs and religious issues remained a redline for news media to address. Many individuals from Muslim minorities, such as Shia or Quranist groups, reported that their places of worship had remained closed since 2014. According to lawyers working on the Quranists’ issues, the Constitutional Court dismissed the court case against them due to mounting international pressure and ordered that the group not gather again. The lawyers also stated the Quranists needed to keep a low profile regarding their places of worship, as well as religious events and gatherings.
SPEC leaders continued to face lengthy and prolonged trials for charges including “criminal mischief” and “trespassing,” after they continued to use properties belonging to the SPEC.
In early July, the Pentecostal Cultural Centre, located in downtown Khartoum opposite Unity Catholic School, reopened. The government had closed the center in 2014 and temporarily turned it into a NISS office after the government claimed the church did not have legal documentation proving ownership of the building.
In September an Omdurman court ruled the SCOC national leadership committee led by Moderator Ayoub Tilliano had ownership of the SCOC headquarters in Omdurman. The leadership committee was engaged in a legal case over ownership of the property following a 2015 raid by security forces on SCOC headquarters, after which the security forces confiscated all their legal documents and brought charges against the leadership council for trespassing. The committee received the legal documents back from security services on September 24.
Government security services were reported to continue to monitor mosques closely for Friday sermon content. Multiple sources stated authorities provided talking points and required imams to use them in their sermons. If an imam’s sermon diverged from the government-provided talking points, the imam would be removed from his position. Some individuals from minority religious groups expressed concern that the Friday sermons encouraged discriminatory or hateful beliefs against the minority groups.
Prisons provided prayer spaces for Muslims, but sources stated that authorities did not allow Shia prayers. Shia prisoners were permitted to join prayer services led by Sunni imams. Some prisons, such as the Women’s Prison in Omdurman, had dedicated areas for Christian observance. Christian clergy held services in prisons, but access was irregular.
The government continued to state it did not have non-Muslim teachers available to teach Christian courses in public schools. Some public schools excused non-Muslims from Islamic education classes. Some private schools, including Christian schools, received government-provided Muslim teachers to teach Islamic subjects, but non-Muslim students were not required to attend those classes. Most Christian students attended religious education classes at their churches based on the availability of volunteer teachers from their own church communities. Their families reported that the children’s schools did not usually recognize the classes, and students in those cases did not receive credit.
On February 11, authorities demolished the SPEC church in the Haj Youssef neighborhood of Khartoum North. Police arrived at the scene following Sunday worship services and ordered congregants to vacate the premises immediately. Police then confiscated the property inside the church, including the pews and Bibles, and razed the building with a bulldozer. Church leaders said they had no advance warning of the demolition. The church had already been seized by a local businessman, who claimed ownership of the church despite ownership deeds in the name of the church dating back to 1989. At year’s end, the church was engaged in an appeal of the decision and the confiscation of the church’s property, but authorities repeatedly postponed court sessions. At year’s end, church leaders had yet to receive compensation for damages or been given an alternative site for worship.
In May a Muslim human rights lawyer fled the country after he was arrested and interrogated by security services for his work advocating for minority religious groups. He had already faced repeated incidents of harassment and intimidation from NISS, including two break-ins of his home the previous year. Human rights activists expressed concern about the departure of the lawyer from their community, as he was a vocal proponent of religious freedom and worked to defend the rights of religious minorities.
According to various church representatives, the government continued to favor mosques over churches in the issuance of permits for houses of worship. Some churches reported they were less willing to apply for land permits or to construct churches given the government’s previous repeated denials. The government attributed its denial of permits to the churches not meeting government population density parameters and zoning plans.
Local parishioners reported that, compared to Islamic institutions, Christian places of worship continued to be disproportionately affected by zoning changes, closures, and demolitions. The government said places of worship that were demolished or closed lacked proper land permits or institutional registration and that mosques, churches, schools, hospitals, and residences were all affected equally by the urban planning projects. Sources estimated at least 24 churches, Christian schools, libraries, and cultural centers were “systematically closed,” demolished or confiscated by the government between 2011 and 2017. During the year, only one church demolition was reported. Government authorities also stated that mosques were affected and provided photographs of mosque demolitions; however, lack of detailed information on the alleged demolitions made it difficult to verify the information, according to observers.
The NISS noted the locations of churches and mosques it was tracking that were located on what the government referred to as “unplanned areas” in Khartoum State. Christian leaders and lawyers said that gaining outright land titles remained very difficult given that the government legally owned all land, and thus the legal status of churches remained unclear.
During the year, 22 churches filed complaints with the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) following an outreach campaign to Christian religious communities in the Khartoum area by the NHRC. Most of the complaints related to land and administrative issues. At year’s end, the commission was following up with the complaints and established a working group to investigate systematic issues related to the registration of and land permits for Christian places of worship.
Following a July 2017 order from the Ministry of Education for Khartoum State mandating that schools (except for Coptic schools) operate from Sunday to Thursday, non-Coptic Christian schools either continued to operate on Sundays to adhere to the national general education guidelines, or they increased instruction hours on other school days to avoid operating on Sundays. Multiple members of the government, including the foreign affairs minister and the minister of education for Khartoum State, continued to publicly express concern that the order would damage the country’s international reputation and unnecessarily impeded individuals’ religious freedom. Government officials stated, however, that they were unaware of how to overturn the order because its origins were unclear.
The government continued to restrict some religiously based political parties, including the Republican Brothers Party, which opposes the government’s use of sharia as a source of law. The Political Parties Affairs Council, which oversees the registration of political parties, refused to register the party in 2014, and the party’s leader filed an appeal of the decision to the Constitutional Court in 2015, but the court refused the appeal. A local community center and library associated with the party in Omdurman remained closed due to government restrictions on its operation.
Government officials continued to state Islamic principles should inform official policies and often pointed to sharia as the basis for the country’s legal framework. President Bashir and other senior figures frequently emphasized the country’s Islamic foundation. In a February speech responding to public opposition to subsidy cuts and a currency devaluation, Bashir said that anyone who protested the economic situation or his administration’s policies was an enemy of Islam and working against the Islamic faith.
The government denied Christian churches or their humanitarian institutions tax-exempt status, although the government granted this status to Muslim relief agencies. Christian churches reported authorities required them to pay or negotiate taxes on items such as vehicles.
The government continued to restrict non-Muslim religious groups from operating or entering the country and continued to monitor activities and censor material published by religious institutions. The MGE and the HCGE again said they had granted a limited number of Christian missionary groups permission to engage in humanitarian activities and promote Muslim-Christian cooperation.
Many officials from various churches reported the government refused to grant, or delayed renewing, work and residency visas to church employees of foreign origin, including missionaries and clergy, or to individuals the government believed would proselytize in public places. Local members of the Catholic Church said these denials had a particularly negative impact on the Catholic Church, whose clergy are mostly of foreign origin, while most clergy of other Christian denominations are ethnically Sudanese or South Sudanese. The government only granted residence permits with less than a year’s validity. The government required clergy to pay a fine of 70 Sudanese pounds ($1) for every day they were not in residency status.
The government reportedly closely scrutinized those suspected of proselytizing and used administrative rationales, or other aspects of the law such as immigration status, to either deport or exert financial pressure on such individuals.
Some religious groups reported the government barred the import of unapproved religious texts and said most Christian denominations were unable to import teaching materials and religious texts as guaranteed by the constitution. According to international reports, in September authorities released two shipping containers with Arabic-language Bibles destined for the Bible Society in Khartoum after they had been detained in Port Sudan for three years.
A small number of Christian politicians, the majority of whom were members of the Coptic Church, continued to hold seats in the government.
During the year, Christian groups called for a Christian director of the MGE Office of Church Affairs. MGE officials said they agreed to appoint a Christian but had yet to do so because Christian communities could not agree on a representative. Christian groups said the government never expressed a willingness to appoint a Christian, although government officials publicly stated such willingness on multiple occasions. After the government dissolved the MGE and established the HCGE, the opportunities for non-Muslim representation were not clear.
In January the government convened a group of representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, former MGE, Inter-Religious Council, Ministry of Education, and others to discuss the state of religious coexistence. The group identified several areas of concern, including religious education inequities, and resolved to establish an intragovernmental working group on religious coexistence. In October the government formed a new higher-level interministerial group chaired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the same structure and mandate.
Section III. Status of Societal Respect for Religious Freedom
Individual Muslims and Christians reported generally good relationships at the societal level and stated that instances of intolerance or discrimination by individuals or nongovernmental entities were generally isolated.
The Sudan Inter-Religious Council, a registered nonprofit, nonpolitical organization consisting of scholars, half of whom were Muslim and the other half Christian, was mandated by its constitution to advise the MGE/HCGE and to encourage interfaith dialogue.
A segment about gender equality in the country on the Deutsche Welle’s (DW) Arabic-language talk show “Shabab Talk” went viral on September 21. During the segment, a young woman, Weam Shawky, addressed Mohammed Osman Saleh, the chair of the Sudan Scholars Association, and criticized the widespread harassment and intimidation of women because of their clothing. Immediately following the episode, Saleh gave a press conference in which he said the show was put on by “enemies of our culture.” Muslim clerics responded by calling for protests and violence against DW’s production partner, television channel Sudania 24, in Khartoum. Several Muslim clerics decried the show in their Friday sermons, and one cleric accused the host, Jaafar Abdul Karim, of “spreading atheism.” Many human rights activists and other members of the local community defended the show and praised Sudania 24 for initiating an open discussion on the topic of women’s rights and the public order system.
Section IV. U.S. Government Policy and Engagement
In meetings between the Charge d’Affaires and the minister of foreign affairs and the ministry’s director for human rights, women, and children, the Charge promoted religious freedom as a means of achieving peace and stability. He emphasized that religious freedom formed a key basis for broader normalization of bilateral relations. The Charge and other embassy officials also made this point repeatedly in regular meetings of the Joint Review Committee of the U.S.-Sudan engagement plan. The Charge further emphasized that persons of different religions needed to be able to practice their religious beliefs freely and that creating an environment without fear of harassment based on religion was crucial to bringing peace and stability to the country’s conflict areas. He also raised the issues of the denial of licenses for new churches, demolition of houses of worship without an alternative, court cases against religious leaders, harassment of Muslim religious minorities, government interference in internal church affairs, and enforcement of “indecent dress” laws.
The embassy held a weeklong series of meetings in May on religious freedom with civil society representatives, religious leaders, and journalists. In the meetings, embassy officials raised religious freedom issues regarding property ownership, access to education and school days conflicting with Christian worship services, and women’s rights.
The U.S. embassy partnered with the Canadian embassy in Khartoum and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to hold a two-day workshop in May on interreligious dialogue. Senior government officials, leaders of religious communities, diplomatic representatives, media, and nongovernmental organizations attended the workshop and shared their views on the state of religious freedom in the country. The main topics discussed were education laws, laws governing religious freedom, and registration of religious properties. An official from the Department of State Office of International Religious Freedom attended the workshop and met with government representatives, including Foreign Minister Ibrahim Ghandour. The official discussed ways the government could take concrete steps toward substantially improving the state of religious freedom in the country.
Embassy officials met regularly with imams and Sufi clerics, and clergy and parishioners of Catholic and Protestant churches to hear their views on the religious freedom situation. Embassy officials attended religious ceremonies of different groups and underscored in regular meetings with leaders of Muslim and Christian groups the importance of religious tolerance. U.S. government representatives closely monitored the legal proceedings concerning religious organizations and religious leaders.
The embassy regularly utilized its social media outlets to share articles and messaging related to religious tolerance and freedom.
Annual report on religious freedom (covering 2018)
https://www.state.gov/reports/2018-report-on-international-religious-freedom/sudan/
Periodical Report
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Preventing Youth Violence
By Maurice J. Elias
There is more consensus about how to reduce and prevent school violence than one might think. But is there the political and moral will to carry out the policies that are needed?
Questions about the seriousness of our intentions toward youths have begun to be raised more frequently at gatherings of experts on preventing violence and promoting students' social competence. The problem can be seen, in part, from some of our routine school-violence policies and from our seeming reluctance to enact difficult but research-supported approaches to dealing with violent youths in the schools.
Consider, for example, the practice of suspending disruptive young people from school. What purpose does this serve? I believe it is a way to transfer violence from the schools to the community. Suspension is a one-way ticket to the streets. If many of the kids we suspend can't keep up with work when they are in school, how can they make it up when they have been suspended for five or more days? More to the point, why would they want to?
What we know about violent youths suggests intervention strategies that are more appropriate--for them and for the community.
We know, for example, that children who engage in frequent or extreme acts of violence need to be removed for a time from familiar surroundings--the places where their violent behavior is encouraged, reinforced, condoned, or, at the very least, ignored. These are kids whose parents and neighbors often have assaulted themselves with drugs, or one another with weapons of varying degrees of lethality. These are kids who may have tried to stop the violence around them but who came to believe that survival demanded they learn the local rules of war.
In so-called alternative schools, such as the well-regarded Essex County Educational Services Commission Alternative High School on the campus of Upsala College in New Jersey, there is a recognition of the need to help these troubled youths learn to relate with and become interdependent upon other young people who have also had such problems, and to provide a curriculum that makes sense to them. Subject areas are integrated around themes that these kids can understand: jobs, the problems of urban areas, family issues, getting to know more of the world around them.
Most important, they form relationships with staff people who care about them and their future. These staff members are not indifferent to the students' misbehavior. They are not unmindful of the necessity of teenagers' learning essential academic skills. But, most centrally, they realize their profound role as guides and mentors. They know that their failure may lead the young person in their charge to follow a negative trajectory bound to result in incarceration or death.
The success of alternative schools is based on establishing enduring relationships and making a transformation in the identity of the students, so that they go from hopeless to hopeful and from defeated and sullen to proud and optimistic.
How serious is the problem of violence in our schools and our communities? Think about kids like Jacob Gonzales, a 10-year-old in Detroit who helped another child "set up" a mother of two young children for a robbery that resulted in the woman's death--all for a little over $80.
Jacob took his $20 share of the robbery money and bought some junk food and toys. When he was arrested, he had no sense of having done anything wrong. "It was a game," he said. Can there be any more vivid reason to give efforts at violence prevention our most thoughtful attention?
The problem is too serious and too deeply rooted to be subjected to half-hearted, vaguely conceived, inadequately funded, or poorly monitored interventions. Yet, this is the state of the art today. Existing programs to curb violence in the schools are too limited, too weak, and too often don't reach those in greatest need.
The reasons for this are not mysterious. In the 1970's, we were concerned about "disaffected" youths, kids who sat in school, or perhaps attended sporadically or dropped out, and were unmotivated, disengaged from learning. In the 1980's the focal issue was substance-abuse prevention, as many kids--including the disaffected ones--were turning to self-medications and the peer culture of smoking, marijuana, alcohol, and other drug use as a way of coping with life.
Now we are faced with a rising amount of violence, and, just as bad, with a phenomenon in which kids are actually afraid of other groups of kids largely because they are labeled as "violent." I saw this recently in a school in central New Jersey, where the kids shunned the African-American males because of a strong, media-conveyed stereotype of all black men as violent and volatile. The tragedy of this was amplified by the fact that these were 4th graders.
Kids are crying out to us to do something. When their anguish was quiet, or self-directed, we did not respond with sustained vigor and concern. But now their feelings are turning outward. They are enraged, disenfranchised, and they feel they have little to lose, no futures to compromise. The problem is there for us to see: Schools and communities must be places where all children feel valued, useful, and needed.
The argument that some parents might not be the best role models has, for too long, been an excuse to evade a harsh reality and the tough work that must be done: If the kids are not in a supportive environment, then schools and social systems must develop effective ways to compensate, even as other systems work to change the problematic conditions. What we cannot do is throw away any more generations of children as we "wait and hope" for things to get better.
It is important for educators to applaud and work with community-based efforts at violence prevention. We can draw inspiration, for example, from groups like the Hallmark Corporate Charitable Foundation, which is devoting enormous resources to developing the "Talking With T.J." program. It is targeted at helping kids ages 7 to 10 learn the social-competence skills of teamwork and conflict resolution and social problem-solving.
Hallmark has set up a structure in which a national team of educators, media experts, curriculum writers, scientific advisers, developmentalists, evaluators, and young people have been working with youth organizations such as the Boys and Girls Clubs, 4-H Clubs, and Girl Scouts, to reach kids in their after-school time, in groups where they feel less turned off, left out, and hopeless than many of them feel at school. This kind of project provides a clear example of what can happen when moral will, armed with the best of our existing knowledge, is mobilized.
Yet no one should argue that these kinds of efforts can be sufficient. Schools have to be places from which viable, positive future pathways for young people can be forged. They must, above all, be places where children can learn to live and get along with one another, and get ready to assume their future roles as responsible citizens of a democracy, as parents, as community leaders, and as productive members of the workforce. And these possibilities must extend equally to all students, regardless of where they live, their culture of origin, their gender, or specific handicaps they might have.
How can this happen? The presence of violence and violence-related problems must do more than spur us to adopt violence-prevention programs. We must join with the National Mental Health Association, the Consortium on the School-Based Promotion of Social Competence, and other groups which urge us to work toward comprehensive health education and the promotion of social competence and life skills in schools and communities. Task forces and think tanks have given us more than enough information to guide this kind of work. To help focus the efforts of those whose political and moral will has only been waiting for a clear sense of direction, here are pivotal areas that, if allowed to go unaddressed, will continue to hold us back:
Every child entering school should have a social-development plan, designed to insure that age-appropriate life skills are being learned throughout the school years.
All those entering the teaching professions must have the skills necessary to carry out life-skills-development work confidently and well, and must see this as a part of their jobs. Certification and hiring practices should reflect this priority.
Because problems will persist in schools while efforts move forward to develop better models and procedures for working with young people, school administrators need to be prepared to be action researchers, considering the collective impact of various programs and educational approaches, working to combine them, and tracking their progress continually, until and even after goals appear to be attained.
Concomitant changes are needed in higher education, in training programs for teachers and school administrators, and in the preparation of special-services staff members. Institutions unwilling and unable to instill the attitudes and skills needed for this task should not be accredited. And the same should be true of the professional training of pediatricians and other family health-care providers.
Finally, I recommend that all schools become centers for parenting support and education. Public-health issues like violence, alcohol and other drug abuse, and aids require public-health solutions--bold, definitive, focused, sustained efforts. The stakes are high: the very identities of our future adult citizens. Our efforts must be correspondingly great.
Maurice J. Elias is a professor of psychology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. He is also the coordinator of the university's internship program in applied, school, and community psychology, and is the co-founder of the Consortium on the School-Based Promotion of Social Competence.
Vol. 14, Issue 40, Pages 54, 56
Published in Print: August 2, 1995, as Preventing Youth Violence
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AT&T to Pay Quarter Million Dollars to Settle EEOC Age Discrimination Suit
Telecom Giant Fired 16-Year Employee Due to Age, Federal Agency Charged
KANSAS CITY - Telecommunications giant AT&T will pay $250,000 and furnish other relief to settle an age discrimination suit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today.
According to the EEOC's suit, in the fall of 2008, AT&T fired Terry Pierce from its Lee's Summit, Mo., facility because of her age. Pierce, who had been employed by the company for 16 years as sales coach manager, was 53 years old when AT&T discharged her, while at the same time retaining younger, lower-performing sales coach managers or allowing them to transfer.
Such alleged conduct violates the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). The EEOC filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri (EEOC v. AT&T, Case No. 4:11-cv-990-DW) after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.
In addition to the monetary relief, the company agreed to redistribute its anti-discrimination policy with a message from its EEO director reaffirming the company's commitment to the policy; provide anti-discrimination training; and report to the EEOC on complaints of age discrimination and terminations of persons over 40.
"Age discrimination is a serious problem, especially in times of economic downturn," said Barbara A. Seely, Regional Attorney of the EEOC's St. Louis District Office. "Not only do victims of age bias lose their jobs unjustly, they often are unable to find new jobs for the same reason. The EEOC will defend people's rights to be treated fairly by employers."
AT&T, Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Dallas. As of May 2013, AT&T was the 21st largest company in the world by market value. The current AT&T reconstitutes much of the former Bell system and includes ten of the original 22 Bell operating companies.
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Tony Mowbray wants Marcus Tudgay to flourish at Coventry City
Coventry City manager Tony Mowbray wants Marcus Tudgay to help the club challenge at the top of Sky Bet League 1 this season.
Tudgay has signed a new one-year contract at the Ricoh Arena, having helped steer the Sky Blues clear of relegation last term.
Now, Mowbray wants the 32-year-old to cement a place in his starting squad ahead of the new season, and help the club to challenge at the top of the division.
"I'm delighted to see Marcus Tudgay stay at the club for another season," he told the club’s official website.
"Marcus was a player I highlighted at the back end of last season as someone who gives us some much-needed experience but also intelligence and an awareness on the ball.
"He is a player who has a presence in the dressing room and I've really enjoyed working with him since my arrival at the club in February.
"I'm hoping after a good pre-season, Marcus can claim a starting spot with his performances and help us challenge at the top end of the League 1 table."
Tudgay joined Coventry last summer on a free transfer from Nottingham Forest, and scored twice towards the back-end of the last campaign - against Chesterfield and Crawley Town - to help the club avoid the drop to Sky Bet League 2.
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Faegre Baker Daniels Honored for Leadership in Advancing Women Lawyers
On May 15, 2013, Faegre Baker Daniels LLP was honored by Minnesota Women Lawyers (MWL) with the annual Leadership Award for the firm's efforts to advance women in the legal industry.
The Leadership Award recognizes legal employers in Minnesota that strive to enhance the status, influence and effectiveness of women lawyers in their employ. FaegreBD was recognized for its recruitment and hiring of women attorneys, strong representation of women at all career levels, inclusive approach to selection of leaders, career path and work-life flexibility, and professional development support for women.
When Faegre & Benson and Baker & Daniels merged to become Faegre Baker Daniels on Jan. 1, 2012, the firm undertook a review and reinvention of policies and practices with a goal of increasing diversity and inclusion. Today, the firm's Women's Forum for Achievement provides a dynamic platform for women lawyers to build relationships, create business opportunities, increase professional advancement, develop leadership skills and achieve long-term success. FaegreBD's policies to promote work-life flexibility include "Full-Flex," reduced-time and remote work options; generous maternity and paternity leave options with up to a year of on- and off-ramping to assist with transitions; and backup child care options.
"The success and advancement of our women lawyers have not occurred by accident," said Kathy Noecker, a partner and member of FaegreBD's executive committee, while accepting the award. "We have taken an in-depth look at all processes and policies; governance structures; recruitment and retention practices; assignment, evaluation and compensation systems and criteria – all of which have a material impact on our culture and the experience of our professionals. While this has been an enormous undertaking, and we are still working through implementation in a number of areas, we now have in place a very strong foundation."
Minnesota Women Lawyers is an association of more than 1,200 attorneys, judges, law students, legal employers and others who are dedicated to advancing the success of women attorneys and striving for a just society. The Leadership Award was presented at MWL's annual meeting.
Brita A. Horvath
Director of Diversity & Inclusion
brita.horvath@FaegreBD.com
Kathlyn E. Noecker
kathy.noecker@FaegreBD.com
Andrea Corbito
andrea.corbito@FaegreBD.com
Media ContactMedia Contact
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Public Release: 13-Jan-2014
Autism spectrum disorder: A guide for physicians to help families
Canadian Medical Association Journal
Increased awareness of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is placing huge demands on health care systems and health care professionals to help children and their families cope with the disorder. A comprehensive evidence-based review published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) aims to help physicians provide appropriate medical support to families of children with ASD, from detection to treatment.
"We have come to understand ASD as a remarkably heterogeneous constellation of conditions that covary with other disabilities and disorders (e.g., intellectual disability, epilepsy, ADHD, anxiety disorders) and various medical problems," writes Dr. Stephen Scherer, senior scientist and director of The Centre for Applied Genomics at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and director of the McLaughlin Centre at the University of Toronto, with coauthors. "Recent discoveries of underlying genomic factors have shown great complexity and implicate various networks of causal factors."
ASD, which includes a variety of traits that range from mild to severe, is estimated to affect about 1% of the population, although it is under-recognized in the developing world.
The review, by specialists in pediatrics, psychiatry, epidemiology, neurology and genetics from across Canada, outlines the current understanding of ASD and best practices for pediatricians, family doctors and specialist clinics, and identifies resources for clinicians.
What causes autism?
How is ASD diagnosed?
How can ASD be detected early?
What other illnesses or conditions are associated with ASD?
What treatments and interventions are available and effective?
"Community physicians play an essential role in identifying early signs of ASD and ensuring timely diagnosis," write the authors. "The greatest impact on outcome will come from careful attention to parents' concerns, observing early social and communication skills (e.g., interaction with parents and response to simple social games), immediate referral to available intervention services (e.g., infant development and/or speech-language services, and timely referrals for specialized assessments and interventions."
The authors describe "red flags" for autism as well as best practices for treatments, which include behavioural interventions such as applied behaviour analysis. This technique uses a variety of approaches to teach children skills to reduce problem behaviour.
They also touch upon future directions for understanding the disease.
"New experimental therapeutics hold promise for the treatment of core symptoms and have the potential to alter developmental trajectories. Treatments in animal models carrying single gene mutations for disorders associated with ASD are particularly promising. Future research should focus on how we can better match interventions to child and family characteristics through personalized medicine over the lifetime of the patient," the authors conclude.
Kim Barnhardt
kim.barnhardt@cmaj.ca
@CMAJ
http://www.cmaj.ca/
PARENTING/CHILD CARE/FAMILY
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Public Release: 1-Nov-2017
Mapping the microbiome of...everything
Massive global research collaboration known as the Earth Microbiome Project catalogues planet's microbial diversity at unprecedented scale
University of California - San Diego
IMAGE: Earth Microbiome Project collaborators collect and analyze samples from diverse environments around the world. Top left: Hiking through the rain forest of Puerto Rico to sample soils with students (credit:... view more
Credit: Krista McGuire, University of Oregon; Kefeng Niu; Angelique Corhtals and Lilian Davalos; Byron Crump; Juan Peralta-Sanchez; and S. Craig Cary, University of Waikato, New Zealand
In the Earth Microbiome Project, an extensive global team co-led by researchers at University of California San Diego, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory collected more than 27,000 samples from numerous, diverse environments around the globe. They analyzed the unique collections of microbes -- the microbiomes -- living in each sample to generate the first reference database of bacteria colonizing the planet. Thanks to newly standardized protocols, original analytical methods and open data-sharing, the project will continue to grow and improve as new data are added.
The paper describing this effort, published November 1 in Nature, was co-authored by more than 300 researchers at more than 160 institutions worldwide.
The Earth Microbiome Project was founded in 2010 by Rob Knight, PhD, professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UC San Diego; Jack Gilbert, PhD, professor and faculty director of The Microbiome Center at University of Chicago and group leader in Microbial Ecology at Argonne National Laboratory; Rick Stevens, PhD, associate laboratory director at Argonne National Laboratory and professor and senior fellow at University of Chicago; and Janet Jansson, PhD, chief scientist for biology and laboratory fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Knight, Gilbert and Jansson are also co-senior authors of the Nature paper and Stevens is a co-author.
"The potential applications for this database and the types of research questions we can now ask are almost limitless," Knight said. "Here's just one example -- we can now identify what kind of environment a sample came from in more than 90 percent of cases, just by knowing its microbiome, or the types and relative quantities of microbes living in it. That could be useful forensic information at a crime scene ... think 'CSI.'"
The goal of the Earth Microbiome Project is to sample as many of the Earth's microbial communities as possible in order to advance scientific understanding of microbes and their relationships with their environments, including plants, animals and humans. This task requires the help of scientists from all over the globe. So far, the project has spanned seven continents and 43 countries, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and more than 500 researchers have contributed to the sample and data collection. Project members are using this information as part of approximately 100 studies, half of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
"Microbes are everywhere," said first author Luke Thompson, PhD, who took on the role of project manager while a postdoctoral researcher in Knight's lab and is currently a research associate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "Yet prior to this massive undertaking, changes in microbial community composition were identified mainly by focusing on one sample type, one region at a time. This made it difficult to identify patterns across environments and geography to infer generalized principles."
Project members analyze bacterial diversity among various environments, geographies and chemistries by sequencing the 16S rRNA gene, a genetic marker specific for bacteria and their relatives, archaea. The 16S rRNA sequences serve as "barcodes" to identify different types of bacteria, allowing researchers to track them across samples from around the world. Earth Microbiome Project researchers also used a new method to remove sequencing errors in the data, allowing them to get a more accurate picture of the number of unique sequences in the microbiomes.
Within this first release of data, the Earth Microbiome Project team identified around 300,000 unique microbial 16S rRNA sequences, almost 90 percent of which don't have exact matches in pre-existing databases.
Pre-existing 16S rRNA sequences are limited because they were not designed to allow researchers to add data in a way that's useful for the future. Project co-author Jon Sanders, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Knight's lab, compares the difference between these other databases and the Earth Microbiome Project to the difference between a phone book and Facebook. "Before, you had to write in to get your sequence listed, and the listing would contain very little information about where the sequence came from or what other sequences it was found with," he said. "Now, we have a framework that supports all that additional context, and which can grow organically to support new kinds of questions and insights."
"There are large swaths of microbial diversity left to catalogue. And yet we've 'recaptured' about half of all known bacterial sequences," Gilbert said. "With this information, patterns in the distribution of the Earth's microbes are already emerging."
According to Gilbert, one of the most surprising observations is that unique 16S sequences are far more specific to individual environments than are the typical units of species used by scientists. The diversity of environments sampled by the Earth Microbiome Project helps demonstrate just how much local environment shapes the microbiome. For example, the skin microbiomes of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and fish are more similar to each other than they are to the water they swim in; conversely, the salt in saltwater microbiomes makes them distinct from freshwater, but they are still more similar to each other than to aquatic animal skin. Overall, the microbiomes of a host, such as a human or animal, were quite distinct from free-living microbiomes, such as those found in water and soil. For example, the free-living microbiomes were far more diverse, in general, than host-associated microbiomes.
"These global ecological patterns offer just a glimpse of what is possible with coordinated and cumulative sampling," Jansson said. "More sampling is needed to account for factors such as latitude and elevation, and to track environmental changes over time. The Earth Microbiome Project provides both a resource for the exploration of myriad questions, and a starting point for the guided acquisition of new data to answer them."
For more about the Earth Microbiome Project, visit http://earthmicrobiome.org and follow @earthmicrobiome on Twitter. For the complete list of co-authors and institutions participating in the Earth Microbiome Project, view the full Nature paper at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature24621
Data collected and analyzed in the Earth Microbiome Project have already been used in many studies of:
Skin of whales, dolphins, seals, fish, birds, bats, cats, rats, rattlesnakes and Komodo dragons
Drinking water (http://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2012.12.027, http://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-016-1607-1)
Ocean communities from the surface of the North Atlantic (http://doi.org/10.5194/bg-10-555-2013) to the deep seafloor of the Pacific
Oil spills (http://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2013.254)
Gut health of primates (http://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2016.06.004)
How gut microbiomes evolved to digest ants (http://doi.org/10.1111/mec.12501) and how ant gut microbiomes evolved to eat plants (http://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icx088)
How soil microbes affect wine grapes (http://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.02527-14)
How obesity affects smelling of wine aromas (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085611)
How the human microbiome changes over time (http://doi.org/10.1186/gb-2011-12-5-r50) and alters the spaces we live in (http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1254529)
Heather Buschman
hbuschman@ucsd.edu
@UCSanDiego
http://www.ucsd.edu
John Templeton Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, DOE/Argonne National Laboratory, Australian Research Council, Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, National Science Foundation
MARINE/FRESHWATER BIOLOGY
ZOOLOGY/VETERINARY SCIENCE
Earth Microbiome Project (IMAGE)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature24621
More in Earth Science
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NASA looks at Barry's rainfall rates NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Stronger earthquakes can be induced by wastewater injected deep underground Virginia Tech
Australian ants prepared for 'Insect Armageddon' La Trobe University
View all in Earth Science
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Washington’s forest resources, 2007–2016: 10-year Forest Inventory and Analysis report
193 Million Acres: Toward a Healthier and More Resilient US Forest Service — A New Book!
The National Association of Forest Service Retirees Letter to Sonny Perdue
FIA DATA: The Gold Standard, Part 2
Land ownership changes and Their Influences On Management and Future Needs (2014)
Does the Logging Industry Have A Future In The New Intermountain West? (2006)
Jim Petersen — October 25, 2018
This is the third part of Felt Necessities: Engines of Forest Policy, a series of essays tracing the history of the conservation movement in the United States, and its influence on the nation’s ever-shifting forest policy.
The series expands significantly on a half-day lecture Evergreen founder, Jim Petersen, delivered to a graduate-level forestry class at the University of Idaho in February 2017.
The term “felt necessities” is taken from The Common Law, a book of essays assembled in 1881 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which he explains the historic underpinnings of the nation’s legal system. President Theodore Roosevelt thought so much of Holmes’ essays that nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1902.
We hope you enjoy and learn from this series. Your comments or criticisms are most welcome. Felt Necessities will subsequently be available in book form. To read the first part of the series, click here.
One hundred and twelve years have passed since the National Forest System was formed and the U.S. Forest Service was established. By my count, the nation’s felt necessities have gone through four, maybe five, great transformations, each one orchestrated by visionaries from the public and private sectors whose strong personalities, visions and negotiating skills bring us to where we are today.
The Great 1910 Fire, which leveled some three million acres of virgin timber in northern Idaho and western Montana, most of it in a wind-driven 48-hour firestorm that claimed the lives of 87 firefighters – most of them skid row bums recruited from the streets of Spokane, Washington. Their firefighting tools were shovels and axes. Many didn’t even have proper shoes.
Smoke from the fire drifted all the way to New York City, touching off a public outcry of such enormity that Congress was forced to put the Forest Service in the firefighting business alongside a set of privately funded fire cooperatives that had been formed in the West in the wake of the 1902 Yacolt Burn, a 700,000-acre conflagration formed by winds that drove together a series of blazes in southwest Washington and northwest Oregon.
Weyerhaeuser Timber Company general manager, George S. Long – a gifted executive who shunned publicity – estimated his company’s virgin timber losses in southwest Washington to be north of 500 million board feet, so much that Weyerhaeuser investors were forced to build a sawmill they hadn’t planned to build in Longview, Washington. My Petersen grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant and millwright who later owned sawmills on the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, helped build the Longview mill.
But it was the irrepressible Pinchot, who had been fired from his Chief’s post in early 1910 by then President William Howard Taft – Teddy Roosevelt’s successor – for publicly interfering in the political affairs of his Interior Secretary, Richard Ballinger. Ballinger, a former Seattle mayor who had served as Commissioner of the notoriously corrupt General Land Office during the Garfield Administration. Pinchot had seen Ballinger’s appointment as an ominous sign for the conservation movement. It was to the extent that Ballinger had close ties to wealthy New York industrialists who were interested in developing Alaska’s coal deposits.
Pinchot’s never missed a beat following his firing. Indeed, he continued to act as though he was still Chief. He thus stepped into the public breech in September of 1910 with a scathing rebuke of Congress that put Foggy Bottom on notice that, while he was no longer Chief, Pinchot’s views and his influence had not been diminished by his firing. In fact, he was more frequently quoted following the 1910 Fire than was his successor, Henry Graves. Here is what Pinchot told a reporter from Everybody’s Magazine, a popular publication of the day. Note – in Pinchot’s choice of words – his exceptional flair for drama.
“For the want of a nail, the shoe was cast, the rider thrown, the battle lost. For want of trails the finest white pine forests in the United States were laid waste and scores of lives lost. It is all loss, dead irretrievable loss, due to the pique, the bias, the bullheadedness of a knot of men who have sulked and planted their hulks in the way of appropriations for the protection and improvement of these national forests.”
I would have liked to have been the reporter how nailed this Pinchot exclusive, but I would not have wanted to be a member of Congress in Pinchot’s cross-hairs, though I suspect his rant put a smile on George S. Long’s face.
Pertinent here to our story is the fact that Long had led the formation of the first privately funded fire cooperatives following the Yacolt Burn, the first being the Clearwater Timber Protection Association at Potlatch, just north of here, in, I believe, 1903; the connection being that many of the same Midwestern lumbermen who invested in the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company were also Potlatch investors, and the further connection being the presence of so much western white pine in northern Idaho, a wood quite similar to eastern white pine, a preferred species among Midwestern lumbermen.
Long was also the power behind a historic Spokane meeting that brought together lumbermen from all over the region who shared Long’s desire to attack the wildfire crisis head-on, which meant patrolling one’s own land during wildfire season, helping one another extinguish fires as quickly as possible and contributing money to a public education program.
What you must appreciate here is that these lumbermen – with whom Teddy Roosevelt had such a stormy relationship – were the ones who recognized that conservation based on the still largely unknown and unproven practice of forestry, required of them that they first attack the West’s frequent wildfires head-on.
It would be another 30-plus years before the parallel idea that cutover land ought to be quickly replanted gained much traction. Replanting land would not become an article of faith until western lumbermen formed the Tree Farm System in 1941. By then, there was enough of a nursery system in place in the West to support an ambitious tree planting program.
The Spokane meeting that George S. Long organized took place Monday, January 4, 1909 in the office of Albert Flewelling, otherwise known as “Judge” Flewelling, a lumberman who had made his first fortune in eastern white pine in the Great Lakes region, and now aimed to repeat his feat in western white pine with land and mills he owned in the St. Joe and St. Maries River drainages – rivers I suspect you know well from your silvicultural field work.
Among those gathered in Flewelling’s office: Frank Davies of the Rutledge Timber Company, another Weyerhaeuser venture. Davies had hosted a December 8, 1908 meeting of Idaho cooperatives, at which time it was decided a regional meeting was a good idea. Also present: D.P. Simons, Jr., Washington Forest Fire Association; E.N. Brown, Clearwater Timber Protective Association, Idaho; J.P. McGoldrick of Idaho’s McGoldrick Lumber Company, Idaho; timber legend, T.J. Humbird, Humbird Lumber Company, Sandpoint, Idaho; Clark W. Thompson, Wind River Lumber Company, Washington; M.P. Hunt and C.H. Fancher, Milwaukee Land Company, Idaho; George Cornwall, Timberman publisher and co-founder of the Pacific Logging Congress, Oregon; F.C. Knapp, Peninsula Lumber Company, Washington; Frank H. Lamb, Lamb Timber Company, Washington; Bill Deary, Potlatch Lumber Company, Idaho; G.W. Millett, Montana and, of course, Long himself.
The meeting dragged on for two days before those in attendance named their umbrella group the Pacific Northwest Forest Protection and Conservation Association, and elected Flewelling their first president. I find the enlightened stringing together of the words “forestry,” “protection” and “conservation” to be its own indicator of good things to come.
A couple of interesting backstories here. It was Bill Deary who selected the Potlatch mill site near the Palouse River at Potlatch. When completed, it was the largest white pine sawmill in the world. When asked why he had rejected Moscow as a mill site, the plain-spoken Deary stabbed a stubby pencil into a map at Moscow and declared, “Because there isn’t enough water here to baptize a bastard!”
The old Rutledge mill in Coeur d’ Alene, at one time the largest sawmill on earth, sat on the present site of the Coeur d’Alene Resort’s world-class golf course, and it boomed its logs in the lake where the famous floating green is now tethered. One of my great uncles logged for Edward Rutledge most of his life. Duane Hagadone, who built the resort and golf course, is rumored to have made a small fortune by retrieving perfectly preserved old growth logs from their watery graves beneath his floating green.
As for Jim Humbird’s Sandpoint colossus, it sat on the beach just north of the present- day Edgewater Motel location. Condominiums now occupy some of the site. My Albertson grandfather, a cattleman, and his brother bought two sections of cutover timberland north of Sandpoint – a so-called “stump ranch” – from Jim Humbird in 1916. It remains exceptionally productive timberland.
And “Judge” Flewelling? I will hazard a guess that he readily accepted the presidency of the newly-minted fire cooperative because, as Great Lakes lumberman, he had seen entire towns in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan wiped out by wildfires. The 1871 Pestigo Fire, which burned the same night as the Great Chicago Fire, claimed an estimated 2,400 lives in Wisconsin.
George S. Long also saw to it that two of the Forest Service’s best and brightest young men were invited the Spokane meeting: E.T. Allen, who was then District Forester for District 6, which included National Forests in western Oregon and Washington, and Bill Greeley, Allen’s District 1 counterpart for all of Montana and parts of Idaho, South Dakota and eastern Washington.
Long did not know Greeley, but Allen did and, that was the only recommendation needed. They had both worked for Pinchot in the Forest Service’s Washington office, and were members of SAF’s Pennsylvania Avenue rat pack.
Allen and Greeley had last seen one another in California in the summer of 1905, during the months when Greeley was riding the Sierra’s doing timber inspection work and laying out thinnings in overstocked ponderosa pine forests.
Allen was there as California’s first State Forester, a post for which Pinchot had recommended him. Although the two young foresters had little in common on a personal level – Allen drank heavily and the pious Greeley never drank – both brought exceptional leadership and communications skills to the difficult and challenging job of convincing lumbermen and Congress that good forestry and conservation were going to require enormous investments of public and private capital,
Allen would go on to run the Western Forestry and Conservation Association for more than 30 years, and Greeley would become – at least in my mind – the greatest Chief in the history of the United States Forest Service.
I think the real significance of the Spokane meeting is that felt necessity – in this case the need to address the West’s wildfire crisis as a precursor to forestry’s grand entrance – ran ahead of federal forest policy, which did not catch up with what Long and his fellow lumbermen were doing until the Weeks Law was ratified in 1911, the year following the Great 1910 Fire.
But it wasn’t until 1924, with Greeley at the Forest Service helm, that Congress ratified the Clarke-McNary Act, which put the Forest Service in the firefighting business alongside the West’s rapidly expanding fire cooperatives. Years later, Greeley would sheepishly admit that, during sometimes raucous Clarke-McNary debate, he had hidden in the Senate cloakroom so he could secretly pass favorable questions and answers to supportive Senate members.
Greeley’s determination to force Congress to squarely face the West’s wildfire crisis rested in the fact that Pinchot had named him District 1 forester in 1909, less than a year before the Great 1910 Fire. He thus oversaw the gruesome task of attempting to identify and then bury the mostly unrecognizable remains of 87 dead firefighters.
In 1911, Pinchot’s successor, Henry Graves, brought Greeley back to the Forest Service’s Washington office to oversee administration of the Weeks Law. Spurred on by what he called “memories of blazing canyons and smoking ruins of little settlements and canvas-wrapped bodies,” he was, he said, “an evangelist out to get converts.”
The 1910 conflagration had left a lasting impact on the lives of countless eyewitnesses, one being a logger named Bill Nearing. Born in Canada in 1898, Nearing was 15 when he first logged in the upper reaches of the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River behind an iron gray mare named May. He was running a string of pack horses for the Forest Service when lightning set the first 1910 reburn in 1919.
Men, firefighting tools and food were bussed from Spokane to the headwaters of Deception Creek on the Little North Fork. Nearing then transferred the tools and food to his pack string for the 22-mile trek up Leiberg Creek and down Teepee Creek to the McGee Ranger Station. Meantime, the fire raged in tinder dry snags and downed timber.
Frank McPherson, a pioneer packer and trapper, who owned a ranch downriver from McGee, vividly remembered the 1931 reburn of what remained from the 1910 and 1919 fires. At Cinnamon Creek, about 15 miles below his house, the roar of flames that jumped the river was such that he could not hear commands from a fire boss who was shouting in his ear. McPherson later recalled that the entire eight square mile drainage was incinerated in 15 minutes.
When I was a boy, my grandmother and her sister regaled me with stories about their harrowing escapes from the 1910 Fire. Both escaped on trains that ran through firestorms, my grandmother on an open flatcar and my great aunt in a wooden passenger car that got so hot that the exterior varnish melted. It was still dripping off the coach when she stepped off the train platform in Missoula, Montana.
Meantime, my grandmother transferred her smoldering possessions to a sternwheeler at Kingston, Idaho and rode down the Coeur d’Alene River to Harrison. My grandfather and his crew stayed behind and somehow managed to keep the fire from overtaking his mill and log deck. Today, the only evidence of the old mill is a log pond that he and his crew dug by hand. Kids love fishing it for rainbows and cutthroat that seem to prefer it to the rushing waters of hardscrabble Eagle Creek.
Apart from a 2016 wildfire that burned its way downhill into Settler’s Grove, an ancient cedar stand on the West Fork of Eagle Creek – a few miles from the CCC camp from which my father built trails and fought fire in 1934 – the vast North Fork drainage hasn’t experienced a big fire since 1931, and that is not a good sign. Sooner, not later, northern Idaho residents will be caught up in another 1910-scale firestorm. We are better equipped – but no better prepared – to deal with it than we were 107 years ago. And tens of thousands more of us now live in harm’s way.
For Part 4, Click Here.
Copyright James D. Petersen and the Evergreen Foundation. All rights reserved. No part of this series can be copied in any electronic or written manner without the written permission of Jim Petersen and the non-profit Evergreen Foundation
Evergreen Magazine
Tags: 1910 FireCoeur d’AlenecollaborationCollaborativescooperativesFelt NecessitiesFireFirefightingforest policyForestryGeorge S. LongmontanaspokaneWildland Fire
Next post Felt Necessities: Engines of Forest Policy, Part 4
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About the Author Jim Petersen
Jim Petersen is a co-founder of the non-profit Evergreen Foundation, and publisher of Evergreen, the Foundation’s periodic journal. Evergreen Foundation was established in Medford, Oregon in 1986 to help advance public understanding and support for science based forestry and forest policy. The organization’s original sponsors were all members of the Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association.
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fast feed
Hajj To Air On YouTube, Groupon Raises $700 Million IPO, CIA Team Analyzes Twitter For Real-Time Intelligence
Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.
By Nidhi Subbaraman 2 minute Read
The Hajj To Be Livestreamed on YouTube. Google will be livestreaming the Hajj, the world’s largest religious pilgrimage, in partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture and Information. Approximately 2.5 million Muslims will begin the Hajj on Saturday, November 5 in Mecca. Non-Muslims are forbidden from attending and filming the massive, massive pilgrimage posted significant technical challenges for both YouTube and the Saudi government. —NU
–Updated 10:30 a.m. EST
Fake Mars Mission Ends After 520 Days. The Mars500 mission, which was built to simulate a Mars mission in a Moscow warehouse over 18 months, has ended. European Space Agency researches were locked in the mock capsule for 520 days to test some of the experiences that would accompany a real Mars mission. Such a space mission may be decades away, but as far as the experiment went, “The mission is accomplished,” their team leader said. —NS
Google Explores TV Via Optic Fiber. Google’s network for high-speed Internet access, under construction in Kansas City, MO, and Kansas City, KA, could one day support cable-TV and telecom services, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to their sources, Google has had preliminary discussions with cable Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Discovery communications. If the deal goes through, it has the potential to seriously shake up the TV business. —NS
Groupon Raises $700 Million IPO. Groupon has raised $700 million in its expanded IPO, valuing the company at $13 billion. The offering was priced at $20 a share, AP reports, higher than the expected $16-$18, making it one of the highest tech IPOs since Google debuted, the Wall Street Journal reports. In spite of recent concerns raised over Groupon’s fiscal reporting, the IPO was oversubscribed. —NS
CIA Team Analyzes Twitter For Real-Time Intelligence. The Associated Press reports that a team at the CIA actively follows and monitors about 5 million tweets a day, in several foreign languages, coming from across the globe. The information, cross-referenced with Facebook posts, phone calls, and reporting by regional media outlets, feeds a real-time intelligence report that reaches the White House, the agency found, which also tracked and anticipated the uprising in Egypt. —NS
Google Refines Search Algorithm. In a change that will affect 35% of all searches, Google is changing its search technique to keep it up-to-date with the latest news. Google’s real-time search ended in July when it failed to renew its partnership with Twitter, which fueled the service. It’s now building off its Caffeine web indexing system to better rank more recent results, Google posted on its blog. —NS
–Updated 6:30 a.m. EST
[Image: Flickr user Groupon]
Yesterday’s Fast Feed:iPhone App Tracks Guerillas, Facebook Project Hacked, China Tops Booming Asian App Market, Apple To Issue iOS5 Battery Bug Fix
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DC – South Asian Film Festival – September 8-10 – Tickets
Hosted by DC South Asian Arts Council Inc, a non profit 501 (c) (3) organization, the Washington DC South Asian Film Festival (DCSAFF) is one of the most celebrated screen events on the Washington, D.C. cultural calendar. The festival takes place annually in the heart of America’s capitol, showcasing the best in alternative cinema from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Each year, alongside its tightly curated screening programme of features, documentaries and shorts, DCSAFF hosts exclusive media presentations, retrospectives, and special tributes. The festival is dedicated to providing a platform for both film enthusiasts and industry professionals to exchange ideas through post-screening discussions, industry panels and networking events.
Come to DC for the 6th Annual Washington DC South Asian Film Festival from September 8th – 10th at Montgomery College Rockville’s Robert E. Parilla Performing Arts Center. Enjoy three days of the best in independent cinema from India and Pakistan, a meet & greet with actors and directors, screenings, workshops, and more.
Lipstick Under My Burkha– The story of 4 feisty women in small-town India finding the courage to chase their secret dreams and discover their inner desires. Winner of multiple international awards, Lipstick Under My Burkha is directed by Alankrita Shrivastava and produced by Prakash Jha. Watch the trailer here.
Lala Begum– The story revolves around the bitter relationship of two sisters, Meher (Marina Khan) and Seher (Sonia Rehman Qureshi) in the 1970s. They have not been speaking to each other for the last 20 years. Lala Begum is a 2016 Pakistani drama short film directed by Mehreen Jabbar, written by Syed Mohammad Ahmed and co-produced by Shailja Kejriwal, Mehreen Jabbar and Vikas Sharma. Watch the trailer here.
*Purchase ticket packages directly from DCSAFF by calling Sikha Buddhathoki at: 301-502-0850 or from www.eventcombo.com. Individual movie tickets are available for purchase from the AMC Theatre website.*
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Shahid Kapoor To Star In The Hindi Remake Of Telugu Film Jersey?
by Kajol Mathur | June 26, 2019, 3:11 PM IST
Currently making headlines for his performance in his latest release, Kabir Singh, Shahid Kapoor is on a high. The actor played the lead in this Hindi remake of superhit Telugu film, Arjun Reddy which starred Vijay Deverakonda. Seeing the super success of the film, it seems like that Shahid is all set to star in the Hindi remake of another South film, Jersey. Apparently, Karan Johar has secured the Hindi remake rights of Telugu actor Nani’s recent hit.
Directed by Gautam Tinnanuri, Jersey is the story of 36-year-old cricketer Arjun, who rises to fame towards the end of his cricketing career. The moving tale of Arjun's life moved the audience. Jersey also marked Vikram Vedha heroine Shraddha Srinath’s debut in Telugu. The makers are planning to issue an official announcement once they finalise the cast and crew.
We are still waiting for the big official announcement to happen. Are you excited to see Shahid in the Hindi remake of Jersey? Let us know in the comments below.
More on: Shahid Kapoor
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Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that cancer-causing asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder: Report
By: Reuters |
Updated: December 15, 2018 5:36:21 PM
Coker sued Johnson & Johnson, alleging that “poisonous talc” in the company’s beloved product was her killer. (Reuters)
Darlene Coker knew she was dying. She just wanted to know why. She knew that her cancer, mesothelioma, arose in the delicate membrane surrounding her lungs and other organs. She knew it was as rare as it was deadly, a signature of exposure to asbestos. And she knew it afflicted mostly men who inhaled asbestos dust in mines and industries such as shipbuilding that used the carcinogen before its risks were understood.
Coker, 52 years old, had raised two daughters and was running a massage school in Lumberton, a small town in eastern Texas. How had she been exposed to asbestos? “She wanted answers,” her daughter Cady Evans said.
Fighting for every breath and in crippling pain, Coker hired Herschel Hobson, a personal-injury lawyer. He homed in on a suspect: the Johnson’s Baby Powder that Coker had used on her infant children and sprinkled on herself all her life. Hobson knew that talc and asbestos often occurred together in the earth, and that mined talc could be contaminated with the carcinogen. Coker sued Johnson & Johnson, alleging that “poisonous talc” in the company’s beloved product was her killer.
J&J denied the claim. Baby Powder was asbestos-free, it said. As the case proceeded, J&J was able to avoid handing over talc test results and other internal company records Hobson had requested to make the case against Baby Powder.
Coker had no choice but to drop her lawsuit, Hobson said. “When you are the plaintiff, you have the burden of proof,” he said. “We didn’t have it.”
That was in 1999. Two decades later, the material Coker and her lawyer sought is emerging as J&J has been compelled to share thousands of pages of company memos, internal reports and other confidential documents with lawyers for some of the 11,700 plaintiffs now claiming that the company’s talc caused their cancers — including thousands of women with ovarian cancer.
A Reuters examination of many of those documents, as well as deposition and trial testimony, shows that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the company’s raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public.
The documents also depict successful efforts to influence U.S. regulators’ plans to limit asbestos in cosmetic talc products and scientific research on the health effects of talc.
A small portion of the documents have been produced at trial and cited in media reports. Many were shielded from public view by court orders that allowed J&J to turn over thousands of documents it designated as confidential. Much of their contents is reported here for the first time.
The earliest mentions of tainted J&J talc that Reuters found come from 1957 and 1958 reports by a consulting lab. They describe contaminants in talc from J&J’s Italian supplier as fibrous and “acicular,” or needle-like, tremolite. That’s one of the six minerals that in their naturally occurring fibrous form are classified as asbestos.
