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Home / MC RADIO
By Jennifer Ahlstrom | Posted - Apr 27th, 2018
Full Show: First Risk-Adapted Therapy Trial for Newly Diagnosed Patients (the MASTER trial) with Luciano Costa, MD, PhD, UAB
Luciano Costa, MD, PhD
Interview Date: April 16, 2018
Thanks to our episode sponsor, Celgene Corporation.
Myeloma researchers are learning that the deeper our remissions, the better our outcomes (overall). Dr. Costa joins Myeloma Crowd Radio to share a key study for newly diagnosed multiple myeloma patients that includes four of the best myeloma therapies, a stem cell transplant and then variable maintenance based on the patient's depth of remission. This is one of the first studies ever run in myeloma to give risk-adapted treatment to patients. The study uses a powerful four-drug combination: daratumumab, carfilzomib, lenalidomide and dexamethasone and then stem cell transplant. Following the transplant, patients are tested with a highly sensitive test (MRD test) that can detect one myeloma cell in a million. If patients still have remaining disease, they are given more rounds of the same four-drug combination.
To find this clinical trial on SparkCures, click here:
MASTER trial
Dr. Costa on Myeloma Crowd Radio
Jenny: Welcome to today's episode of Myeloma Crowd Radio, a show that connects patients with myeloma researchers. I'm your host, Jenny Ahlstrom. I would like to thank our episode's sponsor, Celgene, for their support of Myeloma Crowd Radio. We've learned over the last few years that what patients do at the beginning of their treatment can really chart the course for their long-term outcome. And I learned about a study recently for newly diagnosed patients that I was so impressed with. On today's show, we'll be learning about this study. Not only does it use some of the best therapies in the myeloma arsenal today, it also looks at how patients respond to the therapy to know how long the maintenance or follow-up therapy should be. This is called risk-adapted therapy and it better personalizes myeloma care.
So with us today, we have the principal investigator on this clinical trial, Dr. Luciano Costa of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Welcome, Dr. Costa.
Dr. Costa: Good morning. Thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to talk to you and a privilege to share some more information about our study with your audience.
Jenny: Oh, yes, it's wonderful. We're looking forward to it. Let me introduce you before we get started into questions. Dr. Luciano Costa is Medical Director for the Blood and Marrow Transplantation program and Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Costa received his medical degree and PhD in Brazil, his home country. He is Associate Editor of Advances in Cell and Gene Therapy and has published over 100 articles, books and posters on stem cell transplant in multiple myeloma. Dr. Costa's research interests include strategies for stem cell transplant and population outcomes in blood cancers.
So again, we're so happy to have you. Why don't we start first with the general treatment landscape for newly diagnosed patients? When as things have evolved in treating myeloma, we have better drugs, we have more drugs. What are some common themes that patients may want to consider?
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. You're absolutely right that myeloma treatment has evolved substantially in the last 20 years and that has clearly affected the newly diagnosed setting. That's the one line of therapy that virtually every patient with myeloma goes through. However, just based on how new drugs are developed, it's usually that's where new drugs are less used. As a new drug has developed, it first gets its value proven in the relapsed setting and only subsequently in the newly diagnosed setting. So that is always a challenge because you can see new agents having very promising results in patients with relapsed myeloma and it takes sometimes five to ten years to see that new strategy or the new drug to help patients who are newly diagnosed.
But as you said, the current landscape of newly diagnosed patient is really dominated by a combination of immunomodulatory agents such as lenalidomide and proteasome inhibitors, particularly bortezomib. Patients who are not particularly old, and don have any significant cormobidity, do tend to integrate autologous transplant as part of the initial therapy. So I think if you do a survey throughout the country, the most commonly used strategy for newly diagnosed younger and fit patients tends to be the combination of bortezomib, lenalidomide and dexamethasone, followed by autologous transplant, followed by maintenance therapy.
Patients who are older or more frail, who are not considered candidates for high-dose chemotherapy and autologous transplant are often treated with triple therapy nowadays, the majority of patients. But instead of proceeding with autologous transplant, they do a finite number of cycles and then evolve with maintenance therapy. So this strategy you do far better results than you have 10 or 15 years ago, but there' are still some important shortfalls.
I would say, first and foremost, even though those strategies can have response rates that are in the neighborhood of 90%, many of those responses are partial responses. And even among the patients who do obtain a complete response, the majority will experience a relapse later on. So I would say, those treatments are better than they used to be, but they're still not sufficiently effective.
On the opposite side, you might have some patients who have an extremely sensitive disease and might obtain a very deep remission very early on. Some of those patients might be able to discontinue therapy without jeopardizing the outcome. The problem is we have for the longest time lacked adequate tools to measure depth of remission beyond what can be obtained with regular marrow exam or protein electrophoresis. So what results from that is that we tend to give a fixed treatment plan for all patients. And unless the patient becomes refractory and the disease progressed or the patient becomes intolerant, they tend to undergo the same number of cycles of therapy, the same transplant, and the same in depth with maintenance therapy.
And I think if you talk to patients as I do, what you hear from them is some patients are very dissatisfied with the fact that their responses are not complete. They are very dissatisfied with the fact that even though their disease at times may become undetectable, a relapse is eventually going to happen. And other patients are very unhappy with the idea that in order to have a somewhat normal life and get the most benefit in terms of disease control and survival, would have to be on therapy indefinitely.
I think those would be the main challenges for upfront therapy is to be able to adapt the intensity and the duration of therapy to the speed and depth of response and perhaps be able to identify patients who might have had that deep enough response, that they might be able to discontinue therapy altogether without jeopardizing their future.
Jenny: Right. And I think this is a really important point because as we know, all myeloma is not the same. So I have a friend who has had multiple relapses without transplant, but has been on multiple therapies and is still out 20 years. And I have friends who have done tandem autologous transplants and even an allo and now are out 20 years. So not everybody responds in the same way, not everybody has the same type of myeloma. And wouldn't it be great what you're saying?
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jenny: So if you could figure out who should get how much therapy, that's really, really important.
Dr. Costa: I agree. Tremendous work has been done on recognizing some biological distinctions between patients who do very well from patients who do very poorly. While we haven't done yet so effective is to use that knowledge to translate into therapies that are adapted to a patient risk profile and to adapt to a patient speed and depth of response.
Jenny: It's very, very important. So this is great. In my opinion or in my understanding, this is one of the first studies to look at this type of risk adapted idea.
Dr. Costa: I believe so. So the study that we have started, we call it the MASTER and that stands for Monoclonal Antibody Sequential Therapy for Deep Remission Myeloma. It has really been developed for the last two years. We aggregate a group of somewhat ambitious myeloma investigators who also happened to be my good friends and colleagues. And what we saw in the near future was the emergence of new drugs that have a potential to be transformative in multiple myeloma, particularly monoclonal antibodies.
So we proposed to use daratumumab that as we know has made tremendous impact in the relapse setting. Along with carfilzomib that we now know has proven at least in the relapse setting as being as a more potent proteasome inhibitor than bortezomib, along with lenalidomide and dexamethasone. And we also sense the opportunity to utilize minimal residual disease assessment, not only as surrogate for outcome, no longer as an end point, but also as a decision-making tool.
So this trial, after multiple interactions and some pretty intense discussion and negotiation, the final product is a trial where outpatients received four cycles of this combination of carfilzomib, lenalidomide, dexamethasone and daratumumab. And patients are subsequently treated with an autologous transplant unless the patient is not eligible for some particular comorbidity or age. But we intend to proceed with transplant on all patients who are candidates recognizing that transplant has a proven role and induced deeper and durable remissions and is the best therapy or, I should say, the therapy with the best tracking record of clearing minimal residual disease.
And beyond the transplant, patients can receive up to two blocks of four cycles each of the same combination of KRd plus daratumumab. But the greater innovation, in our opinion, is not only bringing this combo to the upfront setting, which we have other reasons to believe is going to be a very effective combo, but also be able to tailor therapy to the depth and speed of MRD clearance. Even though we're collecting traditional response assessment, that's not the end point of the study. The primary point of the study is obtaining clearance of minimal residual disease. And the study design calls for complete interruption of therapy once you have two consecutive measurements with MRD below ten to minus five level of detection. Those patients will then discontinue therapy, be watched without maintenance therapy, but they will be monitored very closely by the traditional serum electrophoresis immunofixation, free light chain, urine electrophoresis immunofixation, but also by measurement of MRD in the bone marrow sample at fixed intervals to make sure that those patients who are now being watched with self-maintenance therapy do not see reemergence of the myeloma clone before even become symptomatic.
So I think you are absolutely right, this is one of the first trials to use MRD as an end point of therapy. And I suspect it might be the first trial, at least the first trial that I'm aware of, in the newly diagnosed setting to use MRD-based response adapted therapy to myeloma.
Jenny: That's fantastic. So as you described the study, you give the four cycles of daratumumab and KRd before the transplant, and then everyone goes to transplant, and then when you're deciding who to -- and you said you have two consecutive measurements of MRD negativity, which means you can't find any myeloma cells at a really deep level, and we'll talk about this later. But for patients who don't know what MRD negative means, it just means that you're looking at a very detailed level of disease detection. And if you find nothing in two consecutive measurements, then you can stop that therapy and for people who still have remaining disease you keep going.
Dr. Costa: That's correct.
Jenny: So my question is, how far apart are these two different measurements? Right after transplant, when are you doing that?
Dr. Costa: Very good question. So the very first measurement is at the end of induction, even before the patient goes to transplant. The second management is after transplant and the subsequent measurements will be after each block of four more cycles of KRd dara. So with this design, the earliest patient would stop therapy would be after induction in transplant. And the latest the patient would stop therapy would be after induction transplant and eight more cycles of KRd dara. And for patients, and I'm sure there will be some, that go through the whole treatment plan and are still MRD positive, then we recommend that they continue on maintenance therapy with lenalidomide because that is considered standard of care.
So this has the potential to be a longer therapy for some patients who are slow at clearing MRD, or who do not clear MRD, where they could receive four cycles transplant and eight more cycle. But it also could be a shorter therapy for patients who have a more responsive disease where they would receive four cycles of KRd transplant and no consolidation, no maintenance therapy.
Jenny: So you would do two blocks potentially and then after the two blocks, you would go to lenalidomide maintenance? Is that right, two blocks of four cycles - is that what you said? Did I get that right?
Dr. Costa: After transplant?
Jenny: Yes.
Dr. Costa: Yes. So you're absolutely right. So let's say a patient who turns out does not clear MRD, then would have first cycles of induction transplant up to eight cycles of consolidation and then lenalidomide maintenance.
Jenny: That makes a lot of sense. So let's talk about why you're including daratumumab, because I know when they talk about standard of care before a stem cell transplant, you may have Velcade, Revlimid, dex or you may have carfilzomib, Revlimid, dex as two different induction options before stem cell transplant. But in this situation, daratumumab has been such a powerhouse, it seems like, that you're bringing it to the first line setting. And for patients who don't understand clinical trials, what you were saying in the beginning of the show, when you say these new therapies that come out, they're always tested in the relapsed setting and it take years to come to the newly diagnosed setting. This is one of the few instances where you're using daratumumab when someone's first diagnosed in a setting, which is I think we should just call that out as an important thing about this study.
Dr. Costa: Correct.
Jenny: So maybe you want to just describe why you're adding daratumumab.
Dr. Costa: Sure. So for your audience that might not be so familiar, daratumumab is a monoclonal antibody that targets CD-38, which is a protein that is expressed in the surface of all plasma cells and that includes multiple myeloma cells. So it's an antibody that has been produced and engineered to be specific to that particular marker in the surface of CD-38. And once infused, it binds almost exclusively to plasma cells and engages the individual immune system in more than one way, actually three or four different ways, and leads ultimately to the killing of the cancer cells. So that is a fascinating concept.
But one that turns out is not new into oncology, we have had monoclonal antibodies using breast cancer, lymphoma, just to mention a few, for exactly 20 years. But only recently we have had monoclonal antibodies in multiple myeloma, elotuzumab being the first one and daratumumab, a not distant second. The clinical data has really been quite impressive for daratumumab. Initially tested in patients, we have had multiple relapses. We saw about 30% response rate with the daratumumab alone.
We have seen two large Phase III clinical trials in patients with relapsed myeloma comparing Revlimid, dexamethasone versus daratumumab, Revlimid and dexamethasone in one study that they called the POLLUX Study. And on another study called the CASTOR Study, we saw bortezomib, dexamethasone versus daratumumab, bortezomib and dexamethasone. And what we saw in those studies is two things. One, daratumumab plays well with others. So it's not a drug in the same family of the same nature than a proteasome inhibitor or an IMiD or an alkylator. The side effect profile is quite different and for the most part does not overlap in terms of side effects with either bortezomib or lenalidomide. So it plays well with others. There's little in terms of added toxicity. But what we saw was a very strong signal in terms of better efficacy.
In both those trials, the addition of daratumuamb reduced the risk of progression of myeloma in about two-thirds as compared to either lenalidomide alone or bortezomib alone. So that makes a very compelling case to go up to the next level, which would be to test this myeloma agent up front. So studies are being done and have been done, testing in a proper large Phase III setting treatment template versus that same template plus daratumumab. And one of those studies was performed in Europe in older non-transplant eligible patients using a template that is not very popular in this country, which is bortezomib, melphalan, prednisone versus bortezomib, melphalan, prednisone plus daratumumab. And again, a very dramatic effect in terms of reduction and risk of progression was seen. So to us, it seems pretty evident that adding daratumumab to other more mainstream agents would be ultimately beneficial.
But the other thing that was also seen is since daratumumab helps regular agents or establish agents to become more effective, we also see a higher level of elimination of minimal residual disease, even in the relapsed setting, which further supports the case for using daratumumab up front in a regimen that intends to eradicate MRD. Other studies have used daratumumab in combination with VRD, which is a more established upfront regimen. We did intend, however, to use KRd for a couple of reasons. One is in the relapsed setting, carfilzomib has been proven to be more potent than bortezomib. In prior trials, using KRd in the upfront setting with transplant have shown that this combination is not only safe but also highly active and can induce elimination of MRD in a high proportion of patients.
So we really felt that this combination with four agents would probably be the one that, among the available agents in myeloma, would give us the highest likelihood of clearing MRD in the highest proportion of patients.
Jenny: Well, I think it's a great approach just because if you can take some of the best drugs and apply them before the myeloma has had a chance to get more complicated on you, then the better. So maybe we should talk about the importance of this first line of therapy because I know I've talked to a lot of different experts at our meetings and things and they always stress, what you choose for the beginning of your treatment can really impact your long-term outcomes and how your disease behaves over time. Do you want to speak to that point at all?
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. And that's an excellent point and I cannot emphasize that enough. Oftentimes, we hear the criticism of that. Well, if you're going to use your best agents up front, so what are you going to do when the myeloma comes back and the patient has already been treated with your best regimens? Well, saving the best for last, as we say, is not a good strategy, has never been proven to be beneficial in essentially any cancer. And the same is certainly not the case in multiple myeloma. I think a few things to pursue there is the greatest remission, the longest remission that patients with myeloma will ever have tends to be the first remission. And it has been very well shown that a strategy that leads to better PFS, better progression free survival, in the upfront setting will translate into best survival in the long run.
Another aspect that oftentimes goes unrecognized is as patients progress and go through second and third and fourth line of therapy, their fitness changes and their ability to receive subsequent of line of therapy does change. Every time the myeloma becomes active again, there is morbidity and mortality associated with that recurrence. That might not be the case for the patient with a more indolent myeloma where we have the chance to slowly observe some biochemical progression for weeks or months before the disease becomes clinically evident. But it's certainly the case for some patients with more aggressive disease, where no matter how close you monitor their disease, it might progress with new fracture, renal failure and changing performance status. So there is even a mortality associated with every episode of recurrence.
The other more practical aspect is as people age and the myeloma takes additional hits on their health, they may not become eligible for a clinical trial or candidates for standard of care therapy with those novel agents up front or later on. So I think that on itself makes a very compelling case for using your drugs earlier. But if you want to take this up one notch and look at a more ambitious way, what I hope will soon become the case is that if you have the right agents and treat the right patients and have the proper tools to monitor and tailor your therapy, we really have the hope that the first therapy might become a definitive therapy. And if you are effective enough with your first line therapy, you might not have to ever worry about treating a recurrence at least in a subset of patients.
This is a very, of course, ambitious goal and is not a goal for one investigator or a group of investigators. It's a goal for a community of myeloma physicians, myeloma investigators, and myeloma patients. But I think that's where we need to keep our focus on, on developing therapies up front that are effective enough that we won't even have to worry about a progression.
Jenny: That would be amazing. And sometimes, our strategy is just get you out as far as possible. And if you're getting a five, seven, nine, ten-year remission versus a two, three, four-year remission, then the likelihood of having more curative therapies, even if you do relapse, is just so much higher.
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think a strategy of using the best therapy up front, it pays itself off even on a static system where there's no innovation. But in myeloma, the case is even more compelling because as you very well know, there are novel therapies being developed on a yearly basis. I have some myeloma colleagues I'm sure can give the same testimony. I have patients who are now 18 years, 19 years free of disease, and when they were diagnosed all that was available was VAD and transplant. And essentially, they have been on multiple lines of therapy, they are doing well, and they have benefit from the innovations that came along the way. So I think if you can buy your patient a very long upfront remission and this is not only on itself a noble and available outcome but also bridge that patient to a possibility of benefiting from future therapies that can be transformational.
Jenny: I totally agree. So care goal at the beginning and longer outcome goal as a secondary if your myeloma is not behaving in the right way that you want. I have a question for you.
Dr. Costa: Sure.
Jenny: You mentioned that sometimes different patients respond in different ways, I know. And when I was going through treatment -- but this was a very long time ago -- sometimes my doctor said, "Sometimes I see patients who respond really quickly, but their myeloma relapses more quickly. And sometimes patients who take more time to get into remission respond more longer term." That was before all this MRD testing and you could even detect to that level. But have you seen similar things in your practice or can you speak to that?
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. Anecdotally, you're absolutely right. I have patients who have never obtained more than a partial remission, who have opted not to be on maintenance and are off therapy for six years doing well with no signs or symptoms of myeloma even though the myeloma is present. And we also have seen patients who have very quick remissions but then have very quick progressions. I think that speaks to the heterogeneity of multiple myeloma. This is different on every patient. We don't fully understand why it behaves that way. Some patients have a myeloma with a more MGUS-like phenotype. And eventually, you have an additional biological step and becomes multiple myeloma and you can treat that myeloma component, but MGUS component remains stable, which may account for that long-term persistence of the malignant clone without features of multiple myeloma.
But the patients who have cytogenetic high risk in a patient with 17p or translocation (4;14), they are the ones who tend to have quick responses and quick progressions. And we know now that in part, I'm not saying in totality but in part, this is due to the fact that that clearance of disease, that the initial eradication of disease is not complete, even though some of those patients might reach a complete remission, meaning the myeloma is not promptly noted in the bone marrow exam and the immunofixation electrophoresis are negative, they still harbor disease at a very low level. We hope that if we can treat them up to the next level, which would be eradication of that minimal amount of disease, we might be able to break that cycle and break that paradigm and create a possibility that those deep or those quick remissions can also be definitive remissions.
This has long been an aspiration, but I think we're starting to see data to support that. The French group at the last ASH meeting show data from IFM 2009, which were patients treated with RVd and some received transplants, some did not. But what was shown for the first time is, at least a subset of patients, attainment of minimal residual disease negative status at the end of therapy might trump the prognostic impact of poor risk chromosomes. So in other words, if you take those patients who are high risk of recurrence based on chromosome analysis and you can't treat their disease down to undetectable by very state-of-the-art molecular technology, they might not recur at all. And that's really an eye opener and really sets a wind of opportunity that we should pursue further.
Jenny: That's wonderful. Wonderful. Now, this study, I understand, is called a single-arm study where no patients are getting randomized to different protocols. So maybe you want to explain that for patients who don't understand sometimes how studies are created and why this might be important for participating newly diagnosed patients.
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. So randomization, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with randomization. For the scientific standpoint, the only way you can definitively conclude that treatment A is better than treatment B is when you do a large study where some patients are randomly assigned to other patients around you assigned to be. And at the end, you show the one is superior to the other for a given meaningful end point. Those studies are very important. They take hundreds of patients and oftentimes many years to be completed. They are considered definitive evidence of the benefit of a new therapy or a new diagnostic test. But there are, of course, many other types of studies that have a different design and a different goal.
So our studies are Phase II non-randomized studies, which means how the patients enroll receive the same treatment plan. And the objective of the study is not to definitively prove that this approach is better than any other approach but to generate data that is compelling enough, that might support a more definitive Phase III study that could eventually change the standard of care. So oftentimes, how new treatments are developed, you first do Phase II and use a more short-term end point. If you can obtain at any point on a compelling proportion of patients, that's your pass to proceed into a large Phase III study.
So in this study, our patients receive the experimental regimen. There is no comparison against another group of patients treated at the same time. We're comparing the results of this therapy with the results that are of what is obtainable with other more traditional regimens. So it can be considered a proof of principle essentially. We're trying to demonstrate that 1), you can use those four drugs in newly diagnosed patients on a safe and effective way, 2), you can obtain MRD negatively in the large proportion of patients, 3) that the majority of those patients can discontinue therapy without seeing recurrence of disease, and 4) and perhaps just as important is that it's feasible to operate a treatment program where you use MRD for real-time guidance of therapy. So those are the things that we hope to accomplish with this single-arm study.
Jenny: Well, let's talk about MRD or minimal residual disease for a minute, because I think this is a really important thing. Now that we have more myeloma drugs and better myeloma drugs and more combinations, as an investigator, when you're trying to run these studies, people can be living eight, ten years. So you're really not getting your data back until many, many, many years later after you try these different combinations. So being able to test or detect disease at a much deeper, more sensitive level for these MRD tests might help you understand who's responding, who's not, and be able to come from some conclusions for us as patients earlier without waiting eight or ten years because we don't really want to wait to know which might be the best option for us.
Dr. Costa: Right. So you're absolutely right. So just to explain a little bit about minimal residual disease, so traditionally how we assess response in multiple myeloma, it's by using morphology under bone marrow and using a serum and urine test to look for the paraprotein that the myeloma produced. And based on those tests, a set of criteria for response has been set up and validated by international myeloma working group. That really has to do with the elimination of the protein and elimination of visible abnormal plasma cells in the bone marrow.
Those tests are very helpful. Those are still the bread and butter of myeloma response assessment, but those are tests that go back many, many decades. And for the longest time, we did not need anything better because most patients were not obtained even a complete remission. They're obtaining no response at all or a partial response or a very good partial response. So it has really for the longest time, not being that crucial to have a test that can see it better because still the majority of patients were left with a large number of plasma cells that produced an abnormal protein in the blood and in the urine.
As the treatments got better, we start seeing more patients reaching what's called complete remission, which can be quite misleading. Complete remission means I cannot detect the protein in the blood or in the urine. And if I do a bone marrow, and have less than 5% of plasma cells. But we know patients can still have a lot of myeloma cells in their body and still be considered in complete remission. And the most definitive proof of that is that most patients who reach complete remission, they're still going to have a relapse later on.
As the treatments become better, the traditional methods of evaluating disease response becomes greatly inadequate. So just keep that in perspective. When you say complete remission by traditional methods, that means the patient can have one in 100 to even five in 100 myeloma cells in their bone marrow, which is a lot of myeloma. But we're talking now about technologies that can detect one cell in 100,000, even one cell in a million, and that's what we call minimal residual disease. There has been essentially two methods to minimal residual disease. They are both being developed. There are some groups that are more aligned with one method, the other group are more aligned with other method. They all have their pros and cons, but we foresee a future where both are going to be utilized and both are going to be helpful.
One of those methods is flow cytometry which essentially makes the cells from the sample, typically a bone marrow sample. Those cells are treated with antibodies that detect different markers and those cells go through a machine called flow cytometry that detects the aberrant expression of some markers that identify those cells are being malignant. This test can detect a one cell in 10,000. The European group, particularly the Spanish group, has developed what's called Euroflow that can detect one cell in 100,000, and they're trying to improve this even further.
Another technology that's a completely DNA-based technology using what's called next generation sequencing and that essentially consist the patients on bone marrow sample from the time of diagnose, when there was an abundance of malignant cells. It identifies one or more specific what we call clonogenic sequences, which are DNA sequence that are unique to the patient's multiple myeloma. And then once the disease is treated, you take a post-treatment sample and look for that sequence or sequences in the new sample. And that technology can detect one cell in 100,000 and one cell in a million.
So what can be shown is that MRD presence, and the level of MRD is clearly link to outcomes. So this has been shown with more than ten years follow up from the Spanish group using particularly a flow methodology. And there had been shown more recently by the French group on the IFM 2009 study where patients who had less than ten to minus six did better than patients that had ten to minus five to ten to minus six, which did better than patients who had ten to minus four to ten to minus five, that did better than patients who have more than ten to minus four. So there's clearly a gradient effect and there might be a level that's low enough if the patients can clear the disease beyond their level, recurrence simply does not happen. And that would be eventually a wonderful thing.
So what we have so far is this test being use as a prognosticator. If you end the initial phase of your therapy and your MRD is down to a certain level, let's say ten to minus six, you know you're better off and your chances of recurrence are less than if it was, for example, ten to minus four. So it's a good surrogate of long-term end points. What we're trying to do is help take to the next level, make that a meaningful end point for clinical trials and more important, stratify therapy. In other words, be a deciding factor of who should receive more therapy versus who should receive less therapy.
Jenny: Right. And when you say ten to the minus six, that is one cell in a million, right?
Dr. Costa: Yes, one cell in a million.
Jenny: And ten to the minus five is one cell in 100,000.
Dr. Costa: One cell in 100,000.
Jenny: And then ten to the minus four, that's not as very sensitive when you're just looking at one in 10,000, right?
Dr. Costa: Yes. One to minus four would be one 10,000, which is -- you're absolutely right, it doesn't seem so sensitive, but still far better than just morphology in protein electrophoresis, which can miss a much higher burden of the disease.