At various times from then into the early 2000s, reports by scientists at J&J, outside labs and J&J’s supplier yielded similar findings. The reports identify contaminants in talc and finished powder products as asbestos or describe them in terms typically applied to asbestos, such as “fiberform” and “rods.”
In 1976, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was weighing limits on asbestos in cosmetic talc products, J&J assured the regulator that no asbestos was “detected in any sample” of talc produced between December 1972 and October 1973. It didn’t tell the agency that at least three tests by three different labs from 1972 to 1975 had found asbestos in its talc – in one case at levels reported as “rather high.”
Most internal J&J asbestos test reports Reuters reviewed do not find asbestos. However, while J&J’s testing methods improved over time, they have always had limitations that allow trace contaminants to go undetected – and only a tiny fraction of the company’s talc is tested.
The World Health Organization and other authorities recognize no safe level of exposure to asbestos. While most people exposed never develop cancer, for some, even small amounts of asbestos are enough to trigger the disease years later. Just how small hasn’t been established. Many plaintiffs allege that the amounts they inhaled when they dusted themselves with tainted talcum powder were enough.
The evidence of what J&J knew has surfaced after people who suspected that talc caused their cancers hired lawyers experienced in the decades-long deluge of litigation involving workers exposed to asbestos. Some of the lawyers knew from those earlier cases that talc producers tested for asbestos, and they began demanding J&J’s testing documentation.
What J&J produced in response to those demands has allowed plaintiffs’ lawyers to refine their argument: The culprit wasn’t necessarily talc itself, but also asbestos in the talc. That assertion, backed by decades of solid science showing that asbestos causes mesothelioma and is associated with ovarian and other cancers, has had mixed success in court.
In two cases earlier this year – in New Jersey and California – juries awarded big sums to plaintiffs who, like Coker, blamed asbestos-tainted J&J talc products for their mesothelioma.
A third verdict, in St. Louis, was a watershed, broadening J&J’s potential liability: The 22 plaintiffs were the first to succeed with a claim that asbestos-tainted Baby Powder and Shower to Shower talc, a longtime brand the company sold in 2012, caused ovarian cancer, which is much more common than mesothelioma. The jury awarded them $4.69 billion in damages. Most of the talc cases have been brought by women with ovarian cancer who say they regularly used J&J talc products as a perineal antiperspirant and deodorant.
At the same time, at least three juries have rejected claims that Baby Powder was tainted with asbestos or caused plaintiffs’ mesothelioma. Others have failed to reach verdicts, resulting in mistrials.
J&J has said it will appeal the recent verdicts against it. It has maintained in public statements that its talc is safe, as shown for years by the best tests available, and that the information it has been required to divulge in recent litigation shows the care the company takes to ensure its products are asbestos-free. It has blamed its losses on juror confusion, “junk” science, unfair court rules and overzealous lawyers looking for a fresh pool of asbestos plaintiffs.
“Plaintiffs’ attorneys out for personal financial gain are distorting historical documents and intentionally creating confusion in the courtroom and in the media,” Ernie Knewitz, J&J’s vice president of global media relations, wrote in an emailed response to Reuters’ findings. “This is all a calculated attempt to distract from the fact that thousands of independent tests prove our talc does not contain asbestos or cause cancer. Any suggestion that Johnson & Johnson knew or hid information about the safety of talc is false.”
J&J declined to comment further for this article. For more than two months, it turned down repeated requests for an interview with J&J executives. On Dec. 8, the company offered to make an expert available. It had not done so as of Thursday evening.
The company referred all inquiries to its outside litigation counsel, Peter Bicks. In emailed responses, Bicks rejected Reuters’ findings as “false and misleading.” “The scientific consensus is that the talc used in talc-based body powders does not cause cancer, regardless of what is in that talc,” Bicks wrote. “This is true even if – and it does not – Johnson & Johnson’s cosmetic talc had ever contained minute, undetectable amounts of asbestos.” He dismissed tests cited in this article as “outlier” results.
In court, J&J lawyers have told jurors that company records showing that asbestos was detected in its talc referred to talc intended for industrial use. Other records, they have argued, referred to non-asbestos forms of the same minerals that their experts say are harmless. J&J has also argued that some tests picked up “background” asbestos – stray fibers that could have contaminated samples after floating into a mill or lab from a vehicle clutch or fraying insulation.
NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK: Bundles (top, center) and a single fiber (bottom) that a plaintiffs’ lab found in a 1978 bottle of Baby Powder from J&J’s corporate museum show the telltale needle-like shape of asbestos. Photo courtesy of Mark Lanier.
The company has made some of the same arguments about lab tests conducted by experts hired by plaintiffs. One of those labs found asbestos in Shower to Shower talc from the 1990s, according to an Aug. 11, 2017, court report. Another lab found asbestos in more than half of multiple samples of Baby Powder from past decades – in bottles from plaintiffs’ cupboards and acquired from eBay, and even a 1978 bottle held in J&J’s corporate museum. The concentrations were great enough that users “would have, more likely than not, been exposed,” the plaintiffs’ lab report presented in several cases this year concluded.
Matthew Sanchez, a geologist with consultants RJ Lee Group Inc and a frequent expert witness for J&J, dismissed those findings in testimony in the St. Louis trial: “I have not found asbestos in any of the current or modern, what I consider modern, Johnson & Johnson talc products,” Sanchez told the jury.
Sanchez did not return calls seeking comment. RJ Lee said it does not comment on the work it does for clients.
Since 2003, talc in Baby Powder sold in the United States has come from China through supplier Imerys Talc America, a unit of Paris-based Imerys SA and a co-defendant in most of the talc litigation. Imerys and J&J said the Chinese talc is safe. An Imerys spokesman said the company’s tests “consistently show no asbestos. Talc’s safe use has been confirmed by multiple regulatory and scientific bodies.”
J&J, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has dominated the talc powder market for more than 100 years, its sales outpacing those of all competitors combined, according to Euromonitor International data. And while talc products contributed just $420 million to J&J’s $76.5 billion in revenue last year, Baby Powder is considered an essential facet of the healthcare-products maker’s carefully tended image as a caring company – a “sacred cow,” as one 2003 internal email put it.
“When people really understand what’s going on, I think it increases J&J’s exposure a thousand-fold,” said Mark Lanier, one of the lawyers for the women in the St. Louis case.
The mounting controversy surrounding J&J talc hasn’t shaken investors. The share price is up about 6 percent so far this year. Talc cases make up fewer than 10 percent of all personal injury lawsuits pending against J&J, based on the company’s Aug. 2 quarterly report, in which the company said it believed it had “strong grounds on appeal.”
J&J Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Alex Gorsky has pledged to fight on, telling analysts in July: “We remain confident that our products do not contain asbestos.”
Gorsky’s comment, echoed in countless J&J statements, misses a crucial point. Asbestos, like many environmental carcinogens, has a long latency period. Diagnosis usually comes years after initial exposure – 20 years or longer for mesothelioma. J&J talc products today may be safe, but the talc at issue in thousands of lawsuits was sold and used over the past 60 years.
That point is recognized in a 2013 markup of a statement for the “Safety & Care Commitment” page of J&J’s website. The original version conveyed a blanket assurance of safety. The edited version was less definitive: “Our talc-based consumer products are have always been (we cannot say “always”) asbestos free, as confirmed by regular testing since the 1970s.”
In 1886, Robert Wood Johnson enlisted his younger brothers in an eponymous startup built around the “Safety First” motto. Johnson’s Baby Powder grew out of a line of medicated plasters, sticky rubber strips loaded with mustard and other home remedies. When customers complained of skin irritation, the brothers sent packets of talc.
Soon, mothers began applying the talc to infants’ diaper-chafed skin. The Johnsons took note. They added a fragrance that would become one of the most recognizable in the world, sifted the talc into tin boxes and, in 1893, began selling it as Johnson’s Baby Powder.
In the late 1950s, J&J discovered that talc from its chief source mine for the U.S. market in the Italian Alps contained tremolite. That’s one of six minerals – along with chrysotile, actinolite, amosite, anthophyllite and crocidolite – that occur in nature as crystalline fibers known as asbestos, a recognized carcinogen. Some of them, including tremolite, also occur as unremarkable “non-asbestiform” rocks. Both forms often occur together and in talc deposits.
J&J’s worry at the time was that contaminants made the company’s powder abrasive. It sent tons of its Italian talc to a private lab in Columbus, Ohio, to find ways to improve the appearance, feel and purity of the powder by removing as much “grit” as possible. In a pair of reports from 1957 and 1958, the lab said the talc contained “from less than 1 percent to about 3 percent of contaminants,” described as mostly fibrous and “acicular” tremolite.
Most of the authors of these and other J&J records cited in this article are dead. Sanchez, the RJ Lee geologist whose firm has agreed to provide him as a witness in up to 100 J&J talc trials, has testified that tremolite found decades ago in the company’s talc, from Italy and later Vermont, was not tremolite asbestos at all. Rather, he has said, it was “cleavage fragments” from non-asbestiform tremolite.
J&J’s original records don’t always make that distinction. In terms of health risk, regulators since the early 1970s have treated small fiber-shaped particles of both forms the same.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, “makes no distinction between fibers and (comparable) cleavage fragments,” agency officials wrote in a response to an RJ Lee report on an unrelated matter in 2006, the year before the firm hired Sanchez. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), though it dropped the non-fibrous forms of the minerals from its definition of asbestos in 1992, nonetheless recommends that fiber-shaped fragments indistinguishable from asbestos be counted in its exposure tests.
And as the product safety director for J&J’s talc supplier acknowledged in a 2008 email to colleagues: “(I)f a deposit contains ‘non-asbestiform’ tremolite, there is also asbestiform tremolite naturally present as well.”
“The lungs of babies”
In 1964, J&J’s Windsor Minerals Inc subsidiary bought a cluster of talc mines in Vermont, with names like Argonaut, Rainbow, Frostbite and Black Bear. By 1966, it was blasting and bulldozing white rock out of the Green Mountain state. J&J used the milled powder in its cosmetic powders and sold a less-refined grade to roofing, flooring and tire companies for use in manufacturing.
Ten years after tremolite turned up in the Italian talc, it showed up in Vermont talc, too. In 1967, J&J found traces of tremolite and another mineral that can occur as asbestos, according to a table attached to a Nov. 1, 1967, memo by William Ashton, the executive in charge of J&J’s talc supply for decades.
J&J continued to search for sources of clean talc. But in an April 9, 1969, memo to a company doctor, Ashton said it was “normal” to find tremolite in many U.S. talc deposits. He suggested J&J rethink its approach. “Historically, in our Company, Tremolite has been bad,” Ashton wrote. “How bad is Tremolite medically, and how much of it can safely be in a talc base we might develop?”
Since pulmonary disease, including cancer, appeared to be on the rise, “it would seem to be prudent to limit any possible content of Tremolite … to an absolute minimum,” came the reply from another physician executive days later.
The doctor told Ashton that J&J was receiving safety questions from pediatricians. Even Robert Wood Johnson II, the founder’s son and then-retired CEO, had expressed “concern over the possibility of the adverse effects on the lungs of babies or mothers,” he wrote.
“We have replied,” the doctor wrote, that “we would not regard the usage of our powders as presenting any hazard.” Such assurances would be impossible, he added, “if we do include Tremolite in more than unavoidable trace amounts.”
The memo is the earliest J&J document reviewed by Reuters that discusses tremolite as more than a scratchy nuisance. The doctor urged Ashton to consult with company lawyers because “it is not inconceivable that we could become involved in litigation.”
Never “100% clean”
By the early 1970s, asbestos was widely recognized as the primary cause of mesothelioma among workers involved in producing it and in industries that used it in their products.
Regulation was in the air. In 1972, President Richard Nixon’s newly created OSHA issued its first rule, setting limits on workplace exposure to asbestos dust.
By then, a team at Mount Sinai Medical Center led by pre-eminent asbestos researcher Irving Selikoff had started looking at talcum powders as a possible solution to a puzzle: Why were tests of lung tissue taken post mortem from New Yorkers who never worked with asbestos finding signs of the mineral? Since talc deposits are often laced with asbestos, the scientists reasoned, perhaps talcum powders played a role.
They shared their preliminary findings with New York City’s environmental protection chief, Jerome Kretchmer. On June 29, 1971, Kretchmer informed the Nixon administration and called a press conference to announce that two unidentified brands of cosmetic talc appeared to contain asbestos.
The FDA opened an inquiry. J&J issued a statement: “Our fifty years of research knowledge in this area indicates that there is no asbestos contained in the powder manufactured by Johnson & Johnson.”
Later that year, another Mount Sinai researcher, mineralogist Arthur Langer, told J&J in a letter that the team had found a “relatively small” amount of chrysotile asbestos in Baby Powder.
Langer, Selikoff and Kretchmer ended up on a J&J list of “antagonistic personalities” in a Nov. 29, 1972, memo, which described Selikoff as the leader of an “attack on talc.”
“I suppose I was antagonistic,” Langer told Reuters. Even so, in a subsequent test of J&J powders in 1976, he didn’t find asbestos – a result that Mount Sinai announced.
Langer said he told J&J lawyers who visited him last year that he stood by all of his findings. J&J has not called him as a witness.
TOP TESTER: Irving Selikoff, who led the Mount Sinai team that investigated asbestos and talc, was also listed among J&J’s “antagonistic personalities.” Photo courtesy of Arthur Langer
Selikoff died in 1992. Kretchmer said he recently read that a jury had concluded that Baby Powder was contaminated with asbestos. “I said to myself, ‘How come it took so long?’ ” he said.
In July 1971, meanwhile, J&J sent a delegation of scientists to Washington to talk to the FDA officials looking into asbestos in talcum powders. According to an FDA account of the meeting, J&J shared “evidence that their talc contains less than 1%, if any, asbestos.”
Later that month, Wilson Nashed, one of the J&J scientists who visited the FDA, said in a memo to the company’s public relations department that J&J’s talc contained trace amounts of “fibrous minerals (tremolite/actinolite).”
As the FDA continued to investigate asbestos in talc, J&J sent powder samples to be tested at private and university labs. Though a private lab in Chicago found trace amounts of tremolite, it declared the amount “insignificant” and the samples “substantially free of asbestiform material.” J&J reported that finding to the FDA under a cover letter that said the “results clearly show” the samples tested “contain no chrysotile asbestos.” J&J’s lawyer told Reuters the tremolite found in the samples was not asbestos.
But J&J’s FDA submission left out University of Minnesota professor Thomas E. Hutchinson’s finding of chrysotile in a Shower to Shower sample – “incontrovertible asbestos,” as he described it in a lab note.
he FDA’s own examinations found no asbestos in J&J powder samples in the 1970s. Those tests, however, did not use the most sensitive detection methods. An early test, for example, was incapable of detecting chrysotile fibers, as an FDA official recognized in a J&J account of an Aug. 11, 1972, meeting with the agency: “I understand that some samples will be passed even though they contain such fibers, but we are willing to live with it.”
By 1973, Tom Shelley, director of J&J’s Central Research Laboratories in New Jersey, was looking into acquiring patents on a process that a British mineralogist and J&J consultant was developing to separate talc from tremolite.
“It is quite possible that eventually tremolite will be prohibited in all talc,” Shelley wrote on Feb. 20, 1973, to a British colleague. Therefore, he added, the “process may well be valuable property to us.”
At the end of March, Shelley recognized the sensitivity of the plan in a memo sent to a J&J lawyer in New Jersey: “We will want to carefully consider the … patents re asbestos in talc. It’s quite possible that we may wish to keep the whole thing confidential rather than allow it to be published in patent form and thus let the whole world know.”
J&J did not obtain the patents.
While Shelley was looking into the patents, J&J research director DeWitt Petterson visited the company’s Vermont mining operation. “Occasionally, sub-trace quantities of tremolite or actinolite are identifiable,” he wrote in an April 1973 report on the visit. “And these might be classified as asbestos fiber.”
J&J should “protect our powder franchise” by eliminating as many tiny fibers that can be inhaled in airborn talc dust as possible, Petterson wrote. He warned, however, that “no final product will ever be made which will be totally free from respirable particles.” Introducing a cornstarch version of Baby Powder, he noted, “is obviously another answer.”
Bicks told Reuters that J&J believes that the tremolite and actinolite Petterson cited were not asbestos.
Cornstarch came up again in a March 5, 1974, report in which Ashton, the J&J talc supply chief, recommended that the company research that alternative “for defensive reasons” because “the thrust against talc has centered primarily on biological problems alleged to result from the inhalation of talc and related mineral particles.”
“We may have problems”
A few months after Petterson’s recognition that talc purity was a pipe dream, the FDA proposed a rule that talc used in drugs contain no more than 0.1 percent asbestos. While the agency’s cosmetics division was considering similar action on talcum powders, it asked companies to suggest testing methods.
At the time, J&J’s Baby Powder franchise was consuming 20,000 tons of Vermont talc a year. J&J pressed the FDA to approve an X-ray scanning technique that a company scientist said in an April 1973 memo allowed for “an automatic 1% tolerance for asbestos.” That would mean talc with up to 10 times the FDA’s proposed limit for asbestos in drugs could pass muster.
The same scientist confided in an Oct. 23, 1973, note to a colleague that, depending on what test the FDA adopted for detecting asbestos in cosmetic talc, “we may have problems.”
The best way to detect asbestos in talc was to concentrate the sample and then examine it through microscopes, the Colorado School of Mines Research Institute told J&J in a Dec. 27, 1973, report. In a memo, a J&J lab supervisor said the concentration technique, which the company’s own researchers had earlier used to identify a “tremolite-type” asbestos in Vermont talc, had one limitation: “It may be too sensitive.”
In his email to Reuters, J&J’s lawyer said the lab supervisor’s concern was that the test would result in “false positives,” showing asbestos where there was none.
J&J also launched reserach to find out how much powder a baby was exposed to during a diapering and how much asbestos could be in that powder and remain within OSHA’s new workplace exposure limits. Its researchers had strapped an air sampling device to a doll to take measurements while it was powdered, according to J&J memos and the minutes of a Feb. 19, 1974, meeting of the Cosmetic Toiletry and Fragrance Association (CTFA), an industry group.
“It was calculated that even if talc were pure asbestos the levels of exposure of a baby during a normal powdering are far below the accepted tolerance limits,” the minutes state.
In a Sept. 6, 1974, letter, J&J told the FDA that since “a substantial safety factor can be expected” with talc that contains 1 percent asbestos, “methods capable of determining less than 1% asbestos in talc are not necessary to assure the safety of cosmetic talc.”
Not everyone at the FDA thought that basing a detection method on such a calculation was a good idea. One official called it “foolish,” adding, according to a J&J account of a February 1975 meeting: “No mother was going to powder her baby with 1% of a known carcinogen irregardless of the large safety factor.”
“Misrepresentation by omission”
Having failed to persuade the FDA that up to 1 percent asbestos contamination was tolerable, J&J began promoting self-policing as an alternative to regulation. The centerpiece of this approach was a March 15, 1976, package of letters from J&J and other manufacturers that the CTFA gave to the agency to show that they had succeeded at eliminating asbestos from cosmetic talc.
“The attached letters demonstrate responsibility of industry in monitoring its talcs,” the cover letter said. “We are certain that the summary will give you assurance as to the freedom from contamination by asbestos for materials of cosmetic talc products.”
In its letter, J&J said samples of talc produced between December 1972 and October 1973 were tested for asbestos, and none was detected “in any sample.”
J&J didn’t tell the FDA about a 1974 test by a professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire that turned up asbestos in talc from J&J – “fiberform” actinolite, as he put it. Nor did the company tell the FDA about a 1975 report from its longtime lab that found particles identified as “asbestos fibers” in five of 17 samples of talc from the chief source mine for Baby Powder. “Some of them seem rather high,” the private lab wrote in its cover letter.
Bicks, the J&J lawyer, said the contract lab’s results were irrelevant because the talc was intended for industrial use. He said the company now believes that the actinolite the Dartmouth professor found “was not asbestiform,” based on its interpretation of a photo in the original lab report.
Just two months after the Dartmouth professor reported his findings, Windsor Minerals Research and Development Manager Vernon Zeitz wrote that chrysotile, “fibrous anthophyllite” and other types of asbestos had been “found in association with the Hammondsville ore body” – the Vermont deposit that supplied Baby Powder talc for more than two decades.
Zeitz’s May 1974 report on efforts to minimize asbestos in Vermont talc “strongly urged” the adoption of ways to protect “against what are currently considered to be materials presenting a severe health hazard and are potentially present in all talc ores in use at this time.”
Bicks said that Zeitz was not reporting on actual test results.
The following year, Zeitz reported that based on weekly tests of talc samples over six months, “it can be stated with a greater than 99.9% certainty that the ores and materials produced from the ores at all Windsor Mineral locations are free from asbestos or asbestiform minerals.”
J&J’s selective use of test results figured in a New Jersey judge’s decision this year to affirm the first verdict against the company in a case claiming asbestos in J&J products caused cancer. “Providing the FDA favorable results showing no asbestos and withholding or failing to provide unfavorable results, which show asbestos, is a form of a misrepresentation by omission,” Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Ana Viscomi said in her June ruling.
“J&J respectfully disagrees with the Judge’s comments,” Bicks said. “J&J did not withhold any relevant testing from FDA.”
The FDA declined to comment on the ruling.
Lacking consensus on testing methods, the FDA postponed action to limit asbestos in talc. Years later, it did set limits on asbestos in talc used in drugs. It has never limited asbestos in cosmetic talc or established a preferred method for detecting it.
Instead, in 1976, a CTFA committee chaired by a J&J executive drafted voluntary guidelines, establishing a form of X-ray scanning with a 0.5 percent detection limit as the primary test, the method J&J preferred. The method is not designed to detect the most commonly used type of asbestos, chrysotile, at all. The group said the more sensitive electron microscopy was impractical.
The CTFA, which now does business as the Personal Care Products Council, declined to comment.
X-ray scanning is the primary method J&J has used for decades. The company also periodically requires the more sensitive checks with electron microscopes. J&J’s lawyer said the company’s tests exceed the trade association standard, and they do. He also said that today, J&J’s X-ray scans can detect suspect minerals at levels as low as 0.1 percent of a sample.
But the company never adopted the Colorado lab’s 1973 recommendation that samples be concentrated before examination under a microscope. And the talc samples that were subjected to the most sensitive electron microscopy test were a tiny fraction of what was sold. For those and other reasons, J&J couldn’t guarantee its Baby Powder was asbestos-free when plaintiffs used it, according to experts, including some who testified for plaintiffs.
As early as 1976, Ashton, J&J’s longtime talc overseer, recognized as much in a memo to colleagues. He wrote that talc in general, if subjected to the most sensitive testing method, using concentrated samples, “will be hard pressed in supporting purity claims.” He described this sort of testing as both “sophisticated” and “disturbing.”
Actress Blair Brown touts Baby Powder in this 1970s-era TV commercial
By 1977, J&J appeared to have tamped down concerns about the safety of talc. An internal August report on J&J’s “Defense of Talc Safety” campaign noted that independent authorities had deemed cosmetic talc products to be “free of hazard.” It attributed “this growing opinion” to the dissemination to scientific and medical communities in the United States and Britain of “favorable data from the various J&J sponsored studies.”
In 1984, FDA cosmetics chief and former J&J employee Heinz Eiermann reiterated that view. He told the New York Times that the agency’s investigation a decade earlier had prompted the industry to ensure that talc was asbestos-free. “So in subsequent analyses,” he told the paper, “we really could not identify asbestos or only on very rare occasions.”
Two years later, the FDA rejected a citizen request that cosmetic talc carry an asbestos warning label, saying that even if there were trace contamination, the use of talc powder during two years of normal diapering would not increase the risk of cancer.
In 1980, J&J began offering a cornstarch version of Baby Powder – to expand its customer base to people who prefer cornstarch, the company says.
The persistence of the industry’s view that cosmetic talc is asbestos-free is why no studies have been conducted on the incidence of mesothelioma among users of the products. It’s also partly why regulations that protect people in mines, mills, factories and schools from asbestos-laden talc don’t apply to babies and others exposed to cosmetic talc – even though Baby Powder talc has at times come from the same mines as talc sold for industrial use. J&J says cosmetic talc is more thoroughly processed and thus purer than industrial talc.
Until recently, the American Cancer Society (ACS) accepted the industry’s position, saying on its website: “All talcum products used in homes have been asbestos-free since the 1970s.”
After receiving inquiries from Reuters, the ACS in early December revised its website to remove the assurance that cosmetic talcs are free of asbestos. Now, it says, quoting the industry’s standards, that all cosmetic talc products in the United States “should be free from detectable amounts of asbestos.”
The revised ACS web page also notes that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies talc that contains asbestos as “carcinogenic to humans.”
Despite the success of J&J’s efforts to promote the safety of its talc, the company’s test lab found asbestos fibers in samples taken from the Vermont operation in 1984, 1985 and 1986. Bicks said: “The samples that we know of during this time period that contained a fiber or two of asbestos were not cosmetic talc samples.”
Then, in 1992, three years after J&J sold its Vermont mines, the new owner, Cyprus Minerals, said in an internal report on “important environmental issues” in its talc reserves that there was “past tremolite” in the Hammondsville deposit. Hammondsville was the primary source of Baby Powder talc from 1966 until its shutdown in 1990.
Bicks rejected the Cyprus report as hearsay, saying there is no original documentation to confirm it. Hammondsville mine records, according to a 1993 J&J memo, “were destroyed by the mine management staff just prior to the J&J divestiture.”
Bicks said the destroyed documents did not include talc testing records.
In 2002 and 2003, Vermont mine operators found chrysotile asbestos fibers on several occasions in talc produced for Baby Powder sold in Canada. In each case, a single fiber was recorded – a finding deemed “BDL” – below detection limit. Bicks described the finding as “background asbestos” that did not come from any talc source.
In 2009, the FDA, responding to growing public concern about talc, commissioned tests on 34 samples, including a bottle of J&J Baby Powder and samples of Imerys talc from China. No asbestos was detected.
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency continues to receive a lot of questions about talc cosmetics. “I recognize the concern,” he told Reuters. He said the agency’s policing of cosmetics in general – fewer than 30 people regulating a “vast” industry – was “a place where we think we can be doing more.”
Gottlieb said the FDA planned to host a public forum in early 2019 to “look at how we would develop standards for evaluating any potential risk.” An agency spokeswoman said that would include examining “scientific test methods for assessment of asbestos.”
“Fishing expedition”
Before law school, Herschel Hobson worked at a rubber plant. There, his job included ensuring that asbestos in talc the workers were exposed to didn’t exceed OSHA limits.
That’s why he zeroed in on Johnson’s Baby Powder after he took on Darlene Coker as a client in 1997. The lawsuit Coker and her husband, Roy, filed that year against J&J in Jefferson County District Court in Beaumont, Texas, is the earliest Reuters found alleging Baby Powder caused cancer.
Hobson asked J&J for any research it had into the health of its mine workers; talc production records from the mid-1940s through the 1980s; depositions from managers of three labs that tested talc for J&J; and any documents related to testing for fibrous or asbestiform materials.
J&J objected. Hobson’s “fishing expedition” would not turn up any relevant evidence, it asserted in a May 6, 1998, motion. In fact, among the thousands of documents Hobson’s request could have turned up was a letter J&J lawyers had received only weeks earlier from a Rutgers University geologist confirming that she had found asbestos in the company’s Baby Powder, identified in her 1991 published study as tremolite “asbestos” needles.
Hobson agreed to postpone his discovery demands until he got the pathology report on Coker’s lung tissue. Before it came in, J&J asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that Coker had “no evidence” Baby Powder caused mesothelioma.
NO SATISFACTION: Lacking the evidence she needed, Darlene Coker, here with one of her doctors, died without ever finding out what caused her mesothelioma. Cady Evans/Handout via REUTERS
Ten days later, the pathology report landed: Coker’s lung tissue contained tens of thousands of “long fibers” of four different types of asbestos. The findings were “consistent with exposure to talc containing chrysotile and tremolite contamination,” the report concluded.
“The asbestos fibers found raise a new issue of fact,” Hobson told the judge in a request for more time to file an opposition to J&J’s dismissal motion. The judge gave him more time but turned down his request to resume discovery.
Without evidence from J&J and no hope of ever getting any, Hobson advised Coker to drop the suit.
Hobson is still practicing law in Nederland, Texas. When Reuters told him about the evidence that had emerged in recent litigation, he said: “They knew what the problems were, and they hid it.” J&J’s records would have made a “100% difference” in Coker’s case.
Had the information about asbestos in J&J’s talc come out earlier, he said, “maybe there would have been 20 years less exposure” for other people.
Bicks, the J&J lawyer, said Coker dropped her case because “the discovery established that J&J talc had nothing to do with Plaintiff’s disease, and that asbestos exposure from a commercial or occupational setting was the likely cause.”
Coker never learned why she had mesothelioma. She did beat the odds, though. Most patients die within a year of diagnosis. Coker held on long enough to see her two grandchildren. She died in 2009, 12 years after her diagnosis, at age 63.
Coker’s daughter Crystal Deckard was 5 when her sister, Cady, was born in 1971. Deckard remembers seeing the white bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder on the changing table where her mother diapered her new sister.
“When Mom was given this death sentence, she was the same age as I am right now,” Deckard said. “I have it in the back of my mind all the time. Could it happen to us? Me? My sister?”
A guiding hand on talc safety research
Johnson & Johnson developed a strategy in the 1970s to deal with a growing volume of research showing that talc miners had elevated rates of lung disease and cancer: Promote the positive, challenge the negative.
That approach was summed up by a J&J applied research director in a “strictly confidential” March 3, 1975, memo to managers of the baby products division, which used the talc in J&J’s signature Baby Powder.
“Our current posture with respect to the sponsorship of talc safety studies has been to initiate studies only as dictated by confrontation,” the memo said. “This philosophy, so far, has allowed us to neutralize or hold in check data already generated by investigators who question the safety of talc.”
Also, the memo said, “we minimize the risk of possible self-generation of scientific data which may be politically or scientifically embarrassing.”
J&J’s effort to protect its iconic Baby Powder franchise by shaping research was led by physician and scientist executives. An early 1970s study of 1,992 Italian talc miners shows how it worked: J&J commissioned and paid for the study, told the researchers the results it wanted, and hired a ghostwriter to redraft the article that presented the findings in a journal.
The effort entailed other attempts to influence research, including a U.S. government study of the health of talc workers in Vermont. J&J’s Windsor Minerals Inc subsidiary, one of several mine operators involved in the study, developed a relationship with the U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health researchers to “even influence the conclusions” through suggestions of “subjective interpretations,” according to a 1973 Windsor Minerals memo.
Peter Bicks, outside counsel for J&J, told Reuters in an email that for the Vermont study, company “representatives acted in an ‘educational and advisory capacity’ to provide the researchers with a realistic study plan.”
A 1979 article in the Journal of Environmental Pathology and Toxicology detailing the findings of the study was not good news for talc. It reported a “significant increase” in “respiratory cancer mortality” among miners. A subsequent analysis of the underlying data published in 1988 determined that at least one of the workers died of mesothelioma, the cancer most closely associated with asbestos.
The proposal to study the health of miners of the Italian talc used in Baby Powder for decades came from William Ashton, J&J’s longtime talc supply chief. Ashton had obtained a summary of miners’ medical records compiled by an Italian physician, who also happened to control the country’s talc exports.
J&J should use those records “for maximum benefit,” Ashton said in a May 8, 1973, letter to Dr Gavin Hildick-Smith, J&J’s director of medical affairs. “It seems to me that the Italian records give us the opportunity to fortify a position on talc safety.”
At the time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was considering a limit on asbestos in talcs. In an Oct. 18, 1973, memo, Hildick-Smith advised J&J: “The risk/benefit ratio of conducting an epidemiological study in these mines must be considered.”
By early 1974, the study was a go. Hildick-Smith sent money to the Italian talc exporter-physician to hire a team of researchers. Hildick-Smith told the lead researcher in a June 26, 1974, letter exactly what J&J wanted: data that “would show that the incidence of cancer in these subjects is no different from that of the Italian population or the rural control group.”
That is exactly what J&J got, Hildick-Smith told colleagues a few months later. At a meeting on Sept. 27, 1974, for a “Talc/powder Safety Studies Review,” he reported the Italian study would dispel the “cancer concern associated with exposure to talc.”
The following spring, Hildick-Smith got a draft of the Italian study from the lead researcher. It needed work to meet the “form and style” requirements of the target journal, he told colleagues in a March 31, 1975, memo. He added that he would send it to a scientific ghostwriter “who will hold it in confidence and rewrite it.”
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LUTHER STRODE: THE COMPLETE SERIES TO BE COLLECTED INTO HARDCOVER EDITION
by First Comics News on August 14, 2017 LUTHER STRODE: THE COMPLETE SERIES TO BE COLLECTED INTO HARDCOVER EDITION2017-08-14T08:39:46-07:00 - News
PORTLAND, OR, 08/14/2017 — Fan-favorite writer Justin Jordan (SPREAD, THE FAMILY TRADE) and artist Tradd Moore (Venom, All-New Ghost Rider) deliver the complete, critically-acclaimed LUTHER STRODE series collected into one hardcover volume for the first time this October in LUTHER STRODE: THE COMPLETE SERIES. It will collect THE STRANGE TALENT OF LUTHER STRODE #1-6, THE LEGEND OF LUTHER STRODE #1-6, and THE LEGACY OF LUTHER STRODE #1-6.
“Luther sent away for the Hercules Method and it changed his life. I sent Luther Strode away to Image, and it changed my life,” said Jordan. “Fortunately, that worked out a lot better for me than it did for Luther in the book. It’s amazing to see the book that started my career as one hardcover edition, and even for people who’ve been with us the whole journey, there’s tons in here never seen by anyone but me, Tradd and Felipe until now.”
Moore added: “It’s an honor and a joy to have our whole series collected in this incredible hardcover format, and I can’t wait to share it with readers old and new. Prepare your eyes for a BLOODBATH!”
Luther Strode is an average teenage nerd until he sends away for The Hercules Method, a bodybuilding course that promises to give him the body of his dreams. But the powers he unleashes make him a target for a murder cult as old as mankind, cost him almost everything, and take him across the world in the fight to take back his life.
LUTHER STRODE (ISBN: 978-1-5343-0324-9, Diamond Code JUL170750) will hit stores on Wednesday, October 4th.
It will be available in bookstores on Tuesday, October 10th and can be pre-ordered now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, and Indigo.
https://www.firstcomicsnews.com/luther-strode-the-complete-series-to-be-collected-into-hardcover-edition/https://www.firstcomicsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/LUTHER-STRODE-logo-600x257.pnghttps://www.firstcomicsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/LUTHER-STRODE-logo-150x64.png 2017-08-14T08:39:46-07:00 First Comics NewsNews
PORTLAND, OR, 08/14/2017 — Fan-favorite writer Justin Jordan (SPREAD, THE FAMILY TRADE) and artist Tradd Moore (Venom, All-New Ghost Rider) deliver the complete, critically-acclaimed LUTHER STRODE series collected into one hardcover volume for the first time this October in LUTHER STRODE: THE COMPLETE SERIES. It will collect THE STRANGE TALENT OF...
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Detroit Lions 3 questions: Matt Patricia play-calling similar to Caldwell
In his preseason home debut, Detroit Lions coach Matt Patricia exhibited some of the same conservative play-calling as his predecessor, Jim Caldwell.
Detroit Lions 3 questions: Matt Patricia play-calling similar to Caldwell In his preseason home debut, Detroit Lions coach Matt Patricia exhibited some of the same conservative play-calling as his predecessor, Jim Caldwell. Check out this story on Freep.com: https://on.freep.com/2L3KGhb
Carlos Monarrez, Detroit Free Press Published 10:21 p.m. ET Aug. 17, 2018 | Updated 4:24 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2018
New York Giants 30, Detroit Lions 17 in preseason game at Ford Field
Detroit Lions wide receiver Kenny Golladay (19) walks off the field after the Lions' preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions tight end Marcus Lucas (86) runs against the New York Giants linebacker Tae Davis (58) during the second half of the preseason gameat Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions wide receiver Brandon Powell (1) is tackled by New York Giants defensive back Leonard Johnson (29) during the second half of the preseason game at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions quarterback Matt Cassel (8) makes a pass during the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions tight end Michael Roberts (80) runs off the field after getting a first down during the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions fans celebrate a touchdown during the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions punter Ryan Santoso (2) punts the ball during the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
A pass intended for Detroit Lions wide receiver Chris Lacy (18) is blocked by New York Giants cornerback Mike Jones (23) during the second half of the preseason game at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions quarterback Matt Cassel (8) keeps the ball for a run during the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions running back LeGarrette Blount (29) is stopped by New York Giants linebacker Mark Herzlich (44) during the second half of the preseason game at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions wide receiver T.J. Jones (13), center, celebrates with offensive tackle Dan Skipper (74) after scoring a touchdown during the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions wide receiver Brandon Powell (1) runs against the New York Giants during the second half of the preseason game at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions wide receiver Teo Redding (10) runs against the New York Giants defensive back Grant Haley (34) during the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
A Detroit Lions fan cheer for the team during the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions guard Frank Ragnow walks off the field after the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Aug. 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions head coach Matt Patricia watches the second half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions running back Kerryon Johnson (33) returns the kick off during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) looks before making a pass during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions punter Sam Martin (6) kicks off the ball during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) is tackled by New York Giants defensive end Kerry Wynn (72) during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford (9), center, talks to teammates during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions coach Matt Patricia, center, looks on as \quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) walks off the field during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) makes a pass during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions running back Theo Riddick (25) celebrates after making a first down during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions defensive back Darius Slay (23) tackles New York Giants tight end Shane Smith (43) during the first half of the preseason game against Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions defensive back Chris Jones (43), center, tackles New York Giants wide receiver Hunter Sharp (15) during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions kicker Matt Prater (5), center, attempts for a field goal during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions quarterback Jake Rudock (14) slides in front of New York Giants defensive back B.W. Webb (37) for s second down during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions defensive back Tavon Wilson (32) tackles New York Giants tight end Evan Engram (88) during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions running back Ameer Abdullah (21) runs after recovering his fumble of a kickoff during the first half of the preseason game against Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions running back Theo Riddick (25) is tackled by Giants linebacker Mark Herzlich (44), left, and defensive back Chris Lewis-Harris (39) during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions running back Theo Riddick (25) runs against the New York Giants during the first half of the preseason game at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions running back Ameer Abdullah (21) fumbles a kickoff and recovers afterwards during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Lions quarterback Jake Rudock (14) makes a pass during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions head coach Matt Patricia, center, and players lock arms during national anthem before a preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions safety Charles Washington (45), tight end Sean McGrath (85) and defensive end Ezekiel Ansah (94) lock arms during national anthem before a preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions cheerleaders dance with Aretha Franklin's song "Think" at the end of the first quarter to honor Aretha Franklin during a preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
Detroit Lions honor Aretha Franklin with a moment of silence before a preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press
New York Giants running back Saquon Barkley, left, meets with former Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders before a preseason football game, Friday, Aug. 17, 2018, in Detroit. Paul Sancya, AP
Detroit Lions quarterback Jake Rudock hands off to running back Ameer Abdullah during warmups before a preseason football game against the New York Giants, Friday, Aug. 17, 2018, in Detroit. Carlos Osorio, AP
Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) warms up before a game against the New York Giants at Ford Field on Aug. 17, 2018. Tim Fuller, USA TODAY Sports
New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning (10) looks on before a game against the Detroit Lions at Ford Field on Aug 17, 2018. Tim Fuller, USA TODAY Sports
Detroit Lions defensive coordinator Paul Pasqualoni looks on before a game against the New York Giants at Ford Field on Aug 17, 2018. Tim Fuller, USA TODAY Sports
Detroit Lions running back Kerryon Johnson (33) warms up before a game against the New York Giants at Ford Field on Aug 17, 2018. Tim Fuller, USA TODAY Sports
Detroit Lions wide receiver Teo Redding (10) looks on before a game against the New York Giants at Ford Field on Aug 17, 2018. Tim Fuller, USA TODAY Sports
Detroit Lions defensive end Ezekiel Ansah (94) warms up before a game against the New York Giants at Ford Field on Aug 17, 2018. Tim Fuller, USA TODAY Sports
New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham (13) adjusts his helmet before a game against the Detroit Lions at Ford Field on Aug 17, 2018. Tim Fuller, USA TODAY Sports
Lions coach Matt Patricia, center, looks on as \quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) walks off the field during the first half of the preseason game against New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit, Friday, August 17, 2018.(Photo: Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press)
Detroit Free Press sports writer Carlos Monarrez answers three questions after the Lions' preseason loss 30-17 to the New York Giants:
What did you think of Matt Patricia’s home debut?
Prepare yourself, because I’m going to say something harsh. Patricia’s play-calling reminds me of... Jim Caldwell. That’s right. I said it. I regret nothing.
Seriously, tell me with a straight face that you weren’t disappointed/disgusted with Patricia opting to kick a field goal in the second quarter on fourth-and-1 from the Giants’ 31? Sure, he needs to evaluate everyone. But not 12-year veteran Matt Prater. C’mon, coach! It’s the preseason. PRE. SEASON. Go for it. The crowd let him have it, too. At least Patricia went for it on fourth-and-2 from the Giants’ 9 in the third quarter — and LeGarrette Blount got stuffed for minus-1 yard. So at least in obvious situations he’s got a little spine. I did like that after Jamal Agnew gave up a deep catch, Patricia coached up the defensive backs and seemed emphasize the need to track the ball in the air.
More: Detroit Lions-N.Y. Giants observations: Kenny Golladay No. 2 receiver
This game seemed a little dull. Were there any bright spots?
No OBJ. No Saquon. No fair. And when the Lions are down, 24-3, early in the fourth quarter and don’t look good getting there, it’s hard to find silver linings. But the backup quarterbacks at least made it interesting.
Matt Cassel was the third quarterback on Friday and started the second half. After the Giants converted an interception that bounced off T.J. Jones, Cassel moved the offense methodically from the Lions’ 25 to the Giants’ 9, where Blount was stopped. Jake Rudock played most of the first half and re-entered in the fourth quarter to lead a scoring drive that cut the deficit to 24-10. Blount also did a nice job gaining some tough yards and Jace Billingsley flashed on Cassel’s long drive, mostly notably on a 20-yarder on a drag route. Oh, and happy 67th birthday to long-snapper Don Muhlbach. I could be off a couple of years. It’s hard to count that high.
More: Detroit Lions honor Aretha Franklin before preseason game at Ford Field
Dave Birkett and Carlos Monarrez break down what they saw in the Detroti Lions' 30-17 loss to the New York Giants on Friday, Aug. 17. 2018. Dave Birkett and Carlos Monarrez, Detroit Free Press
What do you think of the Lions midway through the preseason?
Folks, it’s not looking good. Their tight end situation isn’t good. They don’t have great depth at receiver. Their defensive front could be a real liability. And the linebackers aren’t stellar. They have Matthew Stafford, a promising run game with Kerryon Johnson and Blount, and a decent-to-good secondary. But that isn’t enough to make me think this is a playoff contender.
The third preseason game will offer a truer measure of the starters’ capability, but the Lions, like all NFL teams, are going to need contributions from the back end of their roster throughout the whole season. Unless I’m missing something big and Patricia is keeping every extra vanilla and is waiting for the start of the season to unveil a magical defense and offense, I wouldn’t get your hopes too high.
Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.
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Here's how the Pistons could trade for Russell Westbrook
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La Salle Academy: Making a World of Difference
Home/All News, District, Schools/La Salle Academy: Making a World of Difference
8/17/11 – Philadelphia, PA
How many Catholic elementary schools require ballroom dancing in the curriculum? And have peer mediation assisted by 14 trained student mediators? And stress courtesy in the daily assembly?
How many schools offer a rigorous academic program for 11 months of the year on a daily schedule that runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.? And require Saturday classes five times a year?
How many conduct classes 225 days each year when the state requires only 180 days? And demand 585 more hours of instruction than a traditional classroom? And give eighth graders laptop computers to be used in class and then taken with them upon graduation?
The answer is La Salle Academy, conducted in the traditions of the Christian Brothers and Sisters of St. Joseph. This academy is located at 1434 North Second St. in Philadelphia’s Kensington district. La Salle Academy is the only “Nativity-Miguel” school in Philadelphia. This independent Catholic grade school is owned and significantly supported by the 37-member board of trustees. This school, however, is neither a parish school nor a school for special education.
A few years ago, Father Herbert Sperger, a former pastor of St. Michael Parish, recognized the need for a school to serve children whose life opportunities were at risk from poverty and other factors. He also realized that the former parish convent, with major adaptations, well might be utilized.
Opened in 2003, the academy, with grades three through eight, received Middle States accreditation in 2010. Each teacher is committed to a nine-hour school day and to an academic year that runs from the Tuesday after Labor Day until July 31.
All teachers have master’s degrees, and their work is supported by a computer instructor, a full-time fine arts teacher, a social worker and volunteers. Denis Block, a volunteer from 2007 to 2009, served as gym teacher and softball coach, and tutored chess and homework clubs.
As a volunteer, Block is not alone. For example, this year 30 students from La Salle College High School came each Tuesday to their “brother school” to tutor. Volunteers from many schools are welcomed by students at the academy.
The founding and present president of this 88-student school is Sister Jeanne McGowan, a Sister of St. Joseph. “I have taught grades one through eight, served as principal for 14 years in West Philadelphia, and earned a master’s degree in education and administration from Boston College,” she said. “My final credential is life.”
Teresa Diamond, principal and formerly a principal in North Philadelphia, holds a master’s degree in education and a certificate in school administration. She came to La Salle Academy in 2005.
Megan Thompson, mother of three and a former teacher, for the past five years has been development director for the academy. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in urban education and policy.
The academy’s mission statement affirms that parents and caregivers of students must “desire” but cannot afford a Catholic education. One example of this “desire” is participation in three conferences at which particular goals for students are clarified.
The application process requires an interview with parents (or guardians) and students; a visit by a social worker to the school the student is attending; scores from achievement testing, and complete financial information — salary, food stamps, welfare supplements, etc.
In effect, application for enrollment is also application for a $12,000 grant, which is the operational cost per student. Tuition per child is $200. Students’ average annual income for a family of four is less than $16,000. The annual report for 2010 identifies a total of $1,548,000 for expenditures and transfer to endowment fund.
The make-up of the students body is: Catholic (67 percent), Latino (47 percent), African-American (39 percent), caucasian (14 percent), single-parent homes (62 percent), one parent incarcerated (23 percent), eligible for free or reduced lunch program (96 percent).
As evidenced by the high schools the 2011 graduates will be attending, La Salle Academy is a profile in excellence in Catholic urban education.
“Our miracle is that we opened in 2003 with no money, endowment or alumni,” Sister McGowan said. “Our Catholic school supports the human and Christian education of the young. Our goal is ‘opening minds, changing hearts.’ I would want every child to receive the education that we are giving!”
Nuzzo2011-08-07T21:36:37-04:00August 7th, 2011|0 Comments
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‘The Crazies’ Director Breck Eisner To Take On ‘Stretch Armstrong’ Movie
Another project we haven’t heard from in a while is the movie based on the popular Hasbro toy, Stretch Armstrong.
The movie was once set up at Universal Pictures with The Twilight Saga star Taylor Lautner attached to star, but it has since departed Universal and found its way to Relativity Media’s doorstep, who have been developing it since.
No actors are attached to star in the new attempt at making the movie yet, but the studio has found their director. It’s being reported that they’ve entered into negotiations with Breck Eisner to sit in the director’s chair, working from a script by Dean Georgaris.
Topics: Movies, News, Toys
Tags: Breck Eisner, Dean Georgaris, Relativity Media, Stretch Armstrong
‘Stretch Armstrong’ Gets New Release Date, Loses Taylor Lautner
By Cinemumra | January 30th, 2012 at 10:00 pm
You win some, and you lose some.
According to Deadline, following the failure that was Abduction, not only has star Taylor Lautner been jettisoned from the long-talked-about Stretch Armstrong film, but Universal as a studio has left as well. However, they haven’t lost everything yet. Relativity has come in to sweep up the pieces, and will be releasing the film on April 11, 2014.
Topics: Movies, News
Tags: Stretch Armstrong, Taylor Lautner
‘Stretch Armstrong’ Movie To Be Origin Story, Similar To ‘Iron Man’
By The Movie God | @ | May 20th, 2010 at 12:21 am
ComingSoon recently had the chance to talk with Nicholas Stoller, writer and director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the upcoming comedy, Get Him To The Greek. Stoller chatted about some of his upcoming projects, including the new movie based on the popular Hasbro toy, Stretch Armstrong.
The movie, which will star The Twilight Saga‘s Taylor Lautner, is based on the toy of the same name, which is distinguishable by its squishy body that was able to stretch out to great lengths. The script was originally penned by Steve Oedekerk, but when Monsters vs. Aliens director Rob Letterman was hired to helm, he decided to bring in another writer, and Stoller asked him for the chance. The duo recently worked together on Letterman’s Gulliver’s Travels, which stars Jack Black and Stoller’s good friend Jason Segel.
Tags: Nicholas Stoller, Rob Letterman, Stretch Armstrong, Taylor Lautner
Taylor Lautner ‘Stretch Armstrong’ Brings In Director & New Writer
By The Movie God | @ | April 20th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
We all know about the swarm of movies being made based on toys and board games, including one about the limber Stretch Armstrong starring The Twilight Saga‘s Taylor Lautner (Read: 3D ‘Stretch Armstrong’ Grabs ‘The Twilight Saga’ Star Taylor Lautner; ‘Battleship’ Now Set To Strike On Memorial Day ).
The script for the movie was originally put together by Evan Almighty writer Steve Oedekerk, but now Universal has decided to bring in a new writer to join their equally-new director.
The studio has chosen Rob Letterman to direct their Stretch movie, and has also brought in Nicholas Stoller to rewrite the existing script. Letterman has mostly animated film experience, having directed Shark Tale and Monsters vs. Aliens for DreamWorks, while Stoller has written Fun With Dick and Jane, Yes Man, as well as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, both of which he also directed. The two gentlemen recently collaborated on the upcoming Jack Black flick Gulliver’s Travels, which Stoller wrote and Letterman is directing.
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Tags: 3D, Brian Grazer, Nicholas Stoller, Rob Letterman, Stretch Armstrong, Taylor Lautner, Universal
Taylor Lautner Dumps ‘Max Steel’ To Be With ‘Stretch Armstrong’
By The Movie God | @ | March 1st, 2010 at 8:42 pm
We all know that Taylor Lautner has been Mr. Popular since Twilight and The Twilight Saga: New Moon have hit theaters. Job offers and casting announcements have come often, including for roles in teen superhero project Max Steel, a possible remake of Vision Quest, and the latest announcement that he would become Stretch Armstrong in the new toy-turned-movie project.
Along with other films like Abduction, Cancun, and of course The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, it appears this onslaught of jobs was just a little too much for the 18-year-old actor, and he has decided to step away from the Max Steel role. Lautner also walked away from a film called Northern Lights recently as well.
Tags: Battleship, Hasbro, Mattel, Max Steel, Stretch Armstrong, Taylor Lautner, The Twilight Saga, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Twilight
3D ‘Stretch Armstrong’ Grabs ‘The Twilight Saga’ Star Taylor Lautner; ‘Battleship’ Now Set To Strike On Memorial Day
By The Movie God | @ | February 6th, 2010 at 2:13 am
Universal Pictures is making some big moves with two upcoming titles based on toys by Hasbro: Stretch Armstrong and Battleship.
The biggest announcement comes in the form of Taylor Lautner, star of The Twilight Saga, who has yet again been cast as a superhero of sorts with incredible abilities: Stretch Armstrong. Just in the past few months, we’ve discovered that Lautner was being cast in the title role of teen hero flick, Max Steel, and also that he might be showing up in the not-so-superhero-based remake of 1985’s Vision Quest.
Aside from this casting announcement and the shocking reveal that the movie will be in 3D, not much has been said of the Stretch Armstrong movie. It, like so many other toy-based movie projects, was simply announced and then ventured off to do whatever it has been doing. All we do know is that Steve Oedekerk (Bruce Almighty, Kung-Pow) has written the screenplay, and that mega-producer Brian Grazer is one of the names behind the production.
Topics: Movies, News, Press Releases
Tags: 3D, Battleship, Brian Grazer, Hasbro, Max Steel, Peter Berg, Stretch Armstrong, Taylor Lautner, The Twilight Saga, Twilight, Universal
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At Gems Al Barsha National School for Girls we passionately believe that all children are valued equally, regardless of their abilities and/or social, emotional or behavioral needs. The school recognises that all children are entitled to have access to a broad and balanced curriculum which is differentiated to meet their individual needs.
Gems Al Barsha National School for Girls strives to ensure that the culture and ethos of the school are such that, whatever the abilities and needs of members of the school communities, everyone is equally valued and treats one and other with respect. Pupils should be provided with the opportunities to experience, understand and value diversity.
The School is committed to working closely in partnership with parents. This partnership is a two way process with both parents and the school sharing their concerns for a pupil. We aim to work in partnership with parents to ensure the best educational provision and support is given to their child. We will inform parents when their child has been identified as having Special Educational Needs and together identify the targets and provision of the IEP (Individual Education Plan) on at least a termly basis. Our approach is one of focus on individual needs and personal outcomes rather than SEND classifications, although these will be relevant when external agencies are involved.
Parents who have a concern about their child are encouraged to share this initially with the class teacher or the Head of Inclusion (Special Needs Co-ordinator); issues can be dealt with quickly and successfully in this way.
This policy has been written in conjunction with GEMS Global SEN Standards and incorporates the Dubai Inclusive Education Policy Framework 2017 (Link) for an inclusive society in which disabled people are treated equally and fairly.
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OCTOBER 13, 1921 replaced by a diagonal tube carrying both tension and com-pression. - The whole gear is streamlined with wooden fairing wrapped with tape and doped. The wheels are 26 ins by3 ins. and the axle is ij in. in diam. Under the name of the " Mercury Gosling," and lookingvery smart painted " Mercury " red, this little machine put up an excellent performance at the Los Angeles Air Tourna-ment held on July 16-17 last- The following are the principal characteristics of thismachine :— sPan 21 ft. 9 ins. Chord - ft. 6 jns. Overall length 18 ft. 6 ins. Height Wing curves Area of main planes Area of ailerons Area of tail plane . . Area of elevators . . Area of fin . . Area of rudder Weight empty Weight fully laden Weight/sq. ft. Weight/h.p. Speed range 7 ft. 8 ins.U.S.A. 15. 112 sq. ft.16 sq. ft. '' 12 sq. ft.10 sq. ft. ijsq. ft.5 sq. ft. 885 lbs.1,130 lbs. 111 lbs.12-5 lbs. 60-130 m.p.h. R.38" COURT OF ENQUIRY THE Air Ministry, in publishing the appended report of the Court of Enquiry into the circumstances occasioning the loss of H.M. Airship " R.38," on August 24, 1921, desire to make the following statement :— The Air Council consider that reasonable certainty has been reached as to what actually happened when the accident took place and as to the sequence of events. They are, •however, of the opinion that judgment must be suspended on the further points raised by the report until the work of investigation by the Aeronautical Research Committee, which has already begun, is concluded. Report.—The terms of reference of the Court of Enquiry are reproduced below :— " By command of the Air Council, a Court of Enquiry, composed as mentioned below, will assemble at R.A.F. Airship Base, Howden, at 10.00 hours on Saturday, August 27, 1921, to enquire into the circumstances occasioning the loss of H.M. Airship ' R.38 ' on August 24, 1921, and to express an opinion as to possible causes of the loss." President.—Air Vice-Marshal Sir J, M. Salmond, K.C.B., C.M.G., C.V.O.. D.S.O., R.A.F. Members.—Air-Commodore F. R. Scarlett, C.B., D.S.O. ; Group-Capt. A. M. Longmore, D.S.O. ; Group-Capt. A. B. Burdett, D.S.O. ; Wing-Comdr. T. R. Cave-Browne-Cave, C.B.E. ; Squad.-Leader D. Harries, A.F.C. ; Squad.-Leader R. B. B. Colmore, O.B.E. ; A. W. Johns, Esq., CB.E., R.C.N.C, Assistant Director of Naval Construction, Admiralty. In Attendance.—Comdr. Horace T. Dyer, United States Navy. The Court having considered the evidence and the terms of reference, have reached the following conclusions, but wish to point out that owing to the illness of the Captain of the airship (Flight-Lieut. A. H. Wann, R.A.F.) they have been unable to procure his evidence. It is not anti- cipated, however, that the opinion given below will be modified to any appreciable extent :— (a) That on August 24, 1921, at or about 7.38 hours, H.M. Airship " R.38," while flying at approximately 1,200 ft. over the Humber in the neighbourhood of Hull, broke in two parts, due to failure of the structure in rear of the after- engine cars when being subjected to control tests. (6) That immediately after the fracture a fire broke out in the forward portion, and this was mainly responsible for the large loss of life. (r) That these control tests were being undertaken with a view to determining the airworthiness of the ship. The sequence of the events as disclosed by evidence is as follows :— That the airship, having completed some 30 hours' trial, including 15 minutes at full speed (60 knots), was flying at a height of about 1,200 ft. She was carrying out rudder and elevator tests at a speed of 45 to .50 knots. Almost extreme helm with a quick reversal was being uced, which brought a heavy force on the after portion of the hull, due to the swing of the stern. During this manoeuvre the structure failed between frames 9 and 10, the first indication of which to ground observation was a slackness of the fabric at this point. The ship then broke into two portions. The forward portion caught fire at the fracture! at the moment of or shortly after separation. The fire probably originated in a spark from the electric leads, which became fractured at a point in the immediate vicinity of a similar fracture in the petrol mains. As all •sources of electrical energy were situated in the forward portion only, the rear portion was not affected, as electric leads in the latter portion became dead immediately the fracture took place. The fire in the forward portion spread rapidly, due to the presence of escaping petrol in the keel. An explosion fol- lowed, which led to the collapse of the structure and the ignition of the liberated hydrogen gas. A second explosion took place when the forward portion reached the water. Meanwhile the after portion descended comparatively slowly, but did not catch fire ; four of the five survivors were in this portion, and were rescued uninjured. The Court wish to bring the following points to notice :— 1. That H.M. Airship " R.38 " was designed in August, 1918, in the Department of Airship Production, Admiralty, to meet requirements which appear to the Court to be greatly in advance of those of previous British airships. That the requirements as to maximum height and speed, together with the limits in length imposed by the only avail- able construction sheds, necessitated the utmost economy in hull weights and materials. Many new features, were introduced in the design, and it appears evident that in some cases there was a lack of vital aerodynamical information as to the effect of these modifications on the strength of the structure. That the first frames of the ship were completed in October, 1919, at Cardington by Messrs. Short Bros., and in the same month the Airship Department was transferred from the Admiralty to the Air Ministry. Cardington was taken over from Messrs. Short Bros, in April, 1920, by the Air Ministry, and became the Royal Airship Works. 2. That having regard to the great differences in the requirements between H.M. Airship " R.38 " and previous British airships, the design should have been examined and discussed by an official and competent Committee before actual construction was commenced. There is no evidence to show that this has been done, although opportunity arose after the Armistice when information as to the details of ships built elsewhere became available. 3. That the system by which both the construction of the ship and the inspection of the work are centred in one head, as was the case at the Royal Airship Works, Cardington, is unsound. 4. That although there can be no doubt that efforts were made towards the end to complete the ship in the shortest possible time, there is no evidence that the work on the hull structure suffered. 5. That one parachute was provided for every person on board. That the total complement numbered 49. No survivor owed his escape to a parachu|g, though evidence shows that at least one parachute descended with two men below it, but they were not amongst the survivors. The general break-up and rapid spread of the fire in the keel prevented the more successful use of these appliances. 6. That no bombs or other high explosives were being • carried. 7. That the weather during the whole flight was calm. The Secretary of the Admiralty communicates the fol- » lowing :— " With reference to the Report of the Court of Enquiry into the circumstances occasioning the loss of H.M. Airship ' R.38 ' and the Air Council's statement thereon, the Admiralty are conducting a full investigation into the history of the design of the airship and of the initial stages of its construction up to October, 1919, when responsibility for the design and construction of airships was transferred to the Air Ministry, and the result of this investigation will be published in due course." 67I
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Fargo-Moorhead Area Real Estate
View 4087 listings
Choosing Fargo real estate for your next home will mean residing in the largest city in North Dakota. The population, according to the 2010 census, was 105,549. Fargo, along with the cities of Moorhead, Minnesota and West Fargo, ND, form the Fargo-Moorhead, ND-MN Metropolitan Statistical Area. This area has a population of approximately 208,777. The city was founded in 1871 and present day Fargo was once only a stopping place for steamboats on the Red River. The original name was Centralia; however, it was renamed for The Wells Fargo Express Company founder, William Fargo. Purchasing Fargo homes for sale puts buyers in the midst of an area that has flourished since the Northern Pacific Railroad was established.
Fargo real estate – residential and commercial – is attractive to buyers for the easy accessibility which is in part due to Interstates 29 and 94. The West Acres Shopping Center was constructed near the intersection of these two Interstates. In addition to the Interstates, Fargo has U.S. Highways 81, 10 and 52. The Hector International Airport is located in Fargo. The BNSF Railway provides another mode of transportation for the area and Amtrak service as well as a public bus service; Fargo Moorhead Metro Area Transit (MAT) is available. This is definitely a city that is well-connected when it comes to transportation.
Residents of Fargo real estate are served by the Fargo Public Schools System. There are fifteen elementary, three middle and four high schools. North Dakota State University is located in Fargo as well as several smaller colleges. Fargo is the location of several major corporations, including Cetero Research, Navteq and Microsoft. Considered the economic center of southeastern North Dakota and part of northwestern Minnesota, Fargo is an education, health care, manufacturing, retail and cultural center for the area. Fargo was ranked as the 7th “best small city in the nation to start a business or a career” in a study published by Forbes.
Fargo homes for sale include a selection of single-family homes, condos and townhouses as well as farms or ranches with acreage. Planning agencies within the city have been promoting the revitalization of housing in many of the older areas of the city, for example, the Roosevelt neighborhood, in an effort to strengthen these areas. The combination of affordable housing, low crime rates and low unemployment rates have resulted in Fargo being consistently ranked at the top of Money magazine’s list of America’s most livable cities throughout the latter 1990s and the early 2000s.
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'80 Days' Review: A Pocket-Sized Journey Around The World
Forbes Games Reviews Contributor Group
There’s a story - or more precisely a narrative vignette - about this review of 80 Days, which at surface is a pretty explicable quantity: a steampunk-accented combination of interactive fiction, Ticket to Ride and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, based on the handily public-domain story by Jules Verne and its game-friendly ticking clock narrative, and available on the iPhone and iPad, with Android and other versions potentially to follow.
I was talking with a game designer at Nine Worlds Geekfest about 80 Days and said, half-jokingly, that it was a solid 8, adding that numerical scores were, of course, an arbitrary nonsense.
“So, if these are are arbitrary numbers, why is it an eight?” the designer asked. “What would it need to be to be a nine?”
It’s a good question. What does Halo 4 or Grand Theft Auto V need to do to be a 9, or a 10 (or, more controversially, an 8 or a 7)? How do these scales even work? How do you apply the same metric to a $500 million "shared-world shooter" and a game produced by a half-dozen people? This, of course, is a question critics have to answer all the time. Avengers Assemble is a good film. Rushmore is a good film. Primer is a good film. At some point, the word "good" may lose all meaning.
80 Days is a good game. But what that means is a difficult question.
On a simple, mechanical level, 80 Days is about resource management. Specifically, three numbered resources, two of which control the rhythms of your journey around the world, one of which measures your proximity to victory or defeat. Money, health and time. And a fourth, inferred from context, which is best described as the cool and well-managed love between manservant and gentleman.
Around the World in 80 Days, the original Jules Verne story, lends itself very well to a game treatment, being built as it is around a challenge - to travel from and to the Reform Club in London, circumnavigating the globe in the interim, in 80 Days or less. However, Verne’s 1872, and the story, hinged on a single technological innovation to make this possible: the trans-Indian railroad permitting travel from Bombay* to Calcutta in three days. Obviously, a game in which the player can only take one route is possible - quo vide Out Run - but it might limit replay value.
Instead, developer inkle has populated its 1872 with a glittering array of unavoidably Steampunk modes of travel: airships, evapotranspiration-powered flying bicycles, robot-driven steam carriages and submersible ocean liners. Suddenly, the map opens up - aspirant globetrotters can hunt for airship lines from Africa, or stumble upon experimental technologies hidden in the Caucasus mountains. That melding of the scientific romance of other works by Verne into Phileas Fogg’s journey broadens the field of play, and has other, intriguing impacts on the world, of which more later.
But back to those resources. Travelling the world takes money - and departure times can usually be hastened by spending more money. Fogg’s reserves can be topped up by buying trade goods cheap in one city and selling them at a profit in others. If his cash reserves are depleted, they can be topped up at banks - but it takes time for the payment to be approved.
Arduous journeys deplete Fogg’s health - a slower but more gentle airship passage may take longer than a breakneck rush through a sandstorm, but it will probably take less starch out of his moustache. Specific items - fur hats or galoshes - reduce the impact of particular forms of travel. As Passepartout, your job is to keep Fogg’s dander up - not least because a loss of dander will force a lengthy stay under doctor’s orders.
The best way to re-dander is by tending to Fogg during journeys. How effective this process of shaving, bath-drawing and shirt-pressing is depends on the level of trust and amity Fogg and Passepartout share. Various actions at various points will trigger a notification that your relationship with Fogg has improved or worsened. These are not wholly predictable, but a sense of Fogg as a character emerges from the negative space: outwardly a highly conventional Victorian Englishman, at times he approves of, and needs, Passepartout’s ability to cross class lines and engage in some rough and tumble in a virtuous cause. But he also wants his newspaper brought to him in the morning.
In mechanical terms, 80 Days is a diverting exploration of the emerging rule set of inkle’s map and its various connections, as players look for routes that return to the Reform Club in London without. However, what makes the game for more than the sum of its mechanics is the world represented by those nodes and lines across the map.
Imperial baggage
Rewriting the “Verniverse” turned out to be a remarkably large assignment; around 500,000 words have been poured into creating the world, along with a system of procedurally-generated systems to handle repeatable tasks - conversations about possible onward journeys, minor adventures finding lost cats or necklaces in minor cities.
Another challenge, of course, rests in the Victorian values of the original story. Around the World in 80 Days is very much about the awesome things empire is bringing to the world, both on a macro level (the trans-Indian railway, manifest destiny) and a micro level (the rescue of the smilingly submissive Indian princess Aouda from - no, really - Thuggee cultists, at which point she falls near-immediately in love with Fogg).
The lead writer on this project, Meg Jayanth, has written an interesting piece on Aouda, and the challenges of decolonizing both Jules Verne and steampunk. From the player’s perspective, however, the result is a fascinating destabilizing of the Imperial travel romance. The way the game is played closely resembles the diaries of aristocrats on their grand tours. Fogg and Passepartout arrive in a strange city. They might visit the market, or wire for more money.
Passepartout has the option to explore, which may trigger a multiple-choice encounter, a randomly-generated bit of narrative, or open up new routes out of the city. These explorations also open up simple quests - taking an item to another location, or finding the right words to charm a local into letting slip word of an experimental airship - which are often rewarded by a speedier journey or a valuable trading item. Some of these scripted adventures, such as an attempt to arouse a mutiny or escort a political prisoner across India, can run across multiple encounters and locations. Others are purely there to set the mood.
The world is criss-crossed with possible paths, and the key to success lies in uncovering options - by asking around, by quizzing guides and fellow travellers during long journeys, or more prosaically by buying maps and timetables. One can follow the canonical route - through Europe to Suez, then across India, through Hong Kong and Yokohama, across North America and home. But more intrepid travellers could take the trans-Siberian express across the plains of Russia and hop on a steamer to Pyongyang, or take a time-eating journey south through Africa in the hope of a long, fast airship ride eastward.
At times, the touch of randomization in the game and its encounters creates a decidely rouguelikelike spike in difficulty: few things are less fun than having to wait three days in Wadi Halfa for the next onward trip, without the funds to speed up the next train or access to a bank to get them. However, since there is a failure condition but no fail state - if the wager is lost, Fogg and Passepartout can still make their way back to the Reform Club - there is enjoyment to be had in simply exploring.
All of which is an attempt to say that this one really is about the journey rather than the arrival, and whether it is an eight, or a nine, or a five, probably depends on how much pleasure the player takes in text.
The pleasures of the text
is not to say that 80 Days is an ugly game - watching the red dot crawl across the globe has a satisfying feel to it, and the ability to spin, zoom and shrink that globe to see the cities ahead is an attractive implementation of a useful device. The 2D art of the cities - each one portrayed by a single image of a notable landmark - and the modes of transport and characters Passepartout interrogates during the journey do their job, although the gap between the start, largely monochromatic locations and transports, reminiscent of the art deco poster art of Cassandre, and the colorful profile sketches of the ship captains, conductors and passengers Passepartout pumps for information. But the real pleasure is to be found in the story.
The parallel 1872 on display is a mix of the familiar and the strange. Paris has been recently besieged by Prussia, and Passepartout may recall fighting alongside Delescluze on the wall - but he can also visit an exhibition of airships, featuring anachronistic and impossible vessels like William Bland’s atmotic ship - which was previewed in Paris in 1855, but never built. The Guild of Artificers is filling the world with automata, and the impact of robotized labor on the various empires has unexpected results. In Italy, the Zoaves loyal to the Pope, throw bombs at cybernetically-enhanced Piedmontes troops enforcing the will of the Venetian syndicates.
Rangoon was lost to the British in the second Anglo-Burmese War - but in this world was recaptured with the aid of an army of robotic lions with human faces, allowing Burma’s King Pagan to retain the throne he lost in our robot lion-free 19th century. This all provides a fascinating and clearly painstakingly researched canvas for the player’s explorations.
Passepartout and Fogg are never in real, game-ending peril, although as they move through rebellious colonies and the untamed American West they certainly get into plenty of scrapes. What they are having, however, is an adventure - one unravelled in paragraph after paragraph of prose. The standard of the writing is consistently high - impressively so, given the sheer scale of the enterprise - and the feeling of being inside a ripping, and rolling yarn artfully created.
The point of 80 Days, ultimately, is to enjoy that narrative - the familiar-but-different vision of the world, and Passepartout’s intrigues and flirtations as the player steers him through it, ever attentive to a loose thread or popped collar stud on his gentleman’s person. The game and the player are conspiring to write a book - a picaresque narrative guided but never derailed by the game’s systems.
If that all sounds like fun, then 80 Days may well be a nine, whatever that means. Regardless, it is a huge but carefully assembled adventure, and perhaps the most ambitious - and successful - piece of interactive fiction so far designed for mobile formats, and for the cost of a cup of coffee it's hard not to recommend.
Platform: iOS
Publisher: Apple
Developer: inkle studios
Released: July 31st 2015
Score: 8.5/10
*In the interests of consistency, I have used the historic anglicizations used in the book and the game.
[Disclosures - this review was based on a pre-release review copy. I have social connections with a number of developers, including some who have been involved with inkle studios projects, including 80 Days. I wrote a piece on 80 Days for Wired Magazine, which appeared in the July issue of Wired UK.]
Forbes Games Reviews
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week 4 dis 2 law env
7/4/2018 AT&T pulls $39 billion T-Mobile bid | Deseret News
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/700208468/ATT-pulls-39-billion-T-Mobile-bid.html 1/1
AT&T pulls $39 billion T-Mobile bid By Scott Moritz Bloomberg News Published: December 19, 2011 8:00 pm Updated: Dec. 19, 2011 9:43 p.m.
AT&T Inc. abandoned a $39 billion takeover bid for T-Mobile USA aer underestimating opposition from regulators, thwarting its ambitions to become the biggest U.S. wireless carrier.
AT&T will take a pretax charge of $4 billion to reflect cash payments and other considerations due to T-Mobile-owner Deutsche Telekom AG, the Dallas-based company said in a statement Monday.
AT&T failed to convince the Justice Department, which sued to block the transaction in August, that it could remedy the market impact of absorbing T-Mobile. AT&T would have spent months in litigation to try to win court approval for buying the nation’s No. 4 mobile-phone operator in the largest merger and acquisition announced this year globally. The company also faced possible opposition from the Federal Communications Commission.
“They rolled the dice and took their chances,” said Craig Moffett, a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst in New York. “In the end, it didn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean it was a mistake to try.”
AT&T’s decision came aer the judge in the Justice Department lawsuit agreed on Dec. 12 to put the case on hold as the telephone company decided whether or how to revise the transaction. The delay may have made it more difficult for AT&T to close the deal by the Sept. 20 deadline.
AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said in March, when the deal was announced, that he was confident of receiving regulatory clearance. He said the combination would help improve service, speed up investment in faster networks and drive wireless expansion in rural areas. The deal would have added T-Mobile’s 33.7 million customers to AT&T’s 100.7 million subscribers, surpassing Verizon Wireless’s 107.7 million.
Critics of the deal said it would eliminate an aggressive price competitor, driving up subscription costs. T-Mobile’s wireless plans are $15 to $50 cheaper than comparable AT&T plans, according to an analysis by Consumer Reports.
For Deutsche Telekom, the collapse of the deal leaves it with one more subscriber-losing business as the Bonn-based company confronts the fallout from Europe’s debt crisis. Deutsche Telekom had planned to use the proceeds to cut debt by 13 billion euros ($16.9 billion) and repurchase 5 billion euros of its shares. The company also needs funds to upgrade fiber and wireless networks in Germany and other European markets.
AT&T and Deutsche Telekom pulled their applications to the FCC on Nov. 24, with AT&T announcing the same day that it would record $4 billion in costs this quarter to reflect the risk of the deal collapsing.
The withdrawal came aer FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski asked the commission on Nov. 22 to send the proposal to an agency judge for a hearing. The same move by the FCC in 2002 helped block EchoStar Communications Corp.’s acquisition of satellite-TV rival DirecTV.
According to the terms of the offer, AT&T must pay Deutsche Telekom a $3 billion breakup fee in cash, transfer radio spectrum to T-Mobile and strike a more favorable network-sharing agreement. Deutsche Telekom has valued the breakup package at as much as $7 billion.
In an effort to sell the deal to regulators and the public, AT&T vowed to honor the T-Mobile service plan prices aer the merger. The company also vowed to bring 5,000 call-center jobs currently based overseas to the U.S. in the event of approval.
Outline for Project – Part 1
5th July Discussions
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Leia Promoted from Hereditary Royal to Military Leader in Star Wars: The Force Awakens
It seems that despite wanting to keep as much of the film as secret as possible, director JJ Abrams can't help spouting off about the new Star Wars -- with a new interview with the bombastic director telling us secret things about Leia's role in the new film.
Apparently Leia has gone over to the khaki side and is now spoken about in military terms in The Force Awakens, with Abrams telling Entertainment Weekly that: "She’s referred to as General. But... there’s a moment in the movie where a character sort of slips and calls her 'Princess.'"
He also spoke of Carrie Fisher's role in the film, explaining that she's in the more... serious bits. She's unlikely to be bonking her head on the scenery, with Abrams adding: "The stakes are pretty high in the story for her, so there’s not much goofing around where Leia’s concerned. But it felt historic to have her, especially with Harrison, back in scenes together. I can only imagine the baggage that they bring to it, I’m just a fan who loves this stuff, but they’ve been living with it -- and living in it -- since '77."
Abrams is basically a big fan of Fisher, explaining of the filmmaking process: "...it was a truly joyful experience, and I think that that has to do with the fact that people as funny as Carrie Fisher were simply there." [Entertainment Weekly via Time]
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Trump Pulls Troops Out of Syria in Desperate Attempt to Save His Presidency, Causing Geopolitical Earthquake
By Federico Pieraccini
Region: Middle East & North Africa, USA
Theme: Media Disinformation, US NATO War Agenda
On December 19, Donald Trump announced in a Twitter message: “Our boys, our young women, our men, they’re all coming back and they’re coming back now. We won”. Shortly thereafter, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement: “We have started the process of returning US troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign”.
The reasons for Donald Trump’s move are many, but they are mainly driven by US domestic concerns. The temperature is heating up for Trump following the midterms, as the Democrats prepare to take command of the House of Representatives in January, something that Trump had always hoped to avert. He surrounded himself with generals, in the forlorn hope that this would somehow protect him. If the last two years of his presidency were constantly under the cloud of Mueller’s investigation, or insinuations of being an agent of Putin, from January 2019 the situation is going to get much more complicated. The Democratic electoral base is baying for the President’s impeachment, the party already in full pre-primary mode, with more than 20 candidates competing, with the incumbent of the White House offering the rallying cry.
The combination of these factors has forced Trump to change gears, considering that the military -industrial -intelligence -media- complex has always been ready to get rid of Trump, even in favor of a President Pence. The only option available for Trump in order to have a chance of reelection in 2020 is to undertake a self-promotion tour, a practice in which he has few peers, and which will involve him repeating his mantra of “Promises Made, Promises Kept”. He will list how he has fought against the fake-news media, suffered internal sabotage, as well as other efforts (from the Fed, the FBI, and Mueller himself) to hamper his efforts to “Make America Great Again”.
Trump has perhaps understood that in order to be re-elected, he must pursue a simple media strategy that will have a direct impact on his base. Withdrawing US troops from Syria, and partly from Afghanistan, serves this purpose. It is an easy way to win with his constituents, while it is a heavy blow to his fiercest critics in Washington who are against this decision. Given that 70% of Americans think that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, the more that the mainstream media attacks Trump for his decision to withdraw, the more they direct votes to Trump. In this sense, Trump’s move seems to be directed at a domestic rather than an international audience.
The decision to get out of Syria is timed to coincide with another move that will also very much please Trump’s base. The government shutdown is a result of the Democrats refusing to fund Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. It is not difficult to understand that the average citizen is fed up with the useless wars in the Middle East, and Trump’s words on immigration resonate with his voters. The more the media, the Democrats and the deep state criticize Trump on the wall, on the Syria pull out and on shutting down the government, the more they are campaigning for him.
This is why in order to understand the withdrawal of the United States from Syria it is necessary to see things from Trump’s perspective, even as frustrating, confusing and incomprehensible that may seem at times.
The difference this time around was that the decision to withdraw US troops from Syria was Trump’s alone, not something imposed on him by the generals that surround him. The choice to announce to his base, via Twitter, a victory against ISIS and the immediate withdrawal of US troops was a smart election move with an eye on the 2020 election.
It is possible that Trump, as is his wont, also wanted to send a message to his alleged French and British allies present in the northeast of Syria alongside the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and US soldiers. Trump may be now taunting: “Let’s see what you can do without the US!”
It is as if Trump is admonishing these countries in a more concrete way for not lifting their weight in terms of military spending. Trump is vindictive and is not averse, after taking advantage of his opponent, to kicking him once he is down. Trump could be correct in this regard, and maybe French and British forces will be forced to withdraw their small group of 400 to 500 illegal occupiers of Syrian territory. Macron has for now reacted angrily at Trump’s decision, intensifying the division between the two, and is adamant that the French military presence in Syria will continue.
There is also a more refined reason to justify the US withdrawal, even if Trump is probably unaware of it. The problem in these cases is always trying to peer through the fog of war and propaganda in order to discern the clear, unadulterated truth.
We should begin by listing the winners and losers of the Syrian conflict. Damascus, Moscow, Tehran and Hezbollah have won the war against aggression. Riyadh, Doha, Paris, London, Tel Aviv and Washington, with their al Qaeda, Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist proxies, failed to destroy Syria, and following seven years of effort, are forced to scurry away in defeat.
Those who are walking a tightrope between war and defeat are Ankara and the so-called SDF. The withdrawal of the United States has confirmed the balance on the ledger of winners and losers, with the clock counting down for Erdogan and the SDF to make their next determinative move.
The enemies of Syria survive thanks to repeated bluffs. The Americans of the military-industrial-intelligence apparatus maintain the pretence that they still have an influence in Syria, what with troops on the ground, attacking Trump for withdrawing. In fact, since the Russians have imposed a no-fly-zone across the country, with the S-300 systems and other sophisticated equipment that integrate the Syrian air-defenses into the Russian air defenses, US coalition planes are for all intents and purposes grounded, and the same goes for the Israelis.
Of course the French and British in Syria are infected with the same delusional disease, choosing to believe that they can count for something without the US presence. We will see in the near future whether they also withdraw their illegal presence from Syria.
The biggest bluff of all probably comes from Erdogan, who for months threatened to invade Syria to fight ISIS, the Kurds, or any other plausible excuse to invade a sovereign country for the purposes of advancing his dreams of expanding Turkish territory as far as Idlib (which Erdogan considers a province of Turkey). Such an invasion, however, is unlikely to happen, as it would unite the SDF, Damascus and her allies to reject the Turkish advance on Syrian territory.
The Kurds in turn seem to have only one option left, namely, a forced negotiation with Damascus to give back to the Syrian people, in exchange for protection, the control of their territory that is rich in oil and gas.
Erdogan wants to eliminate the SDF, and until now, the only thing that stood in his way was the US military presence. He even threatened to attack several times, even in spite of the presence of US troops. Ankara has long been on a collision course with NATO countries on account of this. By removing US troops, Trump imagines, relations between Turkey and the US may also improve. This of course is of little interest to the US deep state, since Erdogan, like Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), is considered unsuitable, and is accordingly branded a “dictator”.
Trump probably believes that with this move, as with his defense of MBS concerning Khashoggi, that he can try and establish a strong personal friendship with Erdogan. There are even talks about the sale of Patriot systems to the Turks and the extradition of Gulen.
When Will They Leave, and Cui Prodest?
It remains to be confirmed when and to what extent US troops will leave Syria. If the US had no voice in the future in Syria, with 2,000 men on the ground, now it has even less. Leaving behind 200 to 300 special forces and CIA operatives, together with another 400 to 500 French and British personnel, will, once they are captured with their Daesh and al Qaeda friends, be an excellent bargaining chip for Damascus, as they were in Aleppo.
The military-industrial-intelligence-media complex considers Trump’s decision the worst of of all possible moves. Mattis even resigned on account of this. The presence of US troops in Syria allowed the foreign-policy establishment to continue to formulate plans (and spend money to pay a lot of people in Washington) based on the delusion that they are doing something in Syria to change the course of events. For Israel, it is a double disaster, with Netanyahu desperate to survive, seeking to factor in expected elections in a now-or-never political move. Trump probably understands that Bibi is done for, and that at this point, the withdrawal of troops, fulfilling a fundamental electoral promise, counts more than Israeli money and his friendship to Bibi.
Erdogan has two options before him. On the one hand, he can act against the Kurds. On the other hand, he can sit down at the negotiating table with Damascus and the SDF, in an Astana format, guided by Iran and Russia. Putin and Rouhani are certainly pushing for this solution. Trump, on the other hand, would like to see Turkey enter Syria in the place of US forces, to demonstrate he concluded a win-win deal for everyone, beating the deep-state at their own game.
Erdogan does not really have the military force necessary to enter Syria, which is the big secret. He would be against both the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the SDF, though the two not necessarily in an alliance.
There is a triple bluff going on, and this is what is complicating the situation so much. On the one hand, the SDF is bluffing in not wanting help from Damascus in case Erdogan sends in his forces; on the other hand, Erdogan is bluffing in suggesting he is able to conquer the territory held by the SDF; and finally, the French and British are bluffing by telling the SDF they will be able to help them against both Erdogan and/or Assad.
Iran, Russia, Syria are the only ones who do not need to bluff, because they occupy the best position – the commanding heights. They view Trump’s decisions and his allies with distrust. They know very well that these are mostly moves for internal consumption by the enemies of Syria.
If the US withdraws, there is so much to be gained. The priority then becomes the west of Syria, sealing the borders with Jordan, removing the pockets of terrorists from the east, and securing the al-Tanf crossing. If the SDF will request protection from Damascus and will be willing to participate in the liberation of the country and its reconstruction, Erdogan will be done for, and this could lead to the total liberation of Idlib. It would be the best possible outcome, an important national reconciliation between two important parts of the population. It would give Damascus new economic impetus and prepare the Syrian people to expel the remaining invaders (ISIS and the FSA/ Turkish Armed Forces) from the country, both in Idlib and in the northeast in Afrin.
Russia is aware of the risk that Erdogan is running with the choices he will take in the coming days. Perhaps the reason why Putin chose diplomacy over war with Turkey after the downing of a Russian Su-24 in 2015 was in order to arrive at this precise moment, with as many elements as possible present to convince Erdogan to stick with Russia and Iran instead of embracing Trump’s strategy and putting himself on an open collision course with Damascus, Moscow and Tehran.
Putin has always been five moves ahead. He is aware that the US could not stay long in Syria. He knows that France and the UK cannot support the SDF, and that the SDF cannot hold territory it holds in Syria without an agreement with Damascus. He is also conscious that Turkey does not have the strength to enter Syria and hold the territory if it did. It would only be able justify an advance on Idlib with the support of the Russian Air Force.
Putin has certainly made it clear to Erdogan that if he made such a move to attack the SDF and enter Syria, Russia in turn would militarily support the SAA with its air force to free Idlib; and in case of incidents with Turkey, the Russian armed forces would respond with all the interest earned from the unrequited downing of the Su-24 in 2015.
Erdogan has no choice. He must find an agreement with Damascus, and this is why he found himself commenting on Trump’s words the following day, criticizing US sanctions on Iran in the presence of Iranian president Rouhani. The SDF know that they are between a rock and a hard place, and have already sent a delegation to start negotiations with Damascus.
Trump’s move was driven by US domestic politics and aimed at the 2020 elections. But in doing so, Trump inevitably called out once and for all the bluffs built by Syria’s enemies, infuriating in the process the neoliberal imperialist establishment, revealing how each of these factions has no more cards to play and is in actual fact destined for defeat.
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies.
Featured image is from SCF
The original source of this article is Strategic Culture Foundation
Copyright © Federico Pieraccini, Strategic Culture Foundation, 2018
Articles by: Federico Pieraccini
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Soil expert to headline free sustainability conference at Cedar Valley College
By Julie Thibodeaux 1 Comment
By Minnie Payne
Dr. Elaine Ingham, leading soil biology researcher and founder of Soil Foodweb, Inc., along with Trammell S. Crow, president of the Crow Family Foundation and founder of Earth Day Dallas (now Earth Day Texas), will be keynote speakers at a March 20 Sustainability Conference to be held at Cedar Valley College in Lancaster, starting at 8 a.m., going to 5 p.m. Participants may register online or at the free conference from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. Lunch is also free.
Soil expert Dr. Elaine Ingram will speak at 9 a.m. on March 20. She'll also host an all-day workshop on March 21.
The conference title is “H3: A Responsible Pathway,” and according to Dr. Maria Boccalandro, Sustainability Director of Cedar Valley College, the “H3” stands for head, heart, and hands because the pathway to sustainability involves a commitment of those three parts of your body.
“I think when people talk about sustainability, it’s sometimes confusing,” she relates. “We want to get across to participants and speakers that sustainability is good for people, the planet, and the economy. People are very happy because they recycle, but it’s going beyond that.
“The conference wants to make people take action and reflect on the way we are living and how that affects the quality of our lives.”
Dr. Ingham will be the opening keynote speaker from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. and will share her vast knowledge on soil and how we can use biology to enrich soil into making healthy plants that resist disease and pests. She will also be offering a one-day workshop on March 21 titled “Soil Foodweb and Compost Tea Technology.”
Crow will be the luncheon speaker from noon to 1 p.m. and is expected to talk about Earth Day Texas 2015 and how it is changing the national perception of our state and its journey to sustainability.
Above, Earth Day Texas founder Trammell S. Crow will speak at noon on March 20.
A group of Cedar Valley College drama students have written a play on sustainability and will present a conversation on how we can help restore the earth from 10 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
New to the third-year conference is a plenary from 10:45 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., wherein a panel of experts will cover various sustainability topics.
There will be 19 breakout sessions during the day. The first concurrent session will be from 1:15 p.m. to 2:45 p.m., and feature 10 programs to choose from. Among them, Tom “Smitty” Smith, director of Public Citizen's Texas office, will conduct a session on clean energy and his efforts to push sustainability laws to legislature in Austin. Moderator Winfred “Wendy” Cannon will discuss her work with a group of South Dallas women, non-profits and turning a food desert into a food and job oasis.
Above, Public Citizen state director Tom "Smitty" Smith will speak during the first breakout session. Photo: IndyTexans.org.
The second concurrent session will be from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. and will include 9 sessions, including sustainable marketing consultant Amy King of Nested Strategies, who will share tips for creating a brand. Pam Gist will offer advice on grants for sustainable projects. See complete schedule.
Sessions are 1.5 hours long in an effort to be hands on. A live lab session will show how Cedar Valley College students are solving problems on campuses.
Boccalandro says there are inviting people from neighboring cities, students and employees to attend the conference.
“We want everyone to enjoy learning how to be healthy. Not only will clean energy, clean water and clean jobs be discussed, but there will be a spiritual part as well.”
“South Dallas is known for being a food desert and our first step is to restore the soil like a great many big cities that are beginning to produce food in urban farms. Cedar Valley College president Jennifer Wimbish has made our school an excellent sustainability college, and it’s a reference for South Dallas.”
Minnie Payne is frequent contributor to GreenSourceDFW.org. She’s written for Pegasus News, Frisco Style Magazine and Seedstock. She presently freelances for Living Magazine, The Senior Voice and Your Speakeasy. She can be reached at jdpmap77@gmail.com.
Julie Thibodeaux
Julie Thibodeaux is the Editor for Green Source DFW. Previously, she worked as an editor and writer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Contact her at Julie@greensourcedfw.org.
What a perfect key note speaker since this is the International year of soil! Without soil, food would not be possible! https://soilsalive.com/blog/2015-is-the-international-year-of-soil
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SME Forum
The SME Forum
Small Business in the Urban Economy
Presentation programme
Sporting programme
Festival of culture
Official reception
Press events programme
05 Jun, 12:00–13:30
Russian Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Forum
Investment Track
Pavilion G, conference hall G3
Small and medium-sized enterprises are the foundation and backbone of urban economy, generating added value, tax revenue, and new jobs. Unifying the most effective types of support for entrepreneurs such as financial and material support, access to information, consultations, services provided by the Business Navigator, and others could help grow SME sector in towns and cities. Access to information is often vital for entrepreneurs, particularly regarding:
• opportunities for business development via franchising;
• comprehensive urban construction projects;
• opportunities to become involved in procurement processes by major companies in partnership with public sector;
• training programmes, etc.
These objectives can be achieved using a one-stop shop approach, where all the tools and services are available at a single point.
What is the most effective way of boosting the SME sector in smaller towns and cities? What can be done to simplify the process of launching a standard business? Could experienced entrepreneurs with a successful track record in business development replicate their experience across smaller towns and cities via a franchising model?
Pavel Orlov, Anchor, Russia-24 TV Channel
Pavel Orlov
Anchor, Russia-24 TV Channel
Alexander Braverman, General Director, Chairman of the Board, Russian Small and Medium Business Corporation
Alexander Brechalov, Head of the Udmurt Republic
Alexey Grigoriev, Head of Moscow Representative Office, METRO AG; Director of Corporate Public Policy, METRO in Russia
Irina Makieva, Deputy Chair, State Development Corporation "VEB.RF"
Ilnaz Nabiullin, Founder, Chio Chio Hairdresser Chain
Agnessa Osipova, President, Russian Franchise Association (RFA)
Marina Romanova, Deputy Chair, State Development Corporation "VEB.RF"
Alexander Braverman
General Director, Chairman of the Board, Russian Small and Medium Business Corporation
Mr. Braverman was born on May 1, 1954. He graduated from Kharkiv Engineering and Economics Institute and completed graduate studies at Lomonosov Moscow State Institute of Fine Chemical Technologies. He is a Doctor of Economic Sciences and a professor. 1995–1997 – He served as president of the Russian Marketing Association. 1997–1999 – He was Deputy Chairman of the State Property Committee of the Russian Federation and then First Deputy Minister of State Property of the Russian Federation as well as acting Minister of State Property of the Russian Federation. 1999–2000 – He served as president of the Russian Marketing Association. 2000–2004 – He was Deputy Minister of Property Relations of the Russian Federation and a State Secretary. 2006–2008 – He served as Chairman of the Committee for the Development of an Affordable Housing Market under the Russian Presidential Council for the Implementation of Priority National Projects and the Demographic Policy. August 2008 – Under Order No. 1145-r of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, he was appointed Director General of the Russian Housing Development Foundation.On Oct the 2nd 2015 A. Braverman was appointed as General Director of Joint-stock company «Russian Small and Medium Business Corporation» (JSC «RSMB Corporation» ). From October 12, 2015 he is a member of the Board of Directors of JSC «RSMB Corporation» ex officio.
Alexander Brechalov
Head of the Udmurt Republic
In 1994, he graduated with academic distinction from the Krasnodar Highest Military School (Military Institute) named after General of the Army S.M. Shtemenko. In 1999, he graduated from the Moscow State Academy of Law named after O.E. Kutafin. In 1994-1996 he was a deputy chief of the custodial service at the Chkalovskiy garrison (special air division). In 1996-1999 – lawyer at TV-6 Media.In 1999-2000 – lawyer at the Alfa Bank.In 2001-2002 – head of the legal division at the Uniastrum Bank.In 2002-2003 – director of the legal department at the Uniastrum Bank. In 2003-2006 – Director General at the LLC “Uniastrum Consulting”. In 2006-2011 – President of the Executive office at the LLC “VBO Consulting”.In 2011-2013 – President of the LLC “VBO Consult”.In 2013-2014 – President of the Russian National Non-Governmental Organization for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses “OPORA RUSSIA”. Since 2014 until 2017 – First Vice-President of the Russian National Non-Governmental Organization for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses “OPORA RUSSIA”. According to the Fund “Institute of Economic, Social and Political Studies”, he is at the top of the ISEPI-2016 List of the Most Promising Politicians and Public Figures in Russia. On 10 September 2017 Alexander Brechalov was elected head of the Udmurt Republic
Alexey Grigoriev
Head of Moscow Representative Office, METRO AG; Director of Corporate Public Policy, METRO in Russia
1960 Born in Bonn, Germany.
1977-1982 International law studies, Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
1982-1985 Post-graduate studies, Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
1986 Dissertation and promotion to candidate of legal sciences.
1986-1992 Soviet/Russian Embassy, Berlin.
1992-1993 Foreign Ministry, Moscow.
1993-1995 Office of the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow.
1996-2001 Russian Embassy, Bonn/Berlin.
2001-2002 Deputy Director, Foreign Ministry, Moscow.
2002-2013 Director, Corporate Communications, Siemens LLC., Moscow.
Marital status: Married, 2 daughters.
Foreign languages: German, English.
Irina Makieva
Deputy Chair, State Development Corporation "VEB.RF"
• Graduated from the Gorky State University in 1989 with a degree in Economics, specialising in Industry Planning.
• Graduated from the Nizhny Novgorod Law Academy in 2001.
• 2002–2004: Deputy Head of the Department for Regulation of Entrepreneurial Activity at the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation.
• 2004–2006: Chief Adviser at the Analytical Department of the Expert Division under the President of the Russian Federation.
2006: Deputy Head of the Department of Priority National Projects at the Expert Division under the President of the Russian Federation.
• 2006–2008: Head of the Department for Analysis of Performance by Executive Authorities at the Expert Division under the President of the Russian Federation.
• 2008–2009: Deputy Head of Secretariat of First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation I.I. Shuvalov.
• Since November 2009: Vice-Chairman of the State Corporation «The Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs (Vnesheconombank)».
Has received commendations from the President of the Russian Federation.
Awarded with the medal “For Special Contribution to the Development of Kuzbass” of the 3rd degree in 2010 in recognition of her high professionalism and significant contribution to the social and economic development of the Kemerovo Region.
Awarded the Republic of Tatarstan medal “For Valiant Labour” in recognition of her efficient efforts to modernise the economy of mono-industry towns and fruitful cooperation with the Republic of Tatarstan. Has received a commendation from the President of the Republic of Tatarstan in recognition of her significant contribution to the social and economic development of the Republic of Tatarstan.
Ilnaz Nabiullin
Founder, Chio Chio Hairdresser Chain
Agnessa Osipova
President, Russian Franchise Association (RFA)
In 2014 – elected a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Management.
On December 1, 2016 joined the Expert Council on development of trade activities in the Russian Federation of the Ministry of industry and trade of the Russian Federation.
Since June 2016 – President of the Russian Franchise Association (RFA).
Since 2016 – Osipova A.A. Member of the World Franchise Council (WFC) Under the leadership of Osipova A. A. JSC "BRPI" developed promising areas of activity of the enterprise, including the development of production and its modernization, franchise business promotion, improvement of the concepts and formats of outlets. Special attention is paid to supporting small and medium-sized businesses that provides the opportunity to open new businesses and create additional jobs in the regions of Russia and CIS countries. Currently more than 300 cafes of the company in 115 cities and countries of the CIS and Baltic States provide jobs for more than 2,000 people.
The plant quality management system is certified for compliance with ISO 9001-2008. In 2014 JSC "BRPI" received a certificate "Management System of food safety" FSSC 22000.
Since 2009 JSC “BRPI” has been an Official Purveyor to the Moscow Kremlin.
JSC "BRPI" - the official licensee of the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi 2014
The company conducts charitable activities and charity trips for school children to the ice cream factory, provides support to orphanages in Moscow and St.-Petersburg, to municipal societies and funds of the disabled.
JSC "BRPI" is a partner of the military tattoo festival "Spasskaya Tower" in the Red Square, the primary sponsor of ice-cream Festival in Sokolniki park, a partner in many Federal, municipal, sports, cultural and other social events.
Marina Romanova
Front row participants
Dmitry Golovanov, Chairman of the Board, SME Bank
Rifat Shaikhutdinov, Member of the Committee of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on Economic Policy, Industry, Innovative Development, and Entrepreneurship
Andrey Sharov, Vice-President, Head of GR Directorate, Sberbank
Dmitry Golovanov
Chairman of the Board, SME Bank
Dmitry Y. Golovanov was born in 1971 in Moscow. In 1996 he graduated from the State Finance Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation (Finance and Credit specialty).In 1988 – 1994 he workedin the Main Territorial Department of the Bank of Russia in the Moscow Oblast.In 1994 - 1998 D.Golovanov worked in Unicombank where he rose from senior economist to head of lending and investment department. In 1998 he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Board of CB Respublikansky Bank. Since December 1999 he was acting director of the Russian Bank for Development and in August 2000 he was appointed member of the board and First Deputy Chairman of the Board (since April 2011 – SME Bank). From June 2014 till June 2016 – Chairman of the Board ROSEXIMBANK.From July 18, 2016 Dmitry Golovanov entered upon his duties as SME Bank’s CEO. The decision on his appointment was made by the Supervisory Board of the Bank on June 28, 2016.
Rifat Shaikhutdinov
Member of the Committee of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on Economic Policy, Industry, Innovative Development, and Entrepreneurship
Andrey Sharov
Vice-President, Head of GR Directorate, Sberbank
Born November 1, 1971. Graduated from Krasnoyarsk State University in 1994 and the Russian Civil Service Academy under the President of the Russian Federation in 1997. CSc (Law).Career1994: leading specialist, chief specialist of the legal department, Administration of Krasnoyarsk.1995–1996: leading specialist, chief specialist, head of department, Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.1996–2002: specialist expert, consultant, counsel of the Human Resource Department of the President of the Russian Federation (Presidential Executive Office).2002–2004: head of Civil Service Administration, Ministry of Economic Development of Russia.2004–2009: Director, Department of State Regulation of the Economy, Ministry of Economic Development of Russia.2009–2010: Director, Department for Development of Small and Medium Enterprises and Competition, Ministry of Economic Development of Russia.December 7, 2010: appointed Director, Department of State Governance, Regional Development and Local Government, Government Executive Office.May–November 2012: Vice Governor, Chairman of the Moscow Region Government.Since January 2014: Vice President, Head of Small Business Development Department, Sberbank of Russia.
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“Digital economy is a new paradigm for the development of the state, the economy and society.”
To the participants, organizers and guests of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2019
I extend warm greetings to all the Forum participants and guests.
For more than two decades now, the Forum has been contributing in significant ways to finding answers to the key questions the world is facing today, and shaping a meaningful and constructive agenda for far-reaching international cooperation in the interests of sustainable and balanced development. This year government officials, prominent politicians and experts, as well as business leaders and researchers, will come together to discuss the future of the Russian and global economy and exchange views on various matters related to digitalisation and the technological challenges, as well as such urgent problems as climate change and growing social inequality.
We are all, undoubtedly, committed to promoting peace and security in the world, preserving and multiplying the cultural heritage of humankind so that people from across the world can fulfil their potential, get an education and work in dignity, confident in the future of their children. In order to deliver on these objectives, we need an economy that is strong and effective, honest and transparent global trade rules, free exchange in investment and technologies, and competition that is healthy and fair. Russia is open to proactive and equitable cooperation with all countries, regional and international organisations for achieving overall economic growth, developing transport, energy and telecommunications infrastructures, and promoting integration processes, including in Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific Region.
I strongly believe that the recommendations developed at the Forum and the agreements signed on its sidelines will serve the cause of enhancing international partnerships and building a prosperous future for our countries and peoples.
I hope you enjoy fruitful communication and wish you all the best.
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Outgoing Harrogate Mayor Bernard reflects on year in office
Former Harrogate Mayor Coun Anne Jones presents Coun Bernard Bateman with the chains of office at last year's mayor making ceremony.
It's been a busy year for Councillor Bernard Bateman.
A week ahead of handing over the mayoral reins, Coun Bateman still has 16 events penned in his diary to attend as Mayor of Harrogate Borough Council.
It's a hectic end to a year which will culminate on May 20 at the annual mayor making ceremony, when the incoming Coun Stuart Martin will officially take over the duties and regalia that come with the role.
New mayor and deputy named for Harrogate
Reflecting on his own time in the position, Coun Bateman said it's been a frantic - but "very enjoyable" - year.
"I think it's the one of the busiest mayoralties in Yorkshire," Coun Bateman said of the district he has served.
At a guess, he says he has attended about 700 events since taking over the role in May 2018, the majority of them with wife Linda.
It was a year with many highlights he said - among his favourite part of the role has been travelling to primary schools around the district to represent the council.
"It's been a very enjoyable year, I've met a lot of nice people," he said.
New Harrogate mayor to follow in family footsteps
Coun Bateman said another positive aspect of the office was "being able to make a difference" to local community groups by helping direct them towards potential council funding for their work.
He and wife Linda are also members and keen followers of Harrogate Town FC and have attended matches religiously this season.
Despite the range of commitments, Coun Bateman said he still had a desire to see the mayoralty accessed by the smaller communities around the district - saying he "absolutely" encouraged community members to pick up the phone and invite the mayor to their events.
"If anything, it's not used enough," he said of the office.
"You tend to see the rural, district councils don't use the mayor as much.
Public feedback wanted on proposed North Yorkshire solar farm
"You're there as their servant around the district."
The role of mayor of Harrogate is the latest position he has held in a tenure in local politics which stretches back over two decades, having chaired North Yorkshire County Council and Mayor of Ripon in that time.
Coun Bateman said he knew his successor, Ripon's Coun Martin, would uphold the lofty standards that come with the office.
"I think he'll be very good. I've been involved with him for a good 20 years plus, and he works very hard, especially with the local charities," he said.
Despite relinquishing the role, Coun Bateman has no plans to slow down on his work around the district.
He still holds positions on a variety of important council bodies, including the overview and scrutiny and planning committees.
He's also the North Yorkshire chairman of the Army Benevolent Fund, which he supported as his charity of choice during his mayoral year alongside Candlelighters, and has plans for a busy year helping raise funds for the organisations which helps veterans and their families.
"I've still got plenty to do," he laughed.
Lachlan Leeming, Local Democracy Reporter
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ME's most 'marriage protect-y' Bishop out to alter more than just rights
During 2009's "Yes on One" effort in Maine, I went to great lengths to show how much campaign co-head (and current FRC employee) Bob Emrich supported so-called "ex-gay" therapy. So I have to say, I'm both thrilled and shocked here in 2012, as we gear up for a proactive ballot initiative to reclaim marriage in the state, to see one of the most prominent people behind that earlier effort, Portland Bishop Richard Malone, coming right out and pushing the idea that gays should "change" or remain celibate via the Catholic Church's "Courage" program:
Maine Bishop Launches "Ex-Gay" Group [J.M.G.]
To be perfectly honest, I don't think we've ever come close to nailing the "ex-gay" thing in any of our campaigns. Our side's guiders tend to hear "ex-gay" and think of some wacky thing that won't play with the public, which I totally get. But the thing is, there is no more concrete proof of how much beyond the "protect marriage" rhetoric our opponents would like to go, if left to their own devices. So in campaigns where the other side pretends to be focused only on promoting a good (i.e. "traditional marriage), it would be kinda, sorta good if we let the public know that these same people who are leading the other side's campaigns are also pushing the idea that gays should either alter or stifle their sexual orientations.
I'm not even suggesting we should have campaign ads on the subject, or press releases, or anything that official. But I do strongly believe, as someone who watches this stuff year round and then watches this stuff even more intensely during campaign season, that we need to message this "ex-gay" thing out to the public and the media just a little more. The vast majority of voters -- particularly within that much cherished movable middle -- don't speak in "culture war" terms. They don't know their "ex-gay" from their "Courage" from their holes in the ground. It is our job to connect these dots. That's the burden! It is our duty to make sure the public is basing their vote on the most accurate, fully fleshed out information as possible.
So when that info involves a concerted effort to go beyond the ring finger and onto the very cores of LGBT people? It's important. And they're handing it to us on a silver an "ex-gold" platter. Let's use it!
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Key Question in Closing Rikers: How to Design Replacement Jails
July 25, 2018 | by Chelsey Sanchez
Jail space rendering via "Justice in Design"
The first part of the plan is clear: the jails on Rikers Island will be closed. Less clear is the second part: what, exactly, the replacement jails will look like.
Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, empaneled by then-City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, came to the same conclusion: Rikers – the isolated island, sandwiched between the Bronx and Queens on the East River, holding 10 of the city’s jails and over 7,000 inmates – must be shut down.
In June 2017, de Blasio announced a broad plan to do just that. His controversial proposal calls for continued reduction of the city’s plummeting jail population and the complete closure of all Rikers facilities within a period of 10 years, with remaining Rikers detainees transferred into jails in other parts of the city, using one facility in each borough other than Staten Island. For the plan to close Rikers to work, de Blasio has said, the city must get from the current 8,000-plus inmates across the city to about 5,000, while expanding or opening four facilities.