Jenny: Well, wonderful that these new tests are coming out. And I think the test you're using is the Adaptive clonoSEQ test, right?
Dr. Costa: That's correct. The test that we use in this protocol is the clonoSEQ test that is based on next generation sequencing.
Jenny: Okay. Wonderful. So just a little bit of information, do you want to review just details about the study, like where is it being run and how many patients are you looking for, how do patients join?
Dr. Costa: Absolutely.
Jenny: Maybe the cost. Because I think what was unique about this is that carfilzomib and daratumumab are being given for free from Amgen and from Janssen, right?
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. This study is a investigator-initiated study, which means, yes, as the investigator, we hold the primary responsibility over the study. They study receives financial support and drug from both Amgen and Janssen that provide carfilzomib and daratumumab respectively. The trial intends to accrue 82 patients in seven different myeloma centers because we are the principal investigators and UAB is the coordinating site. The trial started here. We had our first patient treated for the mid-March, and we have close to ten patients already identified and four patients who have started therapy. Eventually, the trial would open at six other sites. We are fortunate to have the support and collaboration of my colleagues from Medical College of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, University of Wisconsin, Oregon Health Science University, Duke University and Emory University. We really expect the initial projection was to accrue this trial in two years, but I suspect we're going to be accruing in just one year based on the interest and the success we have had in those early days of the study.
As you highlighted, the study, like any other clinical trials, that our components are considered standard of care and they are charged to the patient or to the insurance. For example, the costs of seeing the doctor, the cost of doing the main test for a traditional disease assessment, the cost of stem cell transplant, but there are components that are considered experimental and are covered by the study, in this case, the daratumumab, the carfilzomib and the MRD testing by itself. We're very fortunate to have had input from patient advocates on the design of this study and our mutual friend, Jim Omel, was very instrumental in making sure that we had a design that will answer scientific questions and it was also appealing for patients.
This trial is different from many other trials for newly diagnosed patients. It does not have an age gap. We recognize that patients who are older than perhaps 75 might not be adequate transplant candidates, but as long as they fit the other eligibility for the study, they can be treated and patients who are not going to pursue transplant, they receive four additional cycles of care, via daratumumab.
There are patients newly diagnosed. Oftentimes patients are diagnosed in renal failure or in the hospital setting with a new fracture, which makes it difficult for them to meet criteria such as performance status or even renal function. So this trial accepts patients who have had minimal therapy up to four weeks of therapy with bortezomib, cyclophosphamide and dexamethasone to work themselves out of a crisis, for example, acute pain or hypercalcemia or renal dysfunction and they can still qualify for the study. And patients who are interested on this trial should feel free -- at this point, UAB is the only site accruing, but of course, we have information posted in the clinicaltrials.gov where we have my contact information and our coordinator contact information. I'll be more than happy to talk to patients who might be interested. As new sites get activated, we're going to make sure that information is up to date in clinicaltrials.gov so patients can look for a site in their area.
Jenny: Wonderful. And also, we link with a clinical trial finder called SparkCures that we find to be a lot easier to use than clinicaltrials.gov. So I know that this trial is in there, and we'll include a link with the final show so people can find it also. They can help navigate at each of the different centers as well. (see link above)
Dr. Costa: Thank you, appreciate it.
Jenny: I have more questions and the time is going too fast, but I do want to open it up for caller questions just in case somebody wants to ask a question. So if you have a question for Dr. Costa, you can call 347-637-2631 and press 1 on your keypad.So go ahead with your question.
Caller: Hi, Dr. Costa. First, thank you so much. This has been so great. I just have a quick question. So I was wondering, why would a newly diagnosed patient want to consider joining this study over the standard of care treatments?
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. And the reason for it is it's out of hope that a new therapy could be better. There is no proof that a new therapy is better, otherwise would be no need for the clinical trial. But I think the reason a patient would join this study, just like the patient would join any study, is for the possibility of having access to a treatment that might be better it would not be assessed otherwise. So that should be always the primary reason for a patient to join a clinical trial.
Now, there are other potential advantages of being in a clinical trial and they include -- there is an extra level of oversight in reassurance that the treatment goals follow a pre-specified plan that has been approved by multiple layers of oversight, including the FDA, the investigational review board and local scientific review committee. Patients on clinical trials end up receiving an extra patient in addition to the regular clinical staff. There's a resource of staff that make sure that toxicity is properly evaluated, degraded, and the necessary corrections are made.
And the last, and sometimes we don't present that as being a motive for patients, but I'm sure many patients feel good about this is at the end, you also contributing to generate knowledge and pave the way for future patients.
Caller: Well, it sounds like a great study, so thank you so much for everything you've shared.
Dr. Costa: Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Jenny: Okay. Thank you. And one last question for you before we end. Because this is in the newly diagnosed setting and so most of the time, patients will have gone to their doctor and they might have gone to a local community center or something, and someone may have started them on any kind of treatment. Does it make them ineligible for participation in this study if they've already received some kind of prior therapy?
Dr. Costa: That's a good question. And most studies for newly diagnosed patients, if you have received one dose of anything, you are excluded. This study is not like that. We wrote the eligibility in that way essentially to capture those patients that you described. So patients have received up to four doses of bortezomib, or they have received of up to four doses of cyclophosphamide, or they have received up to four doses of dexamethasone within four weeks period of time, they are still eligible for the study as long as information that details the disease’s stage and the level of the paraprotein at the time of diagnosis is available. So patients who have received minimal therapy, they still can be enrolled.
Jenny: Right. Because when you start a therapy, of course, hopefully, your myeloma is going to go down and then you're not using a good baseline of disease burden, right?
Jenny: So you can't measure it or detect and try to figure out what's working better.
Well, amazing. Well, we are so thankful that you have shared the study with us and it's been just so valuable to learn more about it. And again, I was diagnosed in 2010 and there weren't these types of options, but this is a study that I would have really seriously considered and tried to learn more about because I just think it takes some of the best available treatments and then gives you just one of the best options for long-term remissions. So thank you for putting this study together and all your work. I can’t imagine how difficult it was to try to put four different drugs together into a study.
Dr. Costa: Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity. And you're absolutely right, there still has been quite a bit of effort to align two different companies, the FDA who has some very specific criteria to allow us to use MRD for decision making and the endorsement of the patient community is extremely meaningful and really gives purpose for the work we do. And we're very excited to have the opportunity, the privilege to run a study like this, and hopefully that that would translate into better outcomes for our patients. And thank you very much for the opportunity.
Jenny: Oh, thank you. And I believe it will, I really do. So thank you so much for joining us and thank you for our listeners for tuning into Myeloma Crowd Radio. And we hope you tune in next time to learn more about the latest in myeloma research and what it means for you.
Find more myeloma news and information on www.myelomacrowd.org
Jennifer Ahlstrom - Jenny A - Myeloma survivor, patient advocate, wife, mom of 6. Believer that patients can help accelerate a cure by weighing in and participating in clinical trials. Founder of Myeloma Crowd, Myeloma Crowd Radio, HealthTree and the CrowdCare Foundation.
MORE MYELOMA CROWD NEWS
MCRT Webcast: High-Risk Disease Essentials
Change is Possible: Achieve your Myeloma Goals in 2021 with the Help of a Myeloma Coach
American Society of Hematology Meeting Review: Register Now for the Myeloma Crowd Round Table Interactive Webcast on January 30
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Gaming & Monetization
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
GPT-3 Takes AI to the Next Level
December 1, 2020 Artificial Intelligence & Machine LearningAI, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Attention, Generator, Google, GPT-3, Language, Machine Learning, Neural Network, Nvidia, OpenAI, Processing, Robot, Tesla, Transformer, Unsupervisedadmin
“I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot… I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!” – GPT-3
The excerpt above is from a recently published article in The Guardian article written entirely by artificial intelligence, powered by GPT-3: a powerful new language generator. Although OpenAI has yet to make it publicly available, GPT-3 has been making waves in the AI world.
WHAT IS GPT-3?
Created by OpenAI, a research firm co-founded by Elon Musk, GPT-3 stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3—it is the biggest artificial neural network in history. GPT-3 is a language prediction model that uses an algorithmic structure to take one piece of language as input and transform it into what it thinks will be the most useful linguistic output for the user.
For example, for The Guardian article, GPT-3 generated the text given an introduction and simple prompt: “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” Given that input, it created eight separate responses, each with unique and interesting arguments. These responses were compiled by a human editor into a single, cohesive, compelling 1000 word article.
WHAT MAKES GPT-3 SPECIAL?
When GPT-3 receives text input, it scrolls the internet for potential answers. GPT-3 is an unsupervised learning system. The training data it used did not include any information on what is right or wrong. It determines the probability that its output will be what the user needs, based on the training text themselves.
When it gets the correct output, a “weight” is assigned to the algorithm process that provided the correct answers. These weights allow GPT-3 to learn what methods are most likely to come up with the correct response in the future. Although language prediction models have been around for years, GPT-3 can hold 175 billion weights in its memory, ten times more than its rival, designed by Nvidia. OpenAI invested $4.6 million into the computing time necessary to create and hone the algorithmic structure which feeds its decisions.
WHERE DID IT COME FROM?
GPT3 is the product of rapid innovation in the field of language models. Advances in the unsupervised learning field we previously covered contributed heavily to the evolution of language models. Additionally, AI scientist Yoshua Bengio and his team at Montreal’s Mila Institute for AI made a major advancement in 2015 when they discovered “attention”. The team realized that language models compress English-language sentences, and then decompress them using a vector of a fixed length. This rigid approach created a bottleneck, so their team devised a way for the neural net to flexibly compress words into vectors of different sizes and termed it “attention”.
Attention was a breakthrough that years later enabled Google scientists to create a language model program called the “Transformer,” which was the basis of GPT-1, the first iteration of GPT.
WHAT CAN IT DO?
OpenAI has yet to make GPT-3 publicly available, so use cases are limited to certain developers with access through an API. In the demo below, GPT-3 created an app similar to Instagram using a plug-in for the software tool Figma.
Latitude, a game design company, uses GPT-3 to improve its text-based adventure game: AI Dungeon. The game includes a complex decision tree to script different paths through the game. Latitude uses GPT-3 to dynamically change the state of gameplay based on the user’s typed actions.
The hype behind GPT-3 has come with some backlash. In fact, even OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman tried to fan the flames on Twitter: “The GPT-3 hype is way too much. It’s impressive (thanks for the nice compliments!), but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes. AI is going to change the world, but GPT-3 is just a very early glimpse. We have a lot still to figure out.”
Some developers have pointed out that since it is pulling and synthesizing text it finds on the internet, it can come up with confirmation biases, as referenced in the tweet below:
https://twitter.com/an_open_mind/status/1284487376312709120?s=20
While OpenAI has not made GPT-3 public, it plans to turn the tool into a commercial product later in the year with a paid subscription to the AI via the cloud. As language models continue to evolve, the entry-level for businesses looking to leverage AI will become lower. We are sure to learn more about how GPT-3 can fuel innovation when OpenAI becomes more widely available later this year!
Harness AI with the Top Machine Learning Frameworks of 2021
October 27, 2020 Artificial Intelligence & Machine LearningAI, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, CNTK, Cognitive Toolkit, Framework, IBM, Machine Learning, Microsoft, ML, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Watsonadmin
According to Gartner, machine learning and AI will create $2.29 trillion of business value by 2021. Artificial intelligence is the way of the future, but many businesses do not have the resources to create and employ AI from scratch. Luckily, machine learning frameworks make the implementation of AI more accessible, enabling businesses to take their enterprises to the next level.
What Are Machine Learning Frameworks?
Machine learning frameworks are open source interfaces, libraries, and tools that exist to lay the foundation for using AI. They ease the process of acquiring data, training models, serving predictions, and refining future results. Machine learning frameworks enable enterprises to build machine learning models without requiring an in-depth understanding of the underlying algorithms. They enable businesses that lack the resources to build AI from scratch to wield it to enhance their operations.
For example, AirBNB uses TensorFlow, the most popular machine learning framework, to classify images and detect objects at scale, enhancing guests ability to see their destination. Twitter uses it to create algorithms which rank tweets.
Here is a rundown of today’s top ML Frameworks:
TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning built by the Google Brain team. TensorFlow offers a comprehensive, flexible ecosystem of tools, libraries, and community resources, all built toward equipping researchers and developers with the tools necessary to build and deploy ML powered applications.
TensorFlow employs Python to provide a front-end API while executing applications in C++. Developers can create dataflow graphs which describe how data moves through a graph, or a series of processing nodes. Each node in the graph is a mathematical operation; the connection between nodes is a multidimensional data array, or tensor.
While TensorFlow is the ML Framework of choice in the industry, increasingly researchers are leaving the platform to develop for PyTorch.
PyTorch is a library for Python programs that facilitates deep learning. Like TensorFlow, PyTorch is Python-based. Think of it as Facebook’s answer to Google’s TensorFlow—it was developed primarily by Facebook’s AI Research lab. It’s flexible, lightweight, and built for high-end efficiency.
PyTorch features outstanding community documentation and quick, easy editing capabilities. PyTorch facilitates deep learning projects with an emphasis on flexibility.
Studies show that it’s gaining traction, particularly in the ML research space due to its simplicity, comparable speed, and superior API. PyTorch integrates easily with the rest of the Python ecosystem, whereas in TensorFlow, debugging the model is much trickier.
Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK)
Microsoft’s ML framework is designed to handle deep learning, but can also be used to process large amounts of unstructured data for machine learning models. It’s particularly useful for recurrent neural networks. For developers inching toward deep learning, CNTK functions as a solid bridge.
CNTK is customizable and supports multi-machine back ends, but ultimately it’s a deep learning framework that’s backwards compatible with machine learning. It is neither as easy to learn nor deploy as TensorFlow and PyTorch, but may be the right choice for more ambitious businesses looking to leverage deep learning.
IBM Watson began as a follow-up project to IBM DeepBlue, an AI program that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. It is a machine learning system trained primarily by data rather than rules. IBM Watson’s structure can be compared to a system of organs. It consists of many small, functional parts that specialize in solving specific sub-problems.
The natural language processing engine analyzes input by parsing it into words, isolating the subject, and determining an interpretation. From there it sifts through a myriad of structured and unstructured data for potential answers. It analyzes them to elevate strong options and eliminate weaker ones, then computes a confidence score for each answer based on the supporting evidence. Research shows it’s correct 71% of the time.
IBM Watson is one of the more powerful ML systems on the market and finds usage in large enterprises, whereas TensorFlow and PyTorch are more frequently used by small and medium-sized businesses.
What’s Right for Your Business?
Businesses looking to capitalize on artificial intelligence do not have to start from scratch. Each of the above ML Frameworks offer their own pros and cons, but all of them have the capacity to enhance workflow and inform beneficial business decisions. Selecting the right ML framework enables businesses to put their time into what’s most important: innovation.
How Artificial Intuition Will Pave the Way for the Future of AI
September 28, 2020 Artificial Intelligence & Machine LearningAI, Alphago, Analytics, Artificial, Data, Deepmind, Future, Intelligence, Intuition, Learning, Machine, Reinforcement, Selfadmin
Artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful technologies in history, and a sector defined by rapid growth. While numerous major advances in AI have occurred over the past decade, in order for AI to be truly intelligent, it must learn to think on its own when faced with unfamiliar situations to predict both positive and negative potential outcomes.
One of the major gifts of human consciousness is intuition. Intuition differs from other cognitive processes because it has more to do with a gut feeling than intellectually driven decision-making. AI researchers around the globe have long thought that artificial intuition was impossible, but now major tech titans like Google, Amazon, and IBM are all working to develop solutions and incorporate it into their operational flow.
WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTUITION?
Descriptive analytics inform the user of what happened, while diagnostic analytics address why it happened. Artificial intuition can be described as “predictive analytics,” an attempt to determine what may happen in the future based on what occurred in the past.
For example, Ronald Coifman, Phillips Professor of Mathematics at Yale University, and an innovator in the AI space, used artificial intuition to analyze millions of bank accounts in different countries to identify $1 billion worth of nominal money transfers that funded a well-known terrorist group.
Coifman deemed “computational intuition” the more accurate term for artificial intuition, since it analyzes relationships in data instead of merely analyzing data values. His team creates algorithms which identify previously undetected patterns, such as cybercrime. Artificial intuition has made waves in the financial services sector where global banks are increasingly using it to detect sophisticated financial cybercrime schemes, including: money laundering, fraud, and ATM hacking.
One of the major insights into artificial intuition was born out of Google’s DeepMind research in which a super computer used AI, called AlphaGo, to become a master in playing GO, an ancient Chinese board game that requires intuitive thinking as part of its strategy. AlphaGo evolved to beat the best human players in the world. Researchers then created a successor called AlphaGo Zero which defeated AlphaGo, developing its own strategy based on intuitive thinking. Within three days, AlphaGo Zero beat the 18—time world champion Lee Se-dol, 100 games to nil. After 40 days, it won 90% of matches against AlphaGo, making it arguably the best Go player in history at the time.
AlphaGo Zero represents a major advancement in the field of Reinforcement Learning or “Self Learning,” a subset of Deep Learning which is a subset of Machine Learning. Reinforcement learning uses advanced neural networks to leverage data into making decisions. AlphaGo Zero achieved “Self Play Reinforcement Learning,” playing Go millions of times without human intervention, creating a neural network of “artificial knowledge” reinforced by a sequence of actions that had both consequences and inception. AlphaGo Zero created knowledge itself from a blank slate without the constraints of human expertise.
ENHANCING RATHER THAN REPLACING HUMAN INTUITION
The goal of artificial intuition is not to replace human instinct, but as an additional tool to help improve performance. Rather than giving machines a mind of their own, these techniques enable them to acquire knowledge without proof or conscious reasoning, and identify opportunities or potential disasters, for seasoned analysts who will ultimately make decisions.
Many potential applications remain in development for Artificial Intuition. We expect to see autonomous cars harness it, processing vast amounts of data and coming to intuitive decisions designed to keep humans safe. Although its ultimate effects remain to be seen, many researchers anticipate Artificial Intuition will be the future of AI.
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How App Developers Can Leverage the iPhone 12 to Maximize Their Apps January 5, 2021
How to Leverage AR to Boost Sales and Enhance the Retail Experience December 15, 2020
GPT-3 Takes AI to the Next Level December 1, 2020
Harness AI with the Top Machine Learning Frameworks of 2021 October 27, 2020
How Artificial Intuition Will Pave the Way for the Future of AI September 28, 2020
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David Crary
Tags: politics, Government
HHS leaders: No evidence of child abuse surge amid pandemic
FILE - In this Friday, Oct. 9, 2020 file photo, the shadows of a school employee escorting a student are cast on the wall as they walk to a classroom on the first day of class at an elementary School in Davie, Fla. On Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021, top officials overseeing child welfare at the Department of Health and Human Services say theyve seen no solid evidence to bear out warnings that serious forms of child abuse would surge during the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee) (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)
NEW YORK – Top officials overseeing child welfare at the Department of Health and Human Services say they’ve seen no solid evidence to bear out warnings that serious forms of child abuse would surge during the coronavirus pandemic.
Lynn Johnson, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, and Jerry Milner, associate commissioner of HHS’ Children’s Bureau, spoke with The Associated Press on Thursday, shortly before they leave their jobs amid the change in administrations.
Back in March, when COVID-19 forced schools to close and many children to be locked down in households buffeted by job losses, many child-welfare experts warned of a likely surge of child abuse perpetrated by harried parents and other caretakers.
Johnson and Milner said many parents indeed have faced pandemic-related stresses, but questioned whether that fueled abuse.
“We can’t just assume because parents have to spend 24/7 with their kids, that there’s going to be more abuse,” she said.
Official 50-state data for 2020 won’t be available for several more months, Milner said. He said he’s been hearing anecdotally that calls to hotlines reporting suspected abuse are down compared to 2019, while calls to support centers from hard-up families seeking assistance have increased.
Johnson and Milner spoke with the AP as the Administration for Children and Families released its latest annual report on child maltreatment in the United States, covering the 2019 fiscal year that ended before the pandemic began.
The report showed that the number of children determined to be victims of abuse and neglect fell for the first time in five years, dropping more than 3%. In 2019, 656,000 children were maltreated, down from 677,000 in 2018, the report said.
Most of the cases — 61% — involved neglect. About 17.5% involved physical or sexual abuse.
Milner said neglect, rather than physical abuse, is the primary reason for family separations in the child-welfare system, and is more common among families living in poverty.
“This underscores the importance of community efforts in preventing child maltreatment by ensuring every family is safe, secure and has the support needed to raise their children in a healthy environment,” he said.
Johnson attributed the 2019 decline in maltreatment cases to the expansion of efforts to assist at-risk families before their circumstances worsen to the point of triggering abuse and removals of children into foster care.
“If we can come in with housing services, mental health services, we can change the trajectory,” she said. “I think we’re on to something that’s working.”
Earlier this year, Milner told the AP he was gratified that child protection was deemed a high priority during the pandemic, but troubled by the tone of some of the early warnings. He suggested that some had “racist underpinnings” — unfairly stereotyping low-income parents of color as prone to abusive behavior.
“To sound alarm bells, because teachers aren’t seeing kids every day, that parents are waiting to harm their kids — it’s an unfair depiction of so many parents out there doing the best under very tough circumstances,” he said in June.
Among the notable findings in the new report for 2019: The number of child fatalities due to child abuse and neglect increased to 1,840, up from 1,780 in 2018.
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Into the dark web
Exploring the virtual bazaar of the World Wide Web—where anything goes
By Jason Smith
Writer Jason Smith viewing a listing for MDMA crystals for sale on the dark web.
Photo by Karlos Rene Ayala
Jason Smith is a Northern California writer who’s the author of the memoir The Bitter Taste of Dying.
Climbing the wooden steps of a rundown triplex somewhere on the outskirts of the Sacramento grid, I wiped the sweat from my eyes with a sticky T-shirt that felt pasted to my chest. July was bleeding into August and it was hot. The flesh around my eyes sagged and my corneas felt like they were sprinkled with sawdust, strained by a staring contest my ceiling and I had been having since the night my AC went out. I was really in no condition to be doing any work that day, but I was flat broke, behind on rent and out of cigarettes.
So there I was, chasing a ghost.
The door opened before I was halfway up the steps. Drug dealers in my experience have always demonstrated exceptional environmental awareness, so I wasn’t shocked that he knew I was there. I was shocked, however, at his appearance.
He looked like a kid, the type who could be seen on any high school campus. What he didn’t look like was what he was—a drug-smuggling cocaine dealer on the run.
His name was Jim, which is to say his name probably wasn’t Jim. I don’t know his real name.
Jim made his living in a corner of the World Wide Web called the “dark web,” something that came along after I retired from that life in 2012, meaning I was unfamiliar with it. But I knew that life. I knew it well. I fought a vicious opiate and benzo addiction for 17 years, before I finally let the compassion and love of others seep in. In December 2012, I said enough was enough. It had been long enough to drift into Jim’s world comfortably, but not so long that it was unrecognizable.
Using easy-to-get encryption software, Jim orders his illicit product from nearly untraceable web pages, then has it shipped through the U.S. Postal Service, which screens only a fraction of its packages.
“This is the next generation of drug dealer, these dark web guys,” said William Ruzzamenti, director of the Central Valley High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which is a division of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “Thanks to them, the United States Postal Service is now the largest drug courier on the planet.”
Shaking my hand, Jim welcomed me inside his hideout, where I sat down on a black futon covered with a gray comforter that looked like it had been used recently.
“I know,” he said as he carried a laptop over to where I was sitting, placing it in front of me on the coffee table. “I look young.”
That’s when he said he was 19 years old.
Anatomy of an online drug trafficker
Also known as the “dark net,” the dark web is an expanding virtual space where anything goes. Think of it like eBay designed by Caligula, where digital currency can purchase any vice or horror man has dreamed up—drugs, stolen IDs, assassins, even webcam access to child dungeons.
And all of it virtually untraceable.
Both Ruzzamenti, who works alongside state and federal agencies as part of a narcotics task force out of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, and DEA Special Agent Casey Rettig suspect the dark web played a role in the mysterious fentanyl overdoses that scourged 14 lives in the Sacramento region last year. Only one person has been tangentially connected to the conspiracy. Authorities still can’t say why counterfeit Norco tablets containing the much stronger synthetic opioid fentanyl were made and distributed, or who was behind it.
It sounded like science fiction to me. I knew the old-school drug game. Late-night drives with two hands on the wheel, praying the tail lights were functioning. I was used to sundown hand-to-hands. Jim was used to coffee roasters and street fairs.
Before his current troubles, Jim spent his days soaking up the south Florida sunshine, buying uncut cocaine with Bitcoin from a seller off the dark web. Jim would spend his nights flipping the product at retail prices to college kids, spring breakers, professional athletes, businessmen and tourists, who he claimed spent “stupid money” on the drug.
Narcotics investigator William Ruzzamenti describes the dark web as the next generation for drug dealers.
Photo via Facebook
“Everybody wants to get high when they vacation down there, including people who’d never sniff coke back home,” he said.
Less than a month before, Jim says, the feds kicked in the unlocked doors of his home just before sun-up. Drugs were seized, the occupants’ hands were zip-tied and the apprehended were counted: The suspects were all there except for one.
Two days before the raid, a neighbor told Jim he’d seen some guys that looked like cops trying hard not to look like cops going through his trash. He had a feeling something was about to go down. He broke the neighbor off a gram to say “thank you,” then caught the first flight to Sacramento, where he had a friend in a shabby triplex with rickety steps.
I tracked down Jim through a matrix of online message boards where people discuss the type of things people discuss when they think nobody’s looking: sex, drugs, money laundering, credit card fraud, financial scams. Needless to say, popping in with, “Hey, I’m a writer doing a story on the dark web, would you be willing to talk?” wasn’t received with warmth. Jim was understandably hesitant at first, but eventually warmed to the idea of talking after skimming a few pieces I’d written.