Challenges and questions remain, one of them being that the existing borough jails in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens don’t have the capacity to hold even 5,000 detainees (most of the individuals held in Rikers jails are pre-trial and have not been convicted of a crime, though some are serving relatively short sentences).
Shutting down Rikers jails requires the expansion or complete reconstruction of the current facilities, as well as erecting a new one in the Bronx. However, another challenge, which may pose far greater obstacles than merely laying down the bricks of these facilities, is establishing the foundation for a new way of thinking when it comes to designing and building jails.
“What we emphasized is that we’re trying to reimagine every step of the criminal justice system and, in particular, the jail facilities themselves,” said Jonathan Lippman, the former Chief Judge of the State of New York and the chair of the independent commission, which released a study advocating for the total shutdown of Rikers Island last April, preceding the mayor’s proposal, which differs in some ways. “So, wherever we’re having the kind of haphazard, decrepit, depressing conditions that you have now, we’re trying to look at ‘what should it be if you started from scratch?’”
The question of jail design is one of the most important facing the city as it moves toward closing Rikers Island, and aims to utilize the jails themselves as part of the equation in helping people transition after a jail stay of any length and reduce the chances they will ever be back.
Among others, one task force convened by the de Blasio administration is working on the issue, while a private architecture firm, Perkins Eastman, has been hired in a $7.5 million contract to take the task force’s input into consideration as it makes design and construction plans.
The culmination of the efforts of the task force and of Perkins Eastman will first be manifested into the Capital Scope Development Project Study, set for release by the end of this year, which will gauge the costs of the project as well as assess the capacity of the current borough facilities and explore how these facilities may be expanded or completely reconstructed.
For Lippman, the new network of jail facilities that will replace Rikers would imitate a “more normative environment that supports rehabilitation while simultaneously providing the neighborhoods with a couple of amenities,” as indicated in his commission’s study. Crafting such jails would mean to upend the existing conditions on Rikers – a place that Lippman calls an “accelerator of human misery,” with rotting floorboards, sewage backups, impaired heating and cooling systems and incessant violence, according to the commission’s report – and, instead, enhance access to natural light, activity spaces, direct supervision and community involvement.
The study also indicated the importance of a facility’s geographic location, since proximity to courthouses can cut travel costs of moving detainees from the jails to courthouses and back, and visitors should have easier access to visit their detained loved ones, which is part of reducing recidivism. Rikers Island is accessible to the outside world by one bridge, and anyone attempting a visit to the island can only go by car (although private parking is limited) and bus -- there is no subway access.
“I think jails today, modern jails, can actually be a boon to the community,” Lippman said, citing the prosperity of Boerum Hill, the Brooklyn neighborhood where the Brooklyn House of Detention currently stands, “and rebut the idea that being in close proximity to the jail makes people unsafe or that it’s ugly or that it’s destructive to the community.”
In another report produced by the Lippman commission and the Van Alen Institute, providing room for civic services, retail shops or community spaces would be a basic function of a jail facility built with the intent of fully integrating into the community it’s in. Such a building would open up part of the first floor to the needs or desires of the community – say, for an art gallery, or a medical clinic, or a social services agency – while the upper floors would be where the jail operates.
“This is an opportunity for us, not to recreate what we have, but to really begin to think outside the box in terms of what we want,” said Stanley Richards, a member of the independent commission and the executive vice president of The Fortune Society, an organization that provides reentry services for formerly incarcerated people.
Richards additionally co-chairs the design committee of the mayor’s task force, where he works on developing design principles that will guide architects and general contractors in the design of the borough facilities.
“The only principles that were guiding the design and the development of the facilities that we currently have is, ‘How do you keep people detained and keep them away from society? How do you punish people?’ And that’s how they were built,” said Richards, who is formerly incarcerated himself, having spent two years in a Rikers jail. “That is not the design principles that we’re operating from.”
One important question on the table is what will be done with the existing, in-use Brooklyn and Manhattan jails, which are in especially busy areas of the city -- will they be refurbished or torn down and constructed anew, using modern design principles?
While the decision to expand or overhaul the existing facilities has not yet reached an official decision, Richards said, “Based on the design principles that we’re coming up and based on the capacity we need to build in the borough houses, it is highly unlikely that it will be done in the existing facilities. I believe it will require new facilities.”
The recommendations of the commission also provide a basis for what these new facilities have the potential to look like. A network of cells that surround a common living area, for example, can make way for a system of direct supervision, where a correctional officer can oversee more detainees with improved lines of sight. Grouping detainees into housing units based on similar needs or risk-levels also allows officers to apply a more responsive approach when dealing with detainee misconduct, since the traditional approach has been to rely on punitive segregation, or solitary confinement, even for detainees who engage in low-level misconduct.
The commission also recommends that inmates have access to a sort of “town center,” or an area that would include a clinic, pharmacy, dining hall, and programming spaces, thus providing detainees more freedom of movement, and they should be furnished in a way that imitates normative settings, with fittings as basic as seated, porcelain toilets and upholstered furniture, all of which contributes to the humanization their detention. The de Blasio administration has already announced programs to provide more education and job training to inmates, and has launched the “jails to jobs” program to facilitate short-term employment for those finishing a sentence in a city jail.
The mayor and the City Council settled on the sites of the Rikers-replacement facilities in an announcement this past February, with the projected borough facilities in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens to be held at the location of the standing detention centers, and the jail in the Bronx being at a city-owned tow pound lot in Mott Haven, though the Bronx site quickly became the subject of controversy and it is still unclear exactly where a Bronx jail will be built.
All sites will additionally undergo a single public review process, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, set to kick off either by the end of this year or at the start of 2019, involving hearings with the local community boards, borough presidents, City Council members, and the City Planning Commission. One combined ULURP was announced by the mayor and Council Speaker Corey Johnson in order to speed the process, though some have questioned if that will allow enough local input in each affected community.
“New York City is a very different environment to build in and each borough is quite different,” said Elizabeth Glazer, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and co-chair of the Justice Implementation Task Force. “And, so there’s always going to be that sort of tug between the function that the jail must serve and the function that we want it to serve, and how space provides opportunities or constraints as desires.”
In May, the city’s average daily jail population fell to 8,402 – the lowest number it has reached since 1981. In a follow-up report produced by the Lippman commission, it is projected that the city could close Rikers as soon as 2024 and even have the new facilities constructed before then. Still, while it is one thing to build the new facilities, it is another to maintain them in a way that keeps them from defaulting back to today’s conditions on Rikers Island.
“It’s not a resource issue, but it is an institutional issue about how you treat people, how you classify people, how you house people, how you make security decisions,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance and the city’s correction commissioner from 1995 to 1996. “All of that kind of goes to very poor training issues and a lot of this is gonna be complicated.”
Jacobson, who is also a member of the task force’s committee on Culture Change, recalled dealing with staff inefficiency and deteriorating infrastructure during his time as correction commissioner.
“The design is necessary but not sufficient to completely change the way jails operate,” he said. “You can do an incredible amount just with design, but in the end, those places have to be run with a sort of principle of human dignity.”
Jacobson made reference to the jail facilities in downtown Denver and in San Diego, places that emulate the humanizing principles indicated in the commission’s study; they enhance access to communal living spaces, lines of direct supervision and even natural light. From the outside, they hardly look like a jail.
“They’re still gonna be jails, but they don’t have to look or feel anything like those jails do,” Jacobson said. “You want to make it less stressful, less anxiety producing, safer, et cetera, et cetera. You can’t do all that with design, but you can do an incredible amount just with design.”
by Chelsey Sanchez, Gotham Gazette
@chelseynsanchez @GothamGazette
Tags: Bill de Blasio • Criminal justice reform • Rikers Island • Jonathan Lippman • Michael Jacobson • jails • Stanley Richards • Liz Glazer
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H.R. 615 (114th): DHS Interoperable Communications Act
Jan 28, 2015: Introduced Feb 2, 2015: Passed the House Feb 3, 2015: Referred to Senate Committee May 21, 2015: Reported by Senate Committee Jun 11, 2015: Passed the Senate with an Amendment Oct 11, 2016: Passed Congress
(Select Other Version) Jan 28, 2015: Introduced Feb 2, 2015: Passed the House Feb 3, 2015: Referred to Senate Committee May 21, 2015: Reported by Senate Committee Oct 11, 2016: Passed Congress
The text of the bill below is as of Jun 11, 2015 (Passed the Senate with an Amendment).
H.R. 615
In the Senate of the United States,
Amendment:
That the bill from the House of Representatives (H.R. 615) entitled An Act to amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to require the Under Secretary for Management of the Department of Homeland Security to take administrative action to achieve and maintain interoperable communications capabilities among the components of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes. , do pass with the following
Strike out all after the enacting clause and insert:
This Act may be cited as the Department of Homeland Security Interoperable Communications Act or the DHS Interoperable Communications Act .
In this Act—
the term Department means the Department of Homeland Security;
the term interoperable communications has the meaning given that term in section 701(d) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, as added by section 3; and
the term Under Secretary for Management means the Under Secretary for Management of the Department of Homeland Security.
Inclusion of interoperable communications capabilities in responsibilities of Under Secretary for Management
Section 701 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 341) is amended—
in subsection (a)(4), by inserting before the period at the end the following: , including policies and directives to achieve and maintain interoperable communications among the components of the Department ; and
Interoperable communications defined
In this section, the term interoperable communications has the meaning given that term in section 7303(g) of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (6 U.S.C. 194(g)).
Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Under Secretary for Management shall submit to the Committee on Homeland Security of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs of the Senate a strategy, which shall be updated as necessary, for achieving and maintaining interoperable communications among the components of the Department, including for daily operations, planned events, and emergencies, with corresponding milestones, that includes the following:
An assessment of interoperability gaps in radio communications among the components of the Department, as of the date of enactment of this Act.
Information on efforts and activities, including current and planned policies, directives, and training, of the Department since November 1, 2012 to achieve and maintain interoperable communications among the components of the Department, and planned efforts and activities of the Department to achieve and maintain such interoperable communications.
An assessment of obstacles and challenges to achieving and maintaining interoperable communications among the components of the Department.
Information on, and an assessment of, the adequacy of mechanisms available to the Under Secretary for Management to enforce and compel compliance with interoperable communications policies and directives of the Department.
Guidance provided to the components of the Department to implement interoperable communications policies and directives of the Department.
The total amount of funds expended by the Department since November 1, 2012 and projected future expenditures, to achieve interoperable communications, including on equipment, infrastructure, and maintenance.
Dates upon which Department-wide interoperability is projected to be achieved for voice, data, and video communications, respectively, and interim milestones that correspond to the achievement of each such mode of communication.
Together with the strategy required under subsection (a), the Under Secretary for Management shall submit to the Committee on Homeland Security of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs of the Senate information on—
any intra-agency effort or task force that has been delegated certain responsibilities by the Under Secretary for Management relating to achieving and maintaining interoperable communications among the components of the Department by the dates referred to in subsection (a)(7); and
who, within each such component, is responsible for implementing policies and directives issued by the Under Secretary for Management to so achieve and maintain such interoperable communications.
Not later than 100 days after the date on which the strategy required under section 4(a) is submitted, and every 2 years thereafter for 6 years, the Under Secretary for Management shall submit to the Committee on Homeland Security of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs of the Senate a report on the status of efforts to implement the strategy required under section 4(a), including the following:
Progress on each interim milestone referred to in section 4(a)(7) toward achieving and maintaining interoperable communications among the components of the Department.
Information on any policies, directives, guidance, and training established by the Under Secretary for Management.
An assessment of the level of compliance, adoption, and participation among the components of the Department with the policies, directives, guidance, and training established by the Under Secretary for Management to achieve and maintain interoperable communications among the components.
Information on any additional resources or authorities needed by the Under Secretary for Management.
Sections 4 and 5 shall only apply with respect to the interoperable communications capabilities within the Department and components of the Department to communicate within the Department.
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Home Interests Adventure Travel Hiking to Machu Picchu
Hiking to Machu Picchu
By Thomas Kamrath
Thomas Kamrath
It’s 4:30 in the morning of day five. The porters have just come to our tent to wake us. No coffee or tea this morning ― we need to get moving to reach Intipunku, the Sun Gate, by 7 a.m., or we will miss the sunrise over Machu Picchu.
The fabled pre-Columbian town of Machu Picchu, which is thought to have been built by the Incas around 1440 A.D. and was inhabited until the Spanish conquered Peru in 1532 A.D., is located on a ridge between the mountains of Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu in the Peruvian Andes, at an elevation of about 6,750 feet (2,057 m) above the Urubamba Valley. Unknown to the outside world until 1911, the original purpose of the “Lost City” is still being debated.
There are two plausible theories that most historians believe could be true: It was an agricultural site, maximizing the valuable growing sector between the jungle and high valleys. Or it was a large observatory. There are a multitude of ruins that are related to the observation of the sky: the Torreón, where the sun shines through a window opening at dawn of the winter solstice (June 21 on the southern hemisphere), highlighting the rock in the middle of the temple; Intihuatana (Hitching Post of the Sun), where the sun could be ceremonially tied and prevented from falling lower in the sky in winter; and the Temple of the Moon, located on the far side of Huayna Picchu.
After our early morning wake-up, we are still a couple of hours away from the overlook. It is pitch black. I can feel the heavy humid fog left behind by last night’s rain. This is why the tour dossier listed “flashlight.” Unfortunately, my brand-new purchase lasted only one pre-trip check. Fortunately, Dave, my traveling partner, had a spare key-chain light which provided me with a shadowed view of the ground in front of me. The majority of our hiking party of nine must have missed the memo, as we have only four flashlights between us.
An hour later, we are on the trail. It’s dark, foggy, wet and the rocks are slippery. We alternate places between the flashlights “haves” and “have-nots.” As we march, the only voices heard are from the “haves”: “Step up, step down, watch out for the rock on your left.” We are probably better off not knowing there is a 200-foot (60 m) drop-off inches from our feet.
We reach Intipunku with only 15 minutes to spare. The view at sunrise is not what we were told in the travel brochures. Three feet (1 m) in front of our faces is a white substance called “fog.”
As we inch our way down toward the Machu Picchu ruins, my anticipation is mounting. When will the fog lift? Slowly, as if someone is cranking up a curtain, Huayna Picchu — also called Sugar Loaf Mountain — begins to appear, overlooking Machu Picchu. First there are fleeting glimpses, and then finally, there it is, in its full splendor.
When I envisioned going to Machu Picchu I always thought of mysterious ruins and the famous postcard picture looking toward Huayna Picchu. But there is more to this manmade/natural wonder of the world. It is the adventure of getting there. I knew I wanted to experience the feel of the Inca culture and the energy of this “sacred valley.” I also knew I didn’t want to take the train, but needed to hike. Depending on your starting point, the Inca Trail is 25 to 33 miles (40-53 km) of semi-arid desert, breathless mountain passes and stunning tropical cloudforest. Our hike took us four nights and 25 miles (40 km) to finish.
Our local guide Mauro keeps telling us “no worries, the hike is 90 percent mental and only 10 percent physical.” I am not convinced that the physical percentage is correct, but there is definitely a continuous adrenaline rush as we get closer to Machu Picchu. By getting myself into pretty good shape, running 20 miles (32 km) and hiking a 500-foot (152 m) hill five to seven times per week before I left for Peru, I was able to enjoy the beauty of the hike and not worry as much about aching muscles and lungs.
Half the fun of doing a trip like this is meeting people from around the world. Our Inca Trail tour group consists of Mauro; a woman from France living in New York; a woman from England living in Australia; a man from New York; a Korean woman living in Philadelphia; a Chinese woman going to college in California; a former co-worker of mine living in Nevada; and a couple originally from South Africa who are now U.S. citizens; and seven porters who round out our trekking team.
The first day of the Inca Trail hike was almost as eventful as the final day. We had to start the hike a half-day early, due to a planned national strike. The transportation systems were about to be shut down, and quick thinking by Mauro got us out of Cuzco — about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Machu Picchu, where most hiking companies are located — while we still could. It got a little nerve-racking as we were leaving Cuzco. The van driver had to perform a 180-degree turn to avoid a group of protesters heading our way.
The early start gave us four nights on the trail, and allowed us to reduce our miles per day to about six (10 km). The first and second day we were on the west side of the Andes. The terrain was semi-arid to tundra. We had lucid blue skies and fantastic views of Peru’s 20,000-foot (6,100 m) peaks. Our second night was the roughest. After hiking 10 miles (16 km), we camped at 12,600 feet (3,277 m). A combination of dehydration and temperatures dropping into the 20s F (about -3 C) gave everyone a restless night of sleep.
The next morning was the most challenging part of the hike, but also the most satisfying: Dead Woman’s Pass. At 13,700 feet (4,215 m), it is the highest point of the trail. It helped to be fresh and starting at 12,600 feet (3,877 m). We made it to the pass in about an hour and waited for our fellow hikers to arrive (the ones who were working on the 90 percent mental).
After Dead Woman’s Pass the terrain began changing to cloudforest. It is on the fringe of the Amazon, and has a jungle feel. On this part of the trail the foliage has to be cut back every three months or it would engulf the trail. No wonder it took until 1911 for American explorer Hiram Bingham to “re-discover” Machu Picchu after the abandoned settlement had been mostly ignored and later forgotten by Spanish colonial authorities.
Located on a ridge between the mountainsof Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, these ancient Incaruins are truly a world wonder.
The workmanship of the original Inca Trail (built more than 500 years ago) was extraordinary. The majority of the trail is original and in good shape. The stone steps, for the most part, have not crumbled, still fitting snugly together without mortar or adhesive. Occasionally we hit some rough spots where the trail was deteriorating, this always coincided with parts of the trail that had been rebuilt.
It has been said that the seven separate mountain valleys leading into Machu Picchu emanate an elevated energy level. I am not sure if it was that or the accomplishment of finishing the hike and achieving a dream that had been with me since 10th-grade geography class, but there was definitely an energy surge in full swing while visiting the ruins.
We toured the structures once housing ancient Incan communities and marveled at the temples to their gods, many of which are situated on steep precipices. The architecture at Machu Picchu is the most impressive part of the ruins, with the majority of the structures having been built by piling precisely cut stone blocks. Nothing but gravity and careful planning holds the stones together; the cracks are so small that, even centuries later, a credit card could not pass through them.
Back in Cuzco following the trek, our group stuck together after the official tour was finished. We celebrated our successful hike at a local restaurant. I was the only one to brave ordering the national delicacy ― guinea pig. They serve it with the head and feet intact so one doesn’t think he or she is being ripped off. I also tried another dish, something that looked like a cat. It didn’t taste like chicken or duck, as I had been told. It had more of a wild, tangy flavor ― probably closer in taste to the woodchucks that burrow under my deck back home ― not that I know what they taste like!
A trip to South America should always include Machu Picchu. If you do not have the time or energy to walk the Inca Trail, at least take a day or two and ride the train from Cuzco. Prices for food and lodging are very affordable. A train ticket runs about US$ 40 one-way and US$ 75 round trip. For budget travelers, late night “backpacker” trains are available for lower prices.
Currently you must fly to Lima first and then transfer to a local airline for a flight to Cuzco. Plan on spending one or two nights in Lima. Do not make a close connection for your flight to Cuzco, as Customs entering Peru are slow.
Taking a bus or train from Lima to Cuzco will add another 24 to 36 hours to your journey.
April through October is the best time to visit, as it is the dry season. June through August are Peru’s winter months, and the most popular. If you have a chance to go during the Inti Raymi Festival (celebration of the winter solace) on June 23, it is worth seeing. Peru is near the equator, so its winters are not too severe, however, Cuzco is at 11,000 feet (3,385 m) and the Inca trail ranges from 7,000 feet (2,154 m) to 13,700 feet (4,215 m), so it can get cold at night. The range is usually 50 to 70 F (10-26 C) during the day and 30s (0 C) at night.
Trail and Tour Information
A number of regulations and restrictions have been imposed over the last few years that have taken away from the free spirit of hiking, but they have reduced congestion. You must hike the trail with a registered guide. The amount of foot traffic per day is regulated. Even the weight of the gear the porters are allowed to carry is monitored.
Unless you want to haul all your camping gear with you, a tour that includes porters who carry most of your gear is the preferred method. This allows you to carry only a daypack, and gives you more time and energy to enjoy the hike.
There are many tour groups that plan Inca Trail trips. They range from all inclusive to local guided tours. A good cross section of tours would be:
G.A.P. Adventures
www.gapadventures.com
Mountain Travel Sobek
www.mtsobek.com
Wilderness Travel
www.wildernesstravel.com
Commission for the Promotion of Peru
www.peru.info
UNESCO World Heritage Center — Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu
http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=274
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The Great Chinese Art Heist
Strange how it keeps happening, how the greatest works of Chinese art keep getting brazenly stolen from museums around the world. Is it a conspiracy? Vengeance for treasures plundered years ago? We sent Alex W. Palmer to investigate the trail of theft and the stunning rumor: Is the Chinese government behind one of the boldest art-crime waves in history?
Alex W. Palmer
Bartholomew Cooke
The patterns of the heists were evident only later, but their audacity was clear from the start. The spree began in Stockholm in 2010, with cars burning in the streets on a foggy summer evening. The fires had been lit as a distraction, a ploy to lure the attention of the police. As the vehicles blazed, a band of thieves raced toward the Swedish royal residence and smashed their way into the Chinese Pavilion on the grounds of Drottningholm Palace. There they grabbed what they wanted from the permanent state collection of art and antiquities. Police told the press the thieves had fled by moped to a nearby lake, ditched their bikes into the water, and escaped by speedboat. The heist took less than six minutes.
A month later, in Bergen, Norway, intruders descended from a glass ceiling and plucked 56 objects from the China Collection at the KODE Museum. Next, robbers in England hit the Oriental Museum at Durham University, followed by a museum at Cambridge University. Then, in 2013, the KODE was visited once more; crooks snatched 22 additional relics that had been missed during the first break-in.
Had they known exactly what was happening, perhaps the security officials at the Château de Fontainebleau, the sprawling former royal estate just outside Paris, could have predicted that they might be next.
With more than 1,500 rooms, the palace is a maze of opulence. But when bandits arrived before dawn on March 1, 2015, their target was unmistakable: the palace's grand Chinese Museum. Created by the last empress of France, the wife of Napoleon III, the gallery was stocked with works so rare that their value was considered incalculable.
In recent years, however, the provenance of those treasures had become an increasingly sensitive subject: The bulk of the museum's collection had been pilfered from China by French soldiers in 1860 during the sack of Beijing's Old Summer Palace.
In the low light before daybreak, the robbers raced to the southwest wing and shattered a window. They climbed inside, stepping over broken glass, and swiftly went to work dismantling the empress's trove. Within seven minutes, they were gone, along with 22 of the museum's most valuable items: porcelain vases; a mandala made of coral, gold, and turquoise; a Chimera in cloisonné enamel; and more.
The police arrived quickly, but there was little to be done. Before vanishing, the criminals had emptied a fire extinguisher, spraying its snowy foam perhaps in the hopes that it would erase their fingerprints, hide their footprints, and remove any lingering clue as to who they were. “The thieves knew what they were doing and exactly what they wanted,” the museum's president, Jean-François Hebert, told the press. They were “probably very professional.” The theft, he added, was a “terrible shock.” But maybe it shouldn't have been.
In the years since the Fontainebleau heist, the robberies have continued throughout Europe—sometimes in daring, cinematic fashion. The full scale of the criminality is impossible to pinpoint, because many heists never make the headlines. Security officials and museum boards are sometimes reluctant to publicize their own failures, both to avoid embarrassment and to save on the cost of security upgrades.
But the thefts that were made public bear striking similarities. The criminals are careful and professional. They often seem to be working from a shopping list—and appear content to leave behind high-value objects that aren't on it.
In each case, the robbers focused their efforts on art and antiquities from China, especially items that had been looted by foreign armies. Many of these objects are well documented and publicly known, making them very hard to sell and difficult to display. In most cases the pieces have not been recovered; they seem to simply vanish.
After that first robbery, in Stockholm, a police official told the press that “all experience says this is an ordered job.” As the heists mounted, so did the suspicion that they were being carried out on instructions from abroad. But if that was true, an obvious question loomed: Who was doing the ordering?
Security guards stand beside a vase after being sold for $14.8 million at a Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong
For much of the 20th century, China's leaders hardly seemed to care about the country's lost and plundered antiquities. Art was a symbol of bourgeois decadence, fit for destruction rather than preservation. By the early 2000s, however, China was growing rich and confident, and decidedly less Communist. The fate of the country's plundered art was seized upon as a focus of national concern and pride.
Suddenly a new cadre of plutocrats—members of the country's growing club of billionaires—began purchasing artifacts at a dizzying pace. For this new breed of mega-rich collector, buying up Chinese art represented a chance to flash not just incredible wealth but also exorbitant patriotism.
But less conspicuous campaigns to lure art back to China were initiated, too. One of the country's most powerful corporate conglomerates, the state-run China Poly Group, launched a shadowy program aimed at locating and recovering lost art. Poly—an industrial giant that sells everything from gemstones to missiles—was run by a Communist Party titan who staffed the project with officials connected to Chinese military intelligence.
The government, meanwhile, was sanctioning its own efforts via a web of overlapping state agencies and Communist Party–affiliated NGOs. In 2009, a year before the Stockholm heist, the efforts got more serious. Beijing announced that it planned to dispatch a “treasure hunting team” to various institutions across the U.S. and Europe. Museums were left clueless about the purpose of the mission. Were the Chinese coming to assess collections, to conduct research, or to reclaim objects on the spot? More importantly, who, exactly, were the visitors gathering information for?
When an eight-person team arrived at New York's Metropolitan Museum, it was led by an archaeologist and largely composed of employees from Chinese state media and Beijing's palace museum. As the group poked around and asked about the art on display, one participant, a researcher named Liu Yang who had gained some notoriety for his zeal in cataloging China's lost treasures, sleuthed through the museum's long corridors, looking for objects he might recognize. The visit ended without incident, but the shift in tactics was evident: China was no longer content to sit back passively and hope for the return of its art. The hunt was on.
Soon, all across Europe, thefts began.
Those looking for China's lost art have plenty of targets. According to one widely cited government estimate, more than 10 million antiquities have disappeared from China since 1840. The works that mean the most to the Chinese are the ones that left during the so-called Century of Humiliation, from 1840 to 1949, when China was repeatedly carved up by foreign powers. The modern Communist Party has declared its intent to bring China back from that period of prolonged decline, and the return of looted objects serves as undeniable proof—tangible, visible, and beautiful proof—of the country's revival.
By far the most important pieces are those that were hauled away by British and French troops in 1860 after the sacking of the Old Summer Palace. In China today, it's difficult to overstate the indignity still associated with the looting of the palace, which had served as a residence to the last Chinese dynasty. Its gardens, art, and architecture were said to be among the most beautiful in the world. The palace held an array of wonders, not the least of which was a fountain adorned with 12 bronze heads representing the animals of the Chinese zodiac.
“The government in China doesn't think they're stolen objects. They think they belong to them."
When European troops reached the garden, the desecration of the palace became a mad frenzy. Soldiers stripped it of everything they could carry. The zodiac heads were wrenched from their bases and hauled away as trophies. When the soldiers had removed all they could, they torched what remained—retribution, they said, for the torture and murder of British envoys who'd attempted to negotiate with the Chinese. The grounds of the palace were so large and so intricate that the 4,500 troops needed three days to burn everything.
Most of the plunder was taken back to Europe and either tucked away in private collections or presented as gifts to royal families. Queen Victoria of Britain was given a pet Pekingese dog, the first of its kind ever seen in Europe. Unabashed by its provenance, she named it Looty.
In China, the memory of the Old Summer Palace's destruction remains vivid—and intentionally so. The site has been kept as ruins, the better to “stir feelings of national humiliation and patriotism,” as one Chinese academic put it. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before those feelings transformed into action.
The porcelain "chicken cup" that sold for $36 million in 2014
Aarom Tam/Getty Images
Of course, not all of the art that's finding its way home to China is being snatched off museum walls in the dead of night or wrangled back by aggressive bureaucrats. The country's new elite are helping, too.
“The Chinese don't need a coordinating campaign,” says James Ratcliffe, the director of recoveries and general counsel at the Art Loss Register. “There are enough Chinese collectors with a huge amount of money who want the pride of acquiring this art.”
In 2016, for the first time, China had more billionaires than the United States. Many of the country's nouveau riche have taken to art collecting with a giddy enthusiasm. In 2000, China represented 1 percent of the global-art-auction market; by 2014, it accounted for 27 percent. The market for historical Chinese art is so frenzied that even seemingly mundane pieces of Chinese art can electrify the scene at auction houses.
In 2010, a 16-inch Chinese vase went up for sale at an auction house in an unremarkable suburb of London. The starting price was $800,000. Half an hour later, the final bid—reportedly from an anonymous buyer from mainland China—was $69.5 million. Though the provenance of this vase was mysterious, similar objects with traceable histories of looting have proved valuable. “Buying looted artwork has become high-street fashion among China's elite,” Zhao Xu, the director of Beijing Poly Auction, told China Daily.
Their desires adhere to a nationalistic logic: The closer an object's connection to China's ignominious defeats, the more significant its return. In recent years, vases, bronzeware, and a host of other items from the Old Summer Palace have all sold for millions. Behind these purchases is almost always a well-connected Chinese billionaire eager to demonstrate China's modern resurgence on the world stage.
In 2014, a taxi driver turned billionaire named Liu Yiqian paid $36 million for a small porcelain “chicken cup,” coveted because it was once a part of the imperial collection. (According to the Wall Street Journal, he completed his purchase by swiping his Amex card 24 times and promptly stoked controversy by drinking from the dish.) A few months later, he paid an additional $45 million for a Tibetan silk tapestry from the Ming era. “When we are young, we are indoctrinated to believe that the foreigners stole from us,” Liu once told The New Yorker. “But maybe it's out of context. Whatever of ours [the foreigners] stole, we can always snatch it back one day.” (Liu Yiqian did not respond to requests for comment.)
Chinese billionaire Huang Nubo
Nicolas Asfouri/Getty Images
Huang Nubo has a similarly patriotic interest in China's art. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a ruddy complexion and close-set eyes, he's the kind of billionaire who makes other billionaires jealous: He's an accomplished adventurer, one of the few people alive to have visited both the North and South Poles and summited the world's seven tallest peaks (he's topped Everest three times). When I met him at his office in Beijing, he had just returned from an expedition in western China, where he'd reached the top of the world's sixth-tallest mountain.
Huang made his money by building one of the country's most powerful real estate conglomerates, a task he undertook after spending ten years as an official in the publicity department of the Communist Party. His passion for Chinese culture has helped make him famous, and through an effort called the National Treasures Coming Home campaign, he's focusing on the reclamation of lost relics.
After the second break-in at the KODE, Huang contacted the museum. He wanted to fly to Bergen and tour the closed China exhibit. Once there, he was shown a collection of marble columns taken from the Old Summer Palace. Huang began to weep and told the museum director that the columns had no business being displayed in Norway. He donated $1.6 million to KODE, which he says was to upgrade its security. (A spokesman for KODE said the agreement did not concern security.) Soon thereafter the museum shipped seven of the marble columns back to China to be displayed at Peking University on permanent loan. (Huang denies any connection between his donation and the return of the columns.) The looting of the columns and their open display in a European museum “were our disgrace,” he told China Daily, and their return represented “dignity returned to the Chinese people.”
In addition to visiting the KODE, Huang had toured the Château de Fontainebleau, not long before it was robbed. I asked him what he had heard about the theft and the rumor that the stolen relics had made their way back to China. He tightened his face into a small smile and laughed. “I only heard about it,” he said. “[That they might go back to China] is a good suggestion, in terms of result, but it encourages more stealing. I think it's because Chinese relics have good prices on the market nowadays.”
In the face of China's repatriation campaign—and the recent robberies—museums are now scrambling. Some have stood their ground, arguing the legitimacy of their acquisitions or touting the value to the Chinese of sharing their culture abroad. Others have quietly shipped crates of art back to China, in hopes of avoiding trouble with either the thieves or the government.
In 2013, for instance, two of the famed zodiac heads, the rabbit and the rat, from the estate of the French designer Yves Saint Laurent, were handed over after a planned auction was scuttled. Officials in China told Christie's, the auction house, that if the heads were ever sold off, there would be “serious effects” on the firm's business. (Not long after the heads were returned, Christie's became the first international fine-art auction house to receive a license to operate independently in China.)
Many institutions, though, have begun beefing up security. Certainly no museum has been more bedeviled by all of this than the KODE Museum in Bergen, Norway, on the country's rugged southwestern coast. The twice-robbed KODE may not be a household name, but it's apparently well-known to the people stealing China's lost antiquities.
Located on Bergen's picturesque central square, the museum is just three blocks from the local police headquarters. After it was robbed for a second time, in January 2013, Roald Eliassen was eventually hired as director of security. Eliassen is a former cop. He's brawny and compact, with a windburned face and messy gray hair. “I read about the thefts in the newspaper,” he told me. “I thought, ‘How could this happen?’ Once, okay. Twice…well, that's not good.”
During the KODE's first robbery, in 2010, police say the alarms never even sounded. The intruders rappelled through a glass ceiling and grabbed dozens of pieces: imperial seals, elegant vases, and more.
Three years later, the scheme was even more sophisticated. Just after 5 A.M. on a Saturday, criminals set fire to two cars far from the museum. Once the police had dispatched units to respond, two robbers entered offices adjoining the KODE and smashed through a glass wall into the museum's China exhibit. Cops sped to the scene, but the burglars were in and out in two minutes. “They were very exact,” a police official told me. They took 22 items, ignoring more valuable pieces in favor of grabbing specific ones: delicate statues, intricate vases, imperial seals.
The police managed to arrest six men but determined they were merely foot soldiers, unwilling or unable to share useful information about who had hired them. “The thieves didn't think of this themselves,” the police official said. Eliassen offered a simple explanation of what happened: “We had objects that somebody wanted, and he hired someone to take them.”
When I visited Bergen, the China exhibit was closed to the public for renovations after a security upgrade, which included the installation of an imposing series of sliding gates and metal doors. A guard stood watch nearby. Inside the gallery, the space was mostly empty. Anything light enough to be carried had been moved into storage, and the heavy items—white marble statues and pillars and big-bellied Buddhas—were covered in clear tarp.
At the KODE, there was a silver lining to that second heist. Amid all the unwanted attention, authorities got a lucky tip about a piece taken in the first break-in. They were told it had made its way back to China and was now on display at a Shanghai airport. But even this possibility came with its own frustrations: Bergen police lacked the power to follow up, and Norwegian officials, wary of upsetting a delicate relationship with China, did nothing. “If we say an item is in China, they say, ‘Prove it,’ ” said Kenneth Didriksen, the head of Norway's art-crime unit. So, he told me, they stood down. “We don't want to insult anyone.”
Eliassen believed that the best thing for the museum to do was to protect the art that remained. The pieces were probably never coming back. “The government in China doesn't think they're stolen objects,” he said. “They think they belong to them. They won't take it seriously, won't follow the trail. That's the biggest problem.”
Even art-crime experts, though, are quick to acknowledge that the situation might look different from China's perspective. Noah Charney, a professor of art history and founder of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, says that when it comes to winning back their lost art, the Chinese can't imagine how such a thing would be wrong. “It's almost like there's a fog around it from a criminological perspective,” he said. “It's like another planet, in terms of the way people think about what art is, what authenticity is, what is socially unacceptable to do.”
After Beijing’s Old Summer Palace was sacked, many of its treasures ended up at the Château de Fontainebleau, near Paris.
Paul Popper/Popperfoto
Château de Fontainebleau
On a gray day in Beijing, I visited the grounds of the Old Summer Palace. Today the site is a popular destination for tourists and school field trips. It has not been rebuilt; the point of the park is its state of destruction.
I'd come to meet with Liu Yang, who'd been a member of the treasure-hunting delegation to the Met in New York City. In his office, Liu keeps a lone photo on the wall—an aerial shot of the park. In it, the site looks like a bombed-out war zone, with barren patches where statues and monuments once stood. “It was a Chinese fairy tale,” he told me, “and it was destroyed by foreign armies.”
Liu is mild-mannered and scrupulously polite. For 20 years he's been a player in China's battle to get its art back, but even today he feels his work is just beginning. He showed me a book he'd published, a comprehensive inventory of the palace's lost treasures. The pages were filled with sticky notes and handwritten notations, and as he flipped through, he pointed out photos of items held by some of the world's best-known museums.
Of course, he'd been to many of them, sometimes under odd circumstances. “My most troublesome experience was at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,” Liu said. “Everyone was very nervous. They called a Chinese lawyer and gave me the phone so she could tell me that the museum had no items from the Old Summer Palace and that all their items were held via legal means.” (A spokesman for the Met denied that any such call took place.)
“We will never give up, we will never stop—no matter the effort. We need [the Chinese] people to see that everything that belonged to us is coming back.”
Liu says curators in the UK were less defensive. “When I told them these objects were taken, they barely reacted,” Liu said. “They just showed me their records of which generals took what. They're very direct about it. They don't hide it.”
Still, he's not surprised when a museum clamps down once he begins sniffing around. After a visit to the Wallace Collection, in central London, he says, he noticed the museum's website no longer listed the objects he'd asked about. (A spokesman for the Wallace Collection said those objects were temporarily removed to be prepared for an exhibition and are now on display.)
It didn't much matter; Liu had a good idea of what was housed there. He knows the collections of foreign museums inside and out, and museum officials know him, too, even if they don't have much enthusiasm for his research. A few years ago, he had visited the Château de Fontainebleau, and his book had been published right before the sensational robbery there. After the crime, he got a panicked phone call. “I was the first person to learn the news about the robbery there, about 30 minutes after it happened,” he told me. “The museum staff contacted me in very broken Chinese. They said, ‘These items were stolen right after your book was published, and your book was the first catalog of the Old Summer Palace. Do you see a connection?’ ” He says he politely suggested that they maybe tell other museums to improve their security. (Officials at the Château de Fontainebleau did not respond to requests for comment.)
Liu seems ambivalent toward the plight of burgled museums, especially a place like the Fontainebleau, which he says holds more looted Chinese art than any other institution on earth and advertises the collection's origins as plunder from the sacking of the Old Summer Palace. “Displaying these objects in European museums is like a theft itself—they're just showing it off without concern,” Liu said. “I know that we won't get everything back in my lifetime,” he continued. “We will never give up, we will never stop—no matter the effort. We need [the Chinese] people to see that everything that belonged to us is coming back.”
The biggest prize of all, and the most elusive, is the set of zodiac heads from the fountain at the Old Summer Palace, five of which remain missing. “For 100 years we've been looking,” Liu said. Despite his persistence, it's likely that if the 12 zodiac heads are someday re-united and the glorious fountain is re-established, it would not be through the work of a researcher like him, or even thanks to the big spending of a patriotic billionaire like Huang Nubo. Instead, it would be due to the efforts of one of China's richest, most powerful, and most impenetrable entities, a corporation that's been in on the hunt since the very beginning: China Poly.
A boy views the ox bronze head of Qing Dynasty, one of the 12 Chinese zodiac sculptures which originated from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.
China Photos/Getty Images
Even among China's elite class of state-controlled behemoths, the China Poly Group is unique for its power and its varied pursuits. According to Fortune, last year it had declared assets of $95.7 billion, almost twice the GDP of Croatia. Its art-repatriation campaign—begun by its former president, the military-intelligence chief He Ping—is now run by an offshoot firm called Poly Culture, which manages the company's burgeoning antiquities collection. In 2000, the same year as Poly Culture's founding, Poly managed to buy back three of the Old Summer Palace's zodiac heads. It's since added a fourth, while a fifth and sixth are housed at China's National Museum and a seventh is kept at the Capital Museum.
“The heads represent our feelings for the entire nation; we love them and we weep for them,” said Jiang Yingchun, the CEO of Poly Culture. We were sitting at a large conference table high up in the company's Beijing headquarters, with a view of the smog-drenched skyline. Jiang was reclining in a black leather chair and smoking an e-cigarette. In the corner of the room, an air filter hummed quietly.
“We can try many ways to get the heads back,” he told me without much elaboration. “The auction is just one method.” It was not the technique that mattered, he seemed to be saying, but the result: The heads must return. “We can't ignore that the art was taken illegally,” even if it was being well cared for, he said. “If you kidnapped my children and then treated them well, the crime is still not forgiven.”
Poly has long worked hand in hand with the Chinese state and the Communist Party. For decades the company operated as the commercial arm of the People's Liberation Army, peddling weapons around the world while also buying and selling art—and running a global information network to locate lost antiquities. That operation was reportedly once described by the company as a long-term “retrieve action” to reclaim treasures “robbed away from China by western powers.” (Officials for the company didn't respond to written requests to elaborate on this program or to questions about the recent spate of art crimes.)
His e-cigarette depleted, Jiang excused himself for another meeting and handed me off to a curator from the Poly Museum. She proudly offered to show me the recovered zodiac heads. At the entrance to the museum, I noticed a wooden plaque. Many items in the collection, it announced, had been “recovered from overseas and saved from being lost to the nation.”
The curator guided me toward a dark, carpeted room in the rear of the museum. Inside, each of the four revered heads—the ox, the tiger, the monkey, and the pig—had been given its own display case, in which it sat atop purple velvet cushioning.
“The first time I saw them, I was so excited,” the curator told me. She spoke in a low, reverential whisper. She was a student then and remembered how, on the day the heads were officially returned, her entire school had watched the ceremony on television. Students wept at their desks.
I asked if she thought the rest would ever be returned. There had been nothing but fakes and false leads for years, and the best guess seemed to be that the remaining five were hidden away in private collections somewhere in Europe. She paused and walked forward to admire the growling bronze tiger head. “Their return is the deepest hope of the Chinese people,” she said. “It's a very sad and hard history for us. When the heads come back, we will finally feel the power of our country.”
Alex W. Palmer is a writer based in Beijing. This is his first story for GQ.
*This story originally appeared in the August 2018 issue.
Related Stories for GQBest of GQLong ReadsArtCrime
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Trusted Cremation Services in Ludlow
Arranging Funeral Services with Ludlow(ME) Cremation Services
Cremation services in Ludlow(ME) are completed respectfully and diligently, which is exactly what you would expect from anyone involved with funeral services and providing a dignified end to a person's life.
Approximately 50% of people are cremated with cremation services in Ludlow(ME) with the other 50% making the choice to encompass a burial within a funeral service. The numbers of people being cremated is a much higher percentage than the majority of the US, but in every state the numbers are increasing annually. There are a number of reasons for this.
Why do People Choose Cremation Services in Ludlow(ME)?
Cremation services in Ludlow(ME) will almost certainly be less expensive than arranging a burial. For some people, relations have to travel a long way and perhaps arrive from abroad. Cremation allows for a memorial service to be held several weeks or even months after the deceased has passed on.
Some people suggest to cremation services in Ludlow(ME) that they do not like the idea of a person's body decaying in the ground and much prefer the quicker and cleaner method used within a crematorium.
As directed by Ludlow(ME) cremation services, the remains - the ashes - can be placed in an urn and be scattered at a most significant location, which might mean in a local cemetery for a religious person. Other people who are less religious may prefer the ashes to be scattered in a private area at home or perhaps over a favorite lake.
Where you choose to have the ashes scattered in a public area, you may have to seek permission from the owners of that area to allow a scattering to take place. Nevertheless, there are many places, like sports fields, that won't give permission in advance for ashes to be scattered across the field, but might be quite amenable to accept a small private service when the stadium is completely empty and quiet. Your cremation services in Ludlow(ME) will be to help you with these decisions.
Many people will prefer the option of agreeing to an environmentally friendly funeral service. Cremation services in Ludlow(ME) will be able to direct you to the correct locations to assist your requirements.
Where a burial is involved, Ludlow(ME) cremation services will make clear that it has been traditional that a formaldehyde-based embalming fluid is used for the body to be presented correctly. This is not essential when a cremation is your preferred decision. Some people are against land being used to bury a coffin and many large cities and towns have already run out of space within many churchyards.
Ludlow(ME) cremation services will explain that the scattering of the remains do not require any land to be used at all, as the ashes may be kept in an urn at your home or they may be scattered in a particular location of the person's choice. Some people still choose to have their ashes buried where a close family member is found, but this will not take up any more land space.
Cremation services in Ludlow(ME) will explain how a funeral service provides a social support system for all of the people involved. It also allows for all of the bereaved to finally accept that the death of the person cannot be reversed and that part of living is to know that you are going to die one day.
A funeral service offered by cremation services in Ludlow(ME) will help reintegrate the bereaved family back into local community, because they may have been set apart for a few days or more during the grieving process.
Ludlow(ME) cremation services will be able to help reaffirm everyone's relationship to the person who has recently died and the funeral service will provide a perfect opportunity to say goodbye properly and share the experience with close members of family and friends.
A cremation arranged by Ludlow(ME) cremation services can reflect a full funeral service with the only difference, from a burial, being the way a body is committed forwards. With Ludlow(ME) cremation services, this means the coffin will pass through curtains and that will be your final memory for that part of the process.
Worrying about whether you need to make different funeral arrangements because you have chosen a cremation is not necessary. Ludlow(ME) cremation services will explain how you can have a funeral service before cremation or perhaps you may wish to choose a memorial service along with the cremation. Some people will choose to have the funeral service after the cremation so that the urn may be present.
Many crematoriums have areas set aside purposely as a spot set out as a garden of remembrance. This can be a perfect area for you to scatter the cremation ashes. Many churches have similar areas where people who are more religious may be happier with the decision that the ashes are scattered on religious grounds. All of this can be explained carefully to you by Ludlow(ME) cremation services.
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Home> Publications & Directories> Perspectives on History> Issues> May 1995> Letters to the Editor> Nationalism and Identity
Nationalism and Identity
Frans Coetzee | May 1, 1995
Prompted by Liah Greenfield and Lloyd Kramer's opportune and stimulating exchange on pedagogical approaches to nationalism in the November 1994 issue of Perspectives, we would like to suggest some additional perspectives drawn from our own experience in teaching about this protean phenomenon. Our graduate seminar on European nationalism since the French Revolution is organized thematically, but within a general chronological framework. Its point of departure has been to approach nationalism as a question of identity, one in which adherence to the nation in principle, if not in practice, supersedes other forms of identification. Setting it within this context enables students to recognize that nationalism is neither universal nor eternal, and that the same purportedly objective criteria (such as language, religion, or shared historical traditions) need not always be influential in what is a subjective formulation.
We have also found it valuable to explore the popular resonance of nationalism by delving into conceptions of citizenship. Here the emphasis is not confined to a consideration of the rights and responsibilities of full membership in a national community, but also includes an evaluation of the conditions under and mechanisms by which immigrants gain naturalization. The sharp contrasts between France and Germany on this score provide an instructive example, one well analyzed by Rogers Brubaker in his Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Harvard Univ. Press, 1992).
Finally, in tracing the historical influence of nationalism it is crucial not to lose sight of the ways in which nationalism has influenced collective memory and historiography. The possible examples here are numerous, of course; after all, Ernest Renan already recognized more than a century ago the indispensability of a faulty historical memory to conceptions of national identity. In our seminar, the juxtaposition of Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome (Harvard Univ. Press, 1991) with material on Germany's Historikerstreit (such as Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? [Humanities Press, 1993] or Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past [Beacon Press, 1990]) has spawned fruitful discussions.
Nationalism is a classic instance of a subject of tremendous contemporary importance that can be illustrated by historical perspectives. It is a welcome sign, then, to see the issue attracting the critical scrutiny and diversity of approaches it deserves.
Frans Coetzee
Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee
Tags: Letters to the Editor
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Italy's Turin Film Fest to Open 31st Edition With Comedy 'Last Vegas'
11:10 AM PDT 10/16/2013 by Eric J. Lyman
"Last Vegas"
Director Jon Turteltaub will be on hand for the film's Nov. 22 Italian premiere.
ROME – The Italian premiere of Last Vegas, a star-studded comedy from Jon Turteltaub, will open the 31st edition of the Turin Film Festival, organizers said Wednesday.
Turteltaub himself will be on hand for the Nov. 22 premiere of the film, which stars Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline and Michael Douglas as a group of friends who have known each other for 50 years and who travel together to Las Vegas intending to relive their youth.
STORY: 'Last Vegas' Ensemble Comedy Moves Up to Early November
The film, which will open in Europe on Oct. 31 and in the U.S. the following day, will go into wide release in Italy in January, from Universal Pictures International Italia.
The Turin Film Festival, under the artistic direction of film director Paolo Virzi for the first time this year, will conclude Nov. 30.
Twitter: @EricJLyman
Eric J. Lyman
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Costin, Yvonne. "ICT as an Enabler for Small Firm Growth: The Case of the Mompreneur." IJEP 2.1 (2011): 17-29. Web. 17 Jul. 2019. doi:10.4018/jep.2011010102
Costin, Y. (2011). ICT as an Enabler for Small Firm Growth: The Case of the Mompreneur. International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP), 2(1), 17-29. doi:10.4018/jep.2011010102
Costin, Yvonne. "ICT as an Enabler for Small Firm Growth: The Case of the Mompreneur," International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP) 2 (2011): 1, accessed (July 17, 2019), doi:10.4018/jep.2011010102
ICT as an Enabler for Small Firm Growth: The Case of the Mompreneur
Yvonne Costin (University of Limerick, Ireland)
Source Title: International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP) 2(1)
DOI: 10.4018/jep.2011010102
The advancing pace of women’s entrepreneurial activity across the globe is a promising trend to fuel economic development and social progress (Fitzsimons & O’Gorman, 2005). Analysis of the reasons why women start a new business, the choice of product/service, and industry sector highlight the home-based female entrepreneur. These entrepreneurs constitutes a segment referred to as the mompreneurs—mothers who establish a business operated from home. Thus, although mompreneurs gain benefits of operating their business from home, they also experience additional challenges. One such issue is their dependence on ICT. To succeed and grow, mompreneurs’ businesses must use ICT as a backbone for the business in an integrated manner. In this article, the author examines the adoption and application of ICT in the mompreneur business, as well as the challenges encountered in its effective use. A specific emphasis is placed on the issue of ICT and its use by the mompreneur in undertaking business transactions and as a means of facilitating small firm growth.
In spite of growing numbers, women-owned businesses continue to lag behind male owned firms in Ireland both for recently started and established businesses (Forfas, 2007). In 2006 there were 60,000 male new firm entrepreneurs and 21,000 female new firm entrepreneurs in Ireland where men were 2.9 times more likely than women to be new firm entrepreneurs (4.3% of men compared to 1.5% of women). The imbalance in these trends unfortunately has not improved greatly over the last five years, where the average rate of early stage entrepreneurship for the period 2002 to 2007 was 12% for men and 4.8% for women. Moreover in Ireland women are less active as entrepreneurs across all age cohorts, among all income categories and across all educational levels bar one - women with post-graduate qualifications have the same rate of early stage entrepreneurial activity as men. Only one-quarter of the high-expectation and high-growth entrepreneurs are women (Fitzsimons & O’ Gorman, 2008). The dearth of females starting high technology businesses was also highlighted by Richardson and Hynes (2007) where it was recommended that educational, social and professional barriers that militate against females participating in engineering and technology entrepreneurial activity could be reduced. Worryingly, these statistics exist in the backdrop where female education standards are higher than ever, where female participation rates in the labour market have risen significantly and a high proportion of the female population in the age cohort at which entrepreneurial activity is most likely to occur. Therefore, greater levels of female activity in starting and growing businesses must be encouraged and supported. This necessitates a more developed understanding of the profile of women who start a business, their aspiration for business growth and the underlying causes of the challenges encountered in achieving this growth. A particular focus is placed on the role of ICT as an enabler of business development for female entrepreneurs and more so the mompreneur.
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'Film Camera Review - A quick look at the Minolta X-300 / X-370 35mm SLR film camera, a highly recommended AE (automatic exposure) camera for the beginner'
The success of the award-winning flagship Minolta X-700, one of the most highly regarded 35mm Programmed AE SLR film cameras produced, saw Minolta coming out with lower cost models for the consumer market, catering for photo enthusiasts who are looking for a simplified version of the X-700.
First of the followups was the X-500 (X-570 in the US), which was launched in 1983, two years after the X-700. The X-500 was an Aperture-Priority AE model, without the 'MPS' that came with the X-700, but with enhanced electronics that makes it a very favorable model as compared to the X-700.
The introduction of the X-300 (X-370 in the US) was a year later, another Aperture-Priority AE model with a body design that is nearly identical to the X-500. It is, however, a lower cost version, with minimal features, and a simplified viewfinder readout. The X-300 does not have OTF flash mode, DoF preview facility, PC connection, or interchangeable screens.
Minolta X-300 - Overview / Review
The X-300 series, which includes the X-370, X-300s, X-370n, X-9, X-7A, and X-370s, continued as the manual-focus series even after the introduction of the auto-focus Maxxum line. These models cameras were popular, economical, easy to use, and does well to provide, even today, for the needs of film camera enthusiasts.
The Minolta X-300 35mm SLR Film Camera
The Minolta X-300 is an Aperture-Priority AE and match-LED full metered manual 35mm SLR film camera with a quartz-controlled horizontal-traverse focal-plane shutter capable of a speed range from 4 to 1/1000 second, and B. Flash synchronization is at 1/60 second.
Camera operation is switch controlled, the shutter release is two-step electromagnetic, metering is TTL (Through the Lens) center-weighted average, and film ISO speed range is 12 to 3200. The camera is also equipped with a switch selectable 10-second delay self-timer and an AE lock switch.
Standard focusing screen is Acute Matte with horizontal split-image/microprism rangefinder with 95% screen coverage. Metering is powered by 2xSR44 of LR44 button cells. Camera body weight is 470 grams without lens or battery.
The rather spartan good looker, reminiscent of the MPS X-700, the X-300 is available both in chrome and black.
The front plane of the camera is a plain affair with only the sync terminal and the lens release button located on the right vertical of the lens mount housing. On the left is the finger grip, the electronic self-timer, and AE lock/ self-timer switch combo, and on the edge of the top plane, integrated with the shutter release button, is shutter speed dial.
On the far left of the top plate is the film rewind crank, which is also the pull-up film back latch, integrated with the pull-up and turn film ISO speed selector. Slotted between the rewind crank and the pentaprism, where the hot shoe is located, is the On/Off power switch.
On the right of the pentaprism is the Auto mode/shutter speed display, the electromagnetic shutter release button, film forward crank, the frame counter and a small elongated window which is the film safe-load indicator.
The back of the camera is plain except for the viewfinder eyepiece, and the film tab holder located in the middle of the film back.
The bottom plate of the camera carries the film rewind release, battery chamber cover, tripod socket, motor drive coupling, winder guide slots, and electrical contacts.
The viewfinder readout of the X-300 is a simple display of A and M shooting modes, and a shutter speed numerical indicator bar located vertically on the right of the Acute Matte 95% coverage focusing screen with a central split focusing spot surrounded by a microprism band.
'A' or 'M' shooting mode, metered or manually set shutter speed are indicated by red LEDs next to the numerical, speeds are in between when two LEDs are lighted. Over- and under-exposures are indicated by LED arrowheads, and a flash ready icon makes up the display.
Exposure compensation, DoF (Depth of Field) preview, as well as OTF (Off the film) flash mode is not available on the X-300.
Aperture Priority and Fully Manual Exposures
A gradual transition between aperture priority and fully manual shooting modes is the way to go to get you the best out of your film photography experience. With the X-300, which has an excellent metering system that gives you fantastic exposures with its AE mode, match needle metering in manual mode is equally effortless and convenient.
In manual mode operation, which can be done in shutter-priority style, you first set the shutter speed to the speed you want to shoot in, and after framing and focusing the image or composition, adjusts the aperture of the lens to bring the metered speed LED indicator to match the blinking LED which indicates the shutter speed the camera was set to.
Doing manual mode in aperture-priority means that you first pre-set the aperture opening of the lens to the one you want to shoot in, and adjusts the shutter speed setting to get to the correct exposure setting. The X-300 is equally up to the task here as the shutter speed selector dial is located very conveniently just forward of the shutter release button, and its operation easily handled with the index finger.
AE Lock
AE locking on the X-300 is a two-fingered operation.
Use your middle finger to press and activate the AE lock button to retain the exposure reading of your subject, and the other (the index finger) to release the shutter after you have reframed the image.
This method compensates for the unavailability of exposure compensation, easy enough to master, and you will get used to this method soon enough.
The X-300 uses a pair of SR44 or LR44 button cells, a very convenient source are they are easily available.
Be A User
A final plus for the elegant and almost regal X-300 is, of course, ease of use. With such a light bodyweight, the X-300 is highly recommended not only for new or beginner users but also for the advanced enthusiast who prefers to shoot in aperture-priority mode.
All you need to do to gain the most of the depth-of-field style shooting is to set the shutter speed to 'AUTO', preset the lens aperture to want to shoot in, frame, focus and release the shutter. Metering is activated at the first touch of the electromagnetic shutter release.
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Opinion • Politics & Protest
How the ‘Committee of 100’ is doing Beijing’s bidding in the US
Mark Simon
Whether it be Italians, Jews, Koreans, or Chinese, immigrant communities settling in the United States have often looked to those who came before them not only as role models but champions who knocked down the walls of bigotry and opened paths of economic prosperity.
Yet, there have been stages in American history when the interests of the old country come to the shores of the US and groups are established not for the betterment of the immigrants, but rather to do the bidding of the old country. British loyalists after the Revolutionary War, the German-American Friendship Societies of the early 20th century, the Irish Republican Army, and a multitude of small fringe groups that to this day clamour around Washington DC urging American action of some sort in their former home nation.
The Committee of 100. Photo: Apple Daily.
Chinese Americans are now having to deal with this part of the American experience, as China moves from strategic rival to open opponent of the United States. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is advancing its interests through its United Front operations. Be it a Confucius Institute or Patriotic Association focused on the reunification of Taiwan, the CCP is open and active in trying to gain an advantage in US politics and policy.
Nowhere is that pressure by the CCP more obvious than in a Beijing friendly circle of elites called the Committee of 100. They bill themselves as a group of “Extraordinary Chinese-Americans” with the following mission;
Promoting the full participation of all Chinese Americans in American society and acting as a public policy resource for the Chinese-American community
Advancing constructive dialogue and relationships between the peoples and leaders of the United States and Greater China.
Here’s the problem. In regards to the first goal, the Committee does little in terms of promoting full participation of Chinese-Americans in American society. In fact, out of over a dozen public statements in the last two years, only one is clearly concerned with discrimination against Chinese Americans as a group. Discrimination at Harvard and Ivy League schools against Chinese-Americans. In other words, they want their kids to get in.
File photo: Tom Grundy/HKFP.
Where is the Committee on the thousands of Chinese-American high school students who are about to be denied a spot at New York City’s elite high schools because the mayor of New York City wants to limit the number of Asian-American students in order to make way for other minorities? Where is the Committee on sex trafficking? Immigrant Chinese women are far more likely than any other race in the US to be trafficked. Not even the rising instances of hate crimes against Chinese-Americans gets the attention of the Committee.
So what does the Committee of 100 fight for?
Well, if you take them at their word, it’s pretty much anything that benefits the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Think I’m kidding? Scan their website. The one human rights issue they go after is Chinese scientists being falsely accused of spying. It’s good to question the government and there is a valid complaint with the cases of Dr. Sherry Lin and Dr. Xiao XingXi, where the US government brought charges that failed. But that’s two. On the other side, dozens of convictions or pleas of Chinese nationals or Chinese-Americans in less time than these two bad cases spanned make it obvious that the CCP is using ethnic Chinese as tools in spying. Any chance the Committee says boo to the CCP about endangering Chinese-Americans?
Do we hear about the lack of human rights in China? No. Are there concerns about the Uyghurs? No. Is the Committee concerned about religious freedom in China? Nope. And is there any concern about the build-up of the PLA or ongoing espionage threat to the US from the CCP?
Photo: The Committee of 100 website.
The website and their conferences tell the story. The Committee of 100 is a pro-Beijing group, concerned almost exclusively with the interests aligned with those of the Chinese Communist Party. In all their discussions about the US-China relationship try to find any significant objection to the actions of the CCP. You won’t.
Yes, cynical, but we are talking about a group that puts out press statements to support visas for Chinese students yet nothing for thousands of Asian-American school kids in New York City about to be denied an education because of the color of their skin.
Chinese Americans are not the first ethnic group a foreign government tried to corrupt in order to influence US policy. Nor is the Committee of 100 the first group to be called out on their actions on behalf of a foreign government.
But the Committee of 100 shouldn’t be allowed to mask its efforts on behalf of the CCP just because its membership has money.
Committee of 100 Confucius Institute USA
Is China dispensing with ‘hurt feelings’?
US Sec. of State asks US business to think twice in China’s Xinjiang; compares crisis to 1930s Germany
Mark Simon is a Senior Executive with Next Media and writes the Second Opinion Column in Apple Daily.
How the 'Committee of 100' is doing Beijing's bidding in the US
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NNPC says Nigeria will increase crude oil reserves by one billion barrels yearly
Marie Sana July 4, 2018 Oil & Gas No Comments on NNPC says Nigeria will increase crude oil reserves by one billion barrels yearly
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has said that the country will increase crude oil reserves by one billion barrels yearly to meet 40 billion barrels target by 2020.
Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Maikanti Baru, who spoke yesterday at the ongoing Nigerian Oil and Gas (NOG) conference and exhibition in Abuja, said the corporation’s focus for 2018 and beyond was to increase crude oil reserves by one billion barrels year-on-year from the current 37 billion barrels to 40 billion barrels by 2020 and also increase national oil daily production to three million barrels per day.
Baru said security and environment, high industry technical cost, funding of investments, among others, as well as low crude oil prices, remain key challenges in the oil and gas sector, adding the current administration has been working hard to address them.
According to him, government has issued an updated oil and gas policy and initiated the process for enacting a new Petroleum Industry Governance Bill that provides clarity on the government institutions and their roles in the industry.
Besides, he said the corporation would adopt the option of raising more finance from the capital market for new oil and gas projects.He noted that while domestic demand for gas in Nigeria remains unprecedented with a current daily realistic gas demand of 4,000 mmscfd, which is expected to grow exponentially to about 7,500 mmscfd in the next five years, within the next three years, the group would increase natural gas availability from the current 1.5 billion scf/d to about five billion scf/d in 2020.
In another development, the Federal Government says it will no longer approve oil and gas production projects in the petroleum industry unless there are adequate plans on cost.Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, said this yesterday while speaking at the conference and exhibition in Abuja.He said the current cost of oil production in the country remained unacceptable.
“The government will supply enough gas to generate up to 15GW of electricity to the power sector by 2020 and stimulate gas-based industrialisation,” he added.According to him, supply agreements will continue to be made effective with terms that assure bankability to provide the relevant comfort to producers.Meanwhile, the GMD said in terms of frontier exploration, the corporation was hopeful that there would be drilling of appraisal well in the Benue trough in the third quarter of 2018.
https://www.hopefornigeriaonline.com/dilapidated-schools-akwa-ibom/
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Tag Archive for: FX
You are here: Home / FX
Sarah Paulson Will Not Return For ‘American Horror Story: 1984’
July 8, 2019 /0 Comments/in Horror Movies and TV Shows, News /by Nick Banks
Just as Vice President Gerald Ford stated when he assumed the office of president for the departing Richard Nixon, Sarah Paulson’s “long national nightmare is over” when it comes to her involvement in FX’s American Horror Story.
According to an exclusive report in Variety, long-time American Horror Story cast member Paulson will not appear in the anthology series’ upcoming ninth season, entitled American Horror Story: 1984. Paulson has appeared on each and every season up to this point. read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 Nick Banks http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg Nick Banks2019-07-08 23:46:172019-07-08 23:46:17Sarah Paulson Will Not Return For 'American Horror Story: 1984'
‘What We Do In The Shadows’ Renewed for a Second Season on FX
May 7, 2019 /0 Comments/in Horror Movies and TV Shows, News /by Nick Banks
Fans of FX’s vampire mockumentary series What We Do in the Shadows will soon be flapping for joy, as the series based on Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s 2014 film has been renewed for a second season (as reported by Variety).
Nick Grad (president of original programming at FX) praised the creators, stating that “Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi and Paul Simms have more than delivered on the high expectations of ‘Shadows’ fans by adapting the cult classic for television and building a passionate base of new and returning fans.” Grad also gave much of the credit to “…. the rest of the creative team, including Scott Rudin, Garrett Basch and Eli Bush, and the incredible cast and crew for delivering such a fun and original series, and we look forward to working with them all on season two.” read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 Nick Banks http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg Nick Banks2019-05-07 21:22:502019-05-08 22:00:26'What We Do In The Shadows' Renewed for a Second Season on FX
‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Episodes 1-3: The Horror News Network Review
April 15, 2019 /0 Comments/in Horror Movies and TV Shows, News /by John Evans
Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi broke new ground in 2014 with the feature film What We Do in the Shadows by blending the tried and true mockumentary formula with an adept understanding of vampire lore and history. The movie contained the perfect blend of shocking moments and witty banter, and it wasn’t afraid to reveal that there was a genuine heart somewhere under all of that pumping blood. When it was announced that the franchise would live on in the form of a new television series, there was most certainly a lingering question of whether fans could fall in love again with brand new characters and a new setting. Clement and Waititi wrote, directed, and starred in the original film; but this time around they’re only on board for the occasional writing or directing duty. Fortunately, however, the new What We Do in the Shadows series faithfully resurrects the spirit of their beloved film and it introduces the audience to a plethora of hilarious new characters and clever flourishes on the mockumentary format. read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 John Evans http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg John Evans2019-04-15 11:48:122019-04-15 11:48:12'What We Do in the Shadows' Episodes 1-3: The Horror News Network Review
‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Television Series ‘Prince of Darkness’ Teaser Released
February 6, 2019 /0 Comments/in Horror Movies and TV Shows, News /by Nick Banks
How many vampires does it take to screw in a light bulb? If you’ve ever asked yourself this question, look no further than the latest sneak peak at FX’s small screen version of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows.
Clement and Waititi will return to the world of Shadows via the new FX series, as Clement will serve as an executive producer and writer, and Waititi will also executive produce and direct an episode or two. The new series will feature 30 minute episodes and also star Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, Natasia Demetriou, and Harvey Guillen. read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 Nick Banks http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg Nick Banks2019-02-06 21:10:152019-02-06 21:10:15'What We Do in the Shadows' Television Series 'Prince of Darkness' Teaser Released
‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ Episodes 3 & 4: The Horror News Network Review
October 7, 2018 /0 Comments/in Horror Movies and TV Shows, News /by John Evans
The first two episodes of FX’s American Horror Story: Apocalypse lacked even a hint of the highly-touted crossover spectacle the season was promised to feature. Well, that moment finally comes in the last two minutes of Episode Three, after Michael Landon (Cody Fern) kills off the entire new cast (except for Kathy Bates’ Miriam, because- surprise!- she’s a robot now), and the witches from Season Three’s Coven waltz into view. By Episode Four, we’re knee-deep in crossover territory, right down to an unexpected return to American Horror Story: Hotel‘s Hotel Cortez. Fortunately, all of the returning faces of yesteryear- including Emma Roberts and Gabourey Sidibe- don’t slow down the progression of the story and, despite the occasional flashback, actually end up keeping things moving forward. And, while there’s no shortage of ridiculousness to go around, this manages to be one of the most engaging seasons of American Horror Story in years. read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 John Evans http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg John Evans2018-10-07 20:49:382018-10-07 20:49:38‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ Episodes 3 & 4: The Horror News Network Review
September 23, 2018 /0 Comments/in Horror Movies and TV Shows, News /by John Evans
Season Nine of FX’s American Horror Story is upon us, and the apocalypse has never looked so dreary! Trading in cavernous asylums, gothic mansions, and backwoods freak shows for a claustrophobic candle-lit labyrinth, the series heads in a different direction while still promising a glimpse or two at the past. The season opens with the always-incredible Billy Eichner running through the streets of L.A. as if he’s hosting a segment of Billy on the Street. It turns out that mankind has finally triggered the end times, and everyone must fend for themselves. That is, everyone but the ultra-rich and those with impeccable DNA. In a scene that looks like it would feel right at home in an episode of Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories, a mysterious group arrives at a family’s doorstep and demands to take one of their boys to save him from the nuclear fallout. So series newcomer Kyle Allen’s character, Timothy Campbell, is whisked away to a mysterious compound while his family probably contemplates if they even need to respond to his UCLA acceptance letter that just came in the mail. The first episode sets up the premise of the season quickly, and before we know it we’re right in the middle of all the action- which takes place in a Bauhaus-inspired shelter run by a mysterious group called The Cooperative. What follows is what can best be described as an “acquired taste,” as viewers are- for better or for worse- quickly drawn into the typical trappings of the franchise. read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 John Evans http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg John Evans2018-09-23 11:58:332018-09-23 11:58:33'American Horror Story: Apocalypse' Episodes 1 & 2: The Horror News Network Review
Violet and Tate are “Together Forever” in New ‘American Horror Story’ Shot Featuring Taissa Farmiga and Evan Peters
August 31, 2018 /0 Comments/in Horror Movies and TV Shows, News /by John Evans
One of the most popular elements of American Horror Story when it debuted in 2011 was the complicated romance of young Violet and Tate, played by Taissa Farmiga and Evan Peters respectively. We now have definitive evidence that American Horror Story: Apocalypse– the upcoming crossover season featuring characters from Murder House and Cult– will continue their story. Showrunner Ryan Murphy posted a new image of the star-crossed lovers in an Instagram post entitled, “Tate and Violet: Together forever?”: read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 John Evans http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg John Evans2018-08-31 16:55:092018-08-31 17:00:48Violet and Tate are "Together Forever" in New 'American Horror Story' Shot Featuring Taissa Farmiga and Evan Peters
Sarah Paulson Will Direct an Episode and Play Three Characters in ‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’
American Horror Story fans’ minds were collectively blown in November of 2016 when they learned that Sarah Paulson would be playing two different characters in American Horror Story: Roanoke. If only they had some way of knowing that- less than two years later- the talented actress would play three different characters in a single season… and also direct one of its episodes!
E! News reports that Paulson will play Billie Dean Howard of Murder House, Cordelia Goode of Coven, and a new character named Venable in American Horror Story: Apocalypse; and that it was first announced during the 2018 TV Critics Association press tour that she would also be making her directorial debut in the new season. The episode will be the sixth in the season and it will star Jessica Lange, among others. read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 John Evans http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg John Evans2018-08-30 17:37:352018-08-30 17:41:57Sarah Paulson Will Direct an Episode and Play Three Characters in 'American Horror Story: Apocalypse'
Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott Are a Family That Slays Together in ‘AHS: Murder House’ Reunion Photo
Showrunner Ryan Murphy is pulling out all the stops as we get closer and closer to the premiere of American Horror Story: Apocalypse. Last week, he shared a cast reunion photo from the Coven season, and now he’s going back to the beginning with a new shot of two-thirds of the Harmon family of Murder House fame. Apocalypse will be a crossover event, featuring themes and characters from both of the aforementioned seasons, and the news up to this point suggests that nearly every actor and actress will return to his or her original role(s). Murphy’s latest teaser image appeared in Istagram. The shot features Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott as Vivien and Ben Harmon inside of the iconic Murder House: read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 John Evans http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg John Evans2018-08-26 09:50:132018-08-26 09:50:13Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott Are a Family That Slays Together in 'AHS: Murder House' Reunion Photo
Farmiga to Play Multiple Roles in ‘AHS: Apocalypse’
August 24, 2018 /0 Comments/in Horror Movies and TV Shows, News /by Sean McLaughlin
It looks like Taissa Farmiga will be pulling double-duty on the upcoming season of American Horror Story! According to Entertainment Weekly, Farmiga (The Nun) will be following in co-star Jessica Lange’s footsteps and portraying two separate roles (from previous seasons) in AHS: Apocalypse on FX. This announcement adds intrigue to the much-anticipated new season of the show, which already features a murderer’s row of former cast members.
Farmiga had previously let the show’s fans know on social media that she’d be once again be playing the witch Zoe from AHS:Coven. However, EW reports that she will also be portraying her role as Violet from the very first season, entitled Murder House. The character cross-over makes sense, as Apocalypse will tie-in all previous seasons of the hit show which debuted back in 2011. The producers have used many of the same actors and actresses in multiple seasons, but playing different roles. Apocalypse will see the return of Hollywood royalty Lange, Kathy Bates, Sarah Paulson, Emma Roberts, Connie Britton, Stevie Nicks, Dylan McDermott and many others. It will also see the debut of new cast member Joan Collins. read more
http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg 0 0 Sean McLaughlin http://www.horrornewsnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/HNN-logo.jpg Sean McLaughlin2018-08-24 23:52:562018-08-24 23:52:56Farmiga to Play Multiple Roles in 'AHS: Apocalypse'
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Barclays profit tumbles 25% as non-core losses double to £810m
By Dan Cancian
April 27, 2016 08:06 BST
Barclays reported a sharp reduction in pre-tax profit in the first quarter of the year, as non-core losses before tax more than doubled and offset a significant gain in profit from core operations.
In the three months to 31 March, the FTSE 100 lender posted a profit before tax of £793m, a 25% year-on-year decline, as losses from the group's non-core operations jumped from £310m to £815m. That offset an 18% year-on-year increase in core profit before tax to £1.61bn, the bank said.
Underlying profit before tax, which excludes the impact of notable items, decreased 44% year-on-year to £902m, primarily driven by the underlying loss before tax in non-core operations, which widened from £274m in the first quarter of 2015 to £815m.
The quarterly report was the bank's first since it reorganised its operations into a new configuration, comprising of Barclays UK and Barclays Corporate & International. The bank's UK operations saw underlying profit before tax decrease 2% to £704m as lower income was partially offset by improved impairment, with underlying total operating expenses remaining broadly in line.
"We can see clear growth opportunities, such as in our consumer, cards and payments business, in which we want to continue to invest," said group chief executive James Staley.
"The performance of our corporate and investment bank was relatively resilient in a tough quarter, but there is more we must do to improve returns, and we are focused on management actions to do so."
Credit impairment charges increased 15% to £443m primarily driven by the impairment of a number of single name exposures, largely in respect of clients in the oil and gas sector, the bank added.
Meanwhile, total operating expenses reduced 7% to £3.82bn as a number of exceptional items did not recur in the period, although that was partially offset by increased restructuring charges relating to strategic initiatives.
Staley added the bank would continue to target cost reductions and was on track to meet its 2016 guidance for the core business of £12.8bn, and its longer-term target of a group cost to income ratio under 60%.
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BP swings to $485m first quarter loss as slump in oil prices takes its toll
Related topics : Barclays LON:BARC
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Dada was a unique artistic movement which changed entirely the 20th century art. It was established in Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, in 1916, by a group of poets, painters and philosophers in exile. The Dada soirees were characterized by spectacular shows, and included simultaneous poetry, avant-garde music, and dancers wearing masks. The shows involved teasing and enraging the audience, challenging all values of Western culture and art, which were considered obsolete in view of the destruction and carnage of the Great War. The Dadaists objected to the traditional aesthetics of their contemporaries in painting, sculpture, language, literature and music. The group published manifests and periodicals and mounted exhibitions. The years of their joint activity didn’t last long, but the seeds sown in Zurich spread all over the world.
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The Lost Paradise
Michaela Mende-Janco
Raya Zommer
“In my opinion, abstraction is some kind of a new language for all, young and old, because abstraction creates a euphoria of colors and forms, a more sincere, refined and human art, which directly influences the pure sensibility, with no intervention of the intellect. Impersonal art is beyond aesthetics. It is a kind of oasis of freshness and brotherhood amongst all human beings.
…This new art is a revelation of shapes and colors to be understood by all; children, youth, men and women, an art which is universal and common to all peoples because it is abstract, an art that soothes all outbursts. We are convinced that Man is good by nature, talented, wise and inspiring, rising above all the other creatures on earth, in the air and in the seas. Abstract art is the true international language, able to create fraternity of nations. Man deserves the best art and his mission would be to lead and enlighten it.”1
This exhibition includes oil pastel paintings on paper, which Marcel Janco created in the 1960’s. They are all characterized by abstract style. There are several groups of paintings on a scale between pure abstract and figurative abstract; the most conspicuous and central group is the one called “ImaginaryAnimals“, which includes organic forms in space, evoking imaginary animals. The second group, entitled “Rhythms“, is dominated by music dictating the composition. Another group consists of colorful paintings entitled “Storms”, with a turbulence of colors and lines. This group illustrates abstract compositions of round and sharpened forms conversing with one another.
These paintings were created in the 1960’s, a period when the group New Horizons, with Marcel Janco as one of its founders, flourished in Israel. The main importance of the group lies in its belief in new modernism and the abstract language. Marcel Janco, who previously had brought the avant-garde language to Romania, after years of experimentation with abstract in Zurich and Paris, saw it as his mission, when he immigrated to Israel, to foster and bring up to date the language of art in his new country. As an architect, he emphasized the structural elements and the importance of creating geometric compositions. The group wanted to create a typical form of Israeli abstract, and part of Janco’s contribution was to emphasize the symbolic facet.
“Janco paints
The underground groan
And the song of the earth”2
The group “Imaginary Animals” presents amorphous, abstract forms which become concrete. The artist painted the animals in a kind of movement – in some sort of stylized tango. The composition is always balanced and the works are colorful and full of life. This group of paintings emphasizes the biomorphic source of Janco’s work and his tendency to be inspired by Nature. The imaginary animals are not real, but they come from an organic source and naturalistic elements. They bring us back to a reality of inner poetry, a dream of shapes and colors – a lost paradise.
“The Lost Paradise” is a quotation from the Romanian writer and poet Demetru Urmuz (1883-1923), who created an original surrealistic language, defined as absurd long before the Surrealist Movement appeared in literature. Janco connected with the avant-garde aspect of Urmuz’s work and called many abstract works by names inspired by the artist’s writings. This relation between word and picture is very typical of Janco’s abstract work in which vision and narrative co-exist in harmony.
In fact, throughout all his prosperous years as a painter, Janco maintained an ongoing dialogue between the concrete and the abstract. Unlike the contemporary artist Gerhard Richter, who moves in two parallel styles – abstract and figurative, Janco sought to connect between the two: his abstract works are anchored in reality, in a certain experience or cultural context, whereas his figurative works always feature abstract elements which play a role not less central than the theme or the concrete form.
Jean Arp described it in his poem:
“Janco paints concrete
With an abstract hat
Janco paints abstract
With a concrete hat”3
Joseph Isser (1881-1958), Janco’s teacher, taught him as a boy the foundations of classical art. Janco took this classical basis and turned it into a clear element within abstract creation. This is why, in all of Janco’s abstract works, there is some kind of realistic element, a glimpse of a portrait here and a hiding animal there, as though trying to break out of the abstract composition.
“…and there is a certain law of development one should not skip. Every true painter follows a path, quickly or slowly, repeating some phases of the history of art. One cannot start right away with abstract art as it is today. Every painter in the past, had to come a long way and today it’s too easy. Israelis must search here, not in America, not in New-York. (Pointing at a picture hanging in front of us) When an American painter paints squares, he might be thinking of cities like New York or Boston, the huge sky scrapers with their walls and windows. In the beginning there was the poetic experience, but this painter applies only technique in this painting. Thematical elements in painting are varied and changing: it can be an idea, a landscape or a first touch, the first spot on canvas. With me, as I have already said, there was first an idea: the impression of the landscape, the vision preceded the picture”4.
With the group of paintings representing rhythms, Janco tried to express voice in forms and translate various musical experiences into color and form. There are the fugues – whole symphonies of notes, and there are ascending and descending lines, reminiscent of sirens. Janco gave abstract forms movement and rhythm.
Music was a leitmotif in Janco’s biography. As he told Francis M. Naumann in an interview to Arts magazine: “I was first drawn to art in my youth thanks to my mother. She was a very good musician, without academic training, though she could play the works of Liszt and other great musicians. She tried to make musicians out of her three sons and daughter so that we could all play together… but it did not help, because I was unable to learn music. My inclination was to color and form.”5
And in the same interview: “Mussoni, the Italian musician was there (in Zurich). He taught at the Academy of Music in Zurich, and we (the Dadaists) connected with him in order to apply the laws of musical counterpoint to abstract painting”.6
The group of works entitled “Storms“ illustrates the madness which got hold of the forms. Unique to this group is the fact that they look as if created at random by some sort of rapid scribbling, works which by first impression seem not to have been worked through sufficiently. But a further look discovers a well thought out composition, conspicuous balance and meticulous colorful planning. The dark colors (especially black) are obvious and emphasize the bright colors. These paintings are very dynamic and full of inner movement.
The last group is an expression of pure abstract. On paper float geometric, stylized shapes engaged in a dialogue. It is a group of contrasts, light and shadow, broken, closed lines and round, delicate forms jointed together, pseudo-geometric forms which were once a circle or a triangle – a kind of geometric break-up of shapes and lines which play an important role in the composition. In this group, too, there is meticulous planning despite the general impression of casualness. The tension between planning and casualness, has its roots as well in the Dada period, ready-made, and the works of Arp – collages made by casual dropping of paper scraps.
There is something child-like and primal in all the paintings, resulting from the use of oil pastels – a medium which is less associated with fine art – and the way they are spread on the paper. Originality, freedom and freshness were considered by Janco as a Dada inspired ideal – the Dadaists exhibited in the Cabaret Voltaire children’s art as well as folklore art from Europe, Africa and Asia by naïve and intuitive artists.
“Dada appreciated and loved first and foremost the direct and powerful expression of the children. We were the organizers of the first exhibitions of this art in the Cabaret Voltaire”.7
The works created decades after Janco had left the original Dada group correspond to the avant-garde spirit of the beginning of the twentieth century, and although they were made at the period of New Horizons, they show the elements of forms he had brought from Europe.
From a manifesto written by Janco in Tel Aviv:
“We believed in a more primary art, purer, more abstract, nourished by sources of creativity through intuition. An art without formulas, empiric, dedicated to life, vital.”8
Janco demonstrates absolute creative freedom with all that concerns abstract work – his great love. “Abstract Art is the Art of Brotherhood” wrote Janco in 1983. And, in fact, Janco’s works have wings. They are free of all restrictions of form or intellect – borderless, without gravity, maintaining a dialogue in a parallel universe. Sometimes the work is almost poetic, lyrical, sometimes it is expressive and stormy. Abstract is for Janco a universal language which he uses frequently, parallel to the dialogue he had been maintaining in these years with local subject matter related to Israel in its first decade, and for which he uses a more figurative language.
There is a lot of gaiety in his work, the entire spectrum of colors, dynamism, humor and a fair amount of beauty, which was at the base of the New Horizon’s ideology, and which emanated naturally from Janco, the mature artist. All the works are abstract, but concrete elements emerge and make them fresh, dream-like and poetical, partly real, partly imaginary.
Does not paint the world
In order to multiply it
But because it pleases him”9
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Mens 150,000 flying saucer flight test suspected of illegal, civil aviation: without approval
Wen/our reporter Fu Biao
Four turbojet engines emit fiery flames, weighing 80 kilograms of flying saucer slowly lifted off, reached the height of 78 meters slowly fell, the whole process lasted for more than a minute...
Recently, Shu Mansheng, a 52-year-old aviation fan, has manufactured no more than 20 aircraft in an open space of Wuhan Donghu New Technology Development Zone for more than 10 years. However, the local civil aviation administration staff said that Shu Manshengs test flight has not been approved, so his behavior has been suspected of illegal.
Build UFO at a cost of 150,000 yuan
On the day of the test flight, Shu Mansheng drove with his own flying saucer to an open space at the intersection of Guanggu No. 4 and No. 5 in Wuhan Lake New Technology Development Zone.
It was raining and the ground was wet. My flying saucer had four turbojet engines installed, and when it flew, it would emit high-temperature flames, so if the ground was wet, it could protect the lawn at takeoff. Shu Mansheng said, The flying saucer I made this time has two modes of manned and remote control, but for safety, I decided to take it off by remote control.
With the sound of four turbojet engines, Shu Manshengs flying saucer rose slowly, flying in the air for more than a minute, and the highest flying saucer reached a height of 78 meters from the ground.
Shu Mansheng said that it took more than two months to make this flying saucer and spent about 150,000 yuan, the most expensive of which was four turbojet engines.
More than ten years of self-made aircraft
Shu Mansheng told Beijing Youth Daily that he was born in 1966 and worked as a farmer when he was young. Later, he learned how to repair electrical appliances, opened a repair shop and ran other businesses. In 2006 or so, I became interested in airplanes. Then I looked for books to see if I could make airplanes by myself.
In 2010, Shu Mansheng produced his first aircraft. Its a light fixed-wing aircraft with a cost of just over 2,000 yuan. He said. The first test flight, flying for more than a minute, was five or six meters from the ground. After taking off, Shu Mansheng was frightened. Then he loosened the throttle and hurt his calf when landing.
Since then, I have made more than 20 different types of aircraft, including fixed-wing and flying saucer-shaped, the most dangerous one, the aircraft flipped upside down after take-off, but I fastened my seat belt, so I was not injured.
Trial flight is suspected of breaking the law
Shu Mansheng admits that all his test flights over the years have not been reported to the relevant authorities. He said that the flying saucer test site is a test flight site for an unmanned aerial vehicle company.
Local civil aviation administration staff told Beiqing Daily that Shu Manshengs aircraft are relatively simple, once they fly to the sky, they may cause safety accidents. Shu Manshengs many flight tests, whether manned or not, have been suspected of violating the law.
This time, Shu Mansheng operates more like a large UAV. The staff of the Civil Aviation Administration of China said that the owner of the UAV must register in real name. If the registration sign is not implemented in real name and pasted in accordance with the relevant regulations, its behavior will be regarded as illegal violation of the law.
Source: Qiao Junyi_NBJ11279, Responsible Editor of Beiqing Net-Beijing Youth Daily
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The KNOWLEDGE BOOK
A Universal Call to Humanity
The Evolutionary Tableau
The Alpha Channel
The Next Steps
Buying the Book and Contacts
To assist Humanity on its Evolutionary Path the Celestial Authorities have created an "Evolutionary Tableau" (also known as "The Evolutionary Plan") whereby Individuals, and Humanity as a whole, are guided through different Levels of Consciousness.
Each Stage of the Tableau/Plan has a specific Program, and each Program has a specific Time Period for that Program to be completed. And, under the Tableau/Plan, progression to the next Program and Level of Consciousness can only be made once the current Program and Level of Consciousness has been attained. Because some members of Humanity may not attain the required Level of Consciousness within the allotted Time Period, each Program will remain available outside its allotted Time Period to allow them to attain the required Level of Consciousness before progressing to the next.
There are three Stages within the Evolutionary Tableau/Plan:
The Consciousness of Truth (see below) - from 6000 BC to the end of the 29th Century
The Consciousness of Light - from the beginning of the 30th Century to the end of the 38th Century (9 centuries)
The Consciousness of Nothingness - Allness - Nothingness - from the 39th Century onwards
The First Stage of the Evolutionay Tableau/Plan: The Consciousness of Truth
The first Stage in the Evolutionary Tableau/Plan is programmed for Humanity to attain the Consciousness of Truth, and within this Stage a Divine Plan has been established. This Divine Plan, which began at approximately 6000 BC and will be completed at the end of the 29th Century, consists of two Programs:
The Program to attain Religious Fulfilment - from approx 6000 BC to the end of the 20th Century (a total of 62 Centuries)
The Program to attain Universal Consciousness and the Unification of Humanity - from the beginning of the 21st Century to the end of the 29th Century (a total of 9 Centuries)
A Transition Period of 3 centuries (the 20th, 21st and 22nd Centuries) is programmed for Humanity to transition from the first to the second Program of the Divine Plan, and during this period (as more and more attain Religious Fulfilment) religions will begin to disappear as a natural part of the Plan . Then, after the completion of the Transition Period, a 7 century-long Golden Age will begin, lasting from the beginning of the 23rd Century to the end of the 29th Century, during which there will be no wars.
At the end of the 29th Century the first Stage of the Evolutionary Tableau/Plan and the Divine Plan will cease, and the second Stage of the Evolutionary Tableau/Plan (The Consciousness of Light) will begin.
The Divine Plan (for Humanity to attain the Consciousness of Truth) can be shown as follows (not to scale):
Next: The Divine Plan and the Alpha Channel
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Midwestern United States
Dubuque is a city of middle America, surrounded by farmland, with a central business district beside the Mississippi River. And in recent decades, it has received the brunt of the brutal economic changes brought by automation and ICT productivity gains. In the 80s, its largest employer laid off half of its workforce in Dubuque. This, together with the decline of family farming, drove unemployment to 23%, the highest in the nation, in succeeding years.
Sustainable Dubuque
In response, the Mayor and City Council led a broad-based effort to forge a new vision for the city’s future. The result was Sustainable Dubuque, a commitment to create a prosperous, livable and equitable community. The vision spawned multiple efforts. One is a set of smart city projects covering water use, electricity use and public transit. Working with IBM, the city installed sensors, connectivity and software to analyze performance and provide data to users. Starting with 300 homes, the smart water system is now available citywide and is credited with a 7% reduction in water use and an eightfold gain in the detection and fixing of leaks. It has also reduced water treatment costs by $65,000 and increased water revenues by nearly $185,000. The smart travel program tracks 1,500 riders and uses the data to set policies that have produced a 28% increase in ridership over 4 years.
Putting Dubuque to Work
Dubuque Works is a workforce program that unites government, business and educators to enhance the city’s human capital, conduct joint research to develop evidence-based recommendations, and provide outreach to guide area students from school to work. Over the past four years, the program has created more than 5,000 jobs and Dubuque, with just 3% of the state’s population, has been responsible for 10% of the state’s job growth. These different initiatives have attracted more than $37 million in Federal and state grants, which the city has used to stimulate additional workforce development and sustainability efforts. Dubuque’s revival is a work in progress but its early successes create confidence in a more prosperous, equitable and sustainable future.
Website: www.cityofdubuque.org
Smart21 2015
See other pages related to Community Smart21
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The Thais That Bind Us: 10 Years After TAFTA
Eleanor Walsh
Ten years after the introduction of a free trade agreement, Thai-Australia relations are at an interesting new juncture.
1 January 2015 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Thailand-Australian Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). Over this time the relationship between the two countries has grown in all areas: trade, the movement of people, education and defence cooperation.
TAFTA’s immediate impact on trade was significant; tariff reductions on thousands of items enabled Australian exports to Thailand to double within 18 months. In the period 2004 to 2010 trade between Australia and Thailand increased 20% annually, while Australia’s total trade with the rest of the world grew by only 12%. Trade between the two nations is now worth over $19 billion and Thailand represents Australia’s eighth-largest trading partner (in terms of goods and services) and is its second-largest in ASEAN.
TAFTA also encouraged foreign direct investment (FDI) in a variety of sectors in the Australian market especially energy, food and agribusiness. In 2006 Thai investment stock was valued at $338 million. However, this jumped to $7.3 billion in 2012. According to Austrade, the level of Thailand’s FDI has increased more than any other of Australia’s 20 largest investors.
The relationship is not necessarily a balanced one. The level of Thai FDI in Australia is more five times that of Australian investment in Thailand. Australian investments in Thailand are characterised by relatively small projects in the manufacturing and professional services sectors while it is large energy and agricultural ventures that dominate Thai activities in Australia. These include coal mines and wind farms in NSW and a sugar plant in Queensland. Australian firms currently face a series of challenges when wishing to do business in Thailand; these include a lack of skilled workers, as well as infrastructure and logistics costs. The asymmetry continues in regards to merchandise trade and trade in services; the value of imports from Thailand is approximately three times that of Australian exports.
The Thai-Australian relationship is not only characterised by the movement of goods and services, but also of people. Currently more than 900 000 Australians visit Thailand every year and, according to the latest census figures, over 45 000 people of Thai heritage call Australia home. Sydney plays host to the 2nd largest Thai expatriate community in the world after Los Angeles.
Australia continues to be a leading destination for Thai students with over 20 000 students studying here in 2013. The New Colombo Plan and the Australia-Thailand Young University Researchers’ Exchange Programme have created opportunities for young Australians to study in Thailand. The latter sent the first of 10 Australian researchers to Thailand this year and represents a new level of cooperation between the Office of the Higher Education Commission in Bangkok, Australia’s Department of Education and an Australian organisation, the Innovative Research Universities Group. Funded by the Australian government, the New Colombo Plan aims to support Australian undergraduates studying at universities throughout the Indo-Pacific region
Australia is no longer a provider of development assistance to Thailand as, in November 2003, Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced that his government would no longer be accepting foreign aid from 2004 onwards. Funding and grants are still available for human rights NGOs and scholarship programs.
Dating from 1945, defence represents another area of bilateral cooperation. Originally the focus was on the repatriation of POWs and the recovery and re-burial of Australian nationals who had perished on the Siam-Burma Railway. However, since then the relationship has developed between Thai and Australian soldiers serving together in UN missions from South Korea to East Timor.
Annual talks between defence policy makers have been running since 1990 with the express purpose of promoting cooperation on regional security matters. More recently, in August 2014, the Royal Thai Air Force joined the RAAF’s Exercise PITCH BLACK held in the Northern Territory.
The ties that bind these two nations are numerous and diverse but it would appear that Australia is not benefitting as much as it could from the relationship. While real challenges continue to obstruct greater levels of investment (such as the aforementioned logistics and workforce issues), according to DFAT and Austrade, some of the barriers exist largely in people’s imaginations. These include views that Thailand is a poor and underdeveloped country, politically unstable, and suffers from high levels of corruption.
Despite its recent political turmoil, Thailand was labeled one of Bloomberg’s best emerging markets in 2014 and, in terms of ease of doing business, Thailand currently outperforms all of its ASEAN neighbours, with the exception of Singapore and Malaysia. Furthermore, Austrade has stated that all major parties have a pro-business and pro-market stance.
While Thailand’s GDP is undoubtedly lower than Australia’s, its middle class now numbers 12 million, similar to Malaysia and over 4.5 times that of Indonesia. The appetite for high quality manufactured goods is strong and growing every year. To ignore their spending power would therefore be unwise. Austrade does recognise that corruption, especially in the state sector, is an issue but it is interesting to note that Austrade believes that the massive private sector is largely corruption free. Indeed, David Robinett, senior private sector development specialist at the World Bank has stated, “Thailand is a clear leader in corporate governance among Asian economies and emerging economies”.
The challenge for Australian businesses is to build on the foundations that TAFTA has laid and to take greater advantage of the opportunities that it presents in order to make the next decade a more prosperous one.
Eleanor Walsh is a research intern at the AIIA National Office. She can be reached at elewalsh@hotmail.com. This article can be republished with attribution under a Creative Commons Licence.
Modi-US Relations: On-Track but Frosty
By Lindsay Hughes
Given the degree of antipathy that the current US administration has demonstrated towards Narendra Modi and the frostiness of the Modi-Powell meeting earlier […]
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By Keiran Hardy
Recent cyberattacks and hacks in America and Ukraine have exposed the vulnerability of some of the world’s most sophisticated cybersecurity networks. But what […]
Next week sees the publication of the OECD’s half-yearly global economic forecasts; we will bring them to you here, with analysis. Separate reports […]
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Andrew Considine
Contract To
Friendly, Scottish Cup, Scottish League Cup, Scottish Premiership, UEFA Europa League
2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21
45tot
Shot Accuracy
Pass Accuracy
Penalty Kick Accuracy
Player Full Statistics
Player Biography
Player Related News
Andrew Considine (born 1 April 1987) is a Scottish footballer who currently plays as a Defender for Scottish Premiership club Aberdeen. He can play as a centre-back or left-back.
He made his senior debut in 2004 and has played in more than 400 matches for his only club, ranking among the players with most appearances in Aberdeen’s history.
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Student sex blog causes stir
World / 19 October 2012, 2:24pm /
Singapore -
The National University of Singapore said Friday that it will question a Malaysian law student over a sexually explicit blog that has caused a scandal in both countries.
Alvin Tan, 24, who is on a scholarship funded by the Singapore government, and his Malaysian girlfriend Vivian Lee, 23, have temporarily taken down the blog, called “Sumptuous Erotica”, due to family pressures.
Tan and his girlfriend became overnight sensations after their blog - which had photographs and videos of their trysts as well as close-up shots of their genitals - was widely publicised in Singapore and Malaysia.
A spokesman for the university said “disciplinary proceedings” had been initiated against Tan.
“The student concerned has been served a notice of the Board of Discipline (BOD) inquiry. He has also informed the university that he will attend the BOD hearing,” the spokesman told AFP by email.
“The University does not condone posting of offensive content online by any member of the NUS community.”
Singapore's Straits Times newspaper quoted Tan as saying the inquiry will be held on October 31.
Singapore's Education Ministry, which administers scholarships, said in a statement emailed to AFP that it “takes a serious view of the conduct of the student concerned”, adding that “the student's actions are offensive”.
Tan and Lee remain unrepentant.
“If there is one thing that I really like about myself, it is my body,” Tan was quoted by the Straits Times as saying.
In an interview with Yahoo! News Singapore, Lee said she had no regrets about setting up the blog.
“We didn't do it for the attention but for personal enjoyment,” she said.
“I'm living my life as it is.” - Sapa-AFP
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F.lli Della Marca S.r.l. - V.le Arcangelo Ghisleri 40/42 00176 Roma (Italia)
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Latest update: April 17, 2019
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Romania Virtual Jewish History Tour
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Table of Contents: Romania
The territory of present-day Romania was known as Dacia in antiquity and Jewish tombstones dating from early times have been found there. The Jews may have come as merchants or in other capacities with the Roman legions that garrisoned the country from 101 C.E. and early missionary activity in Dacia may have been due to the existence of Jewish groups there. Today, Romania boasts a Jewish population of 9,500.
Learn More - Cities of Romania:
Arad | Banat | Bistrita | Braşov | Bucharest | Carei | Constanta | Darabani | Fagaras | Galati | Marghita | Oradea | Stefanesti | Vaslui
Communal Institutions
Independent Romania
The Struggle for Naturalization
Increasing Anti-Semitism
Jewish Political Life
Jewish Social Structure
Jewish Cultural Life
Holocaust Period
Community During World War II
Jewish Resistance
Contemporary Period - 1960's
1990's - Present
The first real major wave of Jewish immigrants spread through Walachia (a Romanian principality founded around 1290) after they had been expelled from Hungary in 1367. In the 16th century some refugees from the Spanish expulsion came to Walachia from the Balkan Peninsula. A few served as physicians and even diplomats at the court of the sovereigns of Walachia. Since it was on the trade routes between Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire many Jewish merchants traveled through Moldavia, the second Romanian principality (in the northeast), founded in the middle of the 14th century. Some settled there and were favorably received by the rulers of this underpopulated principality.
At the beginning of the 16th century there were Jewish communities in several Moldavian towns, such as Jassy ( Iasi), Botosani, Suceava, and Siret. More intensive waves of Jewish immigration resulted from the Chmielnicki massacres (1648–49). From the beginning of the 18th century, the Moldavian rulers granted special charters to attract Jews. While still in Poland they were told about the advantages offered (exemption from taxes, ground for prayer houses, ritual baths, and cemeteries). They were invited either to reestablish war-ravaged towns (1761, Suceava) or to enlarge others (1796, Focsani). The newcomers were encouraged by the landowners to found commercial centers, the so-called burgs. Among the privileges offered was the right to be represented on the local council. In some cases they undertook to attract other Jews from over the borders. When two counties of Moldavia were annexed by their neighbors (Bukovina by Austria in 1775 and Bessarabia by Russia in 1812), the Jews from these countries preferred to move to Romanian Moldavia, where they were not harassed by the authorities and had both family and business connections. Jewish merchants exported leather, cattle, and corn. Many of the Jews were craftsmen, such as furriers, tailors, boot makers, tinsmiths, and watchmakers.
From an early date, one of the main components of anti-Jewish hatred in Romania was commercial competition. In 1579, the sovereign of Moldavia, Petru Schiopul (Peter the Lame), ordered the banishment of the Jews on the grounds that they were ruining the merchants. In the Danube harbors, it was the Greek and Bulgarian merchants who incited riots against the Jews, especially during Easter. Anti-Jewish excesses that occurred in the neighboring countries often extended to Romania. In 1652 and 1653, Cossacks invaded Romania, murdering a great number of Jews in Jassy.
Greek Orthodox Christianity also preached intolerance toward Jews and shaped the first codes of law: the Church laws of Moldavia and Walachia in 1640. Both proclaimed the Jews as heretics and forbade all relations with them. With the exception of physicians, Jews were not accepted as witnesses in trials. In the codes of 1746 and 1780, the Jews are scarcely mentioned. On the other hand, the first books of anti-Jewish incitement of a religious character appeared around this time: the Golden Order (Jassy, 1771) and A Challenge to Jews (Jassy, 1803).
In 1719, a hakham bashi, Bezalel Cohen, was first appointed for Walachia and Moldavia by the suzerain, the sultan. He resided in Jassy and he had a representative for Walachia in Bucharest. The hakham bashi's function was hereditary and included the right of collecting taxes on religious ceremonies and contributions from every head of a family — comprising 30,000 taxpayers altogether in the two principalities in 1803 — as well as conferring exemption from taxes and tolls. Yet his prestige was slight, and learned rabbis were considered by the Jews as their real spiritual leaders.
A rendering of the Oradea synagoue
in Romania, c. 1900.
The growing Russian and Galician element in the Romanian Jewish population at the beginning of the 19th century opposed the hakham bashi, since such an institution was unknown to them and many of them were followers of Hasidism and led by zaddikim. As they were foreign subjects they asked their consuls to intercede and, in 1819, the prince of Moldavia decided that the hakham bashi should have jurisdiction only over "native" Jews. Because of strife among the diverse groups of Jews and their complaints to the authorities, the hakham bashi system was abolished in 1834.
The Jews also had a guild, one of 32 guilds set up according to nationality or profession, which took care of tax collection proportionately to the number of persons organized in it. For the Jews, the guild was really the legal body of the community. The collective tax was paid from the tax on kosher meat, the expenses of the institutions (talmud torah, hekdesh, cemetery) were covered by the remainder.
The center of the guild was in Jassy, and its head was named staroste ("senior"; Heb. rosh medinah). In Bucharest, this function was carried out by the representative of the hakham bashi. When the hakham bashi system was abolished (1834), the Jews' Guild disappeared as well; the result was the disintegration of the Jewish communities. The collective tax, formerly fixed by the guild, was now imposed by the government. The functions of the community devolved on the various prayer houses and the artisans' guilds and sometimes on the hevra kaddisha or the Jewish hospital (in Jassy).
Trouble for the Jews began in 1821, with the first stirrings of Romanian independence and unity. In the course of the rebellion against the Turks, Greek volunteers crossed Moldavia on their way to the Danube, plundering and slaying Jews as they went (in Jassy, Herta, (now Gertsa), Odobesti, Vaslui, Roman). Between 1819 and 1834, Moldavia and Walachia were occupied by Russia, which gave them a unifying constitution (the so-called Organic Law). From 1835 to 1856, the two principalities were protectorates of Russia, through whose influence anti-Semitism increased. From then on the prevailing attitude was that the Jews exploited the Christian population in order to enrich themselves and so their immigration must be stopped. On the Russian model, Jews were forbidden to settle in villages, to lease lands, and to establish factories in towns. Citizenship was denied to Jews. The corrupt Romanian administrators used this legislation to add to their income by persecuting the Jews. The completions of the Organic Law promulgated in 1839 and 1843 included special measures directed against the Jews. Its new provisions conferred on the authorities the right to determine which Jews were useful to the country, the others being declared vagrants and expelled.
Albaiulas Synagogue, built 1822
During the 1821 revolt against the Ottoman-appointed rulers, and the 1848 revolt against Russia, the revolutionaries appealed for the participation of the Jews and proclaimed their civic equality. Some Jews took part in the 1848 revolt, which was put down by the Russians. The peace treaty of Paris (1856), which concluded the Crimean War and granted the principalities a certain autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty, proclaimed inter alia that in the two Danubian principalities all the inhabitants, irrespective of religion, should enjoy religious and civil liberties (the right to own property and to trade) and might occupy political posts. Only those who had foreign citizenship were excluded from political rights. The leaders of the Moldavian and Walachian Jews addressed themselves both to the Romanian authorities and to the great powers, asking for the abolition of the discrimination against them. However, the opposition of Russia and of the Romanian political leaders hindered this. The two principalities united in 1859; Alexandru Ioan Cuza, who was a member of the 1848 revolutionaries' group and not anti-Semitic, became their sovereign. The number of Jews was then 130,000 (3% of the total population). In 1864, native Jews were granted suffrage in the local councils (“little naturalization”), but Jews who were foreign subjects still could not acquire landed property. Political rights were granted to non-Christians but only parliament could vote on the naturalization of individual Jews—but not a single Jew was naturalized.
In 1866, Alexandru Ioan Cuza was ousted by anti-liberal forces. A new sovereign, Carol of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, was elected and a new constitution adopted. Under the pressure of demonstrations organized by the police (during which the Choir Temple in Bucharest was demolished and the Jewish quarter plundered), the seventh article of the constitution, restricting citizenship to the Christian population, was adopted. Even the visit to Bucharest of Adolphe Cremieux, president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, who delivered a speech in the Romanian parliament, had no effect.
In the spring of 1867, the minister of interior, Ion Bratianu, started to expel Jews from the villages and banish noncitizens from the country. That summer, Sir Moses Montefiore arrived in Bucharest and demanded that Prince Carol put a stop to the persecutions. Despite pledges to do so, the discrimination continued. Hundreds of families, harassed by humiliating regulations (e.g., a prohibition on building sukkot), were forced to leave the villages. Local officials regarded such persecution as an effective method of extorting bribes. Neither the repeated interventions of Great Britain and France, nor the condemnatory resolutions in the parliaments of Holland and Germany had any effect. The Romanian government reiterated that the Jewish problem was an internal one, and the great powers limited themselves to protests.
At the Congress of Berlin (1878), which finalized Romanian independence, the great powers made the grant of civil rights to the Jews a condition of that independence in spite of opposition by the Romanian and Russian delegates. The Romanian representatives threatened the delegates of the Jewish world organizations, as well as the representatives of the Jews of Romania, by hinting at a worsening of their situation. Indeed, after the Congress of Berlin, other anti-Semitic measures were introduced, and there was incitement in the press and public demonstrations organized by the authorities on the Russian model to prove to the great powers that the people were against Jewish emancipation. Their aim was also to create an anti-Semitic atmosphere on the eve of the session of parliament that was to decide on the modification of the article in the 1866 constitution concerning Jewish naturalization. Prince Carol, opening parliament, declared that the Jews had a harmful influence on economic life and especially on the peasants. After stormy debates, parliament modified the article of the constitution which made citizenship conditional on Christianity, but stated that the naturalization of Jews would be carried out individually by vote of both chambers of parliament. During the following 38 years 2,000 Jews in all were naturalized by this oppressive procedure; of those, 883 were voted in en bloc, having taken part in the 1877 war against Turkey.