Jim says he never ventured into the darker side of the dark web because it scared him, but he has plenty of acquaintances who did. He claims it changed them. He couldn’t say how, exactly, but it just did.
“So the first thing you wanna do,” Jim began, immediately absorbed by his computer, “is get a VPN. It’s a ‘virtual private network.’ It’s like a condom for your phone or computer. Everyone needs to use one of these, even if you’re just using the surface web.”
How the dark net works
The “surface web” Jim was referring to is the internet that most of us use day-to-day. The terms “deep” and “surface” were cemented in a 2001 white paper written by Michael K. Bergman for the Journal of Electronic Publishing, which explained that the surface web is the portion of the internet that can be found by search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Any link that pops up in a search is considered part of the surface web.
According to Bergman, the vast majority of the World Wide Web resides below the surface, where pages and URLs are not found by search engines. These sites are part of the “deep web.” For example, your bank’s homepage is on the surface web. However, the intranet used by bank employees to communicate with each other is the deep web. There’s no way for someone to find those pages using a search engine.
These are the internet’s two neighborhoods—surface and deep. The surface is accessible to anyone, the deep is more exclusive.
But that exclusive neighborhood—the deep web—has a red light district. A dirty, shady, libertarian utopia where the black market adheres strictly to free market principles, absent of any government regulation. This is the dark web.
Media outlets often conflate the two terms, colloquially using “deep web” and “dark web” synonymously. They are not, however, the same.
To gain entry to the dark web, Jim explained, you need to download Tor, which is tech shorthand for “the onion router.” According to the book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, Tor was originally developed in the mid ’90s by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory with the goal of facilitating communication between members of the U.S. intelligence community. The Naval Research Laboratory released the open-source code for Tor to the public in 2004, and it’s been maintained by the nonprofit The Tor Project since 2006.
“Tor is a mask that hides your identity,” Jim explained. “You have to be wearing the mask to get to the good shit. No mask, no entry.”
With Tor and a VPN masking your IP address, you can then access what’s called the onion network. Here, instead of a site’s URL ending in .com, .gov or .edu, it ends in .onion.
According to Sarah Jamie Lewis, an independent privacy and anonymity researcher and dark web expert, data coming across the onion network is encapsulated by multiple layers of encryption, similar to layers of an onion.
When using the surface web without Tor, she explains, a computer requests data from a server directly from its IP, or “internet protocol,” which refers to a set of networking guidelines that allow two or more computers to communicate. This IP leaves a trace, meaning anything that’s sent or received leaves behind a device’s fingerprint, which can be traced back to the person.
Tor makes tracing someone’s movements on the dark web almost impossible, Lewis said in an email. Tor renders the user anonymous as it routes encrypted data requests through three different servers, positioned anywhere on the globe where internet access is available.
The vast majority of the World Wide Web resides below the surface, where pages and URLs are not found by search engines.
Infographic by Tina Flynn
“The Tor [makes] three hops, [or in] the case of a hidden service connection, six stops—three from the user making the request, and three from the service responding to the request,” she wrote. “Each hop introduces a new layer of encryption.”
Not even the servers know what the requests passing through them are. They’re simply conduits of encrypted data. Were law enforcement able to somehow intercept the transfer of data between servers, they would still need to decode the encryption. Even then, there’d be no way of determining who made the request, since the Tor masks one’s identity and location.
In her email, Lewis called it a “robust” scheme.
Jim put it more succinctly. “It’s total privacy, total anonymity,” he said.
Preying on human error
Authorities have claimed a couple of big dark net victories, but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule.
Last July, one month before I found Jim, Attorney General Jeff Sessions took a victory lap for shutting down a group of dark web marketplaces, the biggest of which was a site called AlphaBay. These sites sold drugs, guns, child pornography and offered services ranging from hacking someone’s Facebook to ordering a hitman. The investigation involved the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Dutch National Police and Europol.
Sessions praised law enforcement for what he called good, old-fashioned police work. But according to Phil Muncaster, an information technology journalist for the MIT Technology Review, traditional police work is only a factor once human error has occurred.
“Law enforcement has been able to capitalize on basic mistakes made by some of the perps,” Muncaster wrote in an email. “[I]f they all used Tor and anonymizing services correctly, police would stand no chance.”
The first and most infamous dark web marketplace was Silk Road, launched in 2011. Wired magazine called it the “Amazon of contraband,” but investigators were able to track down the site’s founder only after the real IP address, unmasked without Tor, was accidentally broadcast. Investigators were tipped off by a Reddit thread attempting to alert users of the breach.
AlphaBay founder Alexandre Cazes was discovered after password resets for the site were sent directly from his hotmail account, pimp_alex_91@hotmail.com.” That email was connected to his LinkedIn account for a computer repair service in Canada, leading investigators to his real identity and, eventually, his residence in Bangkok, Thailand. Cazes was found last July hanging in his jail cell, dead from an apparent suicide.
“We should remember that it still takes some skill to turn those rookie mistakes … into a concrete conviction,” Muncaster said.
Law enforcement has reacted by getting creative, which both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation claim raises constitutional concerns.
In February 2015, a dark website that hosted child pornography called Playpen inadvertently revealed its IP address, giving the FBI the physical location of its server. According to the FBI’s website, the agency said it used “court-approved investigative techniques” for a joint investigation named “Operation Pacifier.”
But some government watchdogs believe the feds may have gone too far.
Court records show that the FBI hijacked the Playpen server and ran the site for two weeks, distributing child pornography but using a custom malware that exploited a hole in the Firefox browser, allowing the FBI to infect the computers and identify those who were downloading their illegal bait.
U.S. Judge Robert Bryan, a federal magistrate in Tacoma, Wash., ruled that Jay Michaud, one of the defendants caught in the Operation Pacifier sting, had a right to see the malware code that infected his computer as part of the case’s discovery. Federal prosecutors in Seattle chose instead to drop the charges and protect the code’s secrecy.
Annette Hayes, a federal prosecutor for the Western District of Washington, wrote in a motion following the judge’s decision that, “Disclosure is not currently an option.”
Tor makes tracing someone’s movements on the dark web almost impossible says researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis.
Photo courtesy of University of British Columbia
Light amid the dark
Despite being a professor of computer science at Sacramento State University, June Dai said the dark web is a place he chooses not to visit.
Dai, also the director for the Center of Information Assurance and Security, did point out, however, that the dark web is also used by political dissidents to organize in countries with strict censorship, and where real-world political activism risks a prison sentence.
“The dark web anonymity can be used for things other than bad things,” he said. “It is also used for protecting rights and speaking out against governments in places where such things are not permitted.”
Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Guardian in August, “We see Tor use go up whenever a dictatorship takes over or a coup occurs. Tibetans, United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Egypt. The list goes on and on.”
The journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy published a study last year that found 40 percent of the dark web was used for illicit purposes. Cohn points out that, therefore, 60 percent is not.
Many newspapers, including USA Today, The New York Times and The Guardian, have launched their own secure drop servers for whistleblowers to upload documents using Tor and the dark web. The Panama Papers and recent FIFA scandals both came to light thanks to whistleblowers utilizing these tools to protect their identities. SecureDrop is an open-source submission system used by media outlets to gather information from sources whose identities cannot be revealed, protecting both the source and the journalist.
Jim doesn’t concern himself much with political activism, but he does think the dark web has its public safety benefits.
Retrieving a package from the closet with markings indicating it was shipped via the U.S. Postal Service to a P.O. box, he sits down and peels it open. Inside the cardboard envelope is a paper envelope, and inside that paper envelope are two vacuum-sealed packages: one containing white powder, the other containing a dozen pink pills.
“These were freebies,” he said, pointing to the pills. “My coke guy hooks me up. Once you make reliable connects on here, they start giving you better deals and sending you free shit. It’s like Yelp. They need a good rating to survive.”
He pulled up the site where he placed the order for the cocaine. Vendors indicate everything from purity of the drug to the methods they use for shipping. Most state they’re willing to walk first-time buyers through the process to mitigate the risks of shipping. When a vendor says their cocaine is uncut, previous buyers leave reviews either confirming or disputing the claim of purity. It’s easy to see from the outset which vendors deliver on the product they promise, and which do not.
The DEA’s Rettig strongly disagrees with Jim’s assessment that these rating systems reduce harm for addicts or for the community. “You cannot apply a rating system that works in the regular world, and apply it to an illicit substance,” she said.
“A person ordering on the dark web still has no idea what they’re getting,” she added. “I don’t think reviews by a bunch of drug addicts are going to make it safer.”
Jim seemed to disagree.
“The people I order from, I know them and they know I test what they send me,” he said. “This is 10 times safer than buying something that was cut with God knows what.”
In the meantime, there may be no stopping the dark web.
When AlphaBay was shut down, it had 10 times the number of users that Silk Road had. More than 400,000 users shopped the 369,000 listings spending $800,000 per day, according to Deep Dot Web, which monitors dark web frequency. Every expert interviewed for this story agreed that shutting down the dark web is not realistic. Like it or not, they all agree, the dark web is here to stay.
“It’s not a civilized world, this underground market,” professor Dai said. “There’s no way to shut it down or regulate it.”
Alexandre Cazes hanged himself in his cell after being caught operating a dark web marketplace.
Image via Facebook
Asked if this was the future of the internet, he paused. “I don’t know,” he said, still considering the question. “Nobody can answer this. Maybe. Maybe not.”
Jim had disappeared. He stopped responding to emails, and I couldn’t find his username on any message boards. I remember him saying he’d lived in eight different states since 2012. That restless trait hadn’t diminished, it seemed.
Ghosts. They never say goodbye when they go.
Summer begrudgingly yielded to fall, with winter looming on the other side of Thanksgiving. Pulling the door open at Sacramento Harm Reduction Services, I’m greeted by Executive Director Melinda Ruger.
As its name suggests, the clinic meets drug users where they are in their addiction—providing resources to those who want to get clean, and overdose prevention training, clean syringes and other harm-reducing tools to those who are not yet ready.
The place is an island in America’s rekindled drug war, which is expanding to new frontiers thanks to both Sessions and criminal innovation. Meanwhile, guys like Jim proceed to order Schedule I narcotics online the same way the rest of us order Christmas gifts for our families.
There’s a tragic disconnect here that no one seems to be acknowledging.
How do we stop a generation—my generation—from killing itself with drugs?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report in the December 2016 National Center for Health Statistics that found, for the first time in more than two decades, American life expectancy has actually declined.
National public health and safety experts pointed to the rise in overdose deaths and suicides as the culprit. CDC maps show California has been hit particularly hard. Deaths by “drug poisoning” have increased statewide more than 50 percent since 2002, far outnumbering car accidents. Overdoses have become the leading cause of death for people below the age of 50, and the CDC report found precisely what Special Agent Rettig and Officer Ruzzamenti both told me were decimating a population of young people across the country: illicit fentanyl from China being ordered over the dark web.
Neither Ruzzamenti nor agent Rettig sounded optimistic about the nation’s outlook. Law enforcement currently sits patiently awaiting the next dark web slip up, while USPS carriers continue operating as inadvertent drug mules.
It’s a clusterfuck. People are dying, prisons are filling up, and nothing changes. More people died last year than at the height of the AIDS epidemic. More Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016 than died during the entire duration of the Vietnam War.
As I watched Ruger and her staff interact with individuals caught in the grips of the epidemic, I realized I was witnessing something that was missing until now. All the interviews of dark web and cyber security experts, and DEA agents, and law enforcement officers, and drug dealers, they were all missing what was on full display at Harm Reduction Services: Humanity.
When a homeless woman walked in, crying hysterically, because all of her belongings had been stolen, I watched three different staff members approach her, give her a hug, rub her back, and tell her it was going to be OK. Here, drug addicts were treated by staff with kindness and empathy and understanding. They were treated as equals, with dignity.
I thought back to what Jim told me in the beginning. He told me there was humanity in my writing. I didn’t understand what he meant, and I didn’t care. That was my ticket in.
I still don’t know what he meant. But humanity wasn’t just my ticket in. Seeing humanity, in the flesh, up close and personal, shown to a group so used to being shown the opposite.
Humanity.
Turns out, it was also my ticket out.
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David Eagleman's New TV Show 'The Brain' Gets Inside Your Head
By Stacey Anderson On 10/15/15 at 2:33 PM EDT
Dr. David Eagleman poses for a portrait in his laboratory—the Laboratory for Perception and Action—at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dr. Eagleman's new TV show, "The Brain," premiering October 14, attempts to educate neuroscience neophytes on the most fundamental processes of the human brain. His lab work, though, is about saving the minds of America’s addicted. Blink Films
Tech & Science Brains Neuroscience Drug Addiction
The brain is a battlefield, says neuroscientist David Eagleman. You might think you're making single-minded decisions, but you're really not. "Instead, you are made up of multiple drives, all of whom are trying to be in control," he says. Despite being a bit disconcerting—Am I not who I think I am? What are these voices in my head?—the "team of rivals" brain model might, Eagleman believes, pave the way toward the end of drug addiction in the United States, if he can figure out how to teach people to harness those myriad drives.
He's currently in the early stages of a project at his lab at the Baylor College of Medicine that uses real-time feedback in brain imaging to, essentially, reshape how addicts react to their particular bête noir. "You've got these different neural networks that all have purposes and agendas," he says. "Part of your brain really wants something, then there are other networks trying to resist it. We're trying to help people to see these battles under the hood and tip the scales." Eagleman connects his subjects to an MRI machine, then shows them photos of drug paraphernalia; he instructs them to alternately allow their cravings to overwhelm and then suppress their urgings for their drug of choice, charting their neural responses on-screen via a gauge similar to a speedometer. His theory is, with practice, the subject will be able to hone their resistance impulse toward these powerful triggers.
"I call this 'the prefrontal gym'—it's just like going and working out, figuring how to move the needle. The idea is by strengthening your capacity to suppress your craving, when you're out in the real world, you'll still want it, but you'll have the cognitive tool to resist," says Eagleman energetically.
Early footage from these trials creates a particularly dramatic interlude of The Brain With Dr. David Eagleman, his new documentary miniseries for PBS. Written and hosted by the scientist, the program (which premiered on October 14) attempts to educate neuroscience neophytes on the most fundamental processes of our most important organ: how it channels thought, how it processes reality, how it functions in both conscious and unconscious states.
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Much like his childhood hero, Carl Sagan (and Sagan's Cosmos heir, Neil DeGrasse Tyson), Eagleman is a gregarious communicator well-honed for TV; he cuts an earnest, convivial figure as he translates dense research into lean layman's terms. The Guggenheim fellow often brims with youthful glee as he breaks down his own career focuses of synesthesia (a condition in which information between the senses is blended), time perception (how one interprets the temporal order of events in the world, from tactile to visual and auditory sensations) and neurolaw (how neuroscience research findings should dictate societal constructs, from criminal punishment to how juries should weight unconscious actions). He often employs some form of flashy visual metaphor, whether he's clad in full baseball regalia to hit a fastball (to demonstrate unconscious physical reaction) or go spelunking in a foreboding cave (to replicate the dark confines of the human cranial cavity).
The scientist's own résumé is pretty surreal, including a volunteer stint in the Israeli army, an undergraduate degree in British and American literature from Rice University, and a short foray as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles. He's also authored a best-selling fictional work, Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives, which whips up ingenious alternatives to the usual binary argument of the religious heaven versus the atheistic void; in one tale, God is the size of a microbe, with no comprehension of humanity. In another, the undead relive their most common earthly activities in time-blocked spans: They spend six unyielding days clipping their nails, two years feeling bored, 200 days showering, etc. Eagleman's most celebrated nonfiction book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, delves into chewy pontifications of free will, neural contradictions and biological interdependence, while also allotting space for the odd Mel Gibson burn.
Eagleman's theatrical flair also extends to his research projects. In a talk he gave at a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference this spring, to debut a vest of his invention that translates audio information into tactile sensations, he ripped off his navy button-down shirt mid-stride, unveiling the glowing white garment as proudly as Superman unfurling his cape. In 2007, to test whether time actually slows down for someone during a life-threatening experience—or whether the amygdala's thorough capturing of details merely feels longer in that panic or whether "you're seeing time stretched out, like Neo in The Matrix, or it's just a retrospective trick," as Eagleman translates—he and a grad student, Chess Stetson, dropped participants in 110-foot freefall from the tower of a local amusement park ride into a net. Amid their shrieking, the subjects tried to read numbers flashing on specialized wristwatches at a rate slightly faster than what humans can normally perceive; if they were actually seeing the world at a slower pace, they'd be able to detect the numbers. (Their findings: Neo alone had that ability.)
Though Eagleman has taken on a strong ambassadorial role for neuroscience—becoming a sort of "public intellectual," according to his peer Michael S. Gazzaniga of the University of California Santa Barbara—his addiction research may yield a real impact in the field. Eagleman's work in this field re-examines the potential of neuroscanning and the use of MRI machines to treat addiction. Though they are most commonly used to detect neurological cancers and diseases to the central nervous system, such as epilepsy and dementia, MRIs are also well-suited to detect the slight changes of rewired associative patterns. It's not a purpose that has been explored at length yet, or channeled into larger rehabilitative efforts the way Eagleman is attempting, but the potential is there. Hollywood recognized that in 2004: The movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had a similar premise, with rogue scientists strapping "patients" into brain scanners and charting their neural reactions toward ex-lovers.
Eagleman's real-world version is a sort of advancement of cognitive behavioral therapy, a popular type of psychotherapy; this process identifies negative thought patterns and works to curb those triggers gradually. Twelve-step programs hinge on this system; it's a cornerstone of Narcotics Anonymous, and has been endorsed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Psychological Association as one of the most effective methods currently available for preventing drug relapse. (Though only a small percentage of the estimated 20 million Americans age 12 and older who regularly use illegal drugs seek treatment, both note.)
"I think what we're doing is in alignment with other methods that people do, like meditation and cognitive therapy," says Eagleman, "but we're putting that on turbo boost." Dr. Marvin Seppala, chief medical officer of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, calls Eagleman's approach "remarkable." "I think it could really be helpful, because craving is one of the essential features of addiction and contributes to the long-lasting potential for relapse," says Seppala, who has not worked with Eagleman. "The reward center of the brain is subcortical, so it's kind of subconscious. If you can see how much your brain is being altered by such things, and work in real time to reduce how that alteration occurs, I think that could be really powerful."
However, Seppala had reservations about the method taking off as widely as Eagleman aspires, if only for the prohibitive costs of neural scanning. "I'd have doubts, only because of the continuing financial pressure from insurance companies and other payers to limit the cost of health care," he says. The average cost of MRI brain scanning exceeds $1,100 in the U.S.—and insurance companies have become so reticent to cover MRIs, it's become a subject of research papers. Seppala adds, "Also, craving is only one aspect of addiction. There is also compulsion to continue to use, loss of control, and diminished recognition of the problem itself, which is part of the issue of frontal lobe damage."
Eagleman's addiction approach, with its futuristic bend, also seems to appeal to the same dramatic inclinations of his career. "Hey, science is hard. There's a lot of work, there's so much competition for grant funding and publishing. I feel like there are a million ways people can go down rabbit holes and do things that end up being really boring," he says. "When I thrive is trying to do the experiments that get me out of bed in the morning."
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Reviving Manufacturing Is a 'Pipe Dream': Jobs Report Shows Sector's Meager 3,000 Payroll Increase
By Daniel Moritz-Rabson On 6/7/19 at 4:44 PM EDT
U.S. Donald Trump Economy
President Donald Trump's ambitions to revive America's manufacturing jobs are a "pipe dream," an economist told Newsweek after Labor Department figures showed a meager increase in the manufacturing sector's payroll.
Non-farm payrolls increased by just 75,000 in May, far below the 180,000 predicted by economists, while the unemployment rate remained at the 3.6 percent posted in April, the lowest level in half a century.
The report only indicated slow growth for one month, but manufacturing posted the third straight month of slow growth, adding just 3,000 jobs.
The situation for those already working in manufacturing is also underwhelming. Dean Baker, the co-founder of the Center for Economic Policy Research, noted that government data shows annual wage growth for the manufacturing industry was slower than the private sector, coming in at 2.2 percent.
"Mr. Trump for over two years has been huffing and puffing about reviving manufacturing employment. This is a pipe dream," Lawrence White, an economics professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, told Newsweek.
"Manufacturing is not going to disappear from the U.S., but the long-run trend for the last 40 years has been downward in terms of contribution to GDP and especially in terms of employment. We have been increasingly a services-oriented economy, and that is likely to continue," he said.
Employees working on the JAC (Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group) Motor assembly line at JAC's factory in China's eastern Anhui province on April 11. The Trump administration increased tariffs on Chinese imports in May as U.S. manufacturing sector's payroll increase was meager. KELLY WANG/AFP/Getty Images
Trump's inability to revitalize the manufacturing sector isn't a personal failure as much as an indicator of shifts in the domestic labor market. But escalating trade tensions with China aren't helping Trump's declared intention of boosting manufacturing jobs, White and Baker said.
The president's decision to increase tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on Chinese imports last month, which prompted China to retaliate by raising tariffs as much as 25 percent on $60 billion of goods it imports from the U.S., has amplified concerns about the state of the global economy.
The trade escalations have also led to disruptions in supply chains.
Baker told Newsweek that the impact of Trump's trade war on manufacturing has been exaggerated but expressed concern that the president's threat to implement a tariff on all Mexican imports would have a more significant impact on the economy.
"We're much more integrated with Mexico," Baker said, noting that the U.S. automobile industry would particularly suffer. Deutsche Bank analysis estimated that General Motors imports 29 percent of car parts and 17 percent of vehicles from Mexico, while Ford and Fiat Chrysler also import a significant amount of parts and cars from America's southern neighbor.
"You're in effect putting tariffs on GM cars," which would likely have to pass some costs on to consumers, Baker continued. "That's going to encourage people to buy cars from other companies, non-U.S. companies."
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GoDaddy attack likely a psyop to discredit Anonymous while pushing cyber security executive order
Tags: Anonymous, GoDaddy, executive order
(NaturalNews) It is likely no coincidence that on the verge of President Obama's plan to sign an unconstitutional Executive Order (EO) implementing police state cyber security measures, the internet gets hit with one of the worst DDoS attacks ever perpetrated. Today, GoDaddy got "nuked" with a highly-coordinated DDoS attack, taking down its name servers, websites, hosted email and all its internal phone systems. (See original story here.)
The mainstream media is blaming "Anonymous" for the attack, but this is almost certainly a cover story. The problem with being an anonymous group is that anyone can claim to be you. What's even more revealing is that the attacker who claimed responsibility for the attack openly stated he is not part of Anonymous. His twitter name was "Anonymous Own3r," eluding to the hacker slang of someone "owning" a selected target. This term is often used in online video games. It means this user is saying he achieved victory over Anonymous, not that he IS Anonymous.
The attack itself was devastating not only to GoDaddy's customer base, but also to the reputation of Anonymous itself. That was probably the whole point: to make Anonymous look like a group of online terrorists when, in reality, the real Anonymous group historically only attacks selective targets with strong ties to the police state.
Across the mainstream media, from PC Magazine (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409516...) to CBS News (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57509...), the mainstream media is falsely reporting that "Anonymous" claimed responsibility for the attack. But that's simply not true: the "Anonymous Own3r" user claimed responsibility for it. And he added, in a Tweet, these words:
"It is not Anonymous collective it's only me. Don't use Anonymous collective name on it, just my name." (http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/09/10/every...)
So if Anonymous didn't wage the attack on GoDaddy, who did?
A cyber security false flag attack
As InfoWars reported just yesterday, the Obama administration is on the verge of pushing through a cybersecurity executive order. Read details here:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-plans-exec...
To push through a new police state internet directive, however, you can't just smack it down without justification. You first have to create a demand for it by staging your own false flag attack that brings down a significant portion of the internet for a day or so.
And then, when the internet business owners cry out for the government to "do something!" you respond with the executive order. To "keep the internet safe," of course.
This is a classic problem-reaction-solution tactic. First, you create the problem, wait for the reaction, and the implement your solution -- the thing you wanted all along.
In the case of false flags, the "solutions" are always an expanded police state, more government power, fewer civil liberties and the crushing of freedom. This is what's been happening in America at an accelerated rate ever since 9/11 and the Patriot Act.
Now that this false flag attack on GoDaddy has been pulled off, you can expect a swift reactionary -- and even "extremist" -- response from the White House. Watch for a cyber security EO to be signed and implemented within the next few weeks, and watch for this attack on GoDaddy to be cited as the reason for "needing" the EO.
Welcome to the world of false flag cyber warfare.
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Highland Park, IL (Real Estate)
Highest Appreciating Highland Park Neighborhoods Since 2000
Briergate
Western Ave / Hill St
Gilgare Ln / Leonard Wood N
Park Ave / Saint Johns Ave
Highland Park, IL Real Estate Data
Highland Park Housing Market Information
With 29,515 people, 11,564 houses or apartments, and a median cost of homes of $625,159, Highland Park house prices are not only among the most expensive in Illinois, Highland Park real estate also is some of the most expensive in all of America.
Single-family detached homes are the single most common housing type in Highland Park, accounting for 76.59% of the city's housing units. Other types of housing that are prevalent in Highland Park include large apartment complexes or high rise apartments ( 14.72%), row houses and other attached homes ( 5.44%), and a few duplexes, homes converted to apartments or other small apartment buildings ( 3.25%).
Owner-occupied, three and four bedroom dwellings, primarily in single-family detached homes are the most prevalent type of housing you will see in Highland Park. Owner-occupied housing accounts for 82.46% of Highland Park's homes, and 63.63% have either three or four bedrooms, which is average sized relative to America.
At the end of World War II, American soldiers returned home triumphant and, with the help of the GI Bill, built homes by the millions on the edges of America's cities. These homes were predominantly capes and ranches, modest in size, but built to house a growing middle-class as the 20th century became the American century. Highland Park's housing was primarily built during this period, from the '40s through the '60s. A full 38.11% of the city's housing hails from this era. Other housing ages represented in Highland Park include homes built between 1970-1999 ( 28.80%) and housing constructed before 1939 ( 21.65%). There's also some housing in Highland Park built between 2000 and later ( 11.44%).
Highland Park Home Appreciation Rates
Highland Park's appreciation rate notably has been below the national average for the last ten years. The average annual home appreciation rate in Highland Park during the period has been just 0.83%, which is lower than 80% of US communities.
Over the last year, Highland Park appreciation rates have trailed the rest of the nation. In the last twelve months, Highland Park's appreciation rate has been 2.00%, which is lower than appreciation rates in most communities in America. In the latest quarter, NeighborhoodScout's data show that house appreciation rates in Highland Park were at 1.05%, which equates to an annual appreciation rate of 4.27%.
Relative to Illinois, our data show that Highland Park's latest annual appreciation rate is lower than 60% of the other cities and towns in Illinois.
One very important thing to keep in mind is that these are average appreciation rates for the city. Individual neighborhoods within Highland Park differ in their investment potential, sometimes by a great deal. Fortunately, you can use NeighborhoodScout to pinpoint the exact neighborhoods in Highland Park - or in any city or town - that have the best track record of real estate appreciation, by the latest quarter, the last year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, or even since 2000, to assist you in making the best Highland Park real estate investment or home purchase decisions.
Highland Park, IL HOME PRICES
> $1,067,000 14.9
$801,001 - $1,067,000 15.5
Very High for IL
Very High for Nation
4.77080291970803 2.15189873417722
Highland Park Appreciation Rates
IL*
AGE OF Highland Park HOMES
1939 or Older 21.6
TYPE OF Highland Park HOMES
SIZE OF Highland Park HOMES
5 or more bedrooms 15.45
Popular Neighborhoods in Highland Park
Popular Communities Near Highland Park, IL
Lake Bluff, IL
Zip Codes in Highland Park, IL
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Niron Staal Amsterdam
Experience the perfection
Niron Staal Amsterdam is a specialised steel construction, machining and piping company located on the premises of sister company Damen Shiprepair Amsterdam. Centrally located in the harbour of Amsterdam, guaranteeing deep-water access on the North Sea channel and efficient transport options such as Schiphol Amsterdam Airport.
More than 40 years of service has let to the highest standards and quality of steel constructions and machining. Many projects require in-house combination of all three departments which allows us to do large-scale constructions and piping work on one hand and accurate machining at extremely low tolerances on the other. Hence our motto: ‘Experience the perfection’.
After the World War II in 1946, during the foundation of the Nederlandsche Dok en Scheepsbouw Maatschappij (NDSM) the largest machine factory in het Netherlands was taken into use, the foundation of the modern-day Niron. Despite various bankruptcies and acquisitions in the subsequent period, the shipyard, including the machine factory and repair hall, had continued to exist. From 1986, with the establishment of ship repair company Shipdock Amsterdam B.V. under the direction of the DCG Holding, the repair halls were put into use under their own name, Niron Staal (Newbuilding, Repair and Maintenance).
In 1993, after the steel construction department was closed, a partnership was entered with Stapel B.V., a shipyard from Spaarndam, under the name Nista B.V. (Niron-Stapel). At that time the machine factory continued under the name Niron.
Nista B.V. continues the steel construction work and works on the construction of clippers ‘Stad Amsterdam’ and ‘Cisne Branco’ as well as the construction of cutterheads for Vosta LMG and cranes for Figee. When the shipyard gets into a rough period and the trend to outsource steel construction work to Eastern Europe emerged, the company Nista B.V. got declared bankrupt in 2004. In 2005, a restart was made with both the machine factory and steel construction department and the company retained the name Niron Staal and to this day on it still operates a fully equipped machine factory and steel construction department.
Directly to steel construction
Directly to machining
Directly to Piping
Niron Staal Amsterdam is a Damen Shipyards company
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Copyright Damen Shipyards Group © 2021 - KvK 23049923
Niron Staal Amsterdam B.V.
t.t Vasumweg 125
1033 SG Amsterdam
Email: info-nironstaal@damen.com
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Cherry Hill native Cristin Milioti, a wannabe singer-songwriter, is the singing, songwriting heroine of 'Once'
Updated Mar 30, 2019; Posted Mar 18, 2012
By Ronni Reich | The Star-Ledger
Jennifer Brown/The Star-LedgerCristin Milioti stars in "Once" on Broadway
Leaning over the piano, ripples of notes flowing from her fingers and a clear, confident alto pouring out an intimate ballad, Cristin Milioti looks as natural as if she were alone in a practice room.
But this is Broadway — and when she’s not making music by herself, Milioti is the driving force of “Once,” a new musical that opens at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.
Based on the film with Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, in which both appeared to perform their original music, the story follows “Girl” (Milioti) and Steve Kazee’s “Guy” as they bond over songwriting.
“I haven’t been this excited about something in a while,” says Milioti.
“Singing’s always been my No. 1 love. I’ve tried my damnedest to get into musicals for years and they would not have me.”
Milioti, a 26-year-old Cherry Hill native with lively dark eyes and strong cheekbones, is returning to Times Square after turns in “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and “Coram Boy.” She has also been a part of several notable off-Broadway productions, including “Stunning” at Lincoln Center Theater, which earned her a Lucille Lortel nomination.
With a book by Enda Walsh and directed by John Tiffany, “Once” is not a typical musical theater extravaganza, with bright lights and jazz-hands choreography. Sometimes described as a play with music, it has a relatively low-key folk rock score.
Seven-year-old Mckayla Twiggs — who hails from South Brunswick — makes her Broadway debut as “Girl’s daughter.” “Everybody’s not just moving around, they’re dancing around playing instruments,” she says.
“I’m really happy that I got this experience.”
Guy, a sensitive vacuum cleaner repairman, begins the show depressed after a girlfriend leaves Dublin. “Girl” leads him unabashedly into her world and spurs them onto a demo recording featuring her colorful band of roommates.
Rather than a typical ingenue, Milioti says, “Girl” is “such a strong young woman, who is layered and complicated and also has this unbridled love for music.”
“It’s an incredible honor to play her.”
“Once” won an Academy Award for best original song for “Falling Slowly” in 2007. Even before it opened at New York Theatre Workshop in December, a Broadway transfer was announced.
“I didn’t believe it until we got here,” Milioti says.
“A lot can happen — tornados happen, I could break a leg. But when I got to the theater and saw the marquee and those pictures of us outside, I realized it was happening. Just … indescribable joy, and a couple tears.”
Irglová and Hansard have supported the show from the beginning, but Milioti’s extroverted take on this leading lady — who only quiets down and shares her inner thoughts in song — is quite different from Irglová’s more demure persona.
Milioti has never seen the film and plans not to until the show has completed its run.
“The only time I ever got nervous was playing ‘The Hill’ for her,” Milioti says of her solo ballad. “Acting aside, I’ll never be her, she’ll never be me, but I just felt an extreme pressure to do her music justice.”
Milioti is the first actor in her family, but a quirky, artistic thread runs through her relatives. Her mother, who is now a banker, once tap-danced on the Steel Pier in Margate. Her father, who works in I.T., plays guitar and used to be a sound engineer.
Her brother makes longboards and is a ukulele master. And her grandmother performed in the Ice Capades.
Cristin, who attended Cherry Hill High School East, got her start in theater through school plays, bowing as the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!” and Eponine in “Les Misérables” — a role she says she would love to return to.
“There is a secret nerd inside of me that if you play me any part of that score I burst into tears,” she says.
“So many people don’t like that show or they think it’s cheesy or something, but I love it.”
Milioti went on to attend New York University but left at 19 after an agent discovered her. She booked the first two jobs she auditioned for, including an appearance on “The Sopranos.”
With another year or two of experience, she says, she would never have dropped out, but “it worked and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
It took a few more years to feel completely sure about acting and that it was a passion rather than something she could do.
“I don’t know when it hit me, but the reason changed,” she says. “There was an ownership of it. I really love working this hard and exploring people.”
“God, that’s such an actory thing to say,” she adds and laughs at herself.
Although audiences may know her best from straight plays, Milioti always sang and says she grew up with a piano in the house. She knew a few chords and played in bands, but she never took lessons.
To prepare for “Once,” she practiced up to seven hours a day, until she could play each piece.
“Once you cross that threshold, you feel like you can fly,” she says. “Until someone puts another piece of sheet music in front of you.”
In addition to accompanying herself, another challenge in playing “Girl” is the character’s Czech accent. But Milioti never found that daunting, noting that she almost always has an accent or unusual voice in her roles. (“30 Rock” fans might remember her as the squeaky, blond, pigtailed “sexy baby” comedian Abby Flynn.)
“I actually love and find great comfort in dialects because they are very musical,” she says. “You have to get the melody of how a certain group of people speak.”
Like her character, Milioti writes songs, but she hasn’t shared them much. She played her first original song in front of a crowd at an open mic night in January, with members of the cast.
“I think it went okay,” she says. “I didn’t pass out.”
It remains to be seen whether we’ll hear more of Milioti’s music after the show, but for now she’s enjoying portraying a singer-songwriter.
“I’ve always had this fantasy of being a musician or a songwriter, and I had never shared it with anyone,” she says.
“This is an awesome place to go for two and a half hours, because it allows me to live that out.”
Ronni Reich: (973) 392-1726 or rreich@starledger.com
Where: Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St., New York
When: Tuesdays at 7 p.m., Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m.
How much: $59.50 to $131.50; premium seats from $176.50. Call (212) 239-6262 or visit telecharge.com.
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Hail the King Chapter 1140.1
Chapter 1140: The Troop That Lost Its Homelands (Part One)
In legends, the Human Emperor of the North was the reincarnation of a godly king, and he rose up four years ago in an unstoppable manner. In a short time, he became a young lord and shocked the world. Also, he battled with the Holy Church many times and won every single match, and he defeated the troops of Barcelona earlier, bringing even more attention to himself. Right now, this young man was so famous that his fame was chasing after the level of Continental Martial Saint Maradona.
Some people even said that the Human Emperor of the North already became a god.
Also, a piece of even more shocking news appeared in the last month.
It was heard that this young and unparalleled lord already wiped through the Northern Region and realized the dream that many emperors had but couldn’t achieve throughout the last 1,000 years – uniting one of the five regions of Azeroth.
Now, this young ruler was already one of the most powerful figures in the world!
At the moment, only two people dared to retain and help them, the soldiers who were detested by the Holy Church.
One was the legendary and mysterious Continental Martial Saint Maradona.
Unfortunately, this man was a mystery. Except for his disciples, he didn’t have any forces or territories. Even if these soldiers found this figure, the latter wouldn’t be able to help so many people.
The other person was Human Emperor Alexander of the North.
This new and influential figure was rising to the top of the world, and his momentum was so strong that others didn’t dare to look at him as if he was the rising sun. His individual strength almost rivaled that of Continental Martial Saint Maradona, and he controlled a large region. He had countless talented strategists, fierce generals, and powerful masters who could defeat many opponents.
The momentum of this force was so great that even the Holy Church which had just obtained the victory in the Holy War didn’t dare to underestimate it.
In the beginning, these soldiers were afraid that Human Emperor Alexander of the North wouldn’t want to help them who were homeless.
However, it was later learned that this new powerful ruler was a great friend of Shaarawy and the other military leaders, and Human Emperor Alexander of the North was welcoming of them.
This information instantly eliminated the doubts and worries in these people’s minds.
For this troop that lost their homelands, they finally found some hope like lost travelers who finally saw a light in the endless darkness.
After more than half a month of traveling, this troop finally arrived at the border between the Central Region and the Northern Region.
As long as they could cross the Strait of Naples, they would be inside the Northern Region and safe.
“This is the darkness before dawn.” Every soldier was telling themselves this, and they tried their best to squeeze out the last bit of energy in their bodies. They were trying to increase their pace and follow the group. They didn’t want to lag behind and become a burden to their peers.
Suddenly, streaks of powerful energy fluctuations appeared in the southern sky further away.
They were the presences of top-tier priests of the Holy Church.
Having battled the troops of the Holy Church all these days, these soldiers couldn’t be more familiar with the sensations and presences.
The bone-chilling murderous spirits could be felt through the air, and everyone’s heart began to sink.
“Hahaha! You are a bunch of anxious and homeless dogs! I was wondering where you escaped to. You are all here!” While a series of laughs sounded in the sky, five figures who were covered in silver energy flames appeared in the southern sky.
[Make sure that you subscribe to us on – noodletowntranslated dot com! You will get the most recent update in your email!]
CrownedTraitor
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Sudbury-conceived ore haulage system wins Mining Cleantech Challenge
Rail-Veyor Technologies rises to the top during Colorado innovation showcase
Jul 30, 2020 2:00 PM By: Northern Ontario Business Staff
1 / 1 Rail-Veyor Technologies built its demonstration plant in Sudbury in 2010. (Supplied photo)
A Sudbury-based material haulage company has won the 2020 Mining Cleantech Challenge in Colorado.
Rail-Veyor Technologies earned the first-place spot – and $5,000 in prize money – after their light-rail hauling system won out over 13 competitors at the fourth annual event.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Colorado Cleantech Industries Association (CCIA) hosted the event virtually on July 23.
The Mining Cleantech Challenge is a product innovation showcase and competition that connects clean technology solutions to the mining industry.
There are no geographic restrictions or requirements for participating companies.
First conceived in France in the 1960s, the Rail-Veyor was more fully developed in Sudbury in the mid-2000s.
The system is comprised of a series of connected, open-topped rail cars that carry ore along a track. Propelled by an electrified drive network, the remote-controlled system can climb a grade of up to 22 per cent, and it works in both surface and underground applications.
It’s energy-efficient, produces no diesel emissions, boosts productivity, and increases safety by removing workers from its operation.
Systems have been installed at Agnico Eagle’s Goldex Mine in Val d’Or, Que., and Doe Run’s Casteel underground lead mine in Missouri, U.S.
Lisa Youngblood, Rail-Veyor’s executive director of marketing and communications, said the event allowed the company to connect with innovators from around the globe.
“With so many great ideas presented during the day, I was honestly surprised and thrilled when Rail-Veyor was announced as the winner,” she said in a news release.
“We are looking forward to advancing the conversations with industry leaders who are making cleantech a priority for their companies.”
This is not the first time the company has fared well in the competition. In 2019, Rail-Veyor placed third out of 12 competitors.
More Sudbury
Family of miner killed in 2006 at Podolsky Mine awarded more than $2M in damages
Sudbury’s unemployment rate remained mostly unchanged in December
Lithium junior miner scales up processing plans
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Top Online MBA Program in Oklahoma - 2020 Rankings
Did you know......Purdue University Global’s online Master of Business Administration offers degree concentrations in Finance, Healthcare Management, Human Resources, Information Technology, Marketing, and Project Management. Learn more.
Posted by Staff. Last updated February 27, 2020.
Our 2020 ranking of the Top Online MBA Program in Oklahoma. For an explanation of ranking criteria, click here.
Top Oklahoma Online MBA Program - 2020 Rankings
1 Oklahoma State University Stillwater
1. Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma
Oklahoma State University (OSU) is Oklahoma’s first Truman Honor Institution. The school has the largest comprehensive student union and its Edmon Low Library is one of the America’s top 100 academic research libraries. Famous alumni include Garth Brooks, T. Boone Pickens (business magnate and financier), Barry Sanders (NFL running back), and Anita Hill.
Serving nearly 27,000 students, Oklahoma State University houses six academic colleges, plus a veterinary school and an osteopathic medical school, that offer 200 undergraduate majors and options, 79 master's programs, and 45 doctoral programs.
Watson Graduate School of Management houses Spears School of Business, which offers several MBA programs—a 42 credit hour part-time MBA, a 43 credit hour full-time MBA, and a new MBA in Entrepreneurship (formerly the Master’s in Entrepreneurship). Concentrations for the 42 and 43 credit hour programs include Business Sustainability, Data Science, Energy Business, Global Marketing, Human Resource Management, Information Assurance, Marketing Analytics, and Non-Profit Management.
Students in these AACSB-accredited programs also have the option to earn the SAS and OSU Marketing Analytics Certificate. The program is designed to “produce analytically-savvy managers who will be adept at leading teams of IT, Marketing, and Strategy personnel in any organization to solve complex business problems by analyzing appropriate data,” says the school. The curriculum for the program was “designed in partnership with SAS, a leading provider of marketing analytics software and services.”
Both the part-time and full-time Spears OSU MBA programs may be completed online or in hybrid format.
Top Online MBA Program in Wyoming - 2020 Rankings
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Home Contests British Council FameLab science communication competition 2021 for young people worldwide (Funded...
British Council FameLab science communication competition 2021 for young people worldwide (Funded Trip to Cheltenham Science Festival in the UK)
Application Deadline:7 November 2020.
FameLab International, the science communication competition owned by Cheltenham Science Festival and delivered globally by the British Council, is back this year in a new interactive online format this November.
FameLab national finalists from 20 countries will take to the virtual stage to deliver their three-minute presentations on a range of topics from the world of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, to battle it out for the title of global winner 2020.
FameLab is an international competition to find and support the world’s most talented new science communicators. Participants have three minutes to win over the judges and audience with a scientific talk that excels for its content, clarity and charisma.
Cheltenham Festivals held the first FameLab in 2005. Its partnership with the British Council in 2007 took the competition global, and to date, more than 10,000 scientists and engineers have taken part.
Lecturers and researchers in science, engineering or mathematics subjects, including specialist science teachers with a science degree
People who work on applying science, engineering technology or mathematics (e.g. patent clerks, statisticians, consultants to industry)
University students of science, mathematics or engineering 18 or over
People who apply science, mathematics or engineering in the armed forces or government bodies
People who apply science, engineering or mathematics in industry or business.
Networking and learning opportunities are central to the FameLab experience. Not only will international finalists meet and network with fellow participants from all over the world, they will also have the chance to hone their science communication skills by taking part in a masterclass with a highly-experienced international trainer.
The British Council runs FameLab competitions in around 25 countries each year, and the winner of each national competition travels to the UK’s renowned Cheltenham Science Festival in June to compete in the FameLab International Final. Delivering their talk to a live audience, the international finalists battle it out for first place to take home a prize and the glory!
The benefits continue beyond the competition as participants join the ranks of FameLab alumni, a global network of science communicators who are passionate about sharing their knowledge.
FameLab 2021
Visit the Official Webpage of the British Council FameLab science communication competition 2021
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Lessons From the Wrist
Tamara D. Rozental, MD RJOS/OREF/DePuy Research Grant in Women's Musculoskeletal Health
Topic: Assessed serum levels of 25-hydroxy vitamin D and protein markers of bone turnover to learn if knowing these levels could predict a patient’s risk for fragility fracture
Results: Understanding of whether vitamin D and bone turnover levels can predict a patient’s risk for fragility fracture
Patient Care application of results: Ability to determine which patients are most at risk for fragility fractures, allowing for preventative intervention with vitamin supplements and medications.
Simplified patient care application: Supplements and medications that can reduce the incidence of fragility fractures in patients who are most at risk.
OREF grant recipient looks for ways to predict risk and prevent fragility fractures
Jay D. Lenn
Fragility fractures result from a fall from a standing height or less and are not the result of high-energy trauma. They usually signify poor bone heath, and the incidence of such injuries increases significantly with age. Fragility fractures of the distal radius generally occur at an earlier age than fractures of the hip and spine1.
“Wrist fractures may be a sentinel event,” stated Tamara D. Rozental, MD, orthopaedic surgeon at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Fractures of the distal radius are usually the first fragility fracture, so they give us a unique opportunity to intervene, which might make a difference in preventing future injuries.”
A clearer picture of risk factors—especially modifiable risk factors of such injuries—may facilitate even earlier interventions. To that end, Dr. Rozental investigated serum levels of vitamin D and bone turnover markers in postmenopausal women with distal radius fractures.
Dr. Rozental’s work was underwritten in part by a 2012 Ruth Jackson Orthopaedic Society (RJOS)/Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation (OREF)/DePuy Career Development Grant in Women’s Musculoskeletal Health. This program supports female orthopaedic surgeons who are working to improve knowledge in the area of women’s musculoskeletal health and enhance our understanding of gender and diversity differences in the outcomes of orthopaedic treatment. The amount of the award is $50,000 for up to one year.
A better understanding of risk
Decreased bone mineral density (BMD) is a well-documented risk factor for distal radius fracture, but this factor tells only part of the story. Fragility wrist factors occur among many people with normal BMD measurements2. Therefore, there are likely other factors at work.
Vitamin D deficiency is strongly associated with hip fracture, and a small body of recent studies suggests that it may be associated with wrist fractures as well.3 Also, increased bone turnover is associated with an increased risk of fragility fractures, independent of BMD4, but the measurement of bone turnover risk factors is not standardized for the clinical assessment of risk.
In the OREF-funded investigation, Dr. Rozental, along with colleagues at the University of Connecticut Health Center, enrolled 255 women aged 50 or older, 105 of them with fragility wrist fractures and an age-matched control group of 150 women with no history of fractures before age 50. At the 3-month, post-treatment appointment, each fracture patient had a fasting blood draw to assess serum levels of 25-hydroxy vitamin D, as well as protein markers of bone turnover—three markers of bone formation and one of bone resorption. The 3-month delay in testing was intended to minimize the effect that the fracture itself may have on bone metabolism.
Secondary outcome measures included BMD and fracture severity using standard measures. Comparisons of the data from the fracture cases and controls enabled the researchers to determine whether:
Vitamin D is a risk factor for distal radius fracture of fracture severity
Bone turnover markers are predictive of fracture risk
Levels of vitamin D are predictive
Difference in vitamin D levels between fracture cases and controls are independent of possible differences in BMD
The researchers also measured serum parathyroid hormone (PTH), which plays a role in calcium regulation. Because vitamin D increases absorption of calcium in the intestines, a vitamin D deficiency may result in low serum calcium. Low calcium levels, in turn, trigger an increase in PTH, which pulls calcium from bone. The study, therefore, also enabled the investigators to examine the relationship among fractures, vitamin D, bone turnover markers and PTH.
Fracture prevention opportunities
The ultimate goal of understanding risk factors is the prevention of fragility fractures—identifying those people at risk, monitoring risk and, when possible, lowering the risk. Dr. Rozental stated, "If vitamin D deficiency ends up being identified as a risk factor, then I think we need to be more aggressive about monitoring that and supplementing people."
A better characterization of bone turnover markers may lead to the regular use of these measures in clinical practice. Dr. Rozental explained, "If we can determine a person's risk for fragility fractures because he or she has too much resorption or too little bone formation, perhaps we can better tailor medications."
Dr. Rozental’s study confirmed that a history of fracture and low BMD are strongly associated with distal radius fractures, but they are not the only factors that put patients at risk. They also found that postmenopausal women with distal radius fractures have similar levels of vitamin D but increased bone formation markers when compared to women without fracture. This suggests that monitoring vitamin D levels may not be as useful as previously thought in determining fragility fracture risk, but a bone formation marker, Serum type 1 procollagen (P1NP), may be a good indicator of bone fragility. These results were published in the October 2015 issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery5.
Funding research projects
The RJOS/OREF/DePuy grant was, according to Dr. Rozental, instrumental in getting this project off the ground.
“OREF’s reputation is one of its greatest strengths. Other than the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the national level, every orthopaedic surgeon feels like OREF is the most prestigious orthopaedic research organization and foundation. When you think about getting research funding, an award from OREF is always highly regarded.”
Dr. Rozental described the necessity of preliminary funding, like what she received from OREF, for embarking on further investigations to identify other risk factors for fragility fractures, determine whether younger patients with fractures also have vitamin D deficiencies and better characterize the etiology of age-related bone alteration.
She said, "One of the reasons I like clinical medicine is because I'm making a difference one person at a time, and it's a very tangible thing. What research like this allows me to do is look at the big picture. This is a public health problem: osteoporosis affects millions of people every year. We hope the research makes a difference on a much larger scale."
Jay D. Lenn is a contributing writer for OREF. He can be reached at communications@oref.org
1. Baron JA, Karagas M, BarrettJ, Kniffin W, Malenka D, Mayor M, Keller RB. Basic epidemiology of fractures of the upper and lower limb among Americans over 65 years of age. Epidemiology. 1996;7(6):612-8. Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8899387. Accessed on May 2, 2016.
2. Oyen J, Gjesdal CG, Brudvik C, et al. Low-energy distal radius fractures in middle-aged and elderly men and women--the burden of osteoporosis and fracture risk: A study of 1794 consecutive patients. Osteoporos Int. Jul;21(7):1257-1267 Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19813045. Accessed on May 2, 2016.
3. Oyen J, Apalset EM, Gjesdal CG, Brudvik C, Lie SA, Hove LM. Vitamin D inadequacy is associated with low-energy distal radius fractures: A case-control study. Bone. 2011 May 1;48(5):1140-5 Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21295169. Accessed on May 2, 2016.
4. Sornay-Rendu E, Munoz F, Garnero P, Duboeuf F, Delmas PD. Identification of osteopenic women at high risk of fracture: the OFELY study. J Bone Miner Res. Oct 2005;20(10):1813-1819. Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16160738. Accessed on May 2, 2016.
5. Rozental TD, Herder LM, Walley KC, Zurakowski D, Coyle K, Bouxsein ML, Wolf JM. 25-Hydroxyvitamin-D and Bone Turnover Marker Levels in Patients with Distal Radial Fracture: J Bone Joint Surg Am, 2015 Oct 21; 97 (20): 1685 -1693 Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2106/JBJS.O.00313. Accessed on May 2, 2016.
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Home » What's New » Progressive Myopia: When Your Child’s Vision Keeps Getting Worse
Progressive Myopia: When Your Child’s Vision Keeps Getting Worse
What Is Progressive Myopia?
Nearsightedness or myopia is one of the most prevalent eye disorders worldwide and its incidence is increasing. In fact by 2050, myopia is projected to affect half of the world’s population!