This caused the great powers to refuse for a time to recognize independent Romania. However, they finally followed the example of Germany, which took the first step after having received pecuniary compensation from the Romanian government through the redemption of railway shares belonging to Silesian Junkers and members of the German imperial court—at six times their quoted value.
The situation of the Jews continued to grow worse. Jews had been considered Romanian subjects, but now they were declared to be foreigners. The Romanian government persuaded Austria and Germany to withdraw their citizenship from Jews living in Romania. The Jews were forbidden to be lawyers, teachers, chemists, stockbrokers, or to sell commodities that were a government monopoly (tobacco, salt, alcohol). They were not accepted as railway officials, in state hospitals, or as officers. Jewish pupils were later expelled from the public schools (1893). Meanwhile political intimidation continued. In 1885, some of the Jewish leaders and journalists who had participated in the struggle for emancipation, among them Moses Gaster and Elias Schwarzfeld, were expelled from Romania. Both major political parties in Romania — the Liberals and the Conservatives — were anti-Semitic, with only slight differences. In 1910, the first specifically anti-Semitic party, the National Democratic Party, was founded under the leadership of the university professors A. C. Cuza and Nicolae Iorga.
The first general Jewish representative body, after the dissolution of the Jews' Guild and the internal strife in the communities, was the Brotherhood of Zion society, the forerunner of B'nai B'rith, created in 1872 under the influence of Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, the first American diplomat in Romania. He thus succeeded in shaping a cadre of leaders for the Jewish institutions, but did not see any solution for the masses but emigration. For that purpose he initiated a conference of world Jewish organizations that convened in Brussels (Oct. 29–30, 1872). Under the influence of assimilationist circles, emigration — considered to be unpatriotic — was rejected as a solution of the Jewish problem. The conference suggested to the Jews of Romania that they should fight to acquire political equality. After some years, however, a mass movement started for emigration to Eretz Israel.
The Great Synagogue of Targu-Mures
built in 1899.
The political organization founded in 1890, under the name The General Association of Native Israelites, tended to assimilation and strident patriotism, claiming citizenship only for those Jews who had served in the army. Under pressure by a group of Jewish socialists it extended its demands, claiming political rights for all Jews born in the country. In 1897, anti-Semitic students attacked members of the congress of the association and caused riots in Bucharest. The association ceased its activity and an attempt at reorganization in 1903 failed. Under the pressure of increasing persecution accompanied by an internal economic crisis, a mass emigration of Jews began in 1900; they traveled on foot as far as Hamburg and, from there, went to the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
Up to World War I, about 70,000 Jews left Romania. From 266,652 (4.5% of the total population) in 1899, the Jewish population declined to 239,967 (3.3%) in 1912. The 1907 revolt of the peasants, who at first vented their wrath on the Jews, also contributed to this tendency to emigrate. Meanwhile, the persecution of the Jews increased. Their expulsion from the villages assumed such proportions that in some counties of Moldavia (Dorohoi, Jassy, Bacau), none remained except veterans of the 1877 war.
In 1910, the Union of Native Jews (U.E.P.) was founded to combat anti-Jewish measures and to seek emancipation. Its first head was Adolphe Stern, former secretary of B. F. Peixotto. The U.E.P. operated by intercession with politicians, through mass petitions to parliament, and by printed propaganda against anti-Semitism. In a single case it was successful through direct intercession with King Carol I, who held up the passage of a bill discriminating against Jewish craftsmen (1912).
At the end of the 19th century, the organization of Jewish communities began, together with the creation of a Jewish school system prompted by the expulsion of Jews from the public schools (1893). The certificates of Jewish schools were not recognized, and their pupils had to pass state examinations, paying a fee (which was a charge on community budgets as they covered this fee for the poor) until 1925, when the certificates of Jewish schools were recognized if the language of tuition was Romanian. All Jewish schools were maintained by the communities; in Bessarabia, Tarbut maintained Hebrew schools. The ministry of education contributed only a token subvention.
The impoverishment of the Jewish population also created a need for social assistance that could not be provided by the various existing associations. To achieve the legalization of the communities, several congresses of their representatives were organized (April 1896 in Galati, 1902 in Jassy, and 1905 in Focsani), but they could not agree on the proper nature of a community. Some claimed that it should have an exclusively religious character; others wanted a lay organization dealing only with social welfare, hospitals, and schools. The different Jewish institutions (synagogues, religious associations, hospitals) endeavored to preserve their autonomy. There was a struggle for the tax on meat, too, each demanding this income for itself.
Simultaneously, groups of assimilationist students and intellectuals launched a drive against the community, which they defined as an isolationist instrument. They were joined by anti-Semites who called the community a “state within a state,” a Jewish conspiracy aiming to establish supremacy over the Romanians. Some proposed putting the communities under the Ministry of the Interior. An attempt in 1897 to introduce into parliament a bill on the Jewish communities, its purpose being defined by its sponsor as “to defend the Jewish population against its ignorant religious fanatics,” failed because of the opposition of the liberal government of the day. Later, the principle of autonomy prevailed at Jewish community congresses, owing to the influence of the Zionists, especially Rabbis J. [Jacob] Nacht and J. Niemirover.
Following World War I, Romania enlarged her territory with the provinces of Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transylvania. In each of these the Jews were already citizens, either of long standing like those who had lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or more recent such as those from Bessarabia who achieved equality only in 1917. Indeed, the naturalization of the Jews of Romania was under way in accordance with the separate peace treaty concluded with Germany in the spring of 1918.
After the defeat of Germany, Prime Minister Ionel Bratianu realized that the naturalization of the Jews would be brought up again at the peace conference, so he tried to resolve the problem by issuing a decree of naturalization on December 28, 1918, proclaiming individual naturalization on the lines adopted after the Congress of Berlin. The decision had to be made by the law courts instead of parliament, on the basis of certain certificates that were very difficult to obtain. Though threatened by the government, the Jewish leaders rejected the law and Jews refrained from applying to the court. The Jews demanded that citizenship be granted en bloc after a declaration by every candidate at his municipality that he was born in the country and held no foreign citizenship.
Although the Romanian government continued to assert that the Jewish problem was an internal one, of national sovereignty, when the delegation led by Ionel Bratianu appeared at the peace conference in (May 1919), Georges Clemenceau reminded him that after the Congress of Berlin, Romania had not implemented the provisions concerning the political rights of the Jews. This time the great powers decided to include guarantees in the peace treaty. A Jewish delegation from Romania, composed of U.E.P. and Zionist representatives, arrived in . They joined the Jewish delegations participating in the peace conference and lobbied to have the peace treaty specify the laws Romania should adopt concerning naturalization.
To prevent the conference’s imposition of naturalization of Jews, Ionel Bratianu wired to Bucharest the text of a law (promulgated as a decree on May 22, 1919), according to which citizenship could now be obtained by a declaration of intent in writing to the law court, the latter being obliged to make out a certificate of confirmation that conferred the exercise of political rights. Those who did not possess foreign citizenship, those who satisfied the requirements of the enlistment law, and those who had served in the war were declared citizens, together with their families.
The peace conference did obligate Romania to legislate the political emancipation of the Jews. Bratianu resigned in protest and, only after an ultimatum sent by the peace conference, did the new Romanian government led by Alexandru Vaida-Voevod sign the peace treaty.
In Bukovina , 40,000 Jews were threatened with remaining stateless, on the pretext of their being refugees who had only recently entered the country. A professor of the faculty of law at Jassy published a study in 1921 asserting that this naturalization was anti-constitutional. In 1923, there began a new struggle for the enactment of naturalization in the new constitution. Adolphe Stern, the president of the U.E.P., was elected as a deputy to parliament and had to fight the law proposed by the Bratianu government which in effect canceled most of the naturalizations already acquired. After hard bargaining, not without renewed threats on the part of the government, the naturalization of the Jews was introduced into the constitution on March 29, 1923 , thus also confirming the naturalization of those from the newly annexed territories who would otherwise have been threatened with expulsion. Still, there was a great difference between the laws and the way in which they were implemented. In a regulation published two months after the adoption of the constitution, many procedural restrictions on the Jews living in the new provinces were introduced. In practice, the civil service, the magistracy, university chairs, and officers' corps remained closed to Jews.
Growing social and political tensions in Romania in the 1920s and '30s led to a constant increase in anti-Semitism and in the violence that accompanied it. Anti-Semitic excesses and demonstrations expressed both popular and student anti-Semitism and cruelty; they also served to divert social unrest to the Jews and show Western public opinion that intervention on their behalf was bound to miscarry.
In December 1922, Christian students at the four universities proclaimed numerus clausus as their program; riots followed at the universities and against the Jewish population. As was later revealed in parliament, the student movements were organized and financed by the Ministry of the Interior. The leader of the student movements was Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the secretary of the League of National Christian Defense which was headed by A. C. Cuza. The students formed terrorist groups on the Fascist and Nazi models and committed several murders. In 1926, the Jewish student Falic was murdered at Chernovtsy. The assassin was acquitted. In 1927, Codreanu broke away from A. C. Cuza and founded the Archangel Michael League, which, in 1929, became the Iron Guard, a paramilitary organization with an extreme anti-Semitic program.
On December 9, 1927, the students of Codreanu's League carried out a pogrom in Oradea Mare ( Transylvania), where they were holding a congress, for which they received a subsidy from the ministry of the interior: they were conveyed there in special trains put at their disposal free of charge by the government. Five synagogues were wrecked and the Torah scrolls burned in the public squares. After that the riots spread all over the country: in Cluj eight prayer houses were plundered, and on their way home the participants in the congress continued their excesses against the Jews in the cities of Huedin, Targu-Ocna, and Jassy.
At the end of 1933, the liberal prime minister Duca, one of the opponents of King Carol's dictatorial tendencies, dissolved the Iron Guard and, after three weeks, was assassinated by its men at the king's instigation. The guard was reformed under the slogan, "Everything for the Country." Codreanu's ties with the Nazis in Germany dated from that time. Carol II later aided other political bodies with an anti-Semitic program in an attempt to curb the Iron Guard. From 1935, Vaida-Voevod led the Romanian Front, and accused the Jews in his speeches of the blood libel, parasitism, defrauding the country, and the Judaization of the press and national literature.
After Hitler came to power in Germany (1933), the large Romanian parties also adopted anti-Semitic programs. In 1935, the National Peasants' Party (which united with Cuza's party to form the National Christian Party) announced that its program included “the Romanization of the staff of firms and the protection of national labor through preference for [our] ethnic element” —that is, the removal of Jews from private firms.
Gheorghe Bratianu, leading a dissident liberal party, demanded “nationalization of the cities, proportional representation in public and private posts, in schools and universities, and revocation of Jewish citizenship.”
In July 1934, the “Law for Employment of Romanian Workers in [Private] Firms” was enacted, and established a numerus clausus. The Ministry of Industry and Trade sent all firms special questionnaires which included a clause on "ethnic origin." In 1935, the board of the Christian Lawyers' Association, founded that year by members of the bar from Ilfov ( Bucharest), gave an impetus to anti-Semitic professional associations. The movement spread all over the country. Its program was the numerus nullus, i.e., revoking the licenses of Jewish lawyers who were already members of the bar and not accepting new registrations.
At the universities, students of the Iron Guard forcibly prevented their Jewish colleagues from attending lectures. The academic authorities supported the numerus clausus program, introducing entrance examinations in 1935–36, which led to a decline in the number of Jewish students.
In other professional corporations, no Jews were elected to the board; they were prevented by force from participating in the elections. The great Romanian banks began to reject requests for credit from Jewish banks as well as from Jewish industrial and commercial firms, and the Jewish enterprises were burdened by heavy taxes, imposed with the aim of ruining them. Jewish firms were not granted import quotas for raw materials and goods. Meanwhile Germany financed a series of publications and newspapers aimed at fastening an alliance between the two countries and removing Jews from all branches of the professions and the economy. Many a Jewish merchant and industrialist was compelled to sell his firm at a loss when it became unprofitable under these oppressive measures.
In 1919, the Union of Romanian Jews, led by W. Filderman, recommended that the Jews vote for those Romanian parties that would be favorable to them. As none of the parties formulated an attitude toward the Jewish problem, the Union decided that the Jews should withhold their votes. In the 1920 elections, the Union joined the Zionists to form a list that conducted its election campaign under the symbol of the menorah. As the elections were rigged, not a single candidate succeeded in entering parliament. The Union managed to send Adolphe Stern to parliament in 1922 through joining with the Peasants' Party. From 1923, the Zionists pressed for a policy of a national minority status for the Jews. Their proposal was not accepted by the Union.
A 1925 picture of the synagogue of Oradea, Romania.
In 1926, the first National Jewish deputies and senators were elected from Bukovina, Transylvania, and Bessarabia. As a consequence of these successes the National Jewish Club, in which representatives of the Zionist parties also participated, was founded in Bucharest. Such clubs were established in all the cities of the Old Kingdom.
In 1928, four National Jewish deputies were returned to parliament (two from Transylvania, one from Bukovina, and one from Bessarabia). They formed a Jewish parliamentary club. In 1930, the Jewish Party (Partidul Evreesc) was established in the Old Kingdom and, on May 4, 1931, it held its general congress. Adolphe Stern joined this party. In the parliamentary elections a month later, the Jewish Party gained five seats and, in the 1932 elections, it again obtained five. The situation of the Jewish parliamentarians was far from easy, because they were not only interrupted during their speeches but were often physically attacked by the deputies of the anti-Semitic parties. After 1933, there were no more Jewish members of parliament, except for J. Niemirover, who in his capacity of chief rabbi was officially a senator.
The undefined legal status of the Jewish communities in Romania tempted local authorities to meddle more and more in their affairs. A rabbi from Bucharest, Hayyim Schor, proclaimed himself chief rabbi. He demanded recognition of a separate Orthodox community everywhere in Romania, and was willing to be satisfied with the status of a private association for the Jewish community, thus abandoning the demand for its recognition as a public body. The Union and the Zionists opposed him. On May 19, 1921, the congress of Jews from the Old Kingdom met in Bucharest and elected J. Niemirover as chief rabbi.
In 1924, there were 796,056 Jews in enlarged Romania (5% of the total population): 230,000 in the Old Kingdom, 238,000 in Bessarabia, 128,056 in Bukovina, and 200,000 in Transylvania. In 1930 their number was 756,930 (4.2% of the total population): 263,192 in the Old Kingdom, 206,958 in Bessarabia, 92,988 in Bukovina, and 193,000 in Transylvania.
The Jewish population of Old Romania was for the most part an urban one. According to the 1899 census, 79.73% of the Jews lived in cities, forming 32.10% of the whole urban population of the country. Only 20.27% lived in villages, forming 1.1% of the whole rural population. This phenomenon was a result of the ban on Jews dwelling in a rural area.
In the Moldavia province, where the Jews were most heavily concentrated, they formed a majority in several towns. In Falticeni they were 57% of the total population; in Dorohoi, 53.6%; in Botosani, 51.8%; in Jassy, 50.8%. In several smaller towns of that region their proportion was greater: in Gertsa, 66.2%; in Mihaileni, 65.6%; in Harlau, 59.6%; in Panciu, 52.4%.
The Romanian population was 84.06% farmers, the Jews constituting the middle class. According to 1904 statistics, 21.1% of the total number of merchants were Jews, but in some cities of Moldavia they were a definite majority, such as in Jassy, 75.3%; Botosani, 75.2%; Dorohoi, 72.9%; Tecuci, 65.9%, etc. Jews represented 20.07% of all artisans, and in several branches they were a majority: 81.3% of engravers, 76% of tinsmiths; 75.9% of watchmakers; 74.6% of bookbinders; 64.9% of hatmakers and 64.3% of upholsterers.
Industry was not advanced in Romania before World War I. There were 625 industrial firms altogether, 19.5% of them owned by Jews. Jews were 5.3% of the officials and workers in these industrial enterprises. In several branches of industry there were Jewish factory owners: 52.8% of the glass industry; 32.4% of the wood and furniture industry; 32.4% of the clothing industry; 26.5% of the textile industry. Of the liberal professions only medicine was permitted to Jews. They constituted 38% of the total number of doctors. The occupational distribution of the Jews was as follows; agriculture, 2.5%; industry and crafts, 42.5%; trade and banking, 37.9%; liberal professions, 3.2%; various occupations, 13.7%.
There are no detailed statistics of the period between the two world wars. The provinces of Bessarabia, Transylvania, and Bukovina were annexed to Old Romania, increasing the Jewish population threefold. In every province their occupational structure was different as the result of historical development. In the two annexed provinces, Transylvania and Bukovina, the Jews had enjoyed civil rights from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and were also represented in the liberal professions. On the other hand, their situation in Bessarabia in czarist times was worse than in Old Romania—a fact which also influenced their occupational structure. The few known figures refer to Greater Romania, with all the annexed territories.
The only census taken in Bessarabia was in 1930 and, according to those figures, the occupational distribution of the Jewish population was as follows: industry and crafts, 24.8%; trade and banking, 51.5%; liberal professions, 2.9%; miscellaneous, 8.2%. It should be noted that Jewish bankers (such as the bank of "Marmorosh-Blank") invested money in the developing industry of Greater Romania. Some industrial enterprises, comprising several factories such as the sugar, metal, and textile works were owned by Jews. In the late 1930s, under the influence of the spread of the Nazi movement to Romania, the whole occupational structure of the Jews collapsed because of persecution on the economic level, which preceded political persecution and murder.
Since most Romanian Jews were of Polish or Russian extraction, their religious and cultural traditions were similar to those of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Their rabbis and teachers, as well as their religious trends, came from there. Hasidism was particularly widespread in the Moldavia province, which borders on Galicia and Russia, and where Hassidic centers were established at the "courts" of the zaddikim of the Ruzhin dynasty in the towns of Stefanesti, Buhusi, Adjud, and Focsani.
The spoken language of the Jewish population was Yiddish; Romanian became more widely used among them only in the second half of the 19th century, at the time when the first Romanian universities were established (Jassy in 1860 and Bucharest in 1864). In that period, too, the development of modern Romanian literature began.
The Orthodox synagogue of Timisoara lies in the background of this portrait, dated 1925.
In the middle of the century Julius (Iuliu) Barasch, of Galician origin, brought Mendelssohnianhaskalah to Romanian Jewry. In 1857, he published the first newspaper in Romanian and French—Israelitul Roman—whose function was to fight for equal civil rights for Romanian Jewry. In 1854 another two newspapers—Timpul (Di Tsayt; Bucharest) and Gazeta Roma (Jassy)—appeared in Romanian and Yiddish, but all three papers ceased publication before the end of a year. Other such attempts met the same fate. Only in 1879 did the weekly Fraternitatea begin to appear, lasting until 1885, when it ceased publication upon the expulsion from Romania of its chief editors, Isaac Auerbach and E. Schwarzfeld, for their stand against persecutions. This paper, which represented the assimilationist trend, was opposed to the incipient pre-Zionist movement that sponsored the establishment of the colonies of Zikhron Ya'akov and Rosh Pinnah in Eretz Israel. Then two papers in Romanian also appeared, supporting aliyah: Aparatorul, which was published in Bucharest from 1881 to 1884, with E. S. Gold as editor, and the weekly Stindardul, which was published in Focsani from 1882 to 1883. The Yiddish paper Ha-Yo'ez, which appeared in Bucharest from 1874 to 1896, also supported aliyah. Eleazar Rokeah, an emissary from Erez Israel, published as special organs of the pre-Zionist movement the Hebrew paper Emek Yizre'el in Jassy (1882), the Yiddish Di Hofnung in Piatra-Neamt (1882), and Der Emigrant in Galati (1882). Of the Jewish press in Romania, the weekly Egalitatea, edited by M. Schwarzfeld, survived for half a century. The weekly Curierul Israelit, edited by M. Schweig, began to appear in 1906, and continued up to 1948, becoming the mouthpiece of the Uniunea Evreilor Romani ("Union of Romanian Jews") after World War I.
In the time of Herzl, several Zionist papers appeared in Romania but did not last long. In 1913, the monthly Hatikva in Romanian was issued in Galati under the editorship of L. Gold, who gathered round him the outstanding Jewish authors in Romanian. Apart from original articles they also published translations of a high literary standard from modern Hebrew poetry and classical Yiddish literature. After World War I, from 1919 to 1923, there was published in Bucharest a daily newspaper in Romanian with a Zionist national tendency, Mantuirea edited by A. L. Zissu with Abraham Feller as chief editor. This paper stood for the idea of a Jewish political party and sharply attacked the tendencies of assimilationist circles. The weekly Renasterea Noastra (1923–42, 1944–48), edited by Samuel I. Stern, continued in this direction. The Zionist Federation published the weekly Citiri din Lumea Evreeasca, edited first by I. Ludo, and later by Theoder Loewenstein.
Between the two world wars, the Zionist students' association published the monthly Hasmonaea. The number of Jewish journalists grew between the two wars, some of them even becoming chief editors of the great democratic papers. They included Constantin Graur, B. Branisteanu, Em. Fagure, G. Milian ( Bucharest); A. Hefter (Jassy), and S. Schaferman-Pastoresu ( Braila). After they had acquired a knowledge of Romanian, several Jewish scholars at the end of the 19th century became distinguished in the field of philology and folklore: Lazar Saineanu (SainMan), compiler of the first practical dictionary of Romanian (1896); M. Gaster, who did research on early Romanian folklore; Heinrich Tiktin, author of a scientific grammar of Romanian in two volumes (1893–94). This tradition continued down to later times. I. A. Candrea also compiled a Romanian dictionary (1931), as did J. Byk and A. L. Graur after World War II. A number of these scholars also devoted time to research on the history of Romanian Jewry. The pioneer in this field was the historian J. Psantir, whose two Yiddish volumes contained Hebrew headings: Divrei ha-Yamim le-Arzot Rumanyah (Jassy, 1871) and Korot ha-Yehudim be-Rumanyah (Lemberg, 1877).
A society for research into the history of Romanian Jewry was established in 1886 and named for Julius Barasch. Among its active members were J. Psantir, M. Gaster, Lazar Caineanu, Elias Schwarzfeld and M. Schwarzfeld. In the three editions of their bulletin, they published source material, memoirs, and bibliographical notes, as well as some combined research and monographs of Jewish communities. Although the society ceased activities after four years, the scholars continued their research. Part of their work appeared in the 19 volumes of the annual Anuarul pentru Israeliti, and in a weekly published by M. Schwarzfeld. Between the two world wars, Meir A. Halevy published several monographs on the history of the Jews of Romania. The Templul Coral ("Choir Synagogue") then erected in Bucharest a museum, library, and archives for the history of Romanian Jewry. In some bulletins of these institutions and in the annual Sinai (1926–32), edited by Meir A. Halevy, there also appeared research on the history of Romanian Jewry.
The Jews of annexed Transylvania used the Hungarian language in the Zionist press, even under Romanian rule, those of Bukovina German, while in Bessarabia the language of the Jewish press was Yiddish. Each province kept its traditions, autonomous structure, and cultural life, within the framework of the all-Romanian Federation of Jewish Communities. Culturally, the deeply rooted Jewish life of Bessarabia, with its Hebrew teachers, writers, and journalists, had a great influence, especially in the Old Kingdom.
German penetration into the Romanian economy increased as the Nazis moved eastward with the Anschluss of Austria (1938), the annexation of Czechoslovakia (1939), and the occupation of western Poland at the outbreak of World War II. A considerable number of Romanian politicians agreed to serve German interests in exchange for directorships in German-Romanian enterprises, and German trade agreements with Romania always demanded the removal of Jews in the branch involved. In this way, Jews were expelled from commerce and industry.
In the summer of 1940, Romania succumbed to German pressure and transferred Bessarabia and part of Bukovina to the Soviet Union, northern Transylvania to Hungary, and southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria (the territory that remained being called Old Romania). When the Romanian army retreated from these areas, its soldiers murdered many Jews, particularly in northern Bukovina and Moldavia; they also threw Jewish travelers, both civilian and military, from moving trains. On June 30, 1940, 52 Jews were murdered in Dorohoi by a retreating Romanian regiment.
Hoping to ensure its borders after the concessions, Romania, which had not been invaded by the German army, became a satellite of Nazi Germany. The first result of this move was the cancellation of Romanian citizenship for Jews, a measure taken by the government, which included members of the Iron Guard, under German pressure in August 1940.
On September 6, when King Carol abdicated, Ion Antonescu, who had been minister of defense in the Goga government, came to power. His government included ministers from the ranks of the Iron Guard, and Romania was declared a Nationalist-Legionary State (the members of the Iron Guard styled themselves "legionnaires"). The "legionary police" was organized on Nazi lines with the help of the S.S. and the S.D. There followed a period of anti-Semitic terrorism that lasted for five months. It began with the confiscation of Jewish-owned shops, together with the posting of signs marked "Jewish shop" and picketing by the green-shirted "legionary police."
The reign of terror reached its height when Jewish industrial and commercial enterprises were handed over to the members of the "Legion" under pressure from the Iron Guard. The owners of the enterprises were arrested and tortured by the "legionary police" until they agreed to sign certificates of transfer. Bands of "legionnaires" entered Jewish homes and "confiscated" any sums of money they found. This resulted in a mortal blow to the Romanian economy and chaos that frightened even the German diplomats. Antonescu tried on several occasions to arrest the wave of terrorism, during which a number of Romanian statesmen opposed to the Iron Guard were killed.
On January 21, 1941, the Iron Guard revolted against Antonescu and attempted to seize power and carry out its anti-Semitic program in full. While part of the "Legion" was fighting the Romanian army for control of government offices and strategic points in the city, the rest carried out a pogrom on Bucharest Jews, aided by local hooligans. Jewish homes were looted, shops burned, and many synagogues desecrated, including two that were razed to the ground (the Great Sephardi Synagogue and the old bet ha-midrash). Some of the leaders of the Bucharest community were imprisoned in the community council building, worshipers were ejected from synagogues, the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization was attacked and its director murdered, and wealthy Bucharest Jews were arrested, according to a previously prepared list. Those arrested were taken to centers of the Iron Guard movement: some were then taken into the forests near Bucharest and shot; others were murdered and their bodies hung on meat hooks in the municipal slaughterhouse, bearing the legend "kosher meat." The pogrom claimed 120 Jewish lives. There were no acts of violence in the provinces because the army was in firm control and fully supported Antonescu. This was also Hitler's reason for supporting Antonescu. Romania held an important role in the war contemplated against the Soviet Union, not only as a supply and jumping-off base, but as an active partner in the invasion of the country.
A period of relative calm followed the Bucharest pogrom and permitted Romanian Jews to gather strength after the shock of the violence. Antonescu, however, was under constant German pressure, for when their revolt failed, members of the Iron Guard found refuge in Germany, where they constituted a permanent threat to his position, as he now lacked his own party to serve as a counterbalance.
In January 1941, Manfred von Killinger, a veteran Nazi known for his anti-Semitic activities, was appointed German ambassador to Romania. In April he was joined by Gustav Richter, an adviser on Jewish affairs who was attached to Adolf Eichmann's department. Richter's special task was to bring Romanian anti-Jewish legislation into line with its counterpart in Germany.
On June 22, 1941, when war broke out with the Soviet Union, the Romanian and German armies were scattered along the banks of the Prut River to penetrate into Bukovina and Bessarabia. As this branch of the front became active only on July 3, the Romanian and German soldiers occupied themselves with slaughtering the Jewish population of Jassy on June 29, 1941. When the soldiers finally went into action, they were joined by units of Einsatzgruppe D, under the command of Otto Ohlendorf. Their combined advance through Bessarabia, Bukovina, and the Dorohoi district was accompanied by massacres of the local Jewish population. At the beginning of August 1941 the Romanians began to send deportees from Bukovina and Bessarabia over the Dniester River into a German-occupied area of the U.S.S.R. (later to be known as Transnistria). The Germans refused to accept the deportees, shooting some and returning the rest. Some of these Jews drowned in the river and others were shot by the Romanian gendarmerie on the western bank; of the 25,000 persons who crossed the Dniester near Sampol, only 16,500 were returned by the Germans. Some of these survivors were killed by the Romanians, and some died of weakness and starvation on the way to camps in Bukovina and Bessarabia. Half of the 320,000 Jews living in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and the Dorohoi district (which was in Old Romania) were murdered during the first few months of Romania's involvement in the war in 1941.
After this period the Jews were concentrated in ghettos (if they lived in cities), in special camps (if they lived in the countryside, or townlets such as Secureni, Yedintsy, or Vertyuzhani). German killing squads and Romanian gendarmes, copying the Germans, habitually entered the ghettos and camps, removing Jews and murdering them. Jews living in villages and townlets in Old Romania (Moldavia, Walachia, and southern Transylvania) were concentrated into the nearest large town. The Jews of northern Moldavia, which bordered on the battle area, were sent to the west of Romania: men under 60 were sent to the Targu-Jiu camp and the women, children, and aged were sent to towns where the local Jewish population was ordered to care for the deportees (who owned nothing more than the clothing on their backs). The homes and property of these deportees were looted by the local population immediately after they were deported.
On September 16, 1941, those in camps in Bessarabia began to be deported to the region between the Dniester and the Bug rivers called Transnistria, from which the Germans had withdrawn, handing control over to the Romanians under the Tighina agreement (August 30, 1941). The deportations included 118,847 Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and the Dorohoi district. At the intervention of the Union of Jewish Communities in Romania, an order was given on October 14 to stop the deportations. They continued, however, until November 15, leaving all the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina [with the exception of 20,000 from Cernauti (Chernovtsy)] concentrated in Transnistria. Of the 14,847 Jews from the Dorohoi district, 2,316 were also deported and brought to Transnistria.
Within two months of deportation, 22,000 Jews died. Some died because they could walk no further, some died from disease, but the majority of Jews were murdered by the gendarmerie that accompanied them on their journey. All the money and valuables were confiscated by representatives of the Romanian National Bank. The Jews then remaining in Old Romania and in southern Transylvania were compelled into forced labor and were subjected to various special taxes. The prohibition against Jews working in certain professions and the "Rumanization of the economy" continued and caused the worsening of the economic situation of the Jewish population.
According to the statistical table on the potential victims of the "Final Solution" introduced at the Wannsee Conference, 342,000 Romanian Jews were destined for this end. The German embassy in Bucharest conducted an intensive propaganda campaign through its journal, Bukarester Tageblatt, which announced "an overall European solution to the Jewish problem" and the deportation of Jews from Romania. On July 22, 1942, Richter obtained Vice-Premier Mihai Antonescu's agreement to begin the deportation of Jews to Poland in September. However, as a result of the efforts of the clandestine Jewish leadership, foreign diplomatic pressure, and pressure by the papal nuncio, A. Cassulo, Ion Antonescu canceled the agreement. He could afford a measure of independence, since Hitler was then seeking the mobilization of additional divisions of the Romanian army against the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Eichmann's Bucharest office, working through the local authorities, succeeded in contriving the deportation of 7,000 Jews from Cernauti (Chernovtsy), Dorohoi, and groups from other parts of Romania. These 7,000 were "suspected of Communism" (they were of Bessarabian origin and had asked to return to the Soviet Union in 1940), and had "broken forced-labor laws.”
At the beginning of December 1942, the Romanian government informed the Jewish leadership of a change in its policy toward Jews. It would henceforth grant Jews deported to Transnistria the right to emigrate to Palestine. Defeat at Stalingrad (where the Romanians had lost 18 divisions) was already anticipated. In 1942–43 the Romanian government began to consider signing a separate peace treaty with the Allies. Although the plan for large-scale emigration failed because of German opposition and lack of facilities, both small and large boats left Romania carrying "illegal" immigrants to Palestine, some of whom were refugees from Bukovina, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia. Between 1939 and August 1944 (when Romania withdrew from the war) 13 boats left Romania, carrying 13,000 refugees. As a result of German pressure exerted through diplomatic missions in Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, the emigration of refugees was discontinued. Two of the boats sank on their way to Palestine: the Struma (on February 23, 1944, with 769 passengers) and the Mefkure (on August 5, 1944 with 394 passengers).
Despite German efforts, the Romanian government refused to deport its Jews to the "east." At the beginning of 1943, however, there was a return to the traditional economic pressures against the Jews in order to reduce the Jewish population. This was achieved by forbidding Jews to work in the civilian economy and by the most severe measure of all – forced labor. In addition, various taxes were imposed on the Jewish population for cash, clothing, shoes, and hospital equipment. These measures, particularly the taxes to be remitted in cash—of which the largest was a levy of 4 billion lei (about $27,000,000) imposed in March 1943—severely pressed Romanian Jewry. The taxes were collected by the "Jewish center." W. Filderman, chairman of the Council of the Union of Jewish Communities openly opposed the tax. He was deported to Transnistria for two months.
At the end of 1943, as the Red Army drew nearer to Romania, the local Jewish leadership succeeded in obtaining the gradual return of those deported to Transnistria. The Germans tried several times to stop the return and even succeeded in bringing about the arrest of the leadership of the clandestine Zionist pioneering movements in January and February 1944. The leaders were released through the intervention of the International Red Cross and the Swiss ambassador in Bucharest; who contended that they were indispensable for organizing the emigration of those returning from Transnistria and other refugees in Romania. In March 1944 contacts were made in Ankara between Ira Hirschmann, representative of the U.S. War Refugee Board, and the Romanian ambassador, A. Cretzianu. Hirschmann demanded the return of all those deported to Transnistria and the cessation of the persecution of Jews. At the time, the Red Army was defeating the Germans in Transnistria, and there was a danger that the retreating Germans might slaughter the remaining Jews. Salvation came at the last moment, when Antonescu warned the Germans to avoid killing Jews while retreating. Concurrently, negotiations over Romania's withdrawal from the war were being held in Cairo and Stockholm, and thus Antonescu was eager to show goodwill toward the Jews for the sake of his own future.
In the spring, Soviet forces also conquered part of Old Romania (Moldavia), and they made an all-out attack on August 20. On August 23, King Michael arrested Antonescu and his chief ministers and declared a cease-fire. The Germans could no longer control Romania, for they were dependent on the support of the Romanian army, which had been withdrawn. Eichmann, who had been sent to western Romania to organize the liquidation of Jews in the region, did not reach his destination.
Fifty-seven percent of the Jewish population under Romanian rule during the war (including the Jews of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina) survived the Holocaust. The following statistics give the death toll. Out of the prewar Jewish population, 264,900 (43%) were murdered. Of this number, 166,597 perished during the first period of the war, 151,513 from Bessarabia and Bukovina and 15,064 from part of Old Romania. The rest died during the deportations to Transnistria or in the camps and ghettos of this region: some were murdered; others died in epidemics, famine, or exposure. In areas from which Jews were not deported, 78.2% of the Jewish population was left without livelihood. The demographic effect was that the ratio of births to deaths fell to 34.1% in 1942 from the 1934 figures of 116.5%.
Preperatory Steps
As soon as Hitler assumed power in Germany (1933), Jewish leaders in Bucharest, mostly Zionists, decided not to remain passive. In November, the congress of the Jewish Party in Romania decided to join the anti-Nazi boycott movement, disregarding the protest raised by the Romanian press and anti-Semitic groups, but the Union of the Romanian Jews (U.E.R.) did not participate in the campaign. The necessity for a united political, as well as economic, struggle soon became obvious.
On January 29, 1936, the Central Council of Jews in Romania, composed of representatives of both Jewish trends—the U.E.R. and the Jewish Party—was established for "the defense of all Jewish rights and liberties against the organizations and newspapers that openly proclaimed the introduction of the racial regime." At the end of the year the Council succeeded in averting a bill proposed in the parliament by the anti-Semitic circles suggesting that citizenship be revoked from the Jews. During the same period the Romanian government attempted to suppress the state subvention for Jewish religious needs, as well as the exemption from taxes accorded to Jewish community institutions. The Council could not obtain the maintenance of the subvention, and it was finally reduced to one-sixth of its allotment.
When Goga's anti-Semitic government came to power, the Council began a struggle against it, gaining support and attention outside Romania. Filderman, president of the Council, left at once for Paris, where he mobilized the world Jewish organizations with headquarters in France and England. He informed local political circles and the League of Nations of events in Romania. At the same time the Jews in Romania began an expanded economic boycott, refraining from commercial transactions, withdrawing their deposits from the banks, and delaying tax payments. The outcome was a "large-scale paralysis of the economic life," as the German minister of foreign affairs stated in his circular of March 9, 1938. Thus the dismissal of the Goga government after only 40 days was motivated not only by external pressure, but also by the effects of the Jewish economic boycott.
The Union of the Jewish Communities
Following the downfall of the Goga government, King Carol's royal dictatorship abolished all the political parties in Romania, including the Jewish Party and the Union of Romanian Jews. The single body of the Jews in Romania was the Union of the Jewish Communities, whose board was composed of the leaders of both Jewish currents. The Union assumed the task of fighting against the increasing number of anti-Jewish measures promulgated by the Romanian authorities under pressure from local anti-Semitic circles and the German government. In some cases its interventions were successful; for example, it achieved the nullification of the prohibition against collecting contributions to Zionist funds, and, as a result of its protests, the restrictions against the Jewish physicians and the Jewish industrial schools were abrogated. In the summer of 1940, after Romania ceded Bukovina and Bessarabia to the Soviet Union, the Romanian police tried to eject Jewish refugees from those two provinces. The Union's board succeeded in convincing the Ministry of the Interior to annul the measure. When the interdiction of ritual slaughter was decreed, the board obtained an authorization for ritual slaughtering of poultry. The cancellation of the prohibition against Jews peddling in certain cities was also achieved. When the anti-Semitic newspapers incited against the leaders of the Union, the police began to search their homes.
Ion Antonescu's government, with the participation of the Iron Guard, closed several synagogues (those with less than 400 worshipers in cities and 200 in villages) and transferred the property to Christian churches. The disposition was canceled after three days, however, as a result of an audience between the Union's president, Filderman, and Antonescu; simultaneously the minister of religion, who ordered the measure, was forced to resign. These acts took place during the first period of the new regime, dominated by the Iron Guard, when trespasses were committed against the Jews daily. The Union's board constantly informed Antonescu and the diverse ministries of these acts, pointing out their illegality and arbitrariness. The argument that constantly recurred in the memoranda presented by the Union's board was that the confiscation of Jewish shops and industrial companies caused the disorganization of the country's economic life. Antonescu used the information provided by the board to support his stand against the trespasses. The Iron Guard responded with a terror campaign against the Jewish leaders; some were arrested and tortured by the "legionary police," others were murdered during the revolt against Antonescu.
Great Synagogue, Suceava,
The Zionist leadership negotiated with Antonescu on organizing the emigration of Romanian Jews. The minister of finance proposed that the emigration be funded by Romanian assets; which had been frozen in the United States because Romania had joined the Axis. The transaction had to be accomplished through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), whose representative in Romania was also the president of the Union. In every city the Jewish community had to register those who wanted to emigrate and were able to pay the amount demanded by the government. The Union's board utilized this agreement as a leverage for achieving certain concessions, especially after Romania joined Germany in the war against the Soviet Union (June 1941). For example, when the evacuation of Jews from villages and towns began, the Union secured the government's agreement not to send these Jews to concentration camps (as had previously been ordered), but rather to lodge them in the big cities, where they were to be cared for by the local Jewish communities. Another achievement (on August 14, 1941) was the liberation of the rabbis, leaders of communities, and teachers employed in Jewish schools, who had been arrested after the outbreak of war with the U.S.S.R., from the Targu-Jiu concentration camp. The Union raised the argument that the plans concerning the release of the Romanian properties in the United States were dependent upon those local leaders. On August 2, 1941, the board achieved the cancellation of the order that Jews wear the yellow badge and other measures, including the creation of ghettos in the cities and mobilizing women to join men in forced labor.
Richter insisted on the reintroduction of repressive measures, and on September 3 the order to wear the yellow badge was reendorsed. This time, in addition to intervention by the Union's leaders, Chief Rabbi Alexander Safran went into action. He appealed to the head of the Christian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Nicodem and, on September 8, Antonescu annulled the order. Nevertheless, the yellow badge was maintained in a number of Moldavian cities, as well as in Chernovtsy (Cernauti), the capital of Bukovina, where the German influence was strong.
During this period, when Romania suffered great losses on the front and Germany called for an increase in Romanian participation, the Union's board employed the argument that Romania, being an ally of the Third Reich, and thus a sovereign state, did not have to accept anti-Jewish laws that were applied only to German satellite countries. Hungary and Italy, allies that did not apply such measures at that time, were presented as examples.
After Jews began to be deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria, the board delegated Chief Rabbi Safran to intervene with the queen mother, Patriarch Nicodem, and the archbishop of Bukovina and induce them to intercede with Antonescu to halt the deportations and permit aid to those who had already been transported over the Dniester. Until a decision could be achieved through their intervention, and against the opposition of von Killinger, the 17,000 Jews who remained in Chernovtsy were not deported. However, the steps taken, with permission to provide assistance to those who had already been deported to Transnistria, were sabotaged by difficulties raised by lower authorities. The Union also endeavored to gain the support of the U.S. ambassador, who interceded with the Romanian government. Nevertheless, when the ambassadors of Brazil, Switzerland, and Portugal proposed to the U.S. ambassador the initiation of an international protest against the Romanian anti-Jewish excesses, the latter reported to Washington that he did not possess enough exact information. Later on, however, in another report (November 4, 1941), he described in detail the massacres committed in Bessarabia and in Bukovina and the cruelties that were committed during the deportations to Transnistria. The description was based on the information received from the Union. (It was only at the end of 1941 that Romania broke off relations with the United States, under German pressure.) The anti-Semitic press—financed and inspired by the German embassy—including the German-language Bukarester Tageblatt, then intensified the incitement againt the Jewish leaders and their constant interventions against anti-Jewish measures.
The Underground Jewish Council
At the end of 1941, the Union of the Communities was dissolved under pressure from Richter, and the Centrala evreilor (Central Board of the Jews) was set up at his suggestion in January 1942. Its leaders were appointed by Radu Lecca, who was responsible for Jewish affairs in the Romanian government, but they were actually subordinate to Richter. Nearly all of the new leaders were unknown to the Jewish public, with the exception of A. Willman, who shortly before his appointment had published a number of pamphlets proposing a kind of neo-territorialist plan to be accomplished with the aid of Nazi Germany. From the outset, the Jewish population expressed its distrust of the new organ. The former leaders of the Jewish institutions formed a clandestine Jewish Council with Chief Rabbi Alexander Safran as its president. The Council leaders handed memoranda personally to, or interceded individually with, Antonescu or his ministers, who went on to deal with them because the government did not trust the Central Board either.
In the spring of 1942, changes were made in the framework of the Central Board. Willman and some of his followers were removed and replaced by others appointed from among the leadership of the Zionist movement and the Union of the Romanian Jews (U.E.R.). Thus the Central Board was prevented from taking any harmful initiatives against the Jewish population. In the summer, the Zionist Organization was dissolved at the request of the Germans, and this was a sign that the Germans disagreed with the Romanian policy, which aided Jewish emigration.
On July 22, when Richter obtained Mihai Antonescu's assent to the deportation of the Jews to the extermination camps in Poland, the clandestine Jewish Council immediately learned of the details of the deportation program and used personal contacts to achieve the repeal of the agreement. Safran invited the archbishop of Transylvania, Nicholas Balan, to Bucharest, since the transports were to be initiated from there. The queen mother was also convinced by Safran to intercede and, together with the archbishop and Ion Antonescu, she did so. Others were also asked to intercede on behalf of the Jews. The papal nuncio, Andreas Cassulo; the Swiss ambassador, Rene de Weck; and even Antonescu's personal physician helped repeal the decision.
Eichmann persevered in demanding the deportation of Romanian Jews. In October 1942 the deportation was issued again, this time from Transylvania. The Council immediately went into action: the most important figure to intercede was Safran with the papal nuncio, who applied to the Romanian minister of foreign affairs to cancel the deportation order. The nuncio's efforts were supported by the Swedish and Turkish ambassadors, and by the delegates of the International Red Cross. At the same time, the Jewish Council achieved the annulment of the order to deport to Transnistria 12,000 Jews accused of having committed crimes or breaches of discipline.
The Struggle to Repatriate Deported Jews
After overcoming the danger of deportation to the extermination camps in Poland, the Jewish Council began to request the return of those who had survived the deportations to Transnistria. The dealings with the Romanian government began in November 1942 over the question of a ransom to be paid by Zionist groups outside Romania. Eichmann's unceasing interventions prevented a clear-cut decision until, on April 23, Antonescu—under German pressure—issued the order that not a single deportee should return. The Jewish leaders then initiated the struggle for a "step by step" resolution to the problem, asserting that a series of categories had been deported arbitrarily, without previous investigation. The Romanian government ordered a detailed registration of categories. At the beginning of 1943, an official commission was appointed to classify the deportees. In July Antonescu authorized the return of certain cases (aged persons, widows, World War I invalids, and former officers of the Romanian army). Implementation of the order, however, encountered difficulties. The governor of Transnistria was under the heavy influence of German advisers. Only at the beginning of December did the deportees begin to return. It was, however, a struggle against time, as the front had reached Transnistria.
The Jewish Council took advantage of the opportunity offered by the conflicts between the Romanians and the Germans, which became more and more stressed, especially after the Nazis discovered the peace feelers sent out by the Romanians to the Allies. The Romanian government now felt that alleviating the condition of the Jews and protecting them from the Germans would create more favorable conditions for Romania upon the conclusion of the peace treaty. From the beginning of 1944 the clandestine Zionist Executive dealt separately with Antonescu on the question of emigration. Its efforts had an influence on the general situation, as the Romanian authorities made the return of the deportees conditional upon their immediate emigration.
The Committee of Assistance
Much of Romanian Jewry fell into poverty because of anti-Jewish economic measures. The former committee of the JDC was able to continue its activity under the control of the Union of the Jewish Communities and the Jewish Council. In October 1943, it was officially recognized within the framework of the "Jewish Central Board" as the Autonomous Committee of Assistance. Assistance was thus provided to the Jews evacuated from towns and villages who could not be maintained by the local communities. The most important accomplishment, however, was the aid in the form of money, medicines, utensils for craftsmen, coal, oil heaters, window glass, clothing, etc. transmitted to Transnistria. In order to cover the budget, money and clothing were collected in the regions not affected by deportations. These means, however, were far from adequate. Because of donationis from the JDC, the Jewish Agency, and other world Jewish organizations was the Autonomous Committee of Assistance able to continue its activity.
In addition to all the official difficulties raised by the Romanian central authorities (the compulsory transfer of money through the National Bank at an unfavorable exchange rate, and the obligation of paying customs for the objects sent), the transports were frequently plundered on the way or confiscated by the local authorities in Transnistria. The assistance, however, was in itself an element of resistance. The mere fact that the deportees knew that they had not been abandoned, at least by their fellow Jews, contributed to the maintenance of their morale. The aid in its various forms saved thousands of lives. Through clandestine correspondence, carried by non-Jewish messengers, reports were received concerning the situation of the refugees. This means of providing information, however, was insufficient, according to the Autonomous Committee of Assistance.
As early as January 1942 authorization was obtained from the Ministry of the Interior for a delegation to go to Transnistria. Due to the opposition of the governor of Transnistria, however, the representatives could not get there until Dec. 31, 1942. The governor received them in audience at Odessa but threatened them, saying they would be unable to return to Romania. He gave them permission to visit only three of the camps in which deported Jews were concentrated. The delegates of the committee responded by requesting a regional conference with representatives of all the camps. During the railway journey to Mogilev, the delegates visited the Zhmerinka camp and received information about the surrounding camps. Upon their arrival at Mogilev (Jan. 8–9, 1943), a regional conference took place with the participation of about 70 delegates. Before the conference opened, the prefect and the commander of the gendarmes warned the delegates not to complain about their situation, adding the threat that complaints might endanger the further receipt of aid. However, the delegates clandestinely submitted a written report concerning the real situation to the representatives of the committee. From Mogilev, the delegation left for Balta, where it did not receive a license for a regional conference, but each delegate from the ghettos or camps of the area was authorized to report individually about the situation. Back in Bucharest, after this two-week tour in Transnistria, the delegates presented their report, which was also sent to Jewish organizations abroad.
In December 1943, representatives of the Autonomous Committee of Assistance again left for Transnistria to organize the return of the deportees, taking with them wagons of clothing. One group of representatives left for the north, to Mogilev and its surroundings; another for the south, to Tiraspol. The central administration of Transnistria did not display any goodwill, but the local authorities provided wagons for the transport. On February 15, 1944, two delegations started out to aid the return of the orphans. On March 17, 1944, another two delegations set out for Transnistria, but they could not reach their destination as the area had already become a front area, the northern part occupied by the Red Army.
The delegates installed themselves in Tighina (Bessarabia), whence they made contact with Tiraspol on the eastern bank of the Dniester River and succeeded in saving almost all those concentrated there. The Germans still had the time to organize a last massacre, murdering 1,000 Jews who were in detention in the Tiraspol jail. When Transnistria and Bessarabia were reconquered by the Soviets, the deportees who followed the armies were the last to succeed in returning to Romania, for afterward, at the end of June 1944, the Soviets closed the frontier. It was reopened only in May 1945 for a last group of 7,000 deportees, after prolonged negotiations in Bucharest between the Jewish leaders and General Vinogradov, the head of the Soviet armistice commission.
Contemporary Period Through the 1960's
By the time that Romania broke with Nazi Germany and entered the war on the side of the Allies (August 23, 1944), Romanian Jewry had been considerably decreased. Emigration from the country would decrease the population even further. The struggle for Jewish independence in Palestine influenced Romanian Jews, and the goal of aliyah, which had been deep-seated in the community in the past, became a powerful force. After World War II, the political regime in Romania exercised its authority over the community life of Romanian Jewry. The government was able to place restrictions on Jewish activities. Government control was prevalent during the first period—from August 23, 1944 until the abolition of the monarchy (December 30, 1947)—and even more so in succeeding periods, through all the internal changes that altered the regime in Romania.
For a few years after the abolition of the monarchy, Romania closely followed the line dictated from Moscow. This situation continued until the end of the 1950s, when the first signs of an independent Romanian policy began to appear. Until 1965, the pattern of this policy gradually solidified and Romania was able to have an independent policy. All the changes in government and policy also left their mark on Jewish community life.
The situation of Romanian Jewry always had a special character. Even in the days of complete dependence on Moscow, when the tools and institutions of national Jewish identity were destroyed and expression of Jewish aspirations was repressed, Romanian Jewry was not compelled to be as alienated from its national and religious identity as were the Jews of the Soviet Union. At the end of the 1960s, the Jewish community in Romania found itself in an intermediate position. Its activities displayed indications of free community life as well as the limitations imposed by the government. Variations in the government's policy also reflected the confusion between the status of Romanian Jewry and Israel. Most questionable was the central issue of the right to leave the country and settle in Israel.
The Romanian Jewish community was characterized by its decreasing size during this period. The only source on the size of the Romanian Jewish community at the end of World War II is a registration (the results of which were published in 1947) that was carried out on the initiative of the World Jewish Congress. According to the registration, there were 428,312 Jews in Romania at the time. This number was the balance after the losses caused by the Holocaust, the annexation of Bessarabia and North Bukovina by the U.S.S.R., and the migration to Palestine during the war. The professional composition of the community at that time (1945) was as follows: 49,000 artisans, 35,000 employees, 34,000 merchants and industrialists, and 9,500 in the free professions. Ten years later the Jewish population had been reduced to about a third. According to the census taken on February 21, 1956, there were 144,236 Jews in Romania, of whom 34,263 spoke Yiddish.
The drastic reduction in the size of the Romanian Jewish community was largely a result of mass emigration, especially during the years 1944–47. The means of emigration were dictated by the conditions of the war and its aftermath. At the end of the war thousands of Jews, terrified by the Holocaust, fled Romania through its western border, which was still open, and reached the West. In addition to this spontaneous migration, 14 refugee boats left Romanian ports carrying 24,000 "illegal" immigrants to Palestine. A portion of Romanian Jewry, including thousands who left Romania of their own volition immediately after the war, was also among those who boarded refugee boats to Palestine in other European ports. From the establishment of the State of Israel (1948) until the end of the 1960s, more than 200,000 Romanian Jews settled in the new state. In addition, it should be noted that not all the Jews who emigrated from Romania went to Israel; about 80,000 others were scattered throughout other countries.
At the end of the 1960s the Romanian Jewish community numbered no more than 100,000.
The Liquidation of Jewish Organizations
On August 23, 1944, when Romania joined the Allies, the Zionist movement came up from its underground operation. The same was true of the Jewish Party, which was reorganized as the representative body of Romanian Jewry and headed by the Zionist leader A. L. Zissu. In 1945, an extension of the Communist Party was established among the Jewish population under the name the Jewish Democratic Committee (Comitetul Democrat Evreesc). For about four years the Zionist movement maintained regular activities in the fields of organization, education, training farms, and Zionist funds. In 1948 there were 100,000 members in the movement and 4,000 in He-Halutz, with 95 branches and 12 training farms. The Zionist Organization in Romania participated in the World Zionist Congress in Basle in 1946. A general representation of Romanian Jewry (including delegates from the Jewish Democratic Committee) was present at the Montreux conference (1948) of the World Jewish Congress. These were the last regular contacts of Romanian Jewry with Jewish organizations abroad; afterward the ties were severed for an extended period.