Many children diagnosed with nearsightedness (myopia) experience a consistent worsening of their vision as they grow into adolescence. This condition can be so aggressive that for some, each time they take their child to the eye doctor for a vision checkup, their prescription gets higher.
This is called progressive myopia and can be a serious condition for many children now and in the future. Not only is there a financial burden and inconvenience associated with having to replace eyeglasses on a regular basis, but high myopia is a risk factor for many eye diseases later in life such as retinal detachment, early onset cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration.
What Causes Progressive Myopia?
Myopia is a refractive error that happens when the eye focuses incoming light in front of the retina, rather than directly on it, resulting in blurred distance vision. While an exact cause of progressive myopia is not known, most research indicates that a combination of environmental and genetic factors trigger the condition.
First of all, there is evidence that a family history of nearsightedness is a contributing factor. Additionally, spending a lot of time indoors may play a role in myopia development, as studies show that children who spend more time outside have less incidence of myopia. Lastly, near point stress, which can be caused from looking at a near object for an extended period of time, can prompt the eye to grow longer and result in myopia. Several eye doctors recommend following the 20-20-20 rule when using digital devices (stopping every 20 minutes to look 20 feet away for 20 seconds) to reduce near point stress caused by computer use.
What Can Be Done To Prevent or Treat Myopia?
There are several treatments that have been shown to slow the progression of myopia.
Orthokeratology (ortho-k):
Also known as corneal reshaping, this treatment uses rigid gas permeable contact lenses that are worn while the patient sleeps to reshape the cornea, which is the clear, front part of the eye. During the day, the patient is usually able to see clearly, glasses-free. In addition to allowing glasses-free vision during the day, this treatment has been shown to reduce the progression of myopia in many children.
Distance Center Multifocal Contact Lenses:
This treatment uses distance center (which means the area for seeing at a distance is in the center of the lens) multifocal soft contact lenses to provide clear vision and slow the progression of myopia. The lenses are worn as normal contact lenses during the day.
Atropine Drops:
Atropine drops are a daily-use prescription eye drop that has been shown to reduce myopia progression. It can be used alone or in combination with ortho-k or multifocal contact lenses.
Additional Myopia Treatments:
While these treatments are available in all of North America, some countries offer additional options that are approved for myopia control. For example, in Canada, ZeissTM MyoVision glasses that have an innovative lens curvature design are available to help reduce the rate of myopia progression. Additionally some doctors in Canada offer Coopervision MiSight® lenses, which are 1-day contact lenses that are worn during the daytime. These contacts have a multifocal lens design with distance centre and near surround that is specifically designed for children.
Myopia & Your Child
If your child’s vision keeps getting worse, it's more than an annoyance - it can be a serious risk factor for their eye health and vision in the future. The best strategy for myopia control depends on the child and the severity of the case, and requires consultation with an experienced eye doctor in order to determine the best solution. If your child wears glasses, make his or her vision a priority; schedule an eye exam to ensure stable vision and healthy eyes.
Medical History and Needs Form
Orillia Eyewear & iCare
3280-1 Monarch Drive
Orillia, ON L3V 8A2
https://www.orilliaeyewear.ca
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https://www.ourmidland.com/news/article/Update-Dioxin-cleanup-plan-for-Midland-approved-6969861.php
Update: Dioxin cleanup plan for Midland approved
By John Flesher AP Environmental Writer
Published 4:41 am EDT, Saturday, June 2, 2012
TRAVERSE CITY (AP) -- The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality said Friday it has accepted The Dow Chemical Co.'s plan for cleaning up properties contaminated with dioxin released from its chemical plant in Midland.
About 1,400 properties in the city, most residential but some vacant, are believed polluted from airborne emissions of dioxin over much of the 20th century. Dioxin is a group of toxic byproducts from industrial processes that the World Health Organization says may impair the human immune and nervous systems and damage organs such as the liver. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is evaluating the potential cancer risk.
After negotiations that began in the mid-1990s, Dow and the DEQ agreed on a cleanup framework in February. Dow later submitted a detailed five-year work plan, which the state agency has approved.
Beginning this month, Dow contractors will collect soil samples from properties with willing owners and measure their dioxin content. Those with dioxin levels greater than 250 parts per trillion will be eligible to have a 1-foot layer of soil removed and replaced with fresh soil and landscaping.
"We think that will remove the contamination that's of any significant level," said Jim Sygo, the department's deputy director.
The 250 ppt standard is less stringent than Michigan's statewide cleanup threshold of 90 ppt. But the law allows local variations based on soil conditions and other factors. In the Midland area, regulators concluded 250 ppt was strong enough to meet cancer risk requirements for people exposed to the soil, Sygo said.
"We have reached an important milestone in the road to resolution," Dow spokeswoman Carrie Houtman said. "Dow is committed to working with residents to ensure that everyone understands if, and how, the implementation of this work plan could impact them. Now that the five-year plan has been approved by DEQ, we anticipate soil testing to begin as early as next week."
Houtman told the Daily News that work can begin next week on properties where homeowners have agreed to allow sampling. About 100 properties were eligible for testing as part of the 2012 program.
"People are working through the process, getting the information they need and making decisions on what to do with their property," Houtman said.
Michelle Hurd Riddick, a member of an advocacy group called the Lone Tree Council that has long pushed for a cleanup, said environmentalists were "optimistic that progress is being made in a community that historically has not wanted to deal with dioxin for decades." But she said the 250 ppt standard was too weak.
Dow acknowledges its dioxin emissions have polluted city neighborhoods downwind of the plant as well as a 50-mile section of the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers and Lake Huron's Saginaw Bay.
The EPA is overseeing cleanup of the rivers. Dow plans to begin with a 3-mile segment of the Tittabawassee near the plant, then move downstream. The EPA says a couple of years will be needed to settle on a plan for the next 24 miles.
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https://www.ourmidland.com/news/police_and_courts/article/Crime-log-6974408.php
Published 8:00 am EDT, Tuesday, October 2, 2012
The following list includes reports from the Midland County Sheriff’s Office and the Midland Police Department.
Sunday, Sept. 30
12:50 a.m. — An East Boulis Drive resident reported seeing a strange man near her home. The man ran into the woods when the woman said she was calling police.
9:09 a.m. — A West Isabella Road home’s mailbox was damaged when it was struck by a vehicle.
9:50 a.m. — A 22-year-old Midland Township woman was arrested for domestic assault at a Yoder Drive apartment.
10:54 a.m. — Deputies responded to a report of domestic violence at an East Boulis Drive home.
11:44 a.m. — Two cables were stolen from a trailer on hunting property along North Meridian Road.
12:01 p.m. — A deputy was called to an East Shaffer Road home for a report of a boy, 16, stealing deer bait from a neighbor. The families are working out the issue by themselves.
1 p.m. — Property in the 2000 block of Wisconsin Street was damaged.
2:15 p.m. — Property was stolen from the 4900 block of Universal Drive.
3:02 p.m. — A motorist was arrested at Washington and East Ashman streets for driving on a suspended license.
3:23 p.m. — Deputies responded to a Lincoln Township home for a report of sexual assault involving a girl, 3.
4:38 p.m. —A deputy was sent to U.S. 10 and M-18 for a report of a man throwing rocks off the overpass.
8:01 p.m. — A deputy was called to a hit and run traffic accident on Redstone Road near McGruder Road. The suspect vehicle was not found. No one was hurt.
8:36 p.m. — A Lee Township man reported arriving home to find the front door partially open. Nothing was out of place.
10:05 p.m. — A Lincoln Township man, 40, was arrested at his home on a felony warrant for home invasion and interfering with electronic communication.
3 a.m. — Deputies were called to a North Merritt Drive home for a report of window peekers, and found an 18-year-old and 15-year-old. They were turned over to their parents.
3:39 a.m. — A deputy was conducting a property check at the Larkin Township Park on North Jefferson Road and found a vehicle with three teens sleeping inside. It was determined the youths had been smoking marijuana.
8:51 a.m. — A deputy was sent to a Ryan Drive home for a report of an injured bird that flew into the yard. The bird flew away before the deputy arrived.
9:11 a.m. — A County Connection bus struck a deer on West Isabella Road in Lee Township. The bus sustained minor damage. No one on the bus was hurt.
12:12 p.m. — Deputies received a complaint of shotgun pellets hitting a Peterson Drive home. No damage was done, and some duck hunters were asked to move farther away to hunt.
12:32 p.m. — A deputy was sent to a report of a disorderly man at a Cheryl Lynn Lane home. The man was not found.
12:38 p.m. — Deputies responded to U.S. 10 at Sanford Lake for a report of an unoccupied fishing boat on the water. The operator was found napping in the bottom of the boat.
3:05 p.m. —A 21-year-old man was arrested for marijuana possession at a Lincoln Township home.
3:22 p.m. — Gasoline, valued at $48, was stolen from a North Coleman Road gas station.
4:44 p.m. — Michigan State Police were sent to check a report of a loud explosion on West Huckleberry Road.
4:57 p.m. — Police investigated a traffic violation at Eastlawn Drive and Abbott Road.
7:08 p.m. — Someone entered hunting property on West Bradford Road and caused $200 worth of damage.
7:48 p.m. — A 77-year-old man reported his 20-by-36-foot political sign was stolen from the intersection of Water and Shearer roads. The sign is valued at $25.
8:51 p.m. — A deputy assisted Midland Police with a fight by attempting to locate the suspect at his George Street home.
10:36 p.m. — A deputy was sent to a report of a possible intoxicated driver on M-18, and found the driver on Shaffer Road. The man, 58, was arrested for drunken driving.
10:40 p.m. — A 17-year-old male reported he was being followed on South Poseyville Road by another car. A deputy contacted the other driver, a 17-year-old female, who said she thought she was following her friend and apologized.
11:54 p.m. — A deputy was sent to a report of a loud party at an Oakbrook Drive home.
4:47 a.m. — A resident reported a truck was shining a spotlight in windows in the City of Midland. A deputy stopped the truck and discovered it was a repo man looking for a truck.
7:39 a.m. — A Bay City man, 19, was arrested on East Gordonville Road for drunken driving after a hit and run crash.
12:48 p.m. — A deputy was called to a South County Line Road farm to investigate a report of a stolen holstein calf, valued at $215. The calf was found deceased at Alma College, and was taken to the Gratiot County Animal Control.
3:05 p.m. — A Midland Township woman, 25, was arrested at a South Poseyville Road home for domestic assault.
7:28 p.m. — A deputy investigated a personal protection order violation in Lee Township.
7:40 p.m. — A deputy was sent to West Isabella Road in Greendale Township for a report of kids jumping out in front of cars.
8:14 p.m. — A woman called 911 numerous times to say she had been kicked out of the truck she was riding in. As a deputy was responding to the incident on West Redstone Road, the woman called to say the driver came back, and then she hung up.
9:16 p.m. — A Sanford woman, 27, was arrested for retail fraud after she was caught trying to steal merchandise valued at $5.19 from a North West River Road store. She was found to be in possession of Xanax while at the jail.
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« Library « Fiction « The Best of O. Henry « Character Analysis
Analysis Pages
Rhetorical Devices
Character Analysis in The Best of O. Henry
Character Analysis Examples in The Best of O. Henry:
🔒 1
"the twelfth house whose bell he had rung..." See in text (The Furnished Room)
Here and throughout the story the young man displays a very strong motivation to find the girl he loves. This strong motivation creates dramatic interest, even when O. Henry is describing the old building and the furnished room in elaborate detail.
William Delaney
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The Last Leaf
"and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above...." See in text (The Last Leaf)
It should be noted that the old man cares about both Johnsy and Sue. This will provide him with a double motive for sacrificing his life to save Johnsy. He is not only doing it for the sick girl, but he is also doing it for Sue who is so terribly concerned about Johnsy. This double motive helps to make Behrman's noble deed more plausible.
"Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings...." See in text (The Last Leaf)
O. Henry had to introduce the character who would paint the fake ivy leaf on the nearby wall. At the same time, the author had to forestall the possibility of the reader guessing that any painter might get the notion of painting such a leaf. O. Henry created a character who should not be suspected of doing such a thing because he is too old to be climbing ladders in the middle of a stormy night, because he is a heavy drinker, and because he expresses such contempt for the idea of anyone dying because of an ivy leaf falling off a vine.
The Cop and the Anthem
"Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. Tomorrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work...." See in text (The Cop and the Anthem)
"The Cop and the Anthem" has a characteristic "O. Henry" surprise ending. In order for the surprise to work effectively, the reader must be prepared for something different. This entire paragraph is intended to prepare the reader to expect Soapy to reform. He has made a definite decision to "find work." But the inspiration of the church anthem has made him lose his hold on reality. He has, in effect, allowed himself to stray back into the middle-class world where he doesn't belong. His fantasies have made him incautious. He doesn't notice the policeman silently approaching.
Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman. “What are you doin' here?” asked the officer. “Nothin',” said Soapy. “Then come along,” said the policeman.
After Twenty Years
"‘Silky’ Bob..." See in text (After Twenty Years)
This nickname suggests a lot about why Bob is wanted by the Chicago police. He acquired that nickname by being a smooth talker and a smooth operator. Although the reader is never given any specifics about Bob's activities in the West, it seems apparent that Bob was operating as a confidence man.
"“Did pretty well out West, didn't you?” asked the policeman...." See in text (After Twenty Years)
The policeman is given a cue to ask this leading question because the other man is showing off with his expensive watch and inviting such a question.
"then a tall man in a long overcoat,..." See in text (After Twenty Years)
The author emphasizes that the plainclothes man is bigger than Bob. This makes it less likely that Bob could make an escape. O. Henry does something similar in "A Retrieved Reformation." He emphasizes that the detective Ben Price is a "big man." This insure that Jimmy Valentine would have a hard time trying to escape being arrested.
🔒 Become a Reader Member to unlock in-line analysis of character development, literary devices, themes, and more!
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Behind The Scenes Of The Golden Age: Life In 1950s Hollywood
Film May 29, 2018
Film’s transition from silent film to talkies thrust cinema into the Hollywood’s Golden Age. The world of film was gifted with unforgettable classics and iconic stars. Back then, star’s lives outside of their films weren’t closely followed like they are today but these photos will show you otherwise. Take a look at these behind the scenes glimpses at what iconic actors and actresses did when the cameras weren’t rolling!
Then-Unknown Julie Andrews Had Help From Bing Crosby
Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images
Behind the scenes of 1955’s High Tor, Bing Crosby ran lines with Julie Andrews, who was then an up and coming actress. High Tor was originally written as a play by Maxwell Anderson in 1936. Ten years later, Anderson decided to adapt High Tor into a television musical. High Tor is based on real-life events and legends surrounding the Lower Hudson River.
High Tor was Julie Andrews’ American television debut. She landed the role after Bing Crosby witnessed her Broadway debut in The Boy Friend. High Tor is considered one of the first made-for-television movies since Crosby was uncomfortable with doing a live performance on television.
Elvis Presley Didn’t Forget The Little People
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Even with his enormous celebrity status, Elvis Presley was never too busy to take time to meet with fans who visited him on set. Here he is, posed with a fan. This is no ordinary fan, though! He’s 14-year-old Tommy Rettig, aka Jeff Miller from Lassie! In 1956 when this photo was taken, Presley signed a seven-year contract with Paramount Pictures.
At the time, many older Americans were outraged at the effect Presley had on the youth. Not only were the adults disapproving of Presley’s style of music, they were enraged by his hip-swinging stage presence. During an appearance on the Milton Berle Show, Presley began gyrating his body when he was told to leave his guitar backstage for a performance.
James Dean And Natalie Wood Welcome Perry Lopez
Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images
Here Natalie Wood has a laugh with actors James Dean and Perry Lopez on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. In 1955, Lopez was an up and coming actor who had just signed with Warner Bros. Studios, who also produced Rebel Without a Cause.
James Dean and Natalie Wood starred in Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray. Dean plays the forlorn teen Jim Stark, who has a hard time coping with his life at home. Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood were both nominated for Academy Awards for their supporting roles, while director Nicholas Ray was nominated for Best Writing.
Cary Grant’s Furry Friend Offered Moral Support
Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images
Cary Grant had a furry friend to run lines with on the set of the 1953 film Dream Wife. Grant plays Clemson Reade, a businessman who leaves his hardworking fiancée for someone who fits his idea of the perfect wife and will take care of him and their future kids.
During Hollywood’s Golden Age, Grant acted in at least 75 films. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor only two times throughout his career — for 1941’s Penny Serenade and 1944’s None but the Lonely Heart.
With animals in the studio, things can get a little hairy behind the camera, as you’ll soon see…
The Future Princess Of Monaco Needed A Rest
Photo by Gene Lester/Getty Images
Grace Kelly worked so many long hours, that sometimes she had to take a nap on set! In 1953, Kelly starred alongside Clark Gable and Ava Gardner in Mogambo, directed by John Ford. Kelly plays Linda Nordley, who arrives in Africa with her husband to film gorillas. She won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for the role and was also nominated for an Academy Award.
Mogambo was a remake of Victor Fleming’s 1932 film Red Dust, which also starred Gable. Both films were adapted from a 1928 play written by Wilson Collison. Keep reading to see Grace Kelly having too much fun on the studio lot!
Jerry Lewis Put His Director In A Sticky Situation
Comedic actor Jerry Lewis must have gotten into all kinds of antics on set, including taping director Norman Taurog to his chair. This photo was taken in 1956 when Taurog directed Lewis in Pardners. The western musical comedy also featured Dean Martin. Since 1946, Lewis and Martin were a popular comedy duo who made several films together.
Norman Taurog also worked with Jerry Lewis for 1959’s Don’t Give Up the Ship and 1960’s Visit to a Small Planet. While filming Pardners, Lewis allegedly filmed a 16 mm documentary behind the scenes.
Life Was Easygoing For Hollywood Stars
Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Actors Jane Russell and Robert Ryan enjoyed their time off from the studio by splashing around in the pools of their Hollywood homes. In 1955, Russell and Ryan starred alongside Clark Gable in The Tall Men, directed by Raoul Walsh. Produced by 20th Century Fox, The Tall Men was shot in Sombrerete, Mexico at Sierra de Órganos National Park.
It can’t be said that anything went on between Russell and Ryan. Ryan was married to wife Jessica Cadwalader throughout his career. Around the time this photo was taken, Russell was married to her high school sweetheart, Bob Waterfield.
These Rear Window Stars Had To Take A Break From Being Serious
Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart had some downtime in between filming for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. On at least one occasion, they let off some steam at the Paramount Studios lot by riding bikes and playing with Rosemary Clooney’s Great Dane puppy.
In this 1954 mystery thriller, Stewart plays L.B. Jeffries, a photographer who begins spying on his neighbors when he is bound to a wheelchair. Rear Window was nominated for four Academy Awards. It is widely considered one of Hitchcock’s greatest films.
This isn’t the only time a furry friend was seen on set! You’ll think Cary Grant’s pal is too adorable!
Ann Blyth Should Have Been More Famous
Ann Blyth must have been having a bit of fun on a studio lot in this photo from 1955. Around that time, Blyth was cast in lead roles for the films The King’s Thief and Kismet.
Blyth was signed to Universal Pictures but was loaned to Warner Bros. to play Veda Pierce in the 1945 film Mildred Pierce. Blyth starred alongside Joan Crawford, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the titular role. Blyth was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Despite her success in the role, a broken back prevented her from taking on more movies right away.
Even The Most Private Scenarios Weren’t That Private
The intimate scenes in Autumn Leaves might have been shocking to audiences back then, but here you’ll see that filming the scene wasn’t very private at all. Director Robert Aldrich hovered over Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson while filming their bed scenes. Crawford plays Milly Hanson in the 1956 drama about an older woman who falls in love with a younger man who is haunted by past demons.
Crawford believed that Autumn Leaves was a fantastic movie that got overshadowed by her other work. She once said, “The cast was perfect, the script was good, and I think Bob [Aldrich] handled everything well.”
Ruby Dee Starred In Jackie Robinson’s Movie
Legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson proved he could also act in The Jackie Robinson Story. He starred as himself alongside Ruby Dee, who played his wife Rae. The biopic was directed by Alfred E. Green and produced by Eagle-Lion Films. The New York Times wrote that Robinson “displays a calm assurance and composure that might be envied by many a Hollywood star.”
Robinson had already broken boundaries when he became the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball. By the time the film was made in 1950, the second baseman was the highest paid Dodger up to that point.
No Monkey Business Backstage
Photo by Weegee (Arthur Fellig)/International Center of Photography/Getty Images
There were a number of chimpanzees employed as animal actors throughout Hollywood’s Golden Age. Most of the chimps played Cheeta, the animal sidekick in numerous Hollywood productions of Tarzan films and television shows.
Zippy was one such chimp to play Cheeta in 1951. Zippy was owned by animal trainer Ralph Quinlan. His most memorable portrayal of Cheeta was in Gordon Scott’s Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle. At least 18 male and female chimpanzees were employed to play Cheeta over the years. In each production, more than one chimp took turns playing the role, depending on what talents the scene called for.
Apparently, chimps need hair and makeup too! You’ll never guess who volunteered to do it…
Marlene Dietrich Accompanied Mike Todd To Oklahoma
Actress Marlene Dietrich attended the Hollywood premiere of Oklahoma on the arm of producer Mike Todd in 1955. At this point, the esteemed German actress had already established a lengthy stage and film career. At the onset of the ’50s, Dietrich primarily performed cabaret shows in major cities around the world.
Mike Todd developed Todd-AO with the American Optical Company. Todd-AO is a widescreen, 70 mm film format that was first used commercially in the 1955 film adaptation of Oklahoma. The following year, Todd produced his most memorable film, Michael Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days.
Just Monkeying Around Behind The Scenes
Actor Johnny Weissmuller sometimes served as the personal makeup artist for Neal, the chimpanzee named Tamba in the 1950’s television series Jungle Jim. Fresh off his popularity from the Tarzan films, Weissmuller went on to star in Jungle Jim, as the titular character who is an explorer in Africa.
Jungle Jim was based on a comic strip of the same name created by Alex Raymond and Don Moore. The television show also starred Martin Huston as Jungle Jim’s son Skipper, as well as actors Dean Fredericks and Paul Cavanagh.
Come to find out, hair and makeup is one of the most integral parts of making a movie…
Jack Carson Probably Felt Honored To Work With Ginger Rogers
Actor Jack Carson was just horsing around with Ginger Rogers when he pretended to feed her some hay in her stall on set. In 1951, Carson and Rogers co-starred together in The Groom Wore Spurs. Rogers plays lawyer A.J. Furnival, who bails out “tough guy” Ben Castle, played by Carson. After marrying the “tough guy,” Furnival quickly discovers that it was all just an act.
By the ’50s, Ginger Rogers was already established as one of the most popular actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Carson was one of four alternating hosts on NBC’s Four Star Revue.
There’s A Lot More People Behind The Camera Than You Think
Photo by Ivan Dmitri/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
This image shows actress Patrice Wymore filming a scene as Johanna Carter in Rocky Mountain. The film starred Errol Flynn and was directed by William Keighley. Wymore was a replacement for the more popular Lauren Bacall, who turned down the part. Because Bacall was assigned to the role under her contract, Warner Bros. studios suspended her but she would end up terminating the contract.
Westerns filmed in the 1950’s were big productions, especially when they were filmed on location. In scenes where there are just two people, there are at least a dozen on the other side of the camera.
Getting Made Up Was Half Of Their Day
Actors George Sanders and Märta Torén spent a lot of time in the makeup chair behind the scenes of the film Assignment – Paris! in 1952. Taking place during the Cold War, the film noir follows a news reporter to Budapest, where he gets framed for espionage.
Assignment – Paris! was filmed on location in Europe. These actors can attest to long days on set, where only a fraction of that time was actually spent acting. Time while not filming is spent setting up scenes and putting the actors through makeup and wardrobe like you see in this picture.
Director George Stevens Was Into His Shots
Photo by Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images
On the set of A Place in the Sun, director George Stevens determined the best angles for actors Montgomery Clift and Raymond Burr. Produced by Paramount Pictures, A Place in the Sun was based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy.
The 1951 drama stars Montgomery Clift as George Eastman, a working-class man who gets involved with two women from different sides of the track, played by Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor. A Place in the Sun earned six Academy Awards, including Best Director for George Stevens.
Smoking On Set Was Pretty Normal
In this photo, Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh relaxed behind the scenes of A Streetcar Named Desire with cigarettes. The actors starred in the 1951 film alongside Kim Hunter and Karl Malden. Leigh plays Blanche DuBois, who comes to New Orleans to visit her sister and brother-in-law, played by Hunter and Brando.
Elia Kazan directed the film, which was adapted from the 1947 play of the same name by Tenessee Williams. In 1948, Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire, while Leigh, Hunter, and Malden all won three of four Academy Awards given to the film.
You Can See The Love In Eddie Fisher’s And Debbie Reynold’s Eyes
Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds apparently couldn’t keep their eyes off each other while rehearsing for a show on CBS. The night before this photo was published in 1954, Fisher and Reynold had announced their engagement.
The couple married in 1955, but the marriage wouldn’t make it out of the decade. Fisher caused an uproar when he was outed for a relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. The romance began when Fisher began consoling Taylor over the death of her third husband, Mike Todd. Reynolds was publicly humiliated by the ordeal and left to care for their two kids when Fisher married Taylor.
Bette Davis Wearing Fur in the Desert
Gene Lester/Getty Images
Bette Davis was one of the most iconic actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Here she’s shown between takes, sitting in Director William Keighley’s chair on the set of The Bride Came C.O.D.
The film was shot in Death Valley, so you can imagine just how hot it is sitting in the direct sunlight waiting for the next take. While she’d probably rather be in a bathing suit, Davis is dressed in a fur coat for the next scene, kicking around sand while smoking a cigarette.
Joan Crawford on the Set of Chained
Tann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
This photo taken on June 12, 1934 shows actress Joan Crawford on the set of director Clarence Brown’s drama, Chained. This was the fifth of eight collaborations between Clark Cable and Brown, seen in the background here.
This was the first film that Crawford worked with cinematographer George J. Folsey, who had discovered a lighting scheme that emphasized her best features. Folsey found that using soft light best highlighted Crawford’s eyes and cheekbones. Crawford was elated with the result, and requested Folsey’s lighting on every film after.
Gene Tierney and Walter Lang on the Set of On The Riviera
Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
Leading actress Gene Tierney was admired for her incredible beauty and she had the talent to back it up. Her top films include Leave Her to Heaven, Heaven Can Wait, The Razor’s Edge, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
Here Tierney is pictured on the set of the musical comedy film On The Riviera in 1951, receiving direction from Director Walter Lang. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, for Best Music and Best Art Direction.
Actress Jean Harlow on the Set of Red-Headed Woman in 1932
Actress Jean Harlow stood out with her platinum blonde hair and stunning figure. She caught the eye of Howard Hughes, who signed her on for her first major appearance in the film Hell’s Angels in 1930. By the late 1930s, Harlow was one of the biggest film stars in the world.
Here she’s pictured on the set of the comedy Red-Headed Woman, for which she received a pay of $1,250 a week. It’s one of the few films that Harlow appeared without her signature platinum blonde hair, instead wearing a red wig.
Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe Didn’t Get Along
Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images
By 1957, Marilyn Monroe was finally earning more respect in the entertainment industry as an actress. However, director and actor Sir Laurence Olivier didn’t show the icon much respect on the set of The Sleeping Prince. Here he is, critiquing Monroe’s performance.
He was frustrated by the fact that her acting coach, Paula Strasberg was always on the film set and she was irritated by Olivier’s comments such as, “All you have to do is be sexy.”
An All-Star Cast for Mister Roberts
Slim Aarons/Getty Images
Initially, Henry Fonda wasn’t the first choice to star in Mister Rogers. The producers believed that he had taken too much time off (eight years) for movie-goers to be interested, but they were wrong.
Directed by John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy, and Joshua Logan, the 1955 film had an all-star cast that also included James Cagney, William Powell, and Jack Lemmon. On the set in Hawaii, Jack Lemmon is behind the camera while Slim Aarons takes a picture of him as Fonda looks on.
Actors Do a Script Reading for Cafe Metropole
Archive Photos/Getty Images
Actress Loretta Young had an incredible list of film credits during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Here she is on the set of Cafe Metropole in 1937, doing a script read-through with actors Tyrone Power, Edward H Griffing, Adolphe Menjou, and Charles Winninger.
The romantic comedy didn’t receive glowing reviews, and it certainly wasn’t Young’s most memorable performance. One critic commented, “The Rivoli [movie theater] has given us much worse, and much better.”
Actors Joke Around at a Hollywood Studio
FPG/Getty Images
This photo was snapped on August 26, 1932, at a Hollywood studio at Mary Pickford’s bungalow. Pickford, along with actors Al Jolson, Douglas Fairbanks, Eddie Cantor, and Ronald Coleman, and film producer Samuel Goldwyn joke around with an over-sized telephone.
You can see two of the men wearing the two-tone black and white leather shoes that were popular during the era with everyone looking polished and happy. What a time to be alive in Hollywood!
Orson Welles, Happy as a Clam on the Set of Citizen Kane
RKO Pictures/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Many men would be envious of the predicament Orson Welles is in, in this photo taken on the set of Citizen Kane. It was 1940 and Welles was surrounded by beautiful women while flipping through the script.
He seems to have the full attention of all eleven women who are swooning over Welles, who was the producer, co-screenwriter, director, and star of the film. Welles’ first feature film, Citizen Kane would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award in nine different categories and is considered by many to be the greatest film ever made.
The Cast of the Thin Man, 1934
John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
The Thin Man was a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett that was turned into a six-part film series, beginning in 1934. Here, the cast socializes between takes on the set in New York City. Actress Maureen O’Sullivan, on the left, is the only one smiling as William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Ronald Colman all give the photographer a smirk or a stern look.
The film was a success, proving to MGM executives that Powell wasn’t “too old and strait-laced” to play Nick Charles, and Loy wasn’t typecast in exotic femme fatale roles.
On the Set of The Sunset Derby
This photo was taken on the set of The Sunset Derby in 1927. Take a look at the car, motorcycle, and wardrobe of this fine cast. This was a silent drama film directed by Albert S. Rogell, who is pictured standing next to the camera.
The film was released on June 5, 1927 with a running time of “six reels”. The film starred Ralph Lewis and Mary Astor, who began acting as a teenager and was just 21-years-old while filming The Sunset Derby.
Bogart and Jenkins Stopped for Speeding at the Studio
Boys just want to have fun… While waiting to be called back to the set, actors Humphrey Bogart and Allen Jenkins decided to take some scooters out for a joy ride around the Warner Bros. Studio lot in 1938.
Of course they were speeding, exceeding the 8 miles-per-hour limit on the studio grounds. They were subsequently stopped by a guard and told to slow down. Neither of the men look very impressed by the guard’s orders.
June Allyson and Humphrey Bogart on the Set of Battle Circus
Frank Worth, Courtesy of Capital Art/Getty Images
Look at the beautiful customized chair created for actress June Allyson. Here she’s pictured on the set of Battle Circus with her costar Humphrey Bogart in 1953. Directed by Richard Brooks, who also wrote the screenplay, the film is set in Korea during the Korean War.
Bogart plays the part of a surgeon, pictured in his scrubs, while Allyson plays the newly-arrived nurse at the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Originally, the film was to be named MASH 66 but MGM studio rejected the title because they didn’t think people would understand that it referred to a military hospital.
Jane Russell on the Set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Jane Russell was one of the most memorable sex symbols of the 1940s and 1950s. She was another actress who got her start in a Howard Hughes’ film, as The Outlaw set her career into motion in 1943.
This photo was taken on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which she played a starring role alongside Marilyn Monroe. Russell was noted for being a down-to-earth actress with a sharp wit. Combined with her timeless beauty, Russell was on the minds of many men.
Veronica Lake Gets Tied Up for This Gun For Hire
Veronica Lake was most well-known for her femme fatale roles during the 1940s. She was also known for her trademark peek-a-boo hairstyle. This caused problems in factories as women workers tried to replicate the style, which caused accidents with their hair draped over one eye. At the government’s request, Lake changed her hairstyle.
This photo shows Director Frank Tuttle talking to Lake as a crew member ties her up for the next scene of This Gun For Hire in 1942.
French Dancer and Actress Leslie Caron Jokes Around
Mondadori via Getty Images
French actress and dancer Leslie Caron appeared in 45 films between 1951 and 2003. She was one of the few starlets who have danced with icons Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Rudolf Nureyev.
Here she’s pictured joking around behind the scenes in 1965, locking up a man who might have been a love interest of hers at the time, as her second divorce, from Peter Hall, was being finalized.
Marlon Brando Chats With His Stand-in
Columbia Pictures/Getty Images
This photo captures actor Marlon Brando on the set of On The Waterfront in 1954. He’s pictured with Carl Fiore, who acted as his stand-in. Stand-ins are important in the film-making process, as they act as a substitute for the actor as the crew makes sure the lighting and camera set-up is ready to go before calling out the stars.
The film was set in Hoboken, New Jersey, and received twelve Academy Award nominations, winning eight. It was also deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress.
Cary Grant and Sophia Loren film Houseboat
Richard C. Miller/Getty Images
This photo was taken in 1958, on the set of Houseboat, starring Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. Here, they shoot a scene at a Hollywood studio– ah, the magic of Hollywood. Director Melville Shavelson holds the boat steady while Loren looks uneasy as she finds a seat.
Grant’s wife, Betsy Drake, wrote the original script and was set to star alongside her husband. However, Grant began a love affair with Loren during The Pride and the Passion, and arranged to have her take his wife’s place in the film instead. Ouch.
James Dean Takes a Smoke Break During Giant
Richard C. Miller/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
This photo was taken in October of 1955 in Marfa, Texas, on the set of Giant. Here, James Dean is pictured taking a smoke break at his trailer between scenes. The epic Western drama was based on a screenplay and starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Dean.
It was one of the last three films that Dean would shoot before his untimely death, and his accident took place before the film was released. Nick Adams stepped in to do Dean’s voice dubbing for the film in post-production.
John Wayne Takes a (Much Needed) Smoke Break
Gianni Ferrari/Cover/Getty Images
This photo taken in 1974 shows John Wayne on the set of Circus World. Directed by Henry Hataway, the film was shot in Madrid, Spain and had several problems throughout filming. Actress Rita Hayworth appeared to be suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and while Wayne had originally looked forward to working with her, he was frustrated with Hayworth’s drunkenness, abusive behavior, and constantly forgetting her lines.
Both David Niven and Rod Taylor dropped from the film, as well as Frank Capra, who was originally scheduled to direct it. Despite all the commotion, the film won the Golden Globe for Best Song while Hayworth was nominated for Best Actress.
ann blyth bing crosby cary grant cliff robertson debbie reynolds eddie fisher elvis presley george sanders ginger rogers grace kelly jack carson jackie robinson james dean james stewart jane russell jerry lewis joan crawford johnny weissmuller julie andrews marlene dietrich marlon brando märta torén montgomery clift natalie wood patrice wymore perry lopez raymond burr robert ryan ruby dee vivien leigh
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JDC Honour Tommy Cox
The late PDC Tournament Director Tommy Cox has been honoured with the naming of the JDC’s Junior World Darts Championship trophy in his name.
Friday 30 Aug 2019
Article by ‐ PDPA
Cox was one of the founders of the PDC and a key figure in the organisation’s growth during two decades as Tournament Director, while he is also a member of the PDC Hall of Fame.
He passed away in November 2018, and has been recognised by the Junior Darts Corporation with the naming of their Junior World Darts Championship trophy in his memory.
The early rounds of the Junior World Darts Championship will be held in Gibraltar in late September as part of the JDC’s festival of darts in the country, with the final then taking place on stage at Alexandra Palace on Saturday December 21 during the William Hill World Darts Championship.
“On behalf of the whole family we are honoured that the JDC have decided to name their World Championship trophy the ‘Tommy Cox Junior World Darts Championship Trophy’,” said Danny Cox, Tommy’s son.
“He devoted his life to the sport and it is, I’m sure everyone would agree, a much better game for his involvement.
“It is fitting that the champions of tomorrow shall set out on their darting journeys by competing to lift the trophy that bears his name. He was a huge fan of the JDC and all it stands for.
“We would like to thank [JDC Chairman] Steve Brown and his organisation for this outstanding gesture.”
The JDC’s Junior World Darts Championship has been won previously by Austria’s Rusty-Jake Rodriguez and Dutch teenager Jurjen Van der Velde.
The JDC’s festival of darts in Gibraltar will include the Junior World Cup as players from nations worldwide gather to compete in the week ahead of the Gibraltar Darts Trophy event as the PDC European Tour returns to The Rock.
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After Many a Summer
A millionaire seeks eternal life, whilst corrupting and neglecting the things that make life worthwhile. A shocking cautionary tale from the author of Brave New World
Jo Stoyte is afraid of death. But Stoyte is also a millionaire, and so he pours his riches into scientific research, desperate to find the secret of immortality. This ruthless quest will enmesh everyone around him in a web of greed, seduction, murder and debasement. Written while he was living in California, this is Huxley’s response to Hollywood’s superficiality and obsession with youth, a powerful cautionary tale which employs all his customary wit and merciless insight.
Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early 20s, but it was his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) – bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in Along the Road (1925). The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932, this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (Time Must Have a Stop,1944, and Island, 1962) and non-fiction (The Perennial Philosophy, 1945; Grey Eminence, 1941; and the account of his first mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception, 1954). Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.
Also by Aldous Huxley
Praise for After Many a Summer
This is Mr. Huxley's Hollywood novel, and you might expect it to be fantastic, extravagant, crazy and preposterous. It is all that, and heaven and hell too....It is the kind of novel that he is particularly the master of, where the most extraordinary and fortuitous events are followed by contemplative little essays on the meaning of life....The story is outrageously good
A highly sensational plot that will keep astonishing you to practically the final sentence
Mr. Huxley's elegant mockery, his cruel aptness of phrase, the revelations and the ingenious surprises he springs on the reader are those of a master craftsman; Mr. Huxley is at the top of his form
The Dickens Boy
Tom Keneally
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Popular Penguins
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March 12th-Karan Casey has long been one of the most innovative, provocative and imitated voices in Irish traditional and folk music. Her career has spanned twenty-five years from the early days as a jazz performer in George’s Bistro in Dublin to her heady days in New York with the band Solas to her now well established solo career and she has sold over half a million albums.
Karan released her first album with the group Solas, which quickly became the most celebrated Irish band in the U.S., and her four years with the group were pivotal. Since embarking on her solo career Karan has released 7 solo albums, a duo album (with John Doyle), an album for children and numerous contributions to other artists’ projects – appearing on more than 60 albums in total.
Karan has won awards for “Best Folk Album” and “Best Folk Female” from Irish Music Magazine and been nominated for the BBC Folk Awards and the Danish Grammys and was a key member of Paul Winter’s Grammy-award winning “Celtic Solstice”.
There is no beter way to spend and evening in March than listening to one of the great voices in Irish folk music.
General Admission-Doors open at 7:30/ Music at 8pm
Pre-Sale tickets- $20/ Day of show- $25
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City fans, Celtic fans, and stars past, present and future turn out to honour Adam Drury
Hamilton Nemo
Published: 5:18 PM May 24, 2012 Updated: 10:59 PM October 10, 2020
Norwich fans in their thousands, approximately 3,000 Celtic fans, and stars past present and future from both clubs turned out on Tuesday at Carrow Road to honour Adam Drury. Players from both sides and a pipe band formed a guard of honour as Drury came on to the pitch with his two children in appreciation of his great service to our club.
Drury joined the Canaries from Peterborough United in March 2001, since when he has clocked up eleven years’ service and played 328 senior games for the club. He was Player of the Year in 2002-3 and club captain from 2003-4 and 2006-7. As captain, he lifted the Division 1 championship trophy in 2003. Whether as club captain, Player of the Year, on the substitute’s bench, or suited and booted on the non playing players bench, he has been a great servant of the club, a model professional, and a model of loyalty, reliability, and stability. Never prone to histrionics, Drury has always been there when his club needed him.
He richly deserved the honour of a testimonial match against the Scottish champions in his eleventh season with the club. When he left Peterborough to join Norwich, the then Posh manager, Barry Fry, described him as the best full back outside the Premier League. For once, Fry was not exaggerating.
The match was played in a great spirit. Celtic put out a young side, and were roared on by 3,000 fans who had made the long journey down from Glasgow. The Celtic fans enjoyed themselves in the balmy Norfolk sunshine. Several of them had consumed at least a couple of drinks and at least one brave soul was seen swimming in the river. I do not know if the local pike, perch and rudd were impressed by his tackle. But the Celtic fans were peaceful and good humoured and I heard of no reports of trouble.
The Celtic fans joined with the City fans in paying tribute to Paul Lambert, who has served both clubs with such distinction, albeit in different capacities. I suspect that many fans on both sides were secretly disappointed that Lambert did not grace the occasion by playing in the game for at least a few minutes. Maybe he could not decide which team to turn out for.
Norwich put out a different team in each half. Almost all of our first team squad appeared at some stage, as did George Francomb, and there were cameo appearances for former City players Michael Nelson, Henri Lansbury, and Daniel Pacheco, as well as Darren Huckerby who was there to support his great pal Adam. Former Canaries John Hartson and Dion Dublin were also in attendance - in the stands but not on the pitch.
For the record the result was a 2-0 win for Norwich. Vaughan and Lansbury scored the goals. But the result did not really matter. What did matter on Tuesday night was that a modest and great servant of Norwich City Football Club received recognition for his 11 years of unselfish service and contribution to the success and history of our club. Many thanks to all who contributed to the success of the evening, but above all: Thank you Ads and well done.
Given the changing nature of football, it may be many years before another player clocks up 11 years continuous service for our club. Most Norwich fans are just hoping and praying that Grant Holt is still at Carrow Road for a fourth successive season, and that Paul Lambert is too. There has been much speculation in the press about both of them. I suppose the speculation about the manager will only go away when new managers are appointed at Villa, Liverpool, and Chelski. Personally I do not think Lambert is maybe not sufficiently well established nor sufficiently media savvy to be a contender for the jobs at Anfield or Stamford Bridge. And Villa not only finished below City in the Premier League last year, but are currently looking for their third manager in just over a year. Given their recent comical history my money is on Jasper Carrott to take that poisoned chalice.
As for Holty there are many unanswered questions about the real reason for his transfer request. Does he want more money? Does he want a guarantee that he will start every game and not be substituted? Does he want to be the highest earner at the club? Does he want to move back up north? Does he want guarantees about Lambert still being at the helm next year?
I have heard all these theories but I do not know which one (if any) to believe.
He seems to have been dissatisfied about something “personal”. At least he and his agent have had an early meeting with the chief executive of the club to try and resolve the matter, which to my mind suggests that the problem is relatively minor and can be sorted out soon. Let us hope so. The bond between the fans and our hero centre-forward is deep, and vital to the success of our club next season.
Whatever happens there will certainly be players coming into our squad next season and players leaving. Thanks to Adam for a great finale to the season. Roll on summer. Let us get the Olympics and jubilee over as quickly as possible. I am interested in neither gold, nor silver, nor bronze. I care not one jot or tittle for diamond. I care only for Yellows, Yellows, Yellows. I cannot wait till our next adventure in the Premier League begins next season.
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‘It was a pleasure to be a part of’ – Cantwell thrilled to play key role in City’s crucial win at Everton
Published: 7:00 AM November 24, 2019 Updated: 11:06 PM October 10, 2020
Todd Cantwell, left, is congratulated by Ben Godfrey after opening the scoring during Norwich City's win at Everton Picture: Paul Chesterton/Focus Images - Credit: Paul Chesterton/Focus Images Ltd
The smile said it all as Todd Cantwell savoured Norwich City’s rejuvenating 2-0 win at Everton - and his third goal of the Premier League season.
The 21-year-old had opened the scoring at Goodison Park in the 54th minute after being put through on goal by Teemu Pukki, calmly slotting past England number one Jordan Pickford.
Dennis Srbeny then came off the bench to make sure of the three points the Canaries deserved in injury-time, lifting Daniel Farke's team from the bottom of the table and bouncing back from a difficult run of six defeats in seven games.
"It was a pleasure to be a part of," Cantwell said. "We took the international break to gather ourselves, regroup and look at it as a new period. Coming here and getting a result like that was fantastic.
"The reality of it is that it's a very tough league, every game is a tough game and we've really got to be at our best to get a result.
"We were solid, we were compact, we looked dangerous on the counter-attack and we managed to win it 2-0, which is a fantastic result."
The England Under-21 international had scored during the 3-2 home defeat to Chelsea earlier in the season and during the epic Carrow Road win over Manchester City.
He continued: "I think today was the most important (goal) probably because we needed a good result and we've managed to come and get it.
"For me, honestly, scoring doesn't mean anything if we don't get a result so to get a goal and to get the three points is fantastic."
Cantwell had been switched to the right of midfield, with Emi Buendia starting on the bench, and worked hard defensively to protect Max Aarons.
While there were still some moments when the creative midfielder wasn't able to protect the ball as well as he would have liked, the Dereham youngster was very much part of a positive performance overall.
"If you don't concede you can't lose a game, that's probably a base to always go from," Cantwell added. "When we can defend the chances they had early on it gives you a boost.
"I said to a couple of the lads before the game, a win would do us the world of good and luckily we've got that and we can move on from it.
"To be fair to Zimbo and Ben I thought they were fantastic."
Cantwell was replaced by Buendia in the 80th minute after treatment on his left ankle and was wearing a protective boot after the game, but wasn't too concerned.
"It's just precautionary," he concluded. "I got a bit of a kick on it and it's obviously not in the best shape at the moment but I don't think it's anything to worry about."
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Article V Convention
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Article V: Are there flaws in our Constitution, or simply failures to obey it?
March 12, 2018 by Nancy Thorner
Article V of the U.S. Constitution has only 22 words about a convention for proposing amendments, but the most important is the word “call.” Since only Congress can “call” the convention, it means that states have no control over who can be a delegate, who makes the rules, who sets the agenda or who wields the gavel.
Many on the left and the right are working together to rewrite our 1787 Constitution, that magnificent and precious document, the fountainhead of our unparalleled American freedom, independence, and prosperity which secured our God given unalienable rights. They believe that changing our Constitution or adding amendments will force politicians to obey it. With that premise, since few obey the 10 Commandments, should we change them as well?
If the problem is that politicians do not obey the current Constitution, then writing a new one is no solution to that problem. Politicians who ignore the current Constitution would ignore a new one, unless of course it allowed them to do as they please and then they’d follow it.
The dangers are many, and euphemistic sounding reasons for another Convention convince constitutionally uneducated citizens of the need for a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA). Few Americans have read the actual BBA bill, which would change our constitution and legalize the already unconstitutional spending by Congress, and when Congress couldn’t meet the budget because of their spending, they’d simply raise taxes on the American people. The Constitution lists the enumerated powers by which Congress is limited in its spending, the BBA Amendment changes those enumerated powers.
Two Methods for Proposing Amendments
Article V of the Constitution includes two methods for proposing amendments. The first and only method used for 27 amendments thus far empowers Congress to propose an amendment, “whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary.”
The second method for proposing amendments, which has never been used since the original 1787 Constitutional Convention (Con-Con), is through a convention called by Congress “on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states.” Once 34 state applications are received, Congress is bound to “call a convention for proposing amendments.”
Article V tells of two modes of ratification. The amendments proposed by Congress or at a convention, can only become part of the Constitution once they’ve been “ratified by the legislatures of three fourths (38) of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress.”
Advocating Constitutional Change
Conservatives, such as Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, who advocate for a Con-Con fail to understand that once Congress convenes a convention, it cannot be undone, and no predetermined rules or limitations, adopted by either Congress or the states will have any bearing on what the convention delegates may choose to do or propose. The delegates would have free latitude to propose any changes they see fit, including the writing of an entirely new constitution, along with changes to the mode of ratification, in order to guarantee the adoption of their amendments. It would be a runaway convention and it is not without historical precedent.
Throughout American history there have been those who wish to rewrite our U.S. Constitution. In 1943, it was a Chicago lawyer for Marshall Fields and Time, in the 1960s it was Senator Everett Dirksen, and we came close to a convention in the late 1980s. Now in the 21st century we are again faced with those on the left and right advocating for another convention.
In his book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, (2014), former Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case, proposes to change the Second Amendment to read:
“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the militia shall not be infringed.”
The addition of these five words essentially allows for the criminalization and disarming of homeowners and law-abiding citizens.
Stevens, appointed by Gerald Ford, would also change the First Amendment to limit political speech, change the Eighth Amendment to forbid the death penalty, and change the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments to end sovereign immunity for the states and absolute immunity to state and local elected officials when they don’t follow federal laws.
Warnings from Statesmen
On November 2, 1788, James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, wrote a letter to G.L. Turberville when he was asked how he felt if another General Convention should be called. Here is a portion of his letter, written only a year after the 1787 Constitution:
"An election into it would be courted by the most violent partizans [sic] on both sides; it would probably consist of the most heterogeneous characters; would no doubt contain individuals of insidious views, who under the mask of seeking alterations popular in some parts but inadmissible in other parts of the Union might have a dangerous opportunity of sapping the very foundations of the fabric.
Having witnessed the difficulties and dangers experienced by the first Convention which assembled under every propitious circumstance, I should tremble for the result of a Second, meeting in the present temper of America, and under all the disadvantages I have mentioned."
In Federalist No. 49, Madison warns against a convention to correct breaches of the Constitution. He said the legislators who caused the problem would get themselves seats at the convention and would then be in a position to control the outcome of a convention.
In Federalist No. 85 (last paragraph), Alexander Hamilton said he “dreads” the consequences of another convention because the enemies of the Constitution want to get rid of it.
Our first US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay wrote that another convention would run an “extravagant risque.” (obsolete spelling of risk)
US Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg reminds us in his September 14, 1986 editorial in The Miami Herald that at the convention of 1787, the delegates ignored their instructions from the Continental Congress and instead of proposing amendments to the Articles of Confederation, wrote a new Constitution; and that “…any attempt at limiting the agenda would almost certainly be unenforceable.”
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said on April 17, 2014 “I certainly would not want a constitutional convention. I mean, whoa! Who knows what would come out of that?”
Convention supporters ridicule these warnings as “fear mongering.” And they quote law professor Scalia in 1979, before his decades of experience as a Supreme Court Justice, to “prove” otherwise.
Any intelligent person must seriously consider these warnings from these brilliant men. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Justice Jay, Justice Goldberg, Justice Burger and Justice Scalia understood the plenipotentiary powers of delegates to an Article V convention.
The Historic and Dangerous Legal Precedent
The only historic precedent for a Constitutional Convention occurred in 1787. The 55 attending delegates were tasked with the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation (AOC).” Article XIII of the AOC stipulated that “any alterations” made to them must be unanimously “confirmed by the legislatures of every State.”
Both these mandates were exceeded. The delegates chose to replace the Articles with an entirely new federal Constitution. They altered the mode of ratification from being “confirmed by the legislatures of every State,” in Article XIII of the AOC, to “the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof,” in Article V of the new Constitution. On September 13, 1788, with only 11 of the 13 states having ratified the new Constitution, the Continental Congress passed a resolution that it “had been ratified.” The new Constitution replacing the AOC was adopted before being “confirmed by the legislatures of every State,” as Article XIII required. With such precedent, who can say this will not happen again?
The 55 attending delegates to the 1787 Convention
ignored their pre-set limited agenda;
trashed the entire existing government;
wrote a new constitution; and most important,
(to assure adoption of their new constitution), they ignored existing ratification requirements, wrote new ones, and used the new rules to bypass the state legislatures.
A second Con-Con hasn’t been held in 231 years because of what happened in its only historic precedent. There is nothing to stop a second convention from doing everything the first did.
Tactics of the left are being used to try to pass a “Convention of States", funded by secret donors who have hidden agendas. There are wealthy globalists who do not like our Constitution for many reasons.
The first thing liberals would do in an Article V convention is to attempt to repeal the Second Amendment, with additional attempts to insert into the Constitution a right to taxpayer-funded abortion and gay marriage.
Progressive Education
It’s interesting to note that these folks pushing another convention often refuse to debate those who know the historic precedents and documents of our founders, but when they do, they always end up failures in the public forum.
We must realize that progressive education has destroyed academic education, and it happened long ago, other than in a few hundred private schools and among home schools, academic teaching is gone. Eliminating the US Constitution and American history from education started in the late 1960s.
Progressive education does not believe in moral, religious or cultural absolutes, but rather only believes in questioning those absolutes and replacing them with relative truths, i.e., convenient lies. Indeed, we need to consider whether the proponents of progressive education have always been “intending to make a clean sweep of traditional values and start with a new set,” as C. S. Lewis put it in his 1943 book, “The Abolition of Man.”
America is shifting from a nation governed by a Constitution to a nation governed by an agenda. What the agenda is should matter to people who love their freedom. It doesn’t matter whether Republicans or Democrats are in power, the agenda keeps moving forward either way, directing us all toward what is touted as a more “enlightened,” a more “socially conscious,” and a more “open and tolerant” society.
Unfortunately, our children are learning nothing of freedom and liberty, our heritage or Constitution, what they are learning is a socialist agenda.
The folks responsible for the Constitution were idealists, but they were also pragmatists. They understood the shortcomings of people, and they didn’t exclude themselves. That’s why they made it possible to amend their divinely-inspired conclusions. But as you may have noticed, they made it a very difficult process. They understood that changing times would call for certain adjustments, but they also understood human nature and understood that a nation, just like an individual, will go through phases. They didn’t want to allow their work to be undone because the nation was undergoing a temporary loss of sanity, as might occur during a war or when a would-be tyrant was elected.
Those who don’t trust the system to self-correct keep calling for a Convention of States. It is beyond me to imagine how they believe that a gathering of representatives from 50 states could improve on the 535 representatives we already have on salary in the House and Senate.
I mean, if those people can’t agree about term limits, a balanced budget, a sensible immigration policy, or limiting the power of the federal government, how can we expect better of these unelected individuals representing the 50 states?
Filed Under: Article V Convention, Constitution
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Relief: Pain Research News, Insights & Ideas - By Stephani Sutherland
Pain-free Fibromyalgia Classes in Guisborough at Physioplus+ https://www.physioplusguisborough.co.uk/articles/pain-free-fibromyalgia-classes-in-guisborough
Fibromyalgia: Cracking the Case
Researchers are just beginning to understand the biological underpinnings of a long-misunderstood condition.
Fibromyalgia. Many patients with this perplexing diagnosis have seen doctor after doctor in search of an explanation for the widespread pain, fatigue, and disordered sleep that has disrupted their lives—sometimes severely. Depression, anxiety, and “brain fog” also commonly affect people with fibromyalgia. Despite decades of research, seemingly everything about fibromyalgia remains mysterious. But, encouragingly, researchers are finally making progress toward understanding this long-unexplained syndrome. Those who study fibromyalgia hope this will legitimize a condition that physicians have long doubted, and bring much-needed relief to patients.
A difficult diagnosis
Not everyone with all-over pain receives the diagnosis of fibromyalgia. The label usually comes from a rheumatologist—a doctor who specializes in musculoskeletal and autoimmune disorders—only after other ailments are ruled out. But other chronic pain diagnoses, including temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJD), chronic pelvic pain conditions such as interstitial cystitis (IC), and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) often mimic the symptoms of fibromyalgia, also often with no discernible physical cause. The diagnosis that a patient receives might depend on the specialist they see, experts say.
Roland Staud, University of Florida, Gainesville, US, likens the current understanding of fibromyalgia to the traditional Indian story of seven blind mice trying to determine the identity of an elephant. One blind mouse feels a leg and calls it a pillar; another grabs ahold of the tail and reports finding a rope. Not until all the parts are considered as a whole does a complete picture of the beast emerge.
Likewise, rheumatologists with patients complaining of muscle aches may diagnose fibromyalgia, whereas a gastroenterologist proclaims IBS the cause of pain, but apart from complaints of regional pain in IBS, the overall symptoms of these two conditions look remarkably similar. Patients with low back pain, osteoarthritis, and other common chronic pain conditions can also develop this characteristic set of symptoms.
Today, researchers are sketching out a picture of fibromyalgia as a pain disorder that can be triggered by any number of individual maladies, each one heightening future risk for developing this enigmatic condition.
Brain pain?
Researchers and doctors have traditionally classified different types of pain into several categories. Nociceptive pain is the acute protective signal of impending tissue damage that arises from stepping on a tack, for example. Inflammatory pain results from the activity of immune cells, as in osteoarthritis. And neuropathic pain springs from nerve damage that results from diabetes or chemotherapy, for instance. Fibromyalgia has been a conundrum in part because it doesn’t really fit into any of those categories, though some symptoms resemble inflammatory pain, and others neuropathic pain.
Over the years, researchers have tried to craft a new category to contain fibromyalgia, which they have variously called functional, dysfunctional, or somatoform disorders. “The term that we prefer is ‘centralized pain,’ meaning that pain clearly is coming largely from the brain rather than from out in the periphery,” says rheumatologist Daniel Clauw, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, US.
Because the pain of fibromyalgia seems to originate from the muscles, for years rheumatologists studied patients’ muscle and joint tissues, but found no evidence of inflammation or damage that could cause pain. Without evidence for bodily injury underlying the pain, many researchers turned to studying the brains of people with fibromyalgia. Some, including Clauw, have embraced the idea that fibromyalgia is primarily a disease of the brain.
The unifying symptoms, like widespread pain and fatigue, of fibromyalgia and other such syndromes indicate that changes in the central nervous system are at play, Clauw says. Brain imaging studies have indeed shown evidence of structural and functional changes in the brains of patients with fibromyalgia. And anti-depressant and anti-seizure medications that are effective for some people with fibromyalgia work in the brain, he adds.
But other researchers contend that all chronic pain conditions lead to changes in the brain, and in fact every experience of pain—whatever its initial cause—emerges from the brain. Many researchers in the field therefore are still searching for as-yet-undetected pathological processes in the body that may be driving the symptoms of fibromyalgia—processes that might be reversible.
Evidence of peripheral nerve damage
In 2013, several groups published evidence of neuropathy, or damage and dysfunction, in the small nerve fibers that transmit pain signals from the skin, in patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia. One study led by Claudia Sommer, University of Würzburg, Germany, found dysfunctional nerve activity in twenty-five adults with fibromyalgia, according to sensory testing (in which subjects reported when they detected hot or cold stimuli) and electrical recordings of peripheral nerve activity. In addition, skin biopsies from fibromyalgia patients often revealed withered or sparse nerve endings. These abnormalities were not present in healthy control subjects or in ten subjects without pain but with depression, a condition that shares some aspects of fibromyalgia such as fatigue and inactivity.
Another study, led by Anne Louise Oaklander at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, US (see related RELIEF podcast with Oaklander here) also used skin biopsies, with similar findings. Oaklander found that forty-one percent among 27 adult subjects meeting diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia also met the diagnostic criteria for small-fiber polyneuropathy (SFPN), a common neuropathic pain condition with myriad causes, whereas only three percent of healthy control subjects showed signs of SFPN.
A third study, led by Jordi Serra, MC Mutual, Barcelona, Spain, and Neuroscience Technologies, London, UK, measured dysfunctional nerve activity in the peripheral nerves of fibromyalgia patients and showed that it mimicked nerve activity seen in patients with SFPN but not healthy controls. Serra uses a highly specialized technique called microneurography to record activity from individual nerves in a person’s skin.
Together, these reports suggest that, somehow, damage to or dysfunction of peripheral nerves is a contributing factor in many cases of what has been diagnosed as fibromyalgia. But many questions remain about the link between neuropathy and fibromyalgia.
Oaklander stresses that it’s important to identify any potential underlying medical causes of fibromyalgia, because some can be halted or improved. Most cases of SFPN can be traced to potentially treatable conditions including diabetes, chemotherapy for cancer, an autoimmune reaction, or—rarely—a genetic abnormality; some cases of SFPN remain mysterious in origin. Oaklander says that many of her patients with neuropathies have improved with treatment of these underlying conditions rather than relying on a standard course of treatment with painkillers. Certainly not all cases of fibromyalgia are rooted in undiagnosed SFPN, Oaklander says, “but pulling out the 40 percent who appear to have SFPN may help researchers to find the cause in the remaining 60 percent as well.”
But for patients, a diagnosis—or even treatment—of SFPN may not be sufficient to halt fibromyalgia. Kathleen Sluka, University of Iowa, Iowa City, US, says that while the findings of peripheral neuropathy in fibromyalgia patients are an important piece of the puzzle, “patients need to understand this is not going to lead to a miracle cure. There are multiple mechanisms underlying fibromyalgia, and there may be several going on at once. Treatments need to be aimed at each of those components and tailored to the individual,” she explained.
Is it a real thing?
While fibromyalgia has gained recognition in recent years as a condition with biological underpinnings, many doctors practicing today still doubt that fibromyalgia is real, or they refer to it as a psychological disorder—one that’s “all in the head.” But, like many diseases in the history of humankind, Serra says, fibromyalgia is evolving in our cultural consciousness. For example, 200 years ago, people with epilepsy were regarded as crazy, or possessed by the devil. Only when electroencephalography (EEG) came along—a test that records brain activity using electrodes attached to the scalp—did doctors realize that the disease was rooted in abnormal brain activity.
“Now, no one doubts that epilepsy is a neurological condition that can be treated. But back then, it was impossible to convince doctors it was a real disease. Fibromyalgia is very similar, in that we have patients who complain of pain and other mysterious symptoms and are studied by physicians who find nothing wrong,” so they often dismiss or ignore the patients, Serra says.
That dismissal can make patients feel crazy, even though they know their pain is very real. “One of the most frustrating things for patients is that they are often not believed—and this may be constant, going on for years,” Serra says. While the new findings of peripheral nerve damage in fibromyalgia patients may not offer a cure or even an immediate treatment, they represent the first objective, physical evidence of dysfunction linked to their illness. “The skin biopsies and microneurography are objective tests. To have a doctor say your nerve activity is abnormal, or that you have small-fiber neuropathy” can be a source of tremendous relief and validation for patients, Serra says.
It’s entirely possible that, until now, studies have missed signs of damage or dysfunction in nerves, Serra says, because they were undetectable with the relatively blunt diagnostic tests used in the past. Peripheral nerves, Serra says, are incredibly sensitive to slight changes in their surroundings, which can alter their activity. “The excitability of nerves is very fine-tuned,” he emphasizes. For example, a pain nerve fiber might be spontaneously active, but once the patient relaxes, that activity stops. That might happen because the patient’s breathing slows, perhaps changing the acidity of blood, or some other factor in the nerve fiber’s environment. “Just this little change in balance determines whether the nerve is firing or not firing,” Serra says. This finding, he explains, also fits with the relationship between stress and pain. “We know this—all patients say, ‘when I’m stressed, I’m worse, and when I’m relaxed, I feel better.’”
Stress and trauma have long been known as contributing factors in fibromyalgia, but researchers are still struggling to find out how they increase risk. “We know that psychology is strongly associated with chronic pain,” Staud says. “Emotional trauma is one of the vulnerabilities for the pain modulatory system, and families with emotional disorders are at much higher risk for chronic pain than others.” Genetic differences—in genes associated with pain or stress, for example—may explain some of that risk, but traumatic experiences seem to accelerate development of fibromyalgia, even in the absence of physical injury.
“Clearly any kind of stress or trauma can bring it on, whether it’s physical, emotional or even a stress on the immune system,” Clauw says. “That includes everything from early-life trauma to a major auto accident to the psychological stress of being deployed to war. Stress is so important.” Today, researchers are actively investigating what types of substances might circulate in the blood or affect the brain to link stress with fibromyalgia. The top contenders include stress hormones and inflammatory molecules released by immune cells in the brain or body.
Many researchers agree that what is now called fibromyalgia—characterized by widespread pain, fatigue, and cognitive and emotional disturbances—may be the final station on the chronic pain track. “Fibromyalgia is the endpoint—the end of the continuum,” says Clauw. “And maybe we can prevent people from getting there if we identify their risk early and treat aggressively,” which might include anti-depressant medications shown to improve fibromyalgia pain in some patients, he says.
Staud went further, saying that everyone might be at risk for chronic pain. “It’s not just the end of the line for chronic pain patients; it’s the end of the line for all of us.” How quickly we get there, he says, depends on how well we can fend off risks. “If you avoid significant trauma in life, be it physical or emotional, that can help keep your pain modulatory system very active and competent.” Otherwise, he says, “you get closer to chronic pain.” Of course not everyone develops chronic pain; some people seem to be protected for life. “For some, it’s a very flat trajectory toward that endpoint; for others, it’s very steep.”
How can people build up this protection to stave off chronic pain? Staud says there are four concrete steps to take in order to minimize risk, whether an individual already has chronic pain or not. First, prevention of injuries or other traumatic events that can lead to pain is important. Of course, this is not always possible, but for someone with fibromyalgia, it might mean avoiding stressful situations that could trigger a pain episode. Second, Staud says, physical exercise seems to condition the body against pain. Third, sleep is also protective, so getting as much high-quality sleep as possible will help. Finally, psychological coping skills are protective against pain. “The ability to adapt to stress of all sorts is critical,” Staud says. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), mindfulness, and supportive social interactions can all help build this resilience. However, Staud says, “there is a relatively small group of people who practice these steps consistently and effectively. The majority of the population does not.”
Staud stresses that all of these recommendations require tremendous effort on the part of the patient—effort they might not be able to expend. Telling people with fibromyalgia to exercise, sleep more and get therapy, he says, “is similar to telling poor people to save more money and be frugal in order to get rich.” Staud says the emphasis in pain care should instead be on prevention and early recognition, and then on building financial, social and emotional support for patients.
But, for those who are able to exercise, Sluka says the research shows that physical activity is perhaps the single most effective approach to alleviate chronic pain. “In the scientific literature, there is strong support for exercise as a way to mitigate pain—it’s one of the most effective treatments,” but only recently are doctors coming around to the idea of “prescribing” exercise for pain. Inactivity, she says, which is common in fibromyalgia patients, might contribute to or even cause some symptoms of fibromyalgia. “Research shows that higher physical activity leads to greater pain inhibition, it can improve cutaneous nerve innervation [the health and number of nerve fibers supplying the skin], and it can alter the immune system. Exercise does wonderful things.”
Sluka also says it is important that patients play an active role in setting the course for their treatment, though this does place an additional encumbrance on patients already bearing the burden of chronic pain. “Patients need to take control and help manage their own condition,” Sluka says. That’s for two reasons: first, because things like improving sleep and getting exercise, which are under a patient’s control, may lessen pain and improve function. And second, by gaining a sense of control, patients can reduce their stress and pain.
Finding a doctor who recognizes fibromyalgia and is willing to try different approaches is also crucial. Some people suffer from fibromyalgia for years, seeing only doctors who tell them there’s nothing wrong with them, or they undergo surgery that doesn’t help, and they become discouraged. “For a lot of people, this is a long struggle. They end up beaten down, feeling helpless and hopeless,” Clauw says. When Clauw encounters these patients, he says it’s very difficult to help them. “We have to attempt to prop them up and reinvigorate them. Patients have to embrace the fact that there are things they have to do to get better. We can’t give them a drug to cure this - we can’t do that with any pain condition. The goal is to get pain appropriately diagnosed and treated early on, so they don’t get to that end of the pathway.”
“The notion that there’s nothing we can do for people with fibromyalgia is really just wrong,” Clauw says. “When you look at everything available, there is almost always something that will help.” It’s important to try different medications and nondrug therapies, he says, because which treatments may work will vary from person to person.
Although many questions about the causes and treatment of fibromyalgia remain unanswered, Serra says, “it’s a very exciting moment in pain research. We’re beginning to see things we couldn’t even imagine. We will begin to make sense of this disease soon.”
Stephani Sutherland, PhD, is a neuroscientist, yogi, and freelance journalist in Southern California. Find her at StephaniSutherland.com or on Twitter @SutherlandPhD
Fibromyalgia: Maligned, Misunderstood, and (Finally) Treatable by Bret Stetka, Scientific American
Nerve Damage Might Explain Chronic Pain by Stephani Sutherland, Scientific American Mind
Related RELIEF content:
Is There a New Explanation for Fibromyalgia? A Podcast with Anne Louise Oaklander
Related Pain Research Forum content:
Multiple Studies, One Conclusion: Some Fibromyalgia Patients Show Peripheral Nerve Pathologies
Elucidating the Pathophysiology of Peripheral Neuropathies: A Conversation With Claudia Sommer
By Stephani Sutherland
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The shocking truth about sexually transmitted diseases in Devon and Cornwall
A World AIDS Day survey has revealed that 75 per cent of people in the South West have had unprotected sex, but 65 per cent have never been tested for HIV
Katie TimmsChief Reporter
Today is World AIDS Day and more than a third of people in the South West believe that HIV is no longer a threat.
A shocking study has revealed that awareness levels are low and that a large percentage of people have never been tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
The annual marker is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, to show support for people living with HIV, and to commemorate those who have died from an AIDS-related illness.
Figures show that more than a quarter of people in Devon and Cornwall believe there is a cure for HIV, a virus that attacks cells that help the body fight infection and, if left untreated, can lead to AIDS.
Plymouth six worst city for STIs as super-gonorrhoea cases soar
The shock statistics of a survey by INSTI, the world’s fastest HIV home self-test, also showed that 75 per cent of the South West have had unprotected sex while 65 per cent have never had a HIV test and nearly half [42 per cent] haven’t had an STI test.
These stark figures show just how important it is to get yourself checked, and it's extremely simple to get it done in Plymouth.
Charlotte with Andrew getting the INSTI HIV test (Image: The Herald)
One charity which is paving the way for HIV awareness is The Eddystone Trust, located on Whimple Street in the city centre. Plymouth Live reporter, Charlotte Turner, shows you how easy it is to get tested, here.
The survey also showed that 20 per cent of people risk their sexual health because they do not like using condoms and 40 per cent of people do not discuss their sexual health with a partner before having sex.
While new HIV diagnoses have fallen for a third consecutive year, the latest data from Public Health England reports that 43 per cent of all diagnoses were late, leading them to repeat its warning that people diagnosed late face 10 times more risk of short-term mortality.
Warning as antibiotic-resistant super-gonorrhoea cases rising in UK
New hope for millions of women with depressed vaginas
Louise Ball, of INSTI said: “While it is indeed good news that new diagnoses are in decline once again, HIV still remains a very real threat in 2019 and there is no room for complacency when it comes to sexual health awareness.
“People are simply playing lottery with their own sexual health, and potentially that of others, by not being aware of the very real risks. There is currently no cure for HIV and whilst it is potentially no longer the death sentence it once was, people are risking lives by not being aware.”
But whilst awareness is low, people still stigmatise the illness, with nearly half of people saying it is associated with sleeping around of being dirty or unclean.
Isabel Inman, of sexual health charity Brook, said: "It's clear from these findings that societal stigma is playing a huge part in limiting people's ability to stay sexually healthy.
"This is why we all need to work together to challenge prejudice and change attitudes. By promoting and normalising safer sex, healthy relationships and getting tested, we can empower people to take charge of their own sexual health and wellbeing."
If you would like more information or to take a HIV test, you can visit The Eddystone Trust at 11 Whimple Street, second floor suite, every Thursday between 5.30- and 7.30pm.
Shocking statistics about awareness of HIV in the South West
Alarmingly, 30 per cent of people in the South West said they haven’t asked a sexual partner due to being drunk/under the influence of drugs.
Only 30 per cent of people in the South West of England have had a HIV test.
Nearly half of people (46 per cent) don’t know how many recognised STI’s there are.
Nearly a quarter of people (22 per cent) think thrush is an STI.
12 per cent think cystitis is, whilst 13 per cent of people think bacterial vaginosis, is an STI.
Alarmingly, 29 per cent of people don’t think HIV is an STI.
17 per cent of people in the South West didn’t learnt about STIs at school.
35 per cent didn’t learn about HIV in school.
A whopping 60 per cent get advice on STIs online.
Only 15 per cent speak to friends.
Nearly a third of people in the South West (30 per cent) think HIV stands for ’Human Infection Virus’.
12 per cent think gay women do not have any risk of HIV transmission.
Over half (51 per cent) think a baby will definitely contract HIV if the mother has it.
Shockingly, 16 per cent of people in the South West care more about the way they look than their sexual health.
WHAT IS WORLD AIDS DAY?
World AIDS Day takes place on December 1 each year.
It’s an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, to show support for people living with HIV, and to commemorate those who have died from an AIDS-related illness.
Founded in 1988, World AIDS Day was the first ever global health day.
What it's like living with HIV in Plymouth
WHY IS WORLD AIDS DAY IMPORTANT?
Over 101,600 people are living with HIV in the UK. Globally, there are an estimated 36.7 million people who have the virus. Despite the virus only being identified in 1984, more than 35 million people have died of HIV or AIDS, making it one of the most destructive pandemics in history.
Today, scientific advances have been made in HIV treatment, there are laws to protect people living with HIV and we understand so much more about the condition.
Despite this, each year in the UK over 4,300 people are diagnosed with HIV, people do not know the facts about how to protect themselves and others, and stigma and discrimination remain a reality for many people living with the condition.
Hundreds of Plymouth people are HIV positive and don't know it
World AIDS Day is important because it reminds the public and government that HIV has not gone away – there is still a vital need to raise money, increase awareness, fight prejudice and improve education.
WHAT CAN I DO ON WORLD AIDS DAY?
World AIDS Day is an opportunity to show solidarity with the millions of people living with HIV worldwide.
Most people do this by wearing an HIV awareness red ribbon on the day.
You can order a red ribbon through our online shop, or pick one up in any MAC Cosmetics store, any branch of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank, selected branches of Morrisons, and selected branches of HSBC UK.
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Hudson Looking To Make An Impression
Young goalkeeper Mathew Hudson is looking to make his mark in pre-season as he continues his development.
Hudson, who came through the club's Academy, played the final half an hour of North End's opening pre-season game on Saturday afternoon and he's relishing the game time as he looks to show what he can do.
The 22-year-old impressed during his 30 minute spell between the sticks against Salford City and he's hoping to add to the experience on Tuesday when PNE face Tranmere Rovers at Prenton Park.
On Saturday's game, Matt said: "It was great, obviously it's quite new for me because in past seasons I've not really got the minutes that I would have liked to but it was great to get out on the pitch on Saturday and hopefully I can get some more minutes under my belt in the rest of pre-season.
Tranmere Rovers vs Preston North End Preview
"At the moment it's just a case of taking every game as it comes and going with the flow because the games come thick and fast and before we know it the season will be upon us.
"It's been really good, I enjoyed Saturday and it was good to get that first win and hopefully we can follow it up on Tuesday.
On Tuesday's trip to Tranmere, Hudson continued: "It's League Two opposition but it's a really good team in Tranmere, a really nice stadium and it's about getting minutes under the belt, playing different teams, seeing what kind of styles they play because I'm sure it's the same kind of styles that we are going to come up against in the Championship.
"It's a case of doing our thing, going out there and trying to get that win. The more wins we can get the more confidence it's going to give the team going in to the first game of the season so it can only be a positive if we can keep winning.
"Everyone is fighting for places, pre-season is always the same and everyone is raring to go and looking to make an impression on the manager and that's definitely something that I want to do.
"If I am getting minutes I definitely want to show the people who are watching what I can do to put myself in the frame to play or be involved at least and that's got to be the main aim for everyone for every game."
Hudson also spoke of what the fans can expect from him as a goalkeeper as he explained his desire to help the team at both ends of the pitch, with distribution one of his key attributes as a 'keeper.
"Kicking and distribution is one of the fun parts and that's something that you learn every day. It's probably not something that you work on as a main thing it's something you work on yourself to develop and it's always been something that I've enjoyed doing.
"Even if it means just staying behind after training to kick a few balls at a manikin or a cone, it's always been something that I've enjoyed so it's definitely one of my main attributes I would say and I would be looking to try and use that as much as I can whenever I am involved.
"It's good fun, I enjoy making assists and setting up attacks and to be honest it's more a case of just getting the ball away from the goal! The further it is away from me the less I will have to do is probably how I see it.
"You look at the likes of Allison and Ederson and 'keepers like that and they can ping the ball 90 yards and get the team up the pitch and relieve the pressure off the defenders and the midfielders. It's good to know the lads are going to run for you and if you hit the ball 90 yards they are going to run after it and it's good that we've got players in the team who are willing to do that."
While matchdays will be a key part of Hudson's development, he also explained how training with the first team squad on a daily basis, as well as with new goalkeeper coach Mike Pollitt, is providing the foundations for his future as a professional both on and off the pitch.
"When you are involved in the first team set up there are so many things you can learn from each day, not just from the goalkeepers but from the senior lads. Especially with me still being a young 'keeper, I can learn everyday from the little things that the senior players do and try and follow in their footsteps to become the right kind of professional and do things the right way.
"There is that side of things and then there's the goalkeeper side of things where I am learning from the other goalkeepers but also from Polly [Mike Pollitt] so it's a win win situation for me really. You can't get that experience elsewhere so having that experience at the club is vital to be honest.
"I'm loving it, every goalkeeper brings something different to the table. He's great, you can't deny the experience that he's got, it's fantastic. He was a Premier League goalkeeper and that's somewhere I want to get to so any little thing I can take from him every day is really good for me. I'm enjoying taking every day as it comes and learning different things every day with Polly."
Watch the full interview with Matt below or watch on iFollow via the official PNE App.