The more the Communist Party strengthened its power, the more Zionist activity in Romania turned from "permitted" to "tolerated," until it was finally outlawed completely. The instrument of this process was the Jewish Democratic Committee, which never succeeded in striking roots among the Jewish population, in spite of the support it received from the authorities. The cue to abolish Zionist activities was given in the decision of the central committee of the Communist Party on June 10–11, 1948, in the midst of Israel's War of Independence. The decision stated that "the party must take a stand on every question concerning the Jews of Romania and fight vigorously against reactionary nationalist Jewish currents."
As early as the summer of 1948, the liquidation of Zionist training farms was begun, and the process was completed in the spring of 1949. In November 1948 the activities of the Zionist funds were forbidden. On November 29, 1948, a violent attack on the branch of the Zionist Organization in Bucharest was organized by the Jewish Communists. On December 12, 1948, the party decision was again publicized, including a clear denunciation of Zionism, "which, in all its manifestations, is a reactionary nationalist movement of the Jewish bourgeoisie, supported by American imperialism, that attempts to isolate the masses of Jewish workers from the people among whom they live." This statement was published in the wake of a bitter press campaign against Zionism during November and December 1948.
The persecution of the Zionist movement was also expressed by the imprisonment of shelihim from Erez Israel. On December 23, 1948, a general consultation of Zionists was held and resulted in the decision to dissolve "voluntarily" the Zionist organizations. Following this decision, the Zionist parties halted their activities, with the exception of Mapam, the youth movements, and He-Halutz. The World Jewish Congress also ceased to operate in Romania. Those organizations that did not close down at the time continued to operate formally until the spring of the following year. On March 3, 1949, however, the Ministry of Interior issued an order to liquidate all remnants of the Zionist movement, including youth movements and training farms. With this order the Jewish community in Romania was given over completely to the dominance of the government alone—at first by means of the Jewish Democratic Committee, until it too was gradually dissolved. In April 1949 the youth movement of the Jewish Democratic Committee was disbanded just as the Communist Party Youth (UTM) was organized, and the committee itself was disbanded in March 1953, together with all other national minorities' organizations in Romania. In 1949–50 the activity of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Romania was discontinued by order of the government. The hostile attitude toward the Zionist movement was also expressed in Romania's attitude toward Israel, which gradually hardened and led to the frequent imprisonment of previously active Zionists. The situation did not begin to improve until 1967.
With the liquidation of the Zionist movement and the dissolution of the Jewish Democratic Committee, the religious communities (kehillot) were the only organized bodies left in Romanian Jewry. The legal foundations for their activities were laid down even before other Jewish frameworks were destroyed. In 1945, the "Regulations on Nationalities" were passed and declared the formal equality of members of all national minority groups before the law. Regulations of the activities of the recognized religions, including Judaism, were set down in the August 4, 1948 order of the presidium of the Grand National Assembly (which also served as the presidency of the state). The regulations of the Federation of Communities of the Mosaic Religion, which were approved by the Assembly's presidium on June 1, 1949, were based upon this order. The Federation's scope of activity was limited to the area of religious worship alone. In the first years of the Communist regime, Jewish Communists infiltrated into the Federation, but afterward their participation in Jewish religious bodies decreased, although it did not cease altogether. The Federation of Communities was responsible for maintaining synagogues and cemeteries and supplying religious objects, unleavened bread for Passover, kosher food, and the like. It was not authorized to deal in matters of Jewish education, however, although it did have the right (according to a decision of the department of religions on Nov. 13, 1948) to set up seminaries for training rabbis, and for a few years it maintained a yeshivah in Arad (Transylvania). According to the registration of 1960, there were 153 communities throughout Romania that maintained 841 synagogues and battei midrash (56 of which were no longer in use), 67 ritual baths, 86 slaughterhouses, and one factory for unleavened bread (in Cluj). From 1956 the Federation also published a Romanian, Yiddish, and Hebrew newspaper entitled Revista Cultului Mozaic Din R.P.R. ("Journal of (Romanian) Religious Jewry"). Since 1964, the chief rabbi officiated as the chairman of the Federation and was also a member of the National Assembly. Thus the Federation became the general Jewish representative in the country.
With the renewal of Jewish life after the war, Jewish education also became more popular. In 1946, the total number of Jewish schools was 190 with 41,000 students. In 1948, five yeshivot, 50 talmud torah schools, 10 Bet Jacob schools, one elementary school of Tarbut, five dormitories for students, 14 dormitories for apprentices, the agricultural training institute (Cultura Agricola), three vocational schools in Bucharest, and three vocational schools in provincial cities (Husi, Sibiu, Radauti) were supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. A substantial number of educational institutions were maintained by the various Jewish communities without outside support. The network of Jewish education was destroyed in the autumn of 1948, when all schools in Romania were nationalized. At that time a small number of schools in which the language of instruction was Yiddish were established (in Bucharest and in Jassy) and remained open until the 1960/61 school year. After the nationalization, Jewish education remained in the hands of melammedim, whose activities were tolerated by the authorities. In 1960 there were 54 talmud torah schools, in addition to the yeshivah that was established in Arad in 1956. By the end of the 1960s the number of educational institutions had decreased considerably.
During the first years after World War II the most important newspaper was Mantuirea, which began to reappear after Romania joined the Allies, and continued to be published until the Zionist movement ceased to exist. In 1945 the press of the Jewish Democratic Committee began to appear, and its major newspaper was Unirea, in Bucharest, which lasted until 1953. As long as Zionist activity was permitted, the Zionist publishing house Bikkurim and the He-Halutz publishing house continued to operate. In Jewish contributions to Romanian literature, art, and music, the influence of the memories of the Jewish milieu was sometimes felt. The writers and poets A. Toma, Maria Banus, Veronica Porumbacu, Barbu Lazareanu, and others belonged to this group. Among the writers who wrote in Yiddish were Jacob Groper, Alfred Margul Sperber, and Ludovic Brukstein. The most outstanding Jewish artists were Josif Iser, M. H. Maxy, and Jules Perachim. Well-known Jewish musicians were Matei Socor, Alfred Mendelsohn, and Max Eisikovits. The only Jewish cultural institution was the Jewish theater in Bucharest. It was established as a state institution in 1948. The Jewish theater in Jassy, which was established at the same time, closed down in 1968. During the 20 years of its existence, the theater produced 107 plays including works by Abraham Goldfaden, Shalom Aleichem, Moliere, and Gogol. In 1968, the Bucharest Jewish theater performed on tour in Israel.
Israel-Romania Relations to the End of the 1960s
In September 1948, the first Israel representative to Romania, the artist Reuven Rubin, arrived in Bucharest, but neither he nor his successors succeeded in substantially developing relations between the two countries. Until 1965, the relations between them were cold; especially because of the attitude of the Soviet Union toward Israel, which was strictly followed by Romanian foreign policy. Cultural ties were not developed during the period, and trade also remained static at a modest level (the mutual trade balance between Israel and Romania reached $4.5 million).
Relations improved considerably, however, as Romania grew more independent of the U.S.S.R. in international affairs. From February 1966, a Romanian minister again headed the Romanian mission in Israel. In March 1967, a high-level Romanian economic delegation visited Israel for the first time, and afterward an Israel economic delegation, headed by the finance minister, went to Bucharest; full trade agreements were signed. In 1968 the trade balance between the two countries reached $20,000,000, and subsequently trade increased. Cultural relations also expanded (Israel musicians, choirs, etc. visited Romania and the countries exchanged art exhibitions), as did tourism.
The Six-Day War (1967) served as a decisive test in the relations between Israel and Romania. On June 10, 1967, a consultation of all East European nations, including Yugoslavia, was held in Moscow and resulted in a denunciation of Israel’s "aggression." The participating states also decided to sever diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. Romania, however, refused to sign the denunciation and also refused to carry out the conference's decisions. She did not sever diplomatic relations with Israel and refrained from taking part in the anti-Israel Soviet propaganda campaign. Romania repeatedly expressed her stand that the Arab-Israel dispute must be settled by political means, taking into consideration the just rights of both sides. In August 1969, Romania and Israel elevated their diplomatic missions to the rank of embassies.
A 1928 picture of Timisoara's Orthodox synagogue.
The official census published in June 1977 gave the Jewish population as only 25,600. According to the statistics given by the Federation of Jewish Communities, which based itself on a registry of those in need of the community's services, the number was approximately 45,000, and its files did not include those Jews who have no connection with the communities. If these Jews were included, it would bring the total Jewish population to approximately 70,000. The Jewish community of Romania is an aging one; 25.51% of all Jews in Romania belong to the age category 41–60 and 46.2% to the age category 60–80. The majority of the Jews of Romania are professionals.
In an earthquake that struck Bucharest on March 4, 1977, the Choral and Malbim synagogues were damaged. During his official visit to Romania on August 1, 1977, Prime Minister Menahem Begin participated in the Sabbath services in the Choral Synagogue and addressed the large congregation.
Religion and Culture
Synagogues throughout the country (about 150) continued to function. In addition to the Chief Rabbi, there were two other rabbis, Rabbi Yitzhak Meir Marilus in Bucharest and Dr. Ernest Neumann in Timisoara. Kosher meat was provided by ritual slaughterers who visit the various communities weekly.
In the latter part of December 1977, the Museum for the History of the Jews in Romania was opened in Bucharest. In August 1977, the centenary of the founding of the Jewish theater in Romania was celebrated by a gala performance at which Tevye der Milchiger by Shalom Aleichem, The Dybbuk by An-ski, and Lessing's Nathan the Wise were presented.
In September 1981 Romania was the site of the convention of the European Rabbinical Conference, marking the first time a major Jewish gathering has been held in an East European country since World War II. The chief rabbis of England, France, Italy, and Holland were among the participants.
The 25th anniversary of the publication of Revista Cultului Mozaic was celebrated in September 1981. The state publishing house has published a bibliographical work on the Jewish press in Romania, Yiddishe Presse in Roomenie by Wolf Tambor.
Relations With Israel
Political relations between Israel and Romania were strengthened with statesmen exchanging visits, and particularly visits by Israelis. Romania has consistently campaigned for a political settlement of the Near East conflict and for a solution that will guarantee the territorial integrity and independence of all states in the region and lead to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied after the Six-Day War. Romania has also underscored the need to solve the problem of the Palestinian Arabs in conformity with their national interests. The fact that the Romanian government adopted a policy quite different from that of the U.S.S.R. and the other East European governments and did not brand Israel as an "aggressor" has permitted Romania and Israel to maintain normal relations.
In August 1977, Prime Minister Begin paid an official visit to Romania. He held wide-ranging talks with his counterpart Manea Manescu, with Foreign Minister Macovescu, and held two lengthy political talks with the President of Romania, Nicolae Caeausescu. The Begin-Caeausescu meeting played an important role in the decision of the president of Egypt to visit Jerusalem in November 1977, and Romania was the only East European country which expressed open support for the Israeli-Egyptian peace initiative.
In the decade 1983–1992, the central development in Romanian life, and especially in the life of the ever-dwindling Jewish community was the overthrow of the Communist regime and the attempts at introducing democracy into the country along Western lines. The change of rule did not bring in its wake any real changes in the life of the few Jews left in the country.
Over the past decade Jewish life throughout Romania continued to revolve around the synagogues and the kosher restaurants, operated by the Federation of Romanian Jewish Communities and funded by the Joint Distribution Committee. The dominating figure in Jewish life continued to be Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen.
Demography and Aliyah
Since the establishment of the State of Israel, some 300,000 Romanian Jews have immigrated there. The more the number of Jews in Romania shrinks, the more difficult it is to obtain reliable current Jewish population figures. The Federation of Communities, whose numbers are used by the Joint, estimate that there is a total of 15,000 Jews, 8,000 of whom are in Bucharest, the capital. Timisoara (in Transylvania) and Jassy each has a community of some 900 people; all the others are scattered among a Romanian populace of 22 million people. The official 1992 government yearbook, citing statistical data from a kind of census, states that there were 9,000 Jews. It may be that not all Jews were counted or admitted to being Jewish, particularly those in mixed marriages.
After the death in 1986 of Rabbi I. M. Marilus, the dayyan of Bucharest, only two rabbis remained in Romania: Chief Rabbi Dr. Rosen, who is also the president of the Federation of Communities, and Dr. Ernest Neuman of Timisoara. The aging of the leadership as well as the migration of a few of the leaders to Israel has thinned out their ranks, and Rabbi Rosen had to fill some positions with people who in the past were active in the communist regime and even in the Ministry of Religion, whose function was to oppress religions rather than encourage them.
Anti-Semitism and Zionism
The remnants of the Romanian Jewish community welcomed the overthrow of Ceasescu and the community journal published a special issue expressing joy at the change. In the new spirit of freedom Rabbi Rosen was the object of personal attacks by anti-Semitic groups, which accused him of close cooperation with the communist regime. Two anti-Semitic newspapers waged this campaign, which the chief rabbi saw as an attack on the entire community. Romania Mare ("Great Romania") and Europa, are weeklies publishing virulent anti-Semitic material, aiming their barbs personally at Rabbi Rosen. In 1992 Paul Everac, director of public television, published a book which also contained anti-Semitic material. He claimed, among other things, that the Jews of Romania control everything and that they number more than 30,000 (more than double the real figure). Complaints lodged by Rabbi Rosen were rejected on the grounds that they were not of public interest. Rabbi Rosen managed to secure the dismissal of the anti-Semitic attorney general, Cherecheanu.
Some observers have felt that the chief rabbi has exaggerated his cries against anti-Semitism; there have been no physical attacks on Jews, aside from an attempted break-in and robbery at the Ploiesti synagogue in June 1992 in which windows were broken and a parokhet torn (police in the district claimed that churches in the area had been similarly broken into), and incitement against Jews has not gone beyond the bounds accepted under Ceausescu. They claim that the outcry by Rabbi Rosen has itself fanned the flame of anti-Semitism.
There is no Zionism in Romania in the commonly accepted meaning. In the early 1990 attempts were made to organize a branch of the Maccabi sport organization and after the overthrow of Ceausescu, a Romania-Israel Friendship League was established, led by the writer Victor Barladeanu. The Jewish Agency emissary in Romania, Tova Ben-Nun, deals with arrangements for aliyah; there are no Zionist youth organizations and Romania is the only country in Eastern Europe—at least in the past few years—which sends no representative to participate in the International Bible Contest for Jewish Youth, held on Independence Day in Jerusalem. However, all this is about to change in the mid-90’s, as youth work is encouraged by the Joint.
The President in the Great Synagogue
To quash the harsh complaints about active anti-Semitism, President Iliescu has invested effort, internally and externally, to placate Chief Rabbi Rosen. In 1993, he took the rabbi with him to the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and before that participated in a memorial service for Holocaust victims held in the Bucharest Choral Synagogue, where Iliescu spoke and condemned anti-Semitism.
The Joint's Rearguard Action
Upon the emigration to Israel of Rabbi Wasserman of Dorohoi, the home for the aged and the kosher restaurant there were closed. Otherwise, all the institutions, restaurants, and homes for the aged are still in operation—10 restaurants and 4 homes (2 in Bucharest, and 2 smaller ones in Arad and Timisoara). Needy Jews receive packages of food and clothing. All this activity is financed by the JDC, fighting a rearguard action to maintain the few remaining Romanian Jews. The situation of the elderly has worsened considerably as their pension's value has eroded to nothing because of inflation, and without the Joint's help they would be starving. The biweekly paper Revista, edited by Chaim Riemer, still appears in four languages. A selection of sermons by Rabbi Rosen has appeared and work is progressing on a book of testimonies which will document the Holocaust of Romanian Jewry.
In an attempt to bring a fresh spirit to the leadership of the communities, Osy Lazar was appointed head of the Bucharest community, while elderly Theodore (Tuvia) Blumenfeld continues to serve as the general secretary of the Federation of Communities. The Federation is actually directed by Rabbi Rosen's adviser and confidant, Iulian Sorin. Sorin was previously a senior official in the communist Ministry of Religions.
Since Ceasescu's overthrow, a few communities in the provinces—and especially in Transylvania—have tried "to declare independence." to establish links with other countries and mainly with emigres from those communities now living in Israel, and even to sell property, without the Federation's approval, an act that was unthinkable during the centralized communist regime. This has created tension between the communities and the chief rabbi, with repercussions even reaching Israel.
Jewish education is almost non-existent. A third of the Jews, whose very number is indeterminate, are involved in mixed marriages, and the majority of the community consists of elderly people whose children and grandchildren live in Israel. Choirs and talmudei Torah outside of Bucharest are dwindling along with the Jewish population. Bucharest has been able to maintain its successful choir and a Talmud Torah, which dozens of children attend on Sundays.
Romania lost its special status regarding relations with Israel, since it is no longer the only Eastern bloc country to have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Relations continued to be normal and friendly, with efforts to increase bilateral trade. Israeli tourism to Romania dropped off.
The death of Rabbi Moses Rosen in May 1994 significantly affected the remaining Jews of Romania. The passing at age 83 of the man who for over 40 years had served as chief rabbi and head of the federation of Romanian Jewish communities signified the end of an era.
New Chief Rabbi
The feeling of stagnation that followed the death of the Rabbi Rosen prompted the representatives in Romania of the AJDC, which essentially administers to Jewish life there, to find a new chief rabbi quickly. Among the five candidates, all from Israel, they chose in May 1995 the Romanian-born professor Yehezkel Mark, a lecturer in literature at Bar-Ilan University who had never served in the rabbinate. Rabbi Dr. Mark energetically assumed the role of chief rabbi and, as the High Holidays approached in his first year in office visited the Jewish communities of Moldova and Transylvania. Rabbi Mark also turned to the Israel Ministry of Religious Affairs asking for individuals to assist with Jewish education, and also to train adults to function as gabbaim, to conduct prayer services, chant the weekly Torah portion, and so on.
Rabbi Rosen’s death also put an end to the concentrated centrality of the Federation of communities and allowed for greater freedom to the individual communities. The Federation was no longer headed by the rabbi but by Prof. Nicolae Cajal; Theodor Blumenfeld was the secretary general, and Iulian Sorin, the vice secretary general and prime mover who, together with the Joint representative, Dr. Zvi Feine, are trying to fill the gap left by the rabbi’s demise. The head of the Bucharest community, the largest in Romania, was Osy Lazar, and Israeli Alex Sivan was in charge of economic affairs (estates) for the Federation.
One of the most difficult issues is the number of Jews remaining in Romania. In 1995, it became known in Israel that the Jewish Agency had been asked—and refused—to bring 3,000 elderly Romanian Jews, those living in Jewish old age homes, to Israel. At the same time it was noted that besides those older people, there were still some 4,000 Jews in the country. A census taken after the fall of Ceausescu indicated that 9,000 remained, while the Federation and Joint speak of 14,000. It seems that 7,000–9,000 Jews live in Bucharest and that the countrywide total is about 12,000, most of them members of mixed marriages. A few dozen requests for conversion are received every year, but Rabbi Mark's reply has been that he “does not do conversions as yet.” Even though the total number of Jews is small, immigration to Israel continues.
Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Community
Despite the declining number of Jews the communities run smoothly and without assistance from the Federation, whose central place has been taken under the prevailing circumstances by the Joint. In addition to the Bucharest community, there are organized communities in the Transylvania region in Cluj, Oradea, Arad, Timisoara and in eastern Romania in Piatra-Neamt, Botosani, Jassy, Braila, Galati, Constanta, Ploiesti, Brasov, Sighet, Satu-Mare, and a number of small communities. Ten kosher canteens are still operated by the communities and kosher meat is provided by three ritual slaughterers.
The community biweekly was recently revamped and changed its name to Jewish Reality (Realitatea Evreiasca). Yiddish is no longer used, and the paper now appears in Romanian, English, and one page in Hebrew, for a total of 12 pages presenting information on the Jewish world with emphasis on Jewish culture and many quotations from Israeli newspapers translated into Romanian. The editor is Dorel Dorian, while the veteran editor, Chaim Riemer, who immigrated to Israel some years ago and then returned to Romania as an emissary of the Joint, was appointed “Honorary Director” and writes the Hebrew page.
In recent years anti-Semitism in Romania has been on a back burner, mainly in intellectual circles and is not accompanied by violent acts. Its most prominent spokesman is Vadim Tudor, editor of the daily newspaper Romania Mare. The newspaper and the political party of the same name incite against the Jews, against Israel, and also against the democratic forces in post-Ceausescu Romania. Iliescu tries to block any rising anti-Semitism, especially when considering America’s decision regarding the granting of economic concessions as a most favored nation. The Jewish community’s attitude, as expressed by Cajal, differs from that held in the past by Rabbi Rosen. Cajal does not declare a general, vocal war on anti-Semitism, but focuses on providing information to convince the Romanians of the great contribution the Jews made to the Romanian people and to the country. It may be that by the time the efficacy of this approach will be proven, there will be no Jews left in Romania.
On October 12, 2004, Romania celebrated its first Holocaust Remembrance Day. President Ion Iliescu told a joint session of Parliament, “We must never forget or minimize the darkest chapter of Romania's recent history, when Jews were the victims of the Holocaust.” Romania established the Memorial Day after a government statement denying that the Holocaust took place on Romanian territory provoked an uproar.
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis signed legislation into law on July 22, 2015, that punishes Holocaust denial with up to three years in prison. The law also bans the promotion of fascist movements and symbols.
Israel-Romania Relations
Israel-Romania relations over the past few years have proceeded on a fairly even keel. Many Romanian laborers work in Israel, while Israeli students, particularly of medicine, study in Romania. Some 400 Romanians immigrate annually to Israel, the majority of them partners in mixed marriages. In 2014, Israel and Romania signed a Joint Declaration for Intergovernmental Consultations, which included statements reaffirming their shared values of democracy, freedom, and rule of law.
During a visit to Romania in July 2015, officials from the Israeli and Romanian Chambers of Commerce announced that they had signed an agreement for business cooperation, to promote economic relations between the two countries. The Chambers of Commerce of Israel and Romania agreed to work together to encourage foreign investment in each other's countries, and continue to develop increasing trade between them. According to Matan Safran, Israel's Foreign Trade Administration representative who was present at the signing of the agreement, “ there is a fruitful system of trade and investments between the two countries. The volume of trade stood at $400 million in 2014 and is on the rise.”
Romanian Foreign Minister Lazar Comanescu paid an official visit to Israel in November 2016, during which he met with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the two discussed areas to expand cooperation between their countries.
Israeli defense contractor Rafael Advanced Systems signed an agreement to sell Iron Dome missile defense technology to Romanian defense firm Romaero in May 2018.
The Revival of the Jewish Youth
The Joint representatives continued to struggle for the continuity of the Jewish community in Romania and, together with the leaders of the community, launched a Jewish Education program aimed at revigorating the youth activity. The Joint recruited Jewish Service Corps (JSC) volunteers to develop informal programming for Jewish youth in Romania. Young active Jews from the United States would travel to Romania for a year, live and work closely with the emerging youth, educating them and supporting local initiative in Jewish education. FEDROM (the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania) has prioritized Jewish outreach, community development and education and hired local staff to work with the JSC volunteers on the following programs:
Revitalization of Romania’s Talmud Torah network, a countrywide Jewish educational program that reaches over 200 Jewish youth.
An annual two-week, jam-packed Summer Education Seminar, which attracts Jewish youth from around the country. For many, this seminar is their first opportunity to explore Jewish issues in depth.
Regional and national Seminars on Jewish Identity, Religious Practices, Leadership Development, and more, which are providing more advanced learning for young activists and important follow-up for many Summer Seminar participants.
Fun-filled Jewish programming at Jewish Camps for children and pre-teens aged 5-13.
The Jewish Education Network and Jewish Education through the Mail (JEM), which reach over 400 families around the country.
OTER – the Organization for Young Jews in Romania, which already has over 10 branches countrywide.
The JDC is also supporting the participation of Romanian Jewish youth in international programs such as the Machol Hungaria annual Israel dance festival in Hungary, the March of the Living, the International Bible Contest, and the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation/JDC International Jewish Summer Camp in Szarvas, Hungary.
The Jewish Agency sets up the “Tnuat Aliyah” youth club, where young Jews who are entitled to make aliyah have a chance to study basic Hebrew, learn about Israel and make new friends. The youth club also has an Israeli dancing group called “Hora”. The group has been touring Romania and Israel and is also performing at various local Jewish and social events.
The Pedagogical Center was created in Bucharest as a response to the increasing demand for Jewish activities and education. The staff is made of young people trained at various leadership and education programs organized by the EUJS (the European Union of Jewish Students) and by the WUJS (the World Union of Jewish Students).
The Pedagogical Center has organized numerous programs and seminars: the annual Judaism Seminar in the summer, regional seminars, journalism and web-design seminars, family programs, the children’s camps, Jewish identity programs, women’s seminars, training seminars for Jewish educators and Talmud Torah teachers and many more. Young and middle-aged Jews attend these programs in increasingly great numbers and there is growing interest in becoming involved in the community life.
The FEDROM has edited and published a Siddur Kabbalat Shabbat created for those who are not familiar with the services. The publication includes the Hebrew text with Romanian transliteration and translation. Later on, the FEDROM also published a Birkon Shabbat, a collection of blessings and songs that accompany the Shabbat traditions, from the time when the family returns after services until Havdalah. Both publications have been distributed to all the Jewish communities around the country and people use them either in their congregations or at home, with their families.
Cemetery fire
On September 30, 2014, a fire broke out at one of Romania’s oldest Jewish cemeteries, damaging much of the land and multiple headstones. There are more than 80,000 individuals buried at the Iasi cemetery, a historic Jewish cemetery that has been serving Romania’s Jewish community since the 18th century. The cemetery is also home to a monument for victims of the Holocaust. Officials believe that the fire was a brush-clearing fire set by local individuals that simply got out of hand. The fire easily spread through the Iasi cemetery due to the overgrowth of dry vegetation from lack of maintenance. for those individuals. A previous fire in 2012 damaged several headstones in the nearby Romanian Jewish cemetery of Pacurari.
Sources: Heritage Films;
JDC;
Anda Dumitru;
Postcard Photo Credits: Judaica Philatelic Resources Other Synagogue Photos: "Synagogues in Romania.";
JTA. “Fire rips through 18th century Romanian Jewish Cemetary,” Forward, (October 2, 2014);
IMRA. “Israel and Romania Sign Business Cooperation Agreement,” IMRA, (June 29, 2015);
IMRA. “PM Netanyahu Meets with the Foreign Ministers of Romania and New Zealand,” IMRA, (November 17, 2016);
Israel sells sea-borne version of Iron Dome defense system to Romanian contractor, JNS, (May 16, 2018).
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“Good teams, when that does happen, the shrug it off and get that next out,” catcher John Buck said. “But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t (a letdown). We got the job done, against a good hitter, Ian Kinsler, got the pitch we wanted, got him out front, popped him up on the curveball and”
Callaspo’s error was the Royals’ fourth of the weekend series, 15th in their last 13 games, and 75th of the season. Only Seattle, Arizona and Washington have more.
If you were going to pick one game as the microcosm to the Royals’ 38-59 season so far, you could do worse than Sunday.
It started out encouraging enough before a solid performance from the starting pitcher was torched by shoddy defense and a weak bullpen, with the whole operation given little margin for error because of a remarkably ineffective offense.
“It always takes emotion out of you when you give up three unearned runs in one inning,” manager Trey Hillman said. “But it happens even more when you’ve only got a couple hits on the board and you’re just having a miserable time offensively doing anything.”
All three runs in the seventh inning were unearned, but Jamey Wright had three more shots at recording the final out before being replaced by Juan Cruz.
Cruz and Roman Colon combined to give up four more runs — each very earned on a homer, walk and three singles.
That pushed the bullpen’s season ERA to 5.04 or, put another way, a very long distance from the spring days when the unit was considered a strength.
“From (the dropped popup) on,” said Texas manager Ron Washington, “we were able to play the game we like to play. Stole some bases, put some balls in play, made some things happen.”
Meanwhile, the Royals’ offense went back to its worst-in-the-league act. They went 13 batters from the second to sixth innings without a baserunner, and only one of those outs made it to the outfield.
The Royals didn’t score until the seventh, when Mark Teahen walked, moved to second when John Buck got hit by a pitch, and scored on a single by Alex Gordon. They added a second run with two outs in the ninth.
There wasn’t much else the Royals did well on offense, collecting only two hits and two walks despite catching a major break when Rangers ace Kevin Millwood — who entered with a 3.44 ERA — left after the second inning with what’s being called a tight left glute.
Righty Dustin Nippert replaced Millwood, and took the Rangers into the seventh, giving up just the one run in 4 2/3 innings. It was the 37th time the Royals scored two or fewer runs.
“These guys, they feel the pressure in front of the hometown fans,” Hillman said. “They feel the disappointment. They know what they want, and they’re frustrated not being able to produce, especially the way the record sits right now and the collapse of the bullpen since we started past the All-Star break.”
All that wasted an effective start by Ponson, who pitched into and out of trouble most of the afternoon. He walked two and gave up a single in the first. Gave up a leadoff walk in the second, a leadoff single in the fourth, and a leadoff double in the sixth.
Nobody scored.
Ponson pitched six scoreless innings, giving up five hits and three walks to go along with four strikeouts. Whether the “effectively wild” label fits, Ponson was effective and he was a bit wild. He’d thrown more balls than strikes into the third inning, and finished the day with 57 strikes in 102 pitches.
Depending on how you judge, it may have been Ponson’s best start of the season. He gave up one run in 7 1/3 innings against the Mariners in May, and three runs in eight innings against the Tigers in April.
“Being in the league so long, I know most of these guys,” Ponson said. “If I don’t make the pitch the way I want to, if I want a fastball down and away and leave it down the middle, they’re going to hit it. Today, I was able, if I wanted to go down and away, if I missed it was off the plate. Those things help.”
It was the third consecutive good outing for a Royals starting pitcher against the Rangers, following Zack Greinke’s one run in seven innings on Friday and Luke Hochevar’s career-high 13 strikeouts in seven innings on Saturday.
The starting pitching has been one of the Royals’ few bright spots this season, giving the team reason to believe they can win most games.
But you know the cliché: momentum is only as good as the next popup.
“At this point, we haven’t exactly been earning a lot of support here,” Mark Teahen said. “I don’t exactly blame the fans. We haven’t really been playing that well.”
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You are here: Home / Forts and Palaces / Forts in Madhya Pradesh
Forts in Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh is situated in the heart of India. Its landscape was once dotted with many important kingdoms. Some of its regions were very important because they offered a passage to the ‘Deccan’. Hence the kingdoms of this region were eagerly sought after by the powerful dynasties of North India. In this kind of situation one needs strong fortifications to defend their provinces. That’s the reason Madhya Pradesh has many impressive forts. Here you will find a list of the finest forts of Madhya Pradesh.
Gwalior Fort
Beautifully sculpted Man Mandir Palace in Gwalior Fort (Picture Credit: Sreyachat)
Gwalior Fort, situated in North Madhya Pradesh, is one of the largest forts in the country. As per the local lore, Suraj Sen – a local chieftain – built this fort in the 8th century AD. Thereafter the fort, which appears impregnable, fell in many hands, one after another. The citadel kept expanding under different dynasties. But it was under the rule of Maan Singh, a Tomar Rajput, that the fort received several magnificent buildings. Within the mighty fortifications of Gwalior, there are temples, palaces, sculptures, and a gurudwara. The art and architecture of the citadel are worth admiring. The most impressive building in the precincts is Man Singh Palace. The city of Gwalior has developed around the base of the hill on which fort is situated. Read More
Roopmati’s Pavilion in the fortified area of Mandu (Picture Credit: Yashasvi Nagda)
The ruined town of Mandu is nestled in the Vindhya Range. Enclosed within massive fortifications, Mandu had witnessed rules of many different dynasties before going into oblivion. It became a part of the state of Madhya Pradesh after independence. In its era it was the largest city in Hindustan (India). Its protective walls enclosed numerous palaces, temples and mosques. Some of these structures have stood the test of time. Jahaz Mahal is the most admirable palace amongst all the remaining palaces in Mandu. Along with it there are many other monuments which represent the wonderful architecture of the medieval India. Though many clans have ruled here, the most remembered king is ‘Baz Bahadur’ due to his love affair with the beautiful ‘Roopmati’. Read More
Travel Tip: The heritage site of Mandu is quite huge. So, if you are a history or architecture buff, you should plan to stay here for at least two days.
Orchha Fort Complex
A palace in the Orchha Fort Complex (Picture Credit: Arian Zwegers)
Orchha, a 16th century fortified town, was once the capital of Bundela kings. In 1738, when they shifted to Tikamgarh, they abandoned this beautiful town. Since then it lay unprotected until it came under the control of the department of archaelogy. This citadel comprised of elegant palaces, beautiful pavilions, temples, and cenotaphs. Many of these building still adorn the serene and picturesque landscape of Orchha. Jahangir Mahal and Raja Mahal are the most impressive buildings. Also don’t miss to visit the cenotaphs which are huge and impressive. Read More
Raisen Fort
Picture Credit: Vijay Tiwari09
Raisen town is 43 km west of Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. The fort here is spread across a hill and town has developed around the base of the hill. To enter this massive fort, you need to be ready to do an exerting ascent. The fort has 9 gates and 3 watchtowers. Enclosed within are the remains of several palaces and waterbodies along with a ‘Shiva’ temple, and a mosque. There are impressive views of the surrounding countryside from atop the fort. Built in 1200 AD, Raisen displays an amalgamation of several architectural styles. Every clan that ruled here has tried to leave its imprint through art and architecture.
Dhar Fort
Picture Credit: Zippymarmalade
Dhar is a small town, 69 km east of Indore. To visit the fort here, you can take a detour while travelling to Mandu from Indore. Situated on a small hill, just outside the town, Dhar Fort was built in 1344. Its ramparts are 2 km long and the edifice is made of red sandstone. The remains of the buildings inside the fort exhibit a mix of Indian, Mughal, and Afghan styles. There was a time when the renowned king Raja Bhoj held sway over this fort. During the revolt of 1857 against the British, this citadel had become an important base for the freedom fighters.
Asirgarh
Picture Credit: Yashasvi nagda
Asirgarh Fort straddles majestically over a hill, 20 km north of Burhanpur in Madhya Pradesh. Situated in the Satpura Range, this fortress was considered to be the gateway to the Deccan. Asirgarh has received its name from Asa Ahir – a landlord – who built this fortress in the 15th century. Akbar seized it in the 17th century. And eventually it landed in the hands of the British. While the structures in the fort are in ruins, a mosque, and a Shiva temple are worth observing. The architecture of Asirgarh displays influences of Islamic, Indian, Persian, and Turkish styles.
Chanderi Fort
Picture Credit: NomadicThunker
Chanderi Fort is a huge fort straddling a hill. It overlooks the town of Chanderi, which is 128 km south of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh. The protective wall of this 11th century fort is 5 km long. Confined within the wall are the remains of several monuments. A palace, a mosque, and a tomb are worth checking out. A king named Kirti Pal had commissioned this fort. But just like many other citadels, Chanderi saw the reign of several dynasties. Before British took it over, it was in the control of ‘Bundela’ dynasty. In 1861, British handed it over to the ‘Scindias’ of Gwalior.
Madan Mahal
Picture Credit: Mityrocks
Madan Mahal, a bastion from the 11th century, is situated in Jabalpur city of Madhya Pradesh. Madan Singh – a king of ‘Gond’ clan – erected it in the 11th century. Almost every structure in the precincts is in a dilapidated state, but one building called Durgavati’s Palace is standing tall. This uniquely built palace has a boulder as its base and is a star attractions in Madan Mahal. To reach here, you need to do a short climb. En route you can stop to watch the popular ‘Balancing Rocks’. This place is a favourite haunt of the youngsters of Jabalpur, sometimes some miscreants are also found here. So, for solo women travellers, it is advisable to go accompanied by somebody.
Maheshwar Fort
Picture Credit: Bernard Gagnon
Forts were generally designed to appear mighty, but the fort at Maheshwar exudes elegance. This beautiful edifice is situated along the bank of Narmada River. Ahilya Devi Holkar, after acceding to the throne following Malhar Rao’s death, built this fort. Today the descendants of the Holkar dynasty have converted it into a heritage hotel. However, a temple in the fort is open to the visitors.
Bandhavgarh Fort
Bandhavgarh Fort is situated on a hill, right in the middle of the Bandhavgarh National Park. Believed to be more than 2000 years old, this fort finds mention in the inscriptions. It is obvious that the fort would have changed many hands. The last dynasty that ruled here was of ‘Baghels’. Their rule began here in the 13th century and continued until 1617, when they abandoned Bandhavgarh to shift to Rewa. Today the forest has penetrated into the fort. The land inside and the buildings are covered with vegetation.
Important: Forest department has stopped offering permission to visit the fort since 2012. So, check with them if you want to visit.
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SOUTH AUSTRALIAN STUDENTS LAND BIGGEST EVER SOFTWARE GRANT
Hakan Ozcelik from Siemens demonstrates the software to UniSA student Emily Hilder
In the largest ever software grant in Australia, Siemens is giving more than $450 million worth of advanced industrial product lifecycle management (PLM) software to the University of South Australia (UniSA).
The grant was announced by Siemens Australia Chairman and CEO Jeff Connolly, who said: “I’m delighted to be here today announcing the grant of Siemens’ PLM advanced industrial software with in-kind commercial value of more than $450 million to the University of South Australia. It demonstrates the great partnership we have with the state of South Australia, which began in 1872, and our commitment to partnering with great educational institutions to building the workforce of the future.”
The grant is part of Siemens’ commitment of over $1 billion in advanced PLM software grants to universities around Australia and will enable students and the university to develop the skills needed to successfully participate in Industry 4.0.
It follows the recommendations and work of the Prime Minister’s Industry 4.0 Taskforce – an industry led group established to support improved bilateral relations between Australia and Germany.
UniSA Vice Chancellor, Professor David Lloyd, thinks the partnership with Siemens Australia will provide extraordinary opportunities for UniSA students and for local industry in the state.
“It’s exciting to think that our students will soon have access to the same software used to design and develop everything from Space X, the Mars Curiosity Rover, Maserati Ghibli and other world leading innovations such as the digital shipyard for Newport News (US) where aircraft carriers are built,” said Professor Lloyd.
“Not only will it allow us to give our students experience of an industry 4.0 environment, it will also deliver huge benefits for manufacturing research at UniSA and for the industry partners we work with every day to support innovation and enterprise. Across space, mining, environment, defence and biomedical technology – it will allow us to model and prototype new ideas and give our students experience of advanced technology in the production of things, systems and processes.
“The Siemens’ investment is farsighted, and we are delighted to be working with them to deliver graduates with the skills and knowledge to shape and transform industry in the future.”
The software grant provides a suite of advanced PLM software, including power tools such as the Teamcenter portfolio for engineering collaboration, NX software for 3D design, the Simcenter portfolio for predictive engineering simulation and analytics and the Tecnomatix portfolio that includes digital avatars.
SYDNEY STUDENT ROCKETEERS’ SKY-HIGH SUCCESS
by Industry Update In Education & Training
A team of student rocketeers from the University of Sydney has become the first Australian team to win a prize at the annual Spaceport America Cup intercollegiate rocketry competition in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Competing against 51 student teams from around the globe, the University of Sydney team... Read More
SYDNEY ROCKETRY STUDENTS SHOOT FOR THE SKY
The University of Sydney Rocketry Team is Australia’s oldest tertiary student rocketry team and is made up of a multidisciplinary group of students who design and manufacture high-powered sounding rockets.
During a test launch in regional NSW in late 2018, the team’s rocket reached a height of... Read More
NEW INTERN PARTNERSHIP TO ACCELERATE WA DEFENCE INNOVATION
A $230,000 partnership between the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute’s APR.Intern programme and Western Australia’s Defence Science Centre will give STEM PhD students experience in defence innovation.
The programme, announced by WA Defence Issues Minister Paul Paplia at launch of the... Read More
WELDING QUALIFICATION TO SUPPORT QLD DEFENCE INDUSTRY
TAFE Queensland, Weld Australia and the Queensland Government are revolutionising the training of welders in the state by offering a new ISO 9606 course in fusion welding that uses state-of-the-art augmented reality technology.
ISO 9606 is the international standard required for welding of... Read More
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Commentary: Freedom's Promise Is Still Denied To Thousands Of Blacks Unable To Make Bail
By Matthew Larson for The Conversation • Jun 19, 2019
Austin Price for KUT
June 19 marks Juneteenth, a celebration of the de facto end of slavery in the United States.
For hundreds of thousands of African-Americans stuck in pretrial detention – accused but not convicted of a crime, and unable to leave because of bail – that promise remains unfulfilled. And coming immediately after Father’s Day, it’s also a reminder of the loss associated with the forced separation of families.
On a very personal level, I know how this separation feels. Every Father’s Day since 2011, I’ve been reminded of the unexpected death of my dad at the age of 48. But also on a professional level, as a criminologist who has been researching mass incarceration for the past decade, I understand the disproportionate impact it’s had on African-Americans, destabilizing black families in the process.
Blacks Behind Bars
Juneteenth is a celebration of African-Americans’ triumph over slavery and access to freedom in the U.S., which occurred in Galveston, Texas, in June of 1865, over two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
While Juneteenth is a momentous day in U.S. history, it is important to appreciate that the civil rights and liberties promised to African-Americans have yet to be fully realized. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander forcefully explains, this is a consequence of Jim Crow laws and the proliferation of incarceration that began in the 1970s, including the increase of people placed in pretrial detention and other criminal justice policies.
There are 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in American prisons and jails – including those not convicted of any crime. Black people comprise 40 percent of them, even though they represent just 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Not Yet Guilty But Not Free
More troubling is the number of incarcerated individuals currently held in jail for crimes of which they have not yet been convicted.
The Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on mass incarceration, has reported that over a half million citizens are languishing in pretrial detention. And like most criminal justice outcomes, the burden of this disproportionately falls on minorities, especially black men and women.
In local jails alone, over 300,000 people are awaiting trial for property, drug or public order crimes. And again, these disproportionately black defendants are confined and separated from their families, friends and jobs simply because they lack the means to post cash bail – the only reason they can’t get out.
Toll On Families
It should be no surprise, then, that 1 in 9 black children now has a parent behind bars, compared with the national rate of 1 in 28.
And many of these children are at an increased likelihood of experiencing physical and mental health issues, academic struggles and a range of other behavioral problems. Children of incarcerated mothers are also at heightened odds of ending up in foster care and being exposed to other traumas.
Being the partner of an incarcerated individual is another often stressful experience that also falls disproportionately on black citizens, particularly women.
The good news is that such injustices are receiving growing attention nationwide.
Just City, a nonprofit organization working to reduce the harms of the criminal justice system, has campaigned to raise funds and promote awareness of its Memphis Community Bail Fund project for Father’s Day – in part because nearly half a million of the black men behind bars are dads.
The aim of the project is to provide both financial and legal support for defendants lacking resources to independently secure their pretrial release, with the goal of the campaign being the release of jailed fathers so that they could be with their kids for the holiday.
Bail funds similar to Just City’s have proliferated throughout the U.S.
On one hand, the multiplication of these organizations is encouraging and reason for optimism. On the other, their growth is another reminder that many of the freedoms celebrated on Juneteenth remain unrealized.
A Long Road Continues
In cities like Detroit, where 1 in 7 adult males is under some form of correctional control in some communities, it is a monumental task to make sense of the short- and long-term impacts of incarceration for black families.
Children suffer. Parents struggle. Relationships deteriorate. And as a result, so too do so many African-American communities. Lost wages matter to families, but they also matter to communities. The lower tax base that results makes it more difficult for struggling public institutions, like schools, to progress. And with such a large share of individuals removed from some communities due to incarceration, and branded as felons upon their release, these communities lose potential voters and the political capital they carry. They are too often disenfranchised and stripped of their full power and potential.
Juneteenth celebrates the freedom of black Americans and the long, hard road they were forced to traverse to gain that freedom. But as criminologists like me have maintained time and again, the U.S. criminal justice system remains biased, albeit implicitly, against them.
Matthew Larson, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University
Racial Justice
PHOTOS: Austin Commemorates The End Of Slavery With Annual Juneteenth Parade
By KUT Staff • Jun 15, 2019
Gabriel C. Pérez / KUT
Spectators lined the streets in East Austin on Saturday for the annual Juneteenth parade, which celebrates the end of slavery in Texas.
Beto O'Rourke Is Talking About Racial Injustice. Black Voters Are Listening.
By Ashley Lopez, KUT • Oct 1, 2018
Julia Reihs / KUT
Congressman Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso Democrat hoping to oust Sen. Ted Cruz in November, is not shying away from talking about race. And black voters are noticing.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll released last month, 97 percent of black voters surveyed said they favor O’Rourke.
Austin City Council Passes Measure To Reduce Racial Disparity In Misdemeanor Arrests
By Audrey McGlinchy, KUT • Jun 15, 2018
Nathan Bernier / KUT
If an Austin police officer stops someone for a nonviolent misdemeanor – such as possessing a small amount of marijuana or driving without a valid license – the officer has a choice: issue a citation or arrest the person. Simply put, the officer has discretion.
Austin City Council members voted 9-0 (two council members were not present) Thursday to do away with some of this discretion. Proponents cited police data that show black and Hispanic people stopped for low-level offenses are more likely than white people to be arrested than cited.
Austin History Center's Juneteenth Tour of African-American Heritage
By Filipa Rodrigues & Joy Diaz • Jun 17, 2013
Filipa Rodrigues, KUT News
A series of Juneteenth celebrations kicked off this weekend, celebrating the day in 1865 when slaves in Texas learned they were free. To honor these celebrations, KUT News is telling a series of stories about the history of the African-American community in Austin.
Activists Call On Lawmakers To Overhaul The Texas Criminal Justice System
By DaLyah Jones • Aug 28, 2018
Hundreds of community activists from across Texas gathered on the steps of the state Capitol on Tuesday to call on Republicans and Democrats to pass legislation to overhaul the criminal justice system here.
Dan Patrick Blames Black Lives Matter Movement for Dallas Shooting
By madlin mekelburg • Jul 8, 2016
Bob Daemmrich / Texas Tribune
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick joined a handful of other Texas Republican officials Friday in blaming former Black Lives Matter protests for the shooting in Dallas Thursday night that left at least five police officers dead.
"I do blame people on social media with their hatred towards police," Patrick said during an interview on Fox News on Friday. He added that, despite the "peaceful" nature of last nights protests, he blames former Black Lives Matter events for the incident.
Watch: What It's Like to Be a Black Student on a Mostly White Austin Campus
Filipa Rodrigues for KUT News
To celebrate Juneteenth, KUT News is bringing you voices from Austin's black community.
Nneka Waturoucha is a 19-year-old University of Texas student. Her father is American and her mother is Nigerian. While she grew up around minority communities in Houston, she’s still assimilating into the predominately white West Campus area.
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A ‘too tall’ tale: girls and the drug DES
By Christine Cosgrove
In 1964, when I was 14, a doctor suggested to my parents that I seemed likely to grow “too tall” for a woman. By that he meant that I would grow too tall to be happy, too tall to fit in, too tall to find a man.
Fortunately, he said, there was something he could do about it. Soon after, I began taking massive doses of a drug he called “the same thing as birth control pills.” The side effects were immediate and unpleasant: nausea, vomiting, leaking breasts, depression, weight gain. My mother complained, the dosage was adjusted downward, my stomach calmed down, and I continued taking the drugs for five more years. I also continued to grow until I was almost 6 feet tall.
Nobody ever seemed concerned about long-term side effects. But more than two decades later, I learned that the drug I’d been given was diethylstilbestrol, or DES, a synthetic chemical compound that acts like estrogen in the body and that is known today for causing cancer and reproductive abnormalities in the offspring of women given it during pregnancy.
The practice of using DES on tall girls had a long history. It was in the late 1940s that doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston first discovered a way to alter height -- a distinctive, heritable trait -- in girls whose parents feared their daughters were growing too tall. In those days, hormone discoveries were heralding a new era in medicine, just as gene therapy is today. Hormones were the miracle that would allow doctors to manipulate how tall a girl grew and allay her mother’s fears.
Why would anyone want to stunt a girl’s growth? Back then, if a girl were heading toward 5 foot 8 or, horrors, 5 foot 10, not only would she have trouble finding clothes that fit, she’d have a hard time finding a husband. And in the days when there were few options besides marriage and children for women, well, that left an old maid.
Before hormones came along, the best advice a medical columnist for the L.A. Times could offer worried mothers whose daughters were heading for the rafters was to limit their food intake and, for heaven’s sake, eliminate vitamins. Some girls who reached towering heights had six inches or so of bone removed from their long legs, but that required a long and complicated recovery at the very least.
So with the availability of the cheap, synthetic drug DES, and the discovery that large amounts of estrogen could push a girl into and through puberty quickly, allowing less time for her bones to grow long, the tall-girl problem appeared to have a solution. An inherited trait that used to be a given -- tall stature -- could now be fixed.
In the U.S., it is estimated that thousands of tall girls obediently swallowed massive amounts of DES -- often 100 times the amount of estrogen delivered in a high-dose birth control pill -- daily over a period of several years. When DES was found to cause cancer in the offspring of women prescribed it during pregnancy, doctors switched tall girls over to different types of estrogen. The practice continues today throughout the world, although many fewer girls in the U.S. or their parents request the treatment.
Now it’s OK to be tall -- just ask Michelle Obama, the Williams sisters or 6-foot-8 Brittney Griner, a Houston high school senior and basketball player with a powerful dunk that will propel her wherever she wants to go in athletics.
What became of the girls who were treated? Now women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, some are happy they had the treatment because they believe they might have been much taller, although there’s no way to know because nobody can really predict a child’s final mature height.
Others are angry. They blame myriad health problems -- including weight gain, ovarian cysts, miscarriages, blood clots, endometriosis, depression and infertility -- on the choices their parents made when they were children. And they wonder what else their long exposure to huge amounts of estrogen will do to their future health.
They have reason to be worried. The first real follow-up on several hundred stunted girls took place in Australia and showed a significant decrease in fertility among those who were treated.
In addition, the women whose height was stunted were not always happy about their final height or the efforts used to achieve it. The Australian researchers, who tracked down women and their parents decades later, discovered that some families were still unable to talk about the subject. One woman said her teenage daughter had run away years earlier rather than take the pills, and she beseeched the researchers to let her know if they found her.
I couldn’t help but think about all this when I heard of the Los Angeles fertility doctor who recently said he would offer parents the option of selecting not only the sex of their child but their choice of hair and eye color too. After a flurry of criticism in the media, he backed down, saying designer babies are off his drawing board.
But they’re sure to return in this era of genome mapping and gene therapy. And before we go too far down that path, we ought to think carefully about where we’re heading. What kind of kid really wants her parents to choose her genes? If you don’t like your mother’s taste in clothes, say, or hairdos, why would you want her to pick out everything about you? And more to the point, whose life is it anyway?
Christine Cosgrove is the coauthor of “Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry’s Quest to Manipulate Height,” which was published last month.
Op-Ed: Building more permanent housing alone won’t solve homelessness in California
Homeless people should have a legal right to shelter and a legal obligation to utilize it.
Editorial: Yet again, Trump ignores the law to impose his will on America’s neighbors
To deal with a surge in asylum seekers, Trump is trying to rewrite federal law and impose terms unilaterally on Mexico and Guatemala. The asylum system does have problems, but that’s not the solution.
Op-Ed: Los Angeles should look to New York for answers to its homeless problem
Whereas L.A. has focused (unsuccessfully) on trying to create long-term affordable housing, New York has focused on creating temporary shelters.
Letters to the Editor: Lady Liberty never lifted her lamp at the southern border
The welcoming words at the foot of the Statue of Liberty are just a myth, and the recent immigration raids prove it.
Letters to the Editor: Joe Biden isn’t a racist for having fought busing in the 1970s
In a way, Joe Biden resembles America: racially problematic half a century ago, but now tolerant and trying to right past wrongs.
Column: A century of surviving crises left democracy overconfident and vulnerable
David Runciman, a politics and history professor at Cambridge University, talks about his book “How Democracy Ends”.
Trump’s asylum ban will only worsen problems at the border
Trump’s latest asylum ban will make problems at the border worse and encourage people entering the country illegally to hide.
Letters to the Editor: The worst thing about Trump’s racism? Republicans’ silence
President Trump tweeted racist attacks that ought to spur universal condemnation. Instead, Republicans are staying largely silent.
Women were brutally strip-searched in L.A. County jails. Now we have to pay for it
The women were ordered to line up outdoors, strip, and toss their clothes onto the concrete in front of them.