Mathew Hudson
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Home / Shop by Artist / O / Georgia OKeeffe / Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction Book of Postcards
Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction Book of Postcards
Twenty-six color reproductions bound in a handy postcard collection.
Oversized postcards measure 6½ x 4¾ in.
Born in 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a tiny village bordering the great north woods, Georgia O’Keeffe became a giant of twentieth-century modern art and the first American woman painter to gain unanimous respect from both critics and the public the world over. Yet she carried the powerful simplicity of the prairie with her always and maintained an integrity in her art that reflected the integrity of her life.
For thirty years, O’Keeffe exhibited and distributed her work through the galleries of famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whom O’Keeffe married in 1924. Her first solo show came at Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, and Stieglitz continued to exhibit her work until his death, in 1946. By that time, O’Keeffe’s large flower paintings, desert landscapes, and other iconic works had become well known and admired both in the United States and abroad. Two traveling retrospectives in 1966 and 1970 ensured her place as one of the most highly regarded American artists of all time.
Georgia O’Keeffe Keepsake Boxed Notecards
Item KB004
Georgia O'Keeffe: Petunias Notecard Folio
Georgia O'Keeffe: Landscapes Panoramic Boxed Notecards
Georgia O'Keeffe Notecard Folio
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Thursday, April 20, 2017 Begins New Appointment Procedure at GCT Bayonne
Starting Thursday April 20th, GCT Bayonne will require appointments for all transactions between 6:00 and 10:00 AM.
Incoming trucks should take note that no queuing will be allowed before 9:45AM.
GCT Bayonne rolled its Truck Management System (“appointment system”) on Sunday, January 15, 2017 following an extensive period of development, testing, and outreach with the drayage community. Jointly funded and developed by Sustainable Terminal Services, Inc., a consortium of the port’s six marine terminal operators, the system fulfills a pivotal Tier One Recommendation of the Port of New York and New Jersey’s Port Performance Task Force. It aims to meter truck arrival rates while keeping resources for all stakeholders operating at maximum levels, decreasing truck turn times, and adding a level of consistency for each trip. GCT Bayonne is the first of the Port of New York and New Jersey’s six constituent marine terminals to implement the Truck Management System. Other terminals are expected to online the TMS in the future.
The initial roll out took place on a limited basis. The move to require reservations for all transactions between 6:00 and 10:00 AM embodies the second phase of the roll out. Additional hours will be added to the system once the capacity from 6:00 until 10:00 has been fully utilized.
Positive results are already being realized. During one of the most recent test periods, a 38% lower turn time was experienced over transactions that occurred after the test period that same day. The new appointment system should continue to improve productivity and terminal capacity while reducing the number of trouble tickets/transactions, and decreasing emissions.
The new system covers all types of transactions (import, export, empty, reefer), and each driver’s appointment will be specific to the transaction(s) he/she would like to make. The system is based on the yard density and capacity in each location rather than simply metering trucks through the gate. This feature makes the system unlike its counterparts deployed elsewhere around the globe, and is expected to bring about greater efficiencies.
Reservation windows run for a full hour with a half hour grace period on either end. For example, an appointment to pick up container 00LU123456 scheduled from 0700 – 0800 would allow the trucker to arrive between 0630 – 0830. Since truck traffic will be metered into the terminal, the system is expected to accommodate single moves in 45 minutes and a double move within one hour. Reservations can be cancelled at any time, and modifications can only be made during the reservations window, which is currently Monday thru Friday 6:00 AM – 6:00 PM.
Drivers’ reservations will be activated when they arrive at GCT Bayonne via a read of their truck’s RFID tag. If the truck does not have a valid reservation or the license plate/RFID association is invalid, the trucks will be directed out at the security checkpoint.
ACCESS AND CUSTOMER SUPPORT
The reservation system can be accessed by registered users at www.porttruckpass.com.
Customer Service is available to support any application issues such as a trucker’s registration by calling 1-866-758-3838.
GCT has also established its own Customer Support Desk to handle individual reservation or transaction specific questions, which is available via 201-706-4242 or truckreservation@global-terminal.com.
A series of You Tube videos with instructions on how to make appointments for each type of transaction (i.e. MT in/Import Out, Export In/MT Out, etc.) as well as FAQ’s and a comprehensive users guide is available on the PortTruckPass portal, at GCT’s website, and at https://vimeopro.com/gct1/gct-bayonne-tms.
ALWAYS THINK SAFETY!
Truckers are reminded to obey all traffic laws including compliance with “No Parking” and “No Standing” requirements in the areas near the terminal.
In: New Programs, Traffic Advisory
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Flying Colorado’s 14ers
Entertainment Entertainment |
Randy Wyrick
Garrett Fisher flew his 65-year-old Piper Cub PA-11
Special to the Weekly |
Above the Summit: An Antique Airplane Conquers Colorado’s Fourteeners
Author: Garrett Fisher
132 pages, 111 images
Published by Tenmile Publishing, Breckenridge, Colo.
To order Fisher’s books, or for information about his groundbreaking work as an entrepreneur and economic innovator, go to http://www.garrettfisher.me.
Garrett Fisher is one of the few people on God’s green earth who sees eye-to-eye with 14ers.
He published a book about flying his 65-year-old Piper Cub PA-11 over and around all of Colorado’s 14ers — mountains that rise to more than 14,000 feet above sea level.
Few in this world will stand atop a 14er, Fisher said. Most of us view them from a distance or after getting off a ski lift. Distance reduces them to “ordinary,” another mountain with snow on it, Fisher said.
They are not.
“An airplane joins a 14er in its domain: the high reaches of the atmosphere, looking at the highest mountains in the Continental United States as an equal,” Fisher said.
His last one was Mount Sneffels, near Telluride. He had landed to pick up some fuel and food, and looked back at the craggy peaks he had just flown over and through, when he had this moment of clarity.
“I must have been out of my mind,” Fisher remembers thinking.
IT’S GENETIC
His grandfather agreed, counseling against this sort of behavior, Fisher said. Then again, his grandfather was 76 when he got his helicopter license, and he taught Fisher to fly that Piper when Fisher was a teenager.
It may seem a little nuts, and maybe it is, but a touch of insanity isn’t the only thing Fisher got from his grandfather and father. He also inherited that plane.
His grandfather restored it years ago. Fisher’s father got from his father, and Fisher inherited it from him.
His grandfather didn’t really use it any longer because, at age 76, he got his helicopter license and bought a Bell chopper — like one of those helicopters in the “M*A*S*H” television show and movie.
He’d fly all over Upstate New York and land at gas stations and coffee shops to have a cup of coffee with his buddies. People were so awed that they’d stop while he was there to ask him about it all and buy stuff from the station. Gas station owners started carrying aviation fuel so he’d land there and create a tourist attraction.
He took his first flight in a Piper J-3 Cub when he was 2 years old. At age 8, his grandfather started giving him flying lessons, and he earned his pilot’s license at age 17.
He flies that PA-11 all over the U.S. and Canada, photographing along the way and writing books about it.
“There is no radio, and I’m literally flying by the seat of my pants, with the door open,” Fisher said.
He’s enthusiastically thrifty and often finds himself in a tent sleeping next to the airplane at small town airports all over America.
When he’s not doing this sort of thing, he’s an entrepreneur and economic innovator, founder of the Institute for Economic Innovation based in Frisco. He has been featured in Wired magazine and Ted Talks’ TEDx.
His other books include “Human Theory of Everything,” “Where the Colorado River is Born” and “Extreme Autumn: Fall in Colorado.”
Like most pilots, Fisher tends to be romantic about flying, something he portrays in his books.
“My goal is to convey the awesome beauty of wilderness areas and the experience of flying over them to as many people as possible,” he said.
He calls his Piper “the ’57 Chevy of the sky.” It weighs 766 pounds empty. It’s a tandem seat aircraft, one seat in the front and one in back — no heater and no electronics. There’s an on/off switch for fuel and a couple gauges, pedals and a stick.
Flying around with the door open, even in brutally cold winter weather, he shot about 1,000 frames every time he went up, and while he was looking for just the right picture he was also tracking places to make emergency landings.
“I never had to use one because the engine never quit, but it’s something that gets drilled into your head,” Fisher said.
Most places have features that define them for people who aren’t from there and some who are. New York City has the Manhattan skyline. In Alaska, it’s raw wilderness, Fisher said.
In general, visitors identify Colorado with snow-capped peaks and specifically 14ers.
“What drives people to climb them and tourists to slam on their brakes and gawk at them, or for me to circle them in an airplane, is rooted in the same thing: the enigmatic mystique of a pile of rocks that defied the conventions by which we live,” Fisher said.
Randy Wyrick can be reached at 970-748-2935 or rwyrick@vaildaily.com.
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Carbondale Clay Center’s ‘Parts and pieces coming together’
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John Chadima, 58
IOW
John Michael Chadima, 58, of Iowa City, died peacefully in his sleep on Tuesday, August 19 of natural causes.
Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 9:00 a. m. on Saturday, August 23 at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Iowa City with Father John Spiegel officiating. Following the service a light brunch will be available at St. Mary’s. Burial will be in the Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City. Friends may call from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Friday at Lensing Funerel & Cremation Service in Iowa City. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that memorial donations be given to the Iowa City Public Library, the Iowa City Animal Shelter or Oaknoll Retirement Home.
John was born on December 14, 1955 to Barbara (Dytrt) and Wayne Chadima in Iowa City. He graduated from Iowa City High School, and received a BBA from the College of Business at the University of Iowa in 1981, where he majored finance. After working at Iowa Book and Supply, John joined Iowa State Bank & Trust Co., now MidWestOne Bank, in 1981. He began as a Savings & Investment Teller and then served as a Financial Services Officer. In 1990, John joined the Trust Services Division and rose to become a Vice President & Trust Officer of the bank. John was a true professional who believed in the bank’s mission --“Take care of our customers, and those who should be”-- and carried it through each of his extraordinary client relationships. John loved the people he worked with, honored their wishes, and always went the extra mile to do the right thing for them.
John was dedicated in service to his community and actively participated in many organizations and boards, including Iowa City Hospice; the Preucil School of Music; Johnson County Historical Society; Iowa City Chamber Leadership Program; Friends of Historic Preservation; Brucemore; Iowa City Foreign Relations Council; UniverCity Program; University of Iowa Museum of Art; Englert Theater; Friends of the Animal Center Foundation and the Oaknoll Retirement Home. He and partner Donald Black generously hosted dinners to benefit the Iowa City Public Library.
John loved Iowa City and his many friends. In return, those who knew John loved and respected him. He described himself as a banker who hated numbers but loved people. The entire community will feel his loss.
John made others feel comfortable and at his homes in Iowa City and Lake MacBride. He loved architecture and design, and reading. He travelled throughout the United States and particularly enjoyed New Orleans and Charleston. John and Donald were very proud to own and renovate one of Iowa City’s premier historic homes. Always impeccably dressed, John insisted on ironing his own shirts.
He will be greatly missed by his family and friends including his partner Donald Black; sister Kathy and her partner Paula Blackard; sister Joanie Bailey and her husband Bryan; nephew Chad Bailey, daughter Ella and son Colin; and nephew Jonathan Bailey, his wife Angela, sons Ethan and Parker, and daughter Maykala; and his uncle Lee Dytrt. His parents preceded him in death.
The family wishes to thank his many friends who have stepped forward to assist this week and to give their deep expressions of condolence.
On line condolences may be directed to www.lensingfuneral.com.
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Theater and Performance
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Performing Arts - Theater/History & Criticism
As If
Herbert Blau
A legendary figure in American theater looks back
As If: An Autobiography traces the complex life and career of director, scholar, and theorist Herbert Blau, one of the most innovative voices in the American theater. From his earliest years on the streets of Brooklyn, with gang wars there, to the often embattled, now-legendary Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, the powerfully told story of Blau's first four decades is also a social history, moving from the Great Depression to the cold war, with fallout from "the balance of terror" on what he once described in an incendiary manifesto as The Impossible Theater.
Blau has always forged his own path, from his activist resistance to the McCarthy witch hunts to his emergence as a revolutionary director whose work included the controversial years at The Workshop, which introduced American audiences to major playwrights of the European avant-garde, including Brecht, Beckett, Genet, and Pinter. There is also an account here of that notorious production of Waiting for Godot at the maximum-security prison at San Quentin, which became the insignia of the Theater of the Absurd.
Blau went on from The Workshop to become codirector of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, and then founding provost of California Institute of the Arts, where he developed and became artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN. Currently Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington, Blau has been visionary in the passage from theater to theory, and his many influential and award-winning books include The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000; Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett; Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion; To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance; The Audience; The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern; and Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point.
This richly evocative book includes never-before-published photographs of the author, his family and friends, collaborators in the theater, and theater productions.
"I read As If from cover to cover, engaged and powerfully moved by a familiar brilliance . . . Blau holds an utterly unique place in twentieth-century American theater, in American culture, and in theater theory and practice."
—Elin Diamond, Rutgers University
"Few theater practitioners have had comparable influence in American theater; few have endured such intoxicating highs and dispiriting lows; none, arguably, has reflected so deeply and sharply about so wide a spectrum of first-hand practical experience."
—Linda Gregerson, University of Michigan
"Masterful . . . a brilliant and touching book written with honesty and humility . . . In addition, it serves as an admirable introduction to Blau's theories, providing a context for his complex and sometimes difficult ideas."
—John Lutterbie, Stony Brook University
"From his childhood in the 'Jewish heart' of Brooklyn to his memorable production of Endgame in the 1960s, Herbert Blau's autobiography provides not only more of Blau's penetrating insights into dramatists like Beckett and into the complex cross-currents of the American experimental theatre of this turbulent period. It is also a rich, deeply felt and powerfully expressed chronicle of cultural change that goes far beyond specific theatrical productions to offer a valuable personal view of the years that did so much to shape the contemporary world, expressed by one of the theatre community's most original and articulate thinkers."
---Marvin Carlson, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Herbert Blau co-founded The Actor’s Workshop, co-directed the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, was artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN, and is credited with introducing American audiences to major playwrights of the European avant-garde. Author of many influential books, he is currently Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington.
Praise / Awards
—Marvin Carlson, Sidney E. Cohn Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
"Herb Blau's memoir—of his life, but also of an era—captures what has always been important about his work. 'Blooded thought', he taught us to call it—the embodied process of 'finding yourself divided, in the embrace of what's remembered'. His vivid account of childhood in a particular kind of American neighbourhood is complemented by reflection on his years in San Francisco when the theatre and the Cold War unfolded as mutual antagonists in his personal drama. Acute, insightful, and sometimes painful, it is also an intellectual page-turner."
—Janelle Reinelt, University of Warwick
"[a] rigorous, thrilling, almost Nabokovian performance of memory with its urgent, profuse, paratactical sentences."
—R. Remshardt, CHOICE
Chapter One: They and There
Copyright © 2011, University of Michigan. All rights reserved.
Sails of the Herring Fleet
Reality Principles
The Very Thought of Herbert Blau
Agitated States
DOI: 10.3998/mpub.100352
6 x 9.
33 B&W illustrations.
Available for sale worldwide
Due to the current global health event, shipping of print books may be delayed. Actual status will show in the shopping cart.
$65.00 U.S.
Brownsville, the Depression, San Francisco, Actor's Workshop, Jules Irving, Barthes, Beckett, Brecht, Stanford, Winters, Godot, San Quentin
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News / Aberdeenshire
Man taken to hospital after being struck by car in Inverurie
by Cheryl Livingstone
February 6, 2018, 8:45 am Updated: February 6, 2018, 11:35 am
A man was taken to hospital this morning after being struck by a car in a north-east town.
High Street in Inverurie was closed for several hours after the incident occurred just before 7.30am.
Police and ambulance attended, and the road was shut between the roundabout at the town hall and Keithhall road. Diversions were put in place and it re-opened at around 10am.
A force spokeswoman said the male pedestrian has been taken to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.
A Scottish Ambulance Services spokeswoman said: “We received a call at 0723 hours today to attend a road traffic collision on High Street, Inverurie.
“We dispatched two ambulances to the scene. One male patient was transported to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.”
Cyclist taken to hospital following crash with car at Aberdeen roundabout
Emergency services called to crash involving cyclist and car in Aberdeen
Man charged with attempted murder after alleged machete attack in Fraserburgh
One taken to hospital following three-vehicle crash on A96
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Portal for students and teachers
Spanish Congress in Argentina
The VIII International Congress of the Spanish Language will be held from March 27–30 in Córdoba, Argentina, with more than 200 writers, academics, experts, and professionals from around the world related to Spanish. It will be inaugurated by King Felipe of Spain and the Argentine president, Mauricio Macri. The theme of the event is “America and the future of Spanish. Culture and education, technology and entrepreneurship.”
It will be the second time that Argentina has hosted the Congress, the first being in Rosario in 2004. Gustavo Santos, Argentina’s secretary of tourism, remarked that “the Córdoba of Leopoldo Lugones [poet] or María Teresa Andruetto [writer] will be infected by the beautiful Spanish language.”
The program of academic events of this panhispanic symposium has been devised by Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the Real Academia Española (RAE), who is taking into account the broad geographical origin of the speakers (America, Africa, Asia, and Europe) as well as the high proportion of women participating in the event.
Luis García Montero, director del Instituto Cervantes; Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the Real Academia Española (RAE) and of the ASALE (Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española); Gustavo Santos, secretary of tourism for Argentina; and Juan Schiaretti, governor of the province of Córdoba.
Experts and artists from all over the Spanish-speaking world and from other countries will take part in the event, including the writers Mario Vargas Llosa and Carme Riera and the Ibero-American general secretary, Rebeca Grynspan.
Five Thematic Axes
The symposium is structured around five thematic sections or axes: “Spanish, universal language,” “Language and interculturality,” “Challenges of Spanish in 21st-century education,” “Spanish and the digital society,” and “The competitiveness of Spanish as a language for innovation and entrepreneurship.”
Each section will begin with a plenary session, a general presentation, and a round table, followed by a series of panels addressing the issue in depth.
There will also be three special plenary sessions: a tribute to Víctor García de la Concha, former director of the RAE (1998–2010) and Instituto Cervantes (2012–2017); a concert in homage to the Spanish musician Manuel de Falla; and another session in which the organizing institutions (RAE-ASALE, Instituto Cervantes, and Argentina) will present their activities and projects.
Previous congresses were held in Zacatecas (Mexico, 1997), Valladolid (Spain, 2001), Rosario (Argentina, 2004), Cartagena de Indias (Colombia, 2007), Valparaíso (Chile, 2010), Panama City (2013), and San Juan (Puerto Rico, 2016).
Registration for the event is now open (www.congresodelalengua.org.ar).
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Betty White Shares Secret To Long Life As She Approaches 99th Birthday
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Andrew Lloyd Weber Volunteers To Be Part Of Coronavirus Vaccine Trial
August 13, 2020 August 13, 2020 CBCBARBADOSNews
Andrew Lloyd Webber is hoping to kickstart the re-opening of Britain’s theaters by volunteering to try a breakthrough coronavirus vaccine.
The composer and theater impresario will take part in an experimental study on Thursday, August 13, and he hopes his efforts will help medics find a cure all for the killer COVID-19 virus.
“I am excited that tomorrow I am going to be vaccinated for the Oxford Covid 19 trial,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “I’ll do anything to prove that theatres can re-open safely.”
Andrew Lloyd Webber declared participation in coronavirus vaccine trial.
The University of Oxford has been developing an experimental vaccine called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and the results have been promising, according to the BBC.
Lloyd Webber’s tweet comes weeks after he urged British leaders to come up with a firm plan to re-open the nation’s theaters, revealing the ongoing shutdown, due to the coronavirus crisis, is costing him millions.
The man behind shows like “Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats” told the BBC, “The average play needs a 65 percent capacity and a musical needs more (to survive)… It’s a lot of money and we can’t do it indefinitely. We’ve reached our borrowing limits.”
Lloyd Webber, who is currently working on the music for the postponed “Cinderella” musical, revealed he has been told theaters may open fully in November, but added, “No one can do that on the basis of an aspiration. We need a date we can open on… but I don’t think theatre is number one on the government’s list of priorities.”
Raymond G Allen Senior best known for the TV series Sanford And Son and Good Times dies at age 91 from respiratory issues
Dolly Parton Is Releasing a Christmas Album
Q 100.7fm is a radio station owned and operated by The Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation located in Barbados West Indies. The station caters to ages 45 and over, playing all music genres from 50’s, 60’s and 70’s and highlighting Barbadian artistes. Our daily programming also reflects community life, past, present and future. We are also the originators of the Radio and TV8 Show Q in the Community aired every Thursday 11am-5pm. We invite Barbadians and Caribbean people from all over the world to log in, listen, comment, send requests, and tell us stories about their lives and homes on qfm.bb. and our slogan Q…is good for you..
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New study reveals lower energy limit for life on Earth
An international team of researchers led by Queen Mary University of London have discovered that microorganisms buried in sediment beneath the seafloor can survive on less energy than was previously known to support life. The findings have implications for understanding the limit of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere.
Marine sediments that cover the seafloor are estimated to contain an abundance of life. Image credit: Jefferey Marlow, Boston University
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, uses data from the sub-seafloor to construct innovative models that divide the oceans into hundreds of thousands of individual grid cells. A global picture of the sub-seafloor biosphere was then assembled, including key lifeforms and biogeochemical processes.
Since the discovery of the ‘deep biosphere’ in the 1990’s, scientists have explored Earth’s subsurface to reveal the extent and characteristics of life within it. Drills are used to penetrate deep into ocean basement rock. Samples are then brought to Earth’s surface and analysed using gene sequencing and microscopy techniques to detect and characterize lifeforms. Surprisingly, scientists have detected life in almost every sample analysed from deep ocean sediments.
Photographs taken from ALVIN, a manned deep-ocean research submersible, taking sediment cores at the ocean floor of the Dorado Outcrop in 2014. Credit: Geoff Wheat, NSF OCE 1130146, and the National Deep Submergence Facility.
Understanding how energy is used to support life
By combining data on the distribution and amounts of carbon and microbial life contained in Earth’s deep biosphere with the rate of biological and chemical reactions, the researchers were able to determine the ‘power’ consumption of individual microbial cells – in other words – the rate at which they utilize energy. All life on Earth constantly uses energy in order to remain active, sustain metabolism, and carry out essential functions such as growth, and the repair and replacement of biomolecules.
The results show that sub-seafloor microbes survive using far less energy than has ever previously been shown to support any form of life on Earth. By stretching the habitable boundaries of life to encompass lower energy environments, the findings could inform future studies of where, when and how life arose on a hostile early Earth, and where life might be located elsewhere in the solar system.
Implications for life elsewhere in the solar system
Dr James Bradley, Lecturer in Environmental Science at Queen Mary said: “When we think about the nature of life on Earth, we tend to think about the plants, animals, microscopic algae, and bacteria that thrive on Earth’s surface and within its oceans – constantly active, growing and reproducing. Yet here we show that an entire biosphere of microorganisms – as many cells as are contained in all of Earth’s soils or oceans, have barely enough energy to survive. Many of them are simply existing in a mostly inactive state – not growing, not dividing, and not evolving. These microbes use less energy than we previously thought was possible to support life on Earth.
“The average human uses around 100 watts of power – meaning they burn approximately 100 joules of energy every second. This is roughly equivalent to the power of a ceiling fan, a sewing machine, or two standard lightbulbs. We calculate that the average microbe trapped in deep ocean sediments survives on fifty-billion-billion times less energy than a human.”
Jan Amend, Director of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI) at the University of Southern California, and co-author of the study, said: “Previous studies of life in the subseafloor – and there have been many good ones – focused predominantly on who’s there, and how much of it is there. Now we’re digging deeper into ecological questions: what is it doing, and how fast is it doing it? Understanding the power limits of life establishes an essential baseline for microbial life on Earth and elsewhere.”
Questions raised about what constitutes life
The findings raise fundamental questions about our definitions of what constitutes life, as well as the limits of life on Earth, and elsewhere. With such little energy available, it is unlikely that organisms are able to reproduce or divide, but instead use this miniscule amount of energy for ‘maintenance’ – replacing or repairing their damaged parts. It is likely, therefore, that many of the microbes found at great depths beneath the seafloor are remnants from populations that inhabited shallow coastal settings thousands to millions of years ago.
Unlike organisms on the surface of Earth, which operate on short (daily and seasonal) timescales according to the Sun, it is likely that these deeply buried microbes exist on much longer timescales, such as the movement of tectonic plates, and changes in ocean oxygen levels and circulation.
The research also sheds light on how the microbes interact with chemical processes occurring deep below the seafloor. Whilst oxygen provides the highest amount of energy to microbes, it is in overwhelmingly short supply – present in less than three per cent of sediments.
Potential for life on other planets
Sediments without oxygen, however, are far more widespread, often containing microorganisms that obtain energy by generating methane – a potent greenhouse gas. Despite being practically inactive, the microbial cells contained in Earth’s marine sediments are so numerous, and survive over such extraordinarily long timescales, that they act as an important driver of earth’s carbon and nutrient cycles – even affecting the concentration of carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere over thousands to millions of years.
“The findings of the research call into question not just the nature and limits of life on Earth, but elsewhere in the Universe,” added Dr Bradley. “If life does exist on Mars or Europa for example, it would most likely take refuge in the subsurface of these energy-limited planetary bodies. If microbes only need a few zeptowatts of power to survive, there could be remnants of extant life, long dormant but still technically ‘alive’, beneath their icy surface.”
Despite being cast in persistent darkness, cut off from most nutrient sources, and subjected to extreme heat and pressure, Earth’s subsurface is estimated to contain an abundance of life. An estimated 15 to 23 billion tonnes of microorganisms live here - hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet. Marine sediments that cover the seafloor contain a significant portion of this deep life.
Research paper: J. A. Bradley, Sandra Arndt, J. P. Amend, E. Burwicz, A. W. Dale, M. Egger, D. E. LaRowe, Widespread Energy Limitation to Life in Global Sub-seafloor Sediments, Science Advances