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Archive for May 2019
Language Often Reveals One’s Character: No Trivial Matter
By Yeshaia Charles Familant | May 31, 2019
At the tea party which Alice attended, though an uninvited guest, she became, unintentionally, embroiled in a debate with the the March Hare, the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse. At one point, you may remember, there was a discussion of the use of language in order to divine its correct meaning and, in particular, about…
Trump: Kim’s Right About Biden
Coming under the heading of Oh-Dear-God-No!… News media is reporting that tRump recently sided with North Korea’s grotesque despot, Kim Jong Un, and that Kim was “right” to say that Joe Biden had a “low IQ.” The Orange One also seemed to indicate that his own National Security Advisor, John Bolton, was taking North Korea’s…
Meme: Network Revisited
WSJ: tRump Wanted USS John McCain Invisible
News outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, are reporting that during his recent trip to Japan, tRump wanted the American warship, USS John McCain, “Out Of Sight,” so as not to remind him of his old rival. Further, crew members from the ship were decidedly un-invited to events at which our alleged commander-in-chief was to…
They Just Don’t Get It
There is a useful article over on the Common Dreams site this month, Why So Many Journalists Are Clueless About the Bernie 2020 Campaign, by Norman Solomon. In it, Solomon argues that mainstream journalists continue to misunderstand, and vastly underestimate, Bernie Sanders’ campaign because they are focused on the Democratic Party establishment and the American…
The Truth about Hawaiian Real Estate
By Chris Madsen | May 30, 2019
by Chris Madsen Most land in Hawaii isn’t investment grade. Hawaii has two land systems. Think about it for a minute and consider the other 49 states all only need one system each. Land Court has been around since 1903 and is the closest system to the original Hawaiian system. Land Court lacks certain things…
image source: Montclair Film [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] VirtualReality 2, Host and commentator, Marc Keyser Note: this is a “virtual” interview. Marc Keyser did not actually interview the actor Jeff Daniels for this piece. However, the author employs public statements from the actor and considers what it might be like to discuss politics with him.…
Mueller Speaks…the storm is coming
Today at 11 am Eastern Standard, Robert Mueller made his first public statement about his longstanding investigation of Trump’s ties to Russian (and other) interests. His message was that he had in no way exonerated Trump, in spite of the president’s statements to the contrary. Mueller also indicated that he is leaving the Department of…
The ‘Golden Rule.’ What if…
My middle son, Hillel, sent me a text message, asking if his namesake was the first to express the ‘Golden Rule.’ I texted him back this answer: “Boychik, this rule, often called the ‘the ethic of reciprocity’ is found in many cultures/religions reaching as far back as the Code of Hammurabi during this Babylonian king’s…
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Poor Listening Skills Are Holding You Back | LifeZette
Poor Listening Skills Are Holding You Back
Now hear this: Business is on the line and marriages are on the rocks.
By Jennifer Fallon | January 19, 2016
Chances are, your poor listening skills are costing you money.
Got your attention? Or are you still texting with your phone in one hand and trying to do something else while reading this?
Focus for just a minute.
We’ve become a society that values getting things done quickly. Multitasking amid a nonstop flow of information flooding our lives and our brains has become the norm. But while we’re trying to soak up information from multiple sources at one time, are we doing any one thing well?
A University of Maryland study from 2009 shows that hospitals across the United States lose $12 billion annually because of poor communication. Innolect Inc., a business management enterprise, says Fortune 500 companies waste at least $75 million each year in ineffective meetings because of poor listening skills. And the average cost per year for poor listening amounts to as much as $26,042 for each worker in the United States.
It isn’t just your business life that is suffering from weak listening skills. Multiple studies have shown that the lack of communication between couples is the leading cause of divorce in this country, followed by financial trouble and infidelity.
[lz_related_box id=”71393″]
Julian Treasure, chairman of the Sound Agency in Chertsey, England, says our listening abilities are under threat.“It’s rare that we encounter silence or even a high level of stillness or quiet,” he told LifeZette.
“We start to habituate to that noise, we start to suppress it, so we get into the habit of not listening. We have a multiple-stream culture where kids are quite happy to be watching TV, texting somebody and talking to somebody all at the same time. We get accustomed to more and more layers. Real listening is paying 100 percent attention to someone speaking, not using 10 percent of our bandwidth,” he said.
“Our society is much more oriented around sending than listening. People are much keener to be heard than to hear.”
Treasure also said the high level of noise we encounter can negatively affect our health. He points out that sound has an influence on our heart rate and hormone levels and that it can influence our behavior. He cites frequent police reports that describe crime scenes with excessive and loud noise.
Laura Janusik, associate professor of communication at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, has done research that shows the decline of listening throughout the years. She found that the amount of time we spend listening each day has decreased from 45 percent in 1930 to 24 percent in 2007. That’s a startling statistic.
[lz_ndn video =29766589]
Janusik believes the decline in listening is in part due to our ready access to written information.
“We know how easy it is to retrieve because of Google. So we don’t try that hard to listen to understand,” she told LifeZette.
She also points out the learning gap around listening skills.
“It’s the most used communication skill (as rated against reading, writing, and speaking), yet it’s the one that is least often taught. Though most of us figure out how to get by with some basic listening skills, most individuals do not fully develop their capacities to listen because they think they don’t have a problem,” she said.
It’s likely we all have a problem. Good news: It’s possible to improve. Janusik says listening is composed of two parts — behavior and cognition. Cognition refers to whether you can mentally comprehend what is being communicated to you. Behavior refers to the nonverbal and verbal communications you use to let the people speaking know they have been heard and understood.
She says there’s actually a large gender gap in how men and women communicate.
“Women typically show listening through eye contact, head nods, facial expressions, asking questions. Men often listen solely cognitively, so they know they understand, but they don’t show the other person that they understand,” she said.
How good are you at listening? Ask yourself:
1: Do you use nonverbal communication (such as eye contact and nodding) to let the speaker know you are listening?
2: Are your thoughts focused on what the other person is saying?
3: Do you ask clarifying questions to help you understand what the other person is saying?
4: Can you remember most of what you discussed in a meeting without looking at your notes?
5: Do you consider and build on the other person’s ideas?
6: Do you take time to sit in silence for a few minutes each day?
7: Do you set aside all distractions and devices during a conversation so that you can listen effectively?
If you answered yes to these questions, you have probably acquired some good listening skills. If you answered no, chances are you have some work to do.
Related: The Power of the Present Moment
If you’re interested in improving your listening skills, Janusik suggests making some adjustments to the behavioral side of your listening. This means using nonverbal cues — such as nodding and eye contact, as well as verbal cues — such as paraphrasing and asking questions to show that you are hearing what others have to say.
The better you are at listening, the more others will want to listen to you. Listening is one of the most under-recognized and yet most important of leadership skills.
“Conversation is a two-way process,” said Treasure. “Most great leaders are great listeners. It’s hard to inspire people if they don’t feel understood or listened to.”
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Appeal set up to raise £25k for flood victims in Bootle
AN APPEAL has been launched to help people affected by the flooding in Bootle.
Around 50 houses were severely damaged when torrential rain hit the area a fortnight ago and many families still have not returned home.
The Community Foundation for Merseyside is aiming to raise £25,000. Development manager Cat Kirkcaldy, said: “People will be able to send applications to us and we will prioritise cases. A lot of families had to move to hotels but there are no cooking facilities and they are on low incomes, so they need that initial support.
“It is going to be a few months before some people can go back to their homes and they will need to buy furniture, so we will be giving short term and long term funding. Quite a lot of those affected are children who have been separated from their friends in the school holidays, and there are a lot of single parent families and elderly people as well.”
The Community Foundation is a national network, which last year raised money for those affected by the Cumbrian floods. It is working alongside Sefton Council, One Vision Housing, Sefton CVS and St Leonard’s Church in Bootle. Donations can be made at www.justgiving.com/ bootlefloodappeal
Former councillor Jack Colbert, who lives off Seaforth Road, said: “I hope this is successful. People round here deserve it.”
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Liverpool roller derby league goes from strength to strength
IT was while I was watching the fast and furious film ‘Whip It’ last year I thought how wonderful it would be if roller derby was played in Liverpool.
Little did I know that the city had its very own league.
The Liverpool Roller Birds league was set up in November and has since seen women flocking to join. For those who don’t know, roller derby is a women-only contact sport for over 18s and is undertaken on roller skates.
Played with two teams on an indoor track, it’s a tough game but still with a hint of glamour.
Imagine my excitement, then, when I found not only did the city have its own roller derby team but was taking on new skaters.
Of course roller skates brought back memories of being a 10-year-old on retro boots and having not skated in years, I wondered whether at the grand age of 29 I was too old to take up a sport like this.
But my fears were unfounded as I walked into Garston Urban Village Hall to find a diverse range of women there, all of different ages and sizes and all enthusiastically getting kitted up for training.
I was introduced to one of the Birds' teammates, Sissy Breakneck. All the Birds have their own nicknames but despite her name, Sissy was really sweet.
The session underway, we were taught basic skating skills as well as how to fall safely – a boon for me!
Some of the ‘chicks’ who started out that day could barely move on their wheels but thanks to the dedication of the team, just three months later they are preparing to play their first game.
Liverpool Roller Birds has a reputation for being a friendly league and with its emphasis on empowering women, for many of us it has improved our confidence while offering a new circle of friends.
For details email liverpoolrollerbirds@hotmail.co.uk or visit the Birds on Facebook.
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Library of Congress > News from the Library of Congress > 2017 > Library Announces Winners of 2017 Literacy Awards
September 1, 2017 Library Announces Winners of 2017 Literacy Awards
Children’s Literacy Initiative, National Center for Families Learning & Pratham Books Take Top Honors
Press Contact: Gayle Osterberg (202)707-0020 | Sheryl Cannady (202) 707-6456
Public Contact: Center for the Book (202)707-5221
Website: Library of Congress Literacy Awards
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the winners of the 2017 Library of Congress Literacy Awards tonight at the Library of Congress National Book Festival gala.
Three organizations received awards from Hayden and philanthropist David M. Rubenstein: the Children’s Literacy Initiative; the National Center for Families and Learning; and Pratham Books.
Originated by Rubenstein in 2013, the Literacy Awards honor organizations working to promote literacy and reading in the United States and worldwide. The awards recognize groups doing exemplary, innovative and replicable work, and they spotlight the need for the global community to unite in striving for universal literacy.
“Literacy is the first line of defense against so many problems—unemployment, hunger, poor health—and gives people a foundation for a brighter future,” Hayden said. “Through the generosity of David M. Rubenstein, the Library of Congress is proud to honor these exemplary organizations for their continued efforts to raise reading levels. Their work is moving and truly life-changing, and it is our privilege to recognize them here tonight.”
Prizes and Recipients
David M. Rubenstein Prize ($150,000): Children’s Literacy Initiative, Philadelphia
Children’s Literacy Initiative (CLI) works with pre-K through third-grade teachers to improve early literacy instruction so children become powerful readers, writers and thinkers. CLI creates a sustainable, school-wide culture of literacy that introduces students to the joys of reading, writing and lifelong learning. The organization coaches teachers one-on-one and in small groups in the classroom—providing demonstrations and feedback that help teachers incorporate effective literacy practices into their daily work with students. It stocks classrooms with learning materials and collections of high-quality children’s literature and extends its services with online professional development resources. CLI provides workshops and seminars to build a teacher’s knowledge of literacy content and pedagogy.
American Prize ($50,000): National Center for Families Learning, Louisville, Kentucky
Established in 1989 by its current president, Sharon Darling, the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) works to eliminate poverty through educational solutions for families. Throughout its 28-year history, NCFL has changed the lives of millions of families across the country by providing literacy strategies, programming and resources. Engaging multiple generations together has been a fundamental and distinguishing aspect of NCFL’s work, because it knows this creates a stronger impact and greater success for families.
International Prize ($50,000): Pratham Books, Bangalore, India
Established with the mission of “a book in every child’s hand,” Pratham Books has helped millions of children have access to engaging, affordable, multilingual books. In order to scale the creation and distribution of multilingual content, Pratham Books launched StoryWeaver, India’s first open-source, digital repository of multilingual stories. All content on StoryWeaver is openly licensed. Users can read, download, print and share stories for free as well as use tools embedded on the platform to create and translate content into local languages.
The Library of Congress Literacy Awards program is also honoring 15 organizations for their implementation of best practices in literacy promotion. These organizations are:
The Asia Foundation, San Francisco
Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Center for Teaching and Learning, Edgecomb, Maine
Centre for Knowledge Assistance and Community Development, Hanoi, Vietnam
CODE, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
CommonLit Inc., Washington, D.C.
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities/PRIME TIME, New Orleans
Reading Partners, Oakland, California
Reading Works Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico
Sealaska Heritage Institute, Juneau, Alaska
Serve Minnesota, Minneapolis
State Library of Western Australia - Better Beginnings Family Literacy Program, Perth, Australia
Story Share Inc., Boston
Tales and Travel Memories, Elgin, Illinois
Yayasan Sulinama, Ambon, Maluku, Indonesia
Rubenstein is the co-founder and co-chief executive officer of The Carlyle Group. He is a major benefactor of the Library of Congress and the chairman of the Library’s lead donor group, the James Madison Council.
The Library of Congress Literacy Awards are administered by the Library’s Center for the Book, which was created in 1977 by Congress to “stimulate public interest in books and reading.” A public-private partnership, the center sponsors educational programs that reach readers of all ages, nationally and internationally. The center provides leadership for affiliated state centers for the book and nonprofit reading-promotion partners and plays a key role in the Library’s annual National Book Festival.
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States—and extensive materials from around the world—both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
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Email: news@loc.gov
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USA Today Logo
USA Today Logo – USA Today is a newspaper in the United States national newspaper published by Gannett Corporation. It is the largest daily newspaper in the country (with about 2.25 million copies every weekday) and the second largest circulation in the anglophone world (after The Times of India). USA Today was founded on September 15 of 1982 by Allen Neuharth. It claims to break with traditional newspapers (sometimes considered too gray, full of words and no color), with a style full of great diagrams and pictures. It is also known for its surveys on the views of the American public.
Initially the paper was also intended to stand apart from traditional methods of distribution, currently sold through a dispatcher with curved edges that resemble old TV as a dispatcher rather than traditional newspapers. USA Today also sought to accommodate business travelers and was widely distributed in airlines, airports and hotels, as in addition to other outlets. He was also one of the first newspapers to use satellite transmissions to send the final edition to different parts of the country for printing and distribution in regional markets. Innovation and use of regional centers of printing allowed closing time delay of the issues and to incorporate recent events and sports news in each issue.
The newspaper has proved a success, but critics have accused him of trivializing the news. His writing style is rarely used and generally subordinate statements has only three major statements by paragraph, all with the goal of readability. As a result, in its early days was referred to pejoratively as “McPaper” or “McNewspaper” in reference to the simplicity of fast food McDonald’s (who now distributes the newspaper). Still, the use of color, graphics and other elements, has been imitated by other magazines and newspapers. Its sports section is particularly popular because of this and its extensive coverage of events.
Since its inception in 1982 until the fall of 2001, Larry King was a columnist for USA Today. In 2001 the newspaper changed its corporate offices to a new building of 120,000 miles in Mc Lean, in the County of Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington not far from its former headquarters in Arlington County. On September 7, 2005 the current price is 0.75 ¢ newspaper and Sunday 0.50. The kiosks are selling more papers in this issue, with some newspapers more economical due to the paper, is environmentally friendly and durable. According to the World Almanac 2005, USA Today is the most widely distributed newspaper in the United States.
Daniel ⋅ Newspaper Logo ⋅
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Not just a phone
For the second time this year, we have put a phone on the cover of Macworld. We know that this will lead many of you to wonder what the heck is wrong with us. After all, the letters will point out, this isn’t Phoneworld , is it?
No, it’s not. But then Apple’s iPhone is not just a phone, either. It’s also a full-featured iPod and—more importantly for Macworld readers—the smallest Mac ever. The iPhone might weigh less than five ounces and rely on a revolutionary new touch-screen interface, but it runs OS X. When you browse the Web on it, you’re using the same WebKit technology that drives Safari on your Mac.
That’s not the only Mac connection, of course. The iPhone is an important addition to the list of products you can attach to your Mac. And unlike most phones, which require add-on software to sync with Macs, the iPhone directly integrates with iTunes, Safari, iCal, and the rest of Mac OS X.
The new, new thing
The original Macintosh changed the world by relying on a mouse to move a cursor around a graphical computer interface. The iPhone does it one better: When you slide your finger across the iPhone’s screen, the photo, Web page, or e-mail message, or whatever else that screen is displaying, moves along with your touch, as if you were moving an actual, physical object. The iPhone has no cursor because your finger is the pointer.
There’s no telling whether the iPhone’s touch-screen interface will find its way into other products. I wouldn’t expect Mac OS X 10.6 to throw out 25 years of interface development. But the iPhone is so innovative that I find it hard to believe it’ll have no spin-offs. It’s entirely possible that Apple’s innovations in the world of small devices will end up leading to related innovations on the Mac side.
I also wouldn’t be surprised to see more devices powered by OS X that aren’t Macs as we know them today. It’s easy to imagine, for example, a laptop that’s more full-featured than an iPhone (offering a bigger screen and a real keyboard, say) but still much smaller than a MacBook. The iPhone and (to a lesser extent) the Apple TV have shown that OS X can be crammed into tiny boxes. That could mean tinier Macs.
In any event, as a magazine focused on everything Apple—not just the Mac but also the iPod, the Apple TV, and now the iPhone— Macworld will continue to keep you up-to-date on everything the company does. Even if you’re not interested in owning an iPhone, the product is important enough to the Mac’s future that you should keep tabs on it. (Our new iPhone Central blog is a good place to do so.)
The backlash begins
In the weeks leading up to the iPhone’s launch, I frequently read that Apple was “overhyping” the phone. In fact, I think that Apple was pretty restrained. After announcing the iPhone back in January, the company let the hype-storm build naturally. Trust me, if companies could simply buy the kind of attention the iPhone received before its release, they would. The iPhone attracted that attention on its own.
However, anytime expectations run so high, there’s bound to be a backlash. In the iPhone’s case, it began within a few days of the release. Early reviewers were shocked—shocked!—to find that the iPhone had flaws. And such reviews have continued in the weeks since.
You’ll find my review of the iPhone at the end of this issue’s iPhone story (“Meet the iPhone,” page 58). No, I don’t think the device is perfect. While the iPhone is a revolutionary product with huge potential, it’s also a “version 1.0” product with plenty of weaknesses and missing features.
Writing a review like this makes me sympathize with movie critics who bridle at awarding a star rating to a movie. As useful as those stars (or in our case, mice) are to readers, trying to reduce your judgment about a film (or a complex product) to a number is in many ways futile. How am I supposed to reduce a product like the iPhone to a number between one and five?
In the end, we settled on a rating that honors the iPhone as a remarkable new product with some room for growth and improvement.
We’re counting on seeing plenty of such growth and improvement. Apple expects to continuously add features to the iPhone through software updates. (And I don’t doubt that updated hardware is already in the pipeline.) My bet is that the iPhones being bought today will be much improved just six months from now; the burden is on Apple to make it happen.
[ Send your comment about the iPhone to iphone@macworld.com. Or call us with your iPhone and leave us a voice mail (for potential use on the Web), at 415/520-9761. ]
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President Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus resigns
President Donald Trump said Friday that he had replaced his chief of staff Reince Priebus with Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly.
Trump, who announced the move on Twitter, did not say whether he had fired Priebus or whether Priebus had resigned, but the former Republican National Committee chairman said he tendered his resignation to the president on Thursday.
President Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus re...
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First ad hoc Division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport at the Asian Games
12 September 2014 – Further to the agreement signed in 2010 between the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) and the International Council of Arbitration for Sport (ICAS), the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is proud to announce the creation of an ad hoc Division at the 17th Asian Games in Incheon, Korea.
Some 13,000 athletes and officials are expected to participate in the games which will begin on 19 September 2014 and last for 16 days. The temporary CAS office in Incheon will open 4 days in advance of the opening ceremony to ensure that participants have free access to justice rendered within time limits that keep pace with the competitions.
In accordance with the Arbitration rules for the 2014 Asian Games, the ICAS, an independent body under the aegis of which the CAS operates, elected its member Michael Hwang (Singapore) to serve as President of the Division and selected six CAS arbitrators to form the tribunal: Dong Su Ahn (Korea), Bruce Collins (Australia), Catherine Davani (Papua New Guinea), Chi Liu (China), Thi My Dung Nguyen (Vietnam) and Vinayak Pradhan (Malaysia). The office in Incheon will be headed by the CAS Secretary General, Matthieu Reeb.
Any participant or sports entity wishing to submit a dispute to the ad hoc Division must submit an application form to the temporary CAS Office in Incheon. The President of the ad hoc Division willthen appoint a panel composed of either one or three arbitrators and a hearing will be rapidly convened. During the hearing all parties, witnesses and potentially affected third parties are invited to express their legal arguments and produce evidence. The ad hoc Division generally renders its decisions within 24 hours. This is made possible by the specially designed logistics and organizational structures put in place.
The CAS office in Incheon will be operational from 15 September 2014 to 4 October 2014:
Oakwood Premier Hotel Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
165 Convensia-Daero-Yeonsu-Gu
Yeonsu-Gu,
KOR - Incheon, 406 840
The CAS is a permanent arbitration institution founded in 1984 and specialized in the resolution of sports law disputes. It has its headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, with decentralized offices in New York and Sydney, and Alternative Hearing Centres in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Cairo. It has nearly 300 arbitrators coming from 85 countries and handles approximately 400 cases per year.
For further information related to CAS activities and procedures in general, please contact either Matthieu Reeb, CAS Secretary
General, or Katy Hogg, Communications Officer. Château de Béthusy, Avenue de Beaumont 2, 1012 Lausanne, Switzerland.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; Tel: (41 21) 613 50 00; fax: (41 21) 613 50 01, or consult the CAS website: www.tas-cas.org
Tags: Asian Games Incheon | Athletics | Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) | International Council of Arbitration for Sport (ICAS) | Korea
Interview with Matthieu Reeb, Secretary General of the Court of Arbitration for Sport - Episode 22
IOA drops late bid plans for New Delhi to host 2019 Asian Games
Sports Authority of India prepares to argue Chand’s hyperandrogenism case to IAAF
Civil liability for sports injuries and why courts compete with arbitration in Belgium
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Home » Web Guide » Malaysian Government » Local Authorities » Federal Territories
Malaysian Government Guide
Malaysian Government only
Local Authorities, Federal Territories
NOTE: Certain websites are only accessible during working hours of the Federal or State Government of Malaysia.
WWW SITE LISTINGS
Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL)
Also known as the City Hall of Kuala Lumpur (CHKL or KLCH) in English term. DBKL is a local authority which administrates Kuala Lumpur city centre and other areas in Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur Municipal Council...
Labuan Corporation
Also known as Perbadanan Labuan (PL) in Malay term. Established on July 1, 2001 under the Labuan Corporation Act 2001 (Akta Perbadanan Labuan 2001), as a result of merger between Labuan Municipal Council (Majlis...
Perbadanan Putrajaya (PPj)
Established under the Perbadanan Putrajaya Act 536, 1995 on March 1, 1996 for the purpose of developing, administering and managing Putrajaya on behalf of the Federal government. It is also entrusted with the...
Visit KL
Visit KL is the official website for Kuala Lumpur (KL). It is created and managed by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall (Malay: Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur). Visit KL is a one-stop traveling information portal that offers...
WEEK'S TOP WEB SITES
Board of Quantity Surveyors Malaysia (BQSM)
Category: Ministry of Works, Malaysia
Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia (IRBM)
Category: Taxation and Accounting
MyIMMs eServices Immigration Department of Malaysia
Category: Passport and Visa
Companies Commission of Malaysia (CCM)
Category: Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, Malaysia
Tribunal For Consumer Claims (TCC) Malaysia
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The Silver Screen: December
23, Nov, 2015
Claire Payne
The Silver Screen: January -
The silver screen brings you monthly updates on the ones to watch. Here are the films we're most excited to see this December!
Long-awaited by Star Wars fans around the world, The Force Awakens is the first of the franchise to be released in 10 years, and in traditional Star Wars style, much of the storyline remains under wraps.
Rumoured to be the darkest of the long-running saga yet, it’s looking as though the film will not feature the comic relief that so many of the other episodes provide. It’s thought that a number of new characters develop Jedi powers - but without Luke Skywalker around to train them, they find themselves incapable of reaching their full potential.
With Harrison Ford (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Expendables 3), Carrie Fisher (When Harry Met Sally…, Sorority Row) and Mark Hamill (Kingsman: The Secret Service) reprising their roles as Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, this will certainly be a favourite among older generations, as well as younger audiences.
The Force Awakens hits screens on December 17.
The tale of the 1820 Essex whaleship finally hits screens on December 26 after its original March 2015 release date was pushed back. Based on the true events recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick's non-fiction book of the same name, the ship is attacked by a sperm whale while on a voyage from Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Stranded at sea with the nearest land over a thousand miles away, tensions run high and crew members resort to desperate measures in order to stay alive. Starring Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Snow White and the Huntsman), Cillian Murphy (The Dark Knight, Transcendence), the cast undoubtedly make this film one to watch this winter.
Directed by Ron Howard (The Da Vinci Code, Rush), this gripping battle for survival will have you on the edge of your seat.
Legendary Pictures brings you Krampus, a frightening festive tale about the evil ‘anti-Santa’ known for punishing badly behaved children in the build up to Christmas, revealing the darker side to the holiday season.
As his family bicker during the height of the festive period, youngster Max (Emjay Anthony: Insurgent, Grey’s Anatomy)becomes disheartened and turns his back on Christmas. What he doesn’t know is that his lack of festive spirit has in fact unleashed the wrath of Krampus.
Starring Adam Scott (Step Brothers, The Aviator) and Toni Collette (Little Miss Sunshine, The Sixth Sense), Krampus certainly opposes the cosy Christmas tales usually released in time for the holiday. Watch as the family fight for their lives against the evil Christmas legend. Catch it in cinemas from December 4.
Victor Frankenstein
The original tale with a twist. Everyone knows the story of Frankenstein and his monster, but Victor Frankenstein will bring you the story from the perspective of Igor, Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant.
You will learn the dark history of Igor’s troubled past, and watch as he becomes witness to the creation of Frankenstein’s monster.
With Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter, Woman in Black) leading and James McAvoy (Wanted, X-Men: First Class) as Frankenstein, this modern take on a classic horror story is definitely not to be missed. It hits screens on December 3.
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Professor Emerita Phyllis Yes Turns Her Artistic Talents to the Stage
Phyllis Yes has always pushed boundaries. Much of her art openly subverts the expected, whether it’s gender roles or physical materials, utilizing lace and sequins alongside objects that are traditionally seen as masculine. Perhaps her most recognizable work is Por She, a silver 1967 Porsche that she painted pink, covered in lace, and drove across the country as a mobile art piece. On March 10, she will debut her newest boundary-pushing work: her first play, Good Morning, Miss America, that takes viewers on an autobiographical trip through the realities of aging and the demands of family life.
Yes came to Portland in 1978 when she became a professor of art at Lewis & Clark. She led the college’s off-campus program in New York City, which focuses on exposing students to the city’s unique artistic and theatrical history.
“We attended a play every week for four months,” Yes said. “I attended classes with the students every week. I loved the performances we saw—on- and off-Broadway.” Her support of students continued back at home. “The Theatre Department has put on many innovative and exciting plays over the years, and I enjoyed seeing talented students participate.”
Yes taught at Lewis & Clark for two decades, serving as chair of the art department and dean of arts and humanities, before becoming professor emerita of art, painting, and drawing in 1998. Her frequent support of live theatre developed into an interest in writing for it, and in 2015, she began work on a play based on her experiences caring for her aging parents. Good Morning, Miss America follows Jane, an independent artist taking care of her mother while navigating a complex web of family obligations, including an irascible father-in-law and an absent sister.
“No one wants to talk about aging,” said Yes. “Caregiving can be riddled with complications: guilt, responsibility, unanswered questions, mistakes, dysfunctional family dynamics, and sibling rivalry, among others. I wanted to share real-life challenges of caring for aging parents, and to spark conversation and action preparing for their later years.”
The two-act play has already resonated with audiences, reaching the semifinals of the Artists Repertory Theatre’s Table/Room/Stage competition in 2016 and selling out shows well in advance.
“I’m thrilled!” said Yes of the play’s early success. “My story is not unlike millions of others, those facing the all-too-familiar scenario of caring for elderly parents. This play is for anyone who has parents or is a parent themselves.”
Good Morning, Miss America runs at CoHo Productions in Northwest Portland from March 10 to 31, 2018.
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This story was written by Emily Price ’18.
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Public Relations is located in McAfee on the Undergraduate Campus.
email public@lclark.edu
Public Relations Lewis & Clark 0615 S.W. Palatine Hill Road MSC 19 Portland OR 97219
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Home View Obituary
Tim Conway 1933 - 2019
Terms of Use Updated: November 2018
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In connection with Legacy Memorial Websites, the following terms shall also apply:
The creator and manager of a Memorial Website shall be known as the "Site Host."
The party who pays for the Memorial Website shall be known as the "Site Sponsor."
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The Site Host shall have the right of first refusal to be the Site Sponsor, however, if the Site Host does not choose to become the Site Sponsor following the trial period, if any, Legacy.com, Inc. may allow another party to become the Site Sponsor. The Site Sponsor’s name will appear on the first page of the Memorial Website after the statement, "Sponsored by…." If a party other than the initial Site Host becomes the Site Sponsor within the trial period, if any, the Site Host may elect to become the Site Sponsor, and Legacy.com, Inc. shall refund the first Site Sponsor’s fee in its entirety. If the fourteen day trial period expires without a Site Sponsor, the Memorial Website shall be archived until such time as a Site Sponsor sponsors the Memorial Website.
In the event that a Site Host is unwilling or unable to continue to serve as Site Host, said Site Host may notify Legacy.com, Inc. in writing of his/her intention to cease serving as Site Host and to appoint a new Site Host. Legacy.com, Inc. may (but is not obligated) to inquire in writing whether a Site Host intends to continue to serve as Site Host. If the Site Host does not appoint a new Site Host, Legacy.com, Inc. may notify the Site Sponsor, if different from the Site Host, to request the appointment of a new Site Host. Thereafter, if the Site Sponsor does not appoint a new Site Host, Legacy.com, Inc. may, at its discretion, at any time, archive the Memorial Website until such time as a new Site Host requests permission to become the Site Host of the Memorial Website.
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Subject to its suspension, cancellation, and termination rights and rights to remove Material, Legacy.com, Inc. represents that the Services content sponsored as "permanent" will remain available through the Services for the duration of Legacy.com, Inc.’s existence, and that each Guest Book sponsored as "one year" will remain available through the Services for one year from the date of sponsorship, unless: (a) the Services ceases to exist in whole or in part during the relevant period; or (b) acts or events beyond the reasonable control of Legacy.com, Inc. cause a deletion, loss of data, failure to store, or other interruption in or termination of the availability of the Services content that you sponsored, or any other service to which you subscribed. You may at any time ask Legacy.com, Inc. to delete without charge the Services content, or other service that you sponsored or purchased.
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Pursuant to 47 U.S.C. Section 230 et seq, as amended, Legacy.com, Inc. hereby notifies You that parental control protection (such as computer hardware, software or filtering services) are commercially available that may assist You in limiting material that is harmful to Minors. Information indentifying current providers of such protections is available at the web site America Links Up
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You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality and security of your account and password, and you are fully responsible for all activities that occur under your password or account, and for any other actions taken in connection with the account or password. You agree to (a) immediately notify Legacy.com, Inc. of any known or suspected unauthorized use(s) of your password or account, or any known or suspected breach of security, including loss, theft, or unauthorized disclosure of your password or credit card information; and (b) ensure that you exit from your account at the end of each session. Legacy.com, Inc. will not be liable for any injury, loss or damage of any kind arising from or relating to your failure to comply with (a) and (b) or for any acts or omissions by you or someone else using your account and/or password.
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LEGACY.COM®, WHERE LIFE STORIES LIVE ON®, OBITFINDER® MOVING TRIBUTES®, MY MEMORIALS®, OBITNETWORK®, OBITMESSENGER®, and OBITTAKER® are registered trademarks of Legacy.com, Inc. LEGACY MEMORIAL WEBSITES™ is a common law trademark of Legacy.com, Inc. Such trademarks and other marks, logos, and names of Legacy.com, Inc., used on or in connection with the Services may not be used in connection with any product or service that is not under Legacy.com, Inc.’s ownership or control. Furthermore, such trademarks may not be used in any manner that is likely to cause confusion among consumers or in any manner that disparages or discredits Legacy.com, Inc. All other trademarks not owned by Legacy.com, Inc. or its affiliates (including its Affiliate Newspapers) that appear in connection with the Services are the property of their respective owners, who may or may not be affiliated with, connected to, or sponsored by Legacy.com, Inc. or its affiliates (including its Affiliate Newspapers).
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The Services are created and controlled by Legacy.com, Inc. in the State of Illinois, U.S.A. You agree that these Terms of Use will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the United States of America and the State of Illinois, without regard to its conflicts of law provisions. Use of the Services is unauthorized in any jurisdiction that does not give effect to all provisions of these Terms of Use. Legacy.com, Inc. makes no claims or assurances that the Services are appropriate or may be downloaded outside of the United States. You agree that all legal proceedings arising out of or in connection with these Terms of Use or the Services must be filed in a federal or state court located in Chicago, Illinois, within one year of the time in which the events giving rise to such claim began, or your claim will be forever waived and barred. You expressly submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of said courts and consent to extraterritorial service of process.
Enforceability. If any portion of these Terms of Use is found to be void, invalid or otherwise unenforceable, then that portion shall be deemed to be superseded by a valid, enforceable provision that matches the intent of the original provision as closely as possible. The remainder of these Terms of Use shall continue to be enforceable and valid according to terms contained herein.
Entire Agreement. Except as expressly provided in a particular "Legal Notice" or other notice on particular pages of the Services, these Terms of Use, which hereby incorporate by reference the terms of Legacy.com, Inc.’s and Ning’s Privacy Policies, constitute the entire agreement between you and Legacy.com, Inc., superseding all prior agreements regarding the Services.
No Waiver. The failure of Legacy.com, Inc. to exercise or enforce any right or provision of the Terms of Use shall not constitute a waiver of said right or provision. Neither party hereto shall be deemed to be in default of any provision of the Terms of Use or for failure in performance resulting from acts or events beyond the reasonable control of such party and arising without its fault or negligence, including, but not be limited to, acts of God, civil or military authority, interruption of electric or telecommunication services, civil disturbances, acts of war or terrorists, strikes, fires, floods or other catastrophes.
Headings & Construction. The section titles in the Terms of Use are for your convenience only and carry no contractual or legal effect whatsoever. The language in these Terms of Use shall be interpreted in accordance with its fair meaning and shall not be strictly interpreted for or against either party.
Contact Legacy.com. For purposes of providing notice of cancellation or termination, contact Legacy.com, Inc. at Contact Us or Legacy.com, Inc, 230 W. Monroe Suite 400, Chicago, IL 60606.
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U.S. investors could take a hit on Puerto Rican bonds
Adam Allington Jul 1, 2015
The tiny island of Puerto Rico, the U.S territory in the Caribbean, is being called “America’s Greece” by some.
Like Greece, Puerto Rico has more debt than it can pay back, upwards of $70 billion, and now it’s asking its creditors for a restructuring of that debt.
Unlike Greece, Puerto Rico isn’t talking about abandoning the dollar, but U.S. investors do stand to take a sizeable hit if the territory defaults on its loan obligations.
Puerto Rico has been an enticing place to park an investment for a long time, due to its so-called “triple tax exempt” status, meaning that income on Puerto Rican bonds can’t be taxed at the federal, state or municipal level.
That makes it a popular choice for everyone from hedge and mutual funds to individual investors. But does that mean Puerto Rico is our Greece?
“It might be a larger exposure, but it’s not necessarily a more dangerous exposure,” says Brian Jacobsen, a portfolio strategist at Wells Fargo. Jacobsen notes the overall stake in Puerto Rican bonds is still just a drop in the total municipal bond bucket.
“It’s just really not enough to make a dent for the investing public as a whole. Puerto Rico has $72 billion in debts but the municipal bond market is about $3.7 trillion,” Jacobsen says.
But others says even a partial default may still cause a ripple effect felt by the larger bond market, an effect we might start seeing after the Fourth of July holiday.
“That’s when investors will come back and look at the value of their mutual funds after reading the headlines and start to have concerns,” says Tom Doe, president of Municipal Market Analytics.
Doe adds that even a small decrease in returns might be enough to set off a bank run of sorts, as investors rush to sell off Puerto Rican bonds.
“Prices decline, interest rates rise and the real unintended loser in this are other states and municipalities who are trying to borrow debt for infrastructure needs,” he says.
The island’s state-run utility, Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, is negotiating with creditors to potentially restructure its nearly $9 billion debt load.
According to data released by Morningstar, mutual funds operated by Franklin Resources and OppenheimerFunds and have the highest exposure to Puerto Rican debt.
As of April, Oppenheimer held $4.6 billion in Puerto Rican securities, about 17 percent of its assets. Franklin held $2.3 billion, roughly a 3 percent allocation to Puerto Rico.
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Iconic Marsalis Family To Release A Live Album, "Music Redeems"
(JUNE 14, 2010)- Marsalis Music and Redeye distribution are proud to announce the release of a rare new album by New Orleans’ own Marsalis family August 24, 2010 entitled “Music Redeems.” One of the most famous New Orleans’ multigenerational jazz families and recent winners of the National Endowment for the Arts 2011 Jazz Masters Award honoring the family’s lifetime achievements and contributions to jazz, gathered together last June at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. for a very special evening. The night was full of celebration, appreciation, and performances as Patriarch, Ellis Marsalis received The Duke Ellington Jazz Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. There is another huge honor on the horizon for the Marsalis family. For the first time in the National Endowment of the Art’s 29 year history, the NEA is presenting a group Jazz Masters Award (the nation’s highest honor for their lifetime achievements and contributions to Jazz music) to the Marsalis family in January 2011.
The incredible, sold-out concert was recorded by Marsalis Music and features performances from sons Branford on saxophone, Wynton on trumpet, Delfeayo on trombone, Jason on drums, poet Ellis III, and special guest, family friend Harry Connick Jr. The evening inspired lively performances of repertoire with special meaning to Ellis and the Marsalis Family, punctuated by family stories and anecdotes about growing up in New Orleans. “I’ve played for presidents and queens and every other thing- nothing made me feel better than seeing my name up there with the Marsalis’,” Harry Connick Jr. said of the evening.
It is no coincidence that “Music Redeems” will be out just days before the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina as all proceeds from the album will fund community programming at the EMCM. The education center is the heart of the New Orleans Musicians’ Village community, and was conceived in 2005 by Branford Marsalisand Harry Connick Jr. in partnership with New Orleans Habitat for Humanityfollowing Hurricane Katrina.
In conjunction with the Marsalis Family album campaign to support the music education center, Marsalis Music will launch an online campaign (www.musicredeems.com) based on this motto and theme, “Music Redeems.” Despite the damage inflicted by the storm and the recent challenges the city faces in response to damage from the oil spill, the culture of New Orleans still lies in its music; the idea of “Music Redeems” expands the project’s local New Orleans roots to a universal theme with which everyone can identify. The goal of the campaign is to highlight the transformative power of music, individually and collectively, by offering fans the opportunity to share their own stories of the redemptive power of music and the role it has played in their lives and read the stories of others.
“Having the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music named for me is more than an honor. It is also an opportunity to realize many of the dreams I have long held for the music and musicians of New Orleans,” said Ellis Marsalis of the music center. Construction of the Ellis Marsalis Music Center is scheduled to be completed in the late spring of 2011. The center will aim at fostering an environment for the great musicians of New Orleans to pass along their traditions to future generations.
THE ELLIS MARSALIS CENTER FOR MUSIC will be a 17,000 square foot community facility designed to provide residents of the New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village and their neighbors with a place to gather and to study, to perform, and to record music. It will include classrooms and practice rooms for the after-school music program and a 150-seat performance space with state-of-the-art lighting and sound. It will house a library of music and music related materials. Additionally, the Center will provide career development resources for established musicians. Music education will be the initial focus of the Center. But as the music program is solidified the Center will broaden the range of artistic disciplines performed and taught all with the parallel goal of using cultural enrichment as a tool for community development.
MARSALIS MUSIC is the creation of Branford Marsalis, one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the past quarter century. Based upon his extensive experience as a saxophonist, composer , and bandleader, Marsalis recognized the need to form a label that allows a diverse array of musicians to document their best effort. Launched in 2002, Marsalis Music has focused primarily on jazz, with a roster featuring such promising new artists as Miguel Zenón and Claudia Acuña as well as Marsalis himself and such established stylists as Joey Calderazzo and Harry Connick, Jr.
Submitted by Ben on August 10th, 2010 — 11:42am
Music Redeems Marsalis Music
Musicians Village
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Carbon Dioxide Removal and the Paris Agreement, Dr. Wil Burns
May 2, 2019 · 4:00 – 5:50 PM
Will Burns, Co-Founding Executive Director & Professor of Research, Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy, School of International Service, American University
In recent years, the feckless response of the world community to climate change has led to a steadily growing drumbeat for research into, and potential deployment of, so-called “climate geoengineering options.”
Indeed, interest in the potential role of such approaches has steadily grown in the past year with the release of several studies, including the IPCC’s 1.5C report, UNEP’s 2018 gap report, and the National Academy of Science’s study on carbon dioxide removal technologies. Climate geoengineering technologies include a range of so-called “solar radiation management” options, including sulfur aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening, and carbon dioxide removal technologies, including bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, enhanced mineral weathering and direct air capture.
While climate geoengineering approaches could potentially help us to avoid passing critical climatic thresholds, many of them are also fraught with risk, and could produce winners and losers, emphasizing the need for just, equitable and effective governance architecture. Moreover, some of these options could have profound implications for the sustainability provisions of Paris, both potentially furthering and undermining these objectives based on choices made in terms of scale of deployment, adequacy of monitoring, and coordination of deployment with mitigation responses.
Given the central role of the Paris Agreement in international climate policymaking, a pertinent question is how climate geoengineering approaches might be governed under the Agreement, if at all. Join Dr. Wil Burns, Co-Founding Executive Director & Professor of Research, Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy, School of International Service, American University, to assess the potential role of the Paris Agreement in governing climate geoengineering research and/or deployment, including their potential role in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of the Agreement’s Parties, as well other aspects of the Agreement that might guide potential deployment by the Parties, including the role of sustainable development provisions to mediate the role of climate geoengineering. In this context, the presentation will include how pertinent aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals might be incorporated into Paris Rulebook provisions related to climate geoengineering.
Carbon Dioxide and the Paris Climate Agreement
PowerPoint Available
PowerPoint presented by speaker
Dr. Wil Burns is a founding Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy, a scholarly initiative of the School of International Service at American University and is based in Berkeley, California. He also serves as a Professor of Research at American University’s School of International Service and a Senior Scholar at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada. He previously served as the Director of the Energy Policy & Climate program at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. He also serves as the Co-Chair of the International Environmental Law Committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association. He is the former President of the Association for Environmental Studies & Sciences, and former Co-Chair of the International Environmental Law interest group of the American Society of International Law and Chair of the International Wildlife Law Interest group of the Society. He has published over 80 articles and chapters in law, science, and policy journals and books, and has co-edited four books. He holds a Ph.D. in International Environmental Law from the University of Wales-Cardiff School of Law.
Prior to becoming an academic, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs for the State of Wisconsin and worked in the non-governmental sector for twenty years, including as Executive Director of the Pacific Center for International Studies, a think-tank that focused on implementation of international wildlife treaty regimes, including the Convention on Biological Diversity and International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. His current areas of research focus are: climate geoengineering; international climate change litigation; adaptation strategies to address climate change, with a focus on the potential role of microinsurance; and the effectiveness of the European Union’s Emissions Trading System.
Related Link/Pre-Reading
Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy
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On the campus of the Middlebury Institute, Morse Building, Room B104, 426 Van Buren Street, Monterey, CA. Attendees will come up the breezeway between the Student Services building and Morse Building, and room B104 will be on the right, just past the first stairwell. Wheelchair access by going around the Student Services building through the Holland courtyard.
Parking is available on the streets surrounding the venue (strict two-hour time limit enforced). There are city lots nearby that can be paid via parking meter, or free parking available on the streets in the neighborhoods above Van Buren Street (two to three blocks up the hill from venue).
Contact Rachel Christopherson at the Center for the Blue Economy at cbe@miis.edu or (831) 647-4183.
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Congress criticises Ihlan Omar’s words, but remains silent about Israel’s violence
March 7, 2019 at 9:14 am | Published in: Article, Israel, Middle East, Opinion, Palestine, US
Orthodox Jews with the group Jews United Against Zionism gather outside the office of Ilhan Omar to show support in Washington, US on 6 March 2019 [Win McNamee/Getty Images]
Ray Hanania
The obsession with US Congresswoman Ihlan Omar’s criticism of Israeli influence over American politics really is unique. And what makes this debate genuinely immoral is that it focuses on Omar’s words but ignores the killing and oppression of Palestinian civilians by Israel.
The Minnesota Congresswoman has been pilloried over the past few weeks for criticising members of Congress who take money from pro-Israel Political Action Committees (PACs) in exchange for political support for Israeli policies. Omar has also highlighted the ugly tendency for many pro-Israel activists and politicians to have an apparently greater loyalty to Israel, a foreign country, than they do to the United States.
As a journalist for nearly half century, I know it is a reality that PACs donate millions to congressmen and women specifically to influence their votes. So why is Omar’s legitimate criticism of donations by supporters of a foreign country, Israel, denounced viciously by Republicans and Democrats alike as an “an anti-Semitic trope”? This is the quid-pro-quo: literally, “something for something”. Translated from Latin into US politics it comes up as, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.
As I have written before, pro-Israel activists and the Congressmen and women they “buy” with their PAC donations have weaponised anti-Semitism, turning it into a political bludgeon rather than trying to suppress the racist hatred of Jews, although Arabs are Semites, too, by the way.
READ: In open letter, Jewish Americans come out in support of Ilhan Omar
When Omar quite legitimately questioned the “loyalty” of some American politicians who put Israel’s interests above those of the United States, she was again denounced as “anti-Semitic”. Yet “loyalty” is a legitimate concern when we look at some of the American politicians who support Israel. Take the outgoing Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, for example. He served as a volunteer at an Israeli military base but has never felt the need to do a similar stint in America. As a Palestinian American, I served in the US military during the Vietnam War, not in the military of a foreign country, so to me this issue is more than relevant.
Critics of Israel are not permitted to bring these things up without being demonised. Rather than playing a role in educating Americans, the mainstream US news media is an accomplice in weaponising anti-Semitism. They provide a platform from which it is made to look as if Omar’s criticisms are anti-Semitic, when they are not.
At this very moment, Congress is considering a resolution to denounce anti-Semitism as a direct response to Omar’s legitimate criticism of pro-Israel lobbying and Americans who put Israel’s interests above US interests, and above both the rule of law and morality.
Why is this important to Israel? Let’s face it, there are only a handful of members of Congress who challenge Israel’s political influence obtained through its PAC donations. Israel and its lobbyists could ignore them, but they don’t, because they need to prevent American citizens from understanding the legitimacy of the criticism. Using the allegation of “anti-Semitism” helps to blind Americans to the truth because they too fear being demonised in this way. After all, who wants to be labelled as a racist?
Moreover, this skewed, twisted national debate distracts the US public from what Israel is really doing to the oppressed Palestinian civilians living under its illegal occupation. While the political assault on Omar is taking place, Israel continues to brutalise Muslim and Christian Palestinians with the impunity bought by those PAC donations. Israel doesn’t want mainstream American Christians to empathise with their co-religionists suffering under Israeli oppression in Bethlehem, Nazareth, Beit Sahur, Beit Jala and East Jerusalem. The pro-Israel lobby’s attack against Omar which dominates the mainstream news coverage in America shuts out coverage of people like Iyad Burnat, who is in America to raise public awareness of the suffering of the people in his home village of Bil’in in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Burnat, 45, has a powerful story to tell about Bil’in that Israel wants to suppress, and the mainstream news media and US Congressmen and women who receive pro-Israel PAC money want to ignore or marginalise.
Criticisms of Israel labelled as antisemitism – Cartoon [Carlos Latuff/Twitter]
Bil’in is a “Palestinian David and Israeli Goliath” story. In 2005, Israel’s 8-metre-high Apartheid Wall began to make its way through Bil’in, separating the 1,800 residents, almost all farmers, from more than 60 per cent of their farmland. They live off the land and taking it away destroys their livelihood.
Under the leadership of Burnat and others, Bil’in successfully forced Israel to tear down the Wall and redirect it through other areas. That small victory, though, has led to Israeli soldiers taking personal satisfaction from punishing the residents of the village, explains Burnat. As the villagers’ protests continue against the theft of their land by nearby illegal Jewish settlements, the Israeli oppression has worsened.
Burnat opposes violence by any side, but because of his activism he has been singled out and shot numerous times. So have two of his five children.
“Bil’in is under occupation and from time to time it gets worse,” he told me during an interview this week. “They confiscate lands, destroy lives. They are destroying our olive trees and our livelihood so push the people out of their homes.”
READ: US’ Rashida Tlaib under fire for using Israel-made website
According to Burnat, anti-occupation activists in Bil’in recognise that they must be creative to rise above Israel’s distracting propaganda and media bias to bring attention to their struggle. In 2009, the villagers mimicked the Hollywood movie Avatar when tying themselves to olive trees in protest at their destruction by Israeli security forces. In 2012, Burnat’s brother Emad, a keen photographer, produced a documentary about Israeli soldiers who repeatedly destroyed his camera equipment to silence him. His film 5 Broken Cameras was nominated for an Oscar in 2013.
Bil’in residents pay a high price for their protests. Burnat told me that Israeli soldiers once grabbed him after a peaceful protest against the wall. They drove him to a remote location and repeatedly beat him, breaking his ribs. “They targeted me and then attacked me,” he recalled. “They started beating me without asking any questions. They tied my hands. They sprayed my eyes with Pepper Spray and covered them with a wet cloth to make it even more painful. They tried to make my injuries look like an accident. They tried to kill me.” The Israelis threw him to the side of the road where he was found by another Palestinian and taken to hospital.
Iyad Burnat believes that the Israelis also target Bil’in’s children in order to put pressure on the village protestors. In July 2014, he and his then 14-year-old son Majd had just left a protest in a neighbouring village and returned to their home when Israeli soldiers pulled up. The commander of the unit aimed his gun and shot Majd. “They were saying that they can get us at any time without any consequences,” Burnat pointed out. “He could have shot me but he shot my son instead with live ammunition because he wanted to send a message that he can get us anytime and anywhere.”
US: Omar’s comments trigger House vote on anti-Semitism
Despite all of this, he insists that the answer to the constant violence from the Israeli soldiers and armed settlers is not violence but education. “We need to educate our children so that they can become strong voices for our freedom. That’s what the Israelis fear.”
Burnat set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to help his son attend college, and is touring the US this week to find sponsors to set up a larger fund for all of the children in Bil’in.
The question I have is that if the critics of Ihlan Omar claim that she is anti-Semitic for raising legitimate questions about issues such as the activities and political donations of the pro-Israel lobby, what do they say about Israeli soldiers whom such critics support and who intentionally shoot civilians with live ammunition, including children? That, of course, is why the Congress is criticising Omar; its members want to keep the American public in the dark about the very real atrocities being committed in Palestine by the state behind those influential PAC contributions: the State of Israel.
You can watch a video podcast with Iyad Burnat by clicking here.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
ArticleIsraelMiddle EastOpinionPalestineUS
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Escobar's Walk-Off Grand Slam Wins It for Knights on Friday
Alcides Escobar launched a walk-off grand slam. (Laura Wolff/Charlotte Knights)
By Charlotte Knights | June 21, 2019 11:25 PM
(UPTOWN CHARLOTTE, NC) -- Exciting. Thrilling. Exhilarating. Electrifying. Heroic.
In front of a sell-out crowd of 10,454 fans at BB&T Ballpark on Friday night, third baseman Alcides Escobar played the hero as he launched a walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the ninth inning to propel the Charlotte Knights to a thrilling 9-6 victory over the Louisville Bats in the opening game of their two-day, three-game series.
Down by a score of 6-5 heading into the bottom of the ninth inning, the Knights went to work. DH Matt Skole led the inning off with a walk and was replaced by pinch-runner Jacob Scavuzzo . With the tying run on first base, left fielder Paulo Orlando followed with a single to put the go-ahead run on first with no outs. First baseman Daniel Palka , who stepped to the plate with four RBIs on the night, roped a single to deep left field to load the bases for the Knights. Enter Alcides Escobar.
An 11-year major league veteran, who hit a key inside-the-park home run in game one of the 2015 World Series, stepped to the plate against RHP Jimmy Herget (1-4, 3.86) in the bottom of the ninth on Friday and delivered the game-winning blast over the left field fence. Escobar's grand slam, Charlotte's second of the 2019 season, led the Knights to their third-straight win. He finished the game 3-for-5 with two runs scored and the grand slam.
The Knights combined to record 13 hits on the night. Palka finished the game 3-for-5 with a home run and four RBIs. The home run -- a three-run shot in the first inning-- was his 15th of the season. Chicago White Sox outfielder Jon Jay went 2-for-4 with two runs scored as he continued his MLB rehab assignment.
RHP Dylan Cease started for the Knights and allowed six runs (five earned) on nine hits over 5.2 innings pitched. Cease, who is ranked as the third-best prospect in the Chicago White Sox system, fanned seven batters but did not factor in the decision. RHP Connor Walsh tossed 2.1 scoreless innings to keep the Bats at bay, while RHP Jimmy Cordero (2-1, 1.08) earned the win after a scoreless ninth inning.
The two teams will play a day/night doubleheader at BB&T Ballpark on Saturday with first pitch of game one on tap for 1:05 p.m. and game two at 7:04 p.m. Game one will feature a $25 all-you-can-eat ticket available to fans and gates for that game will open at 12:00 p.m. In the nightcap, the Knights will honor the 50th Anniversary of the 1969 Charlotte Hornets (baseball) Championship Team. Gates for that game will open at 6:00 p.m.
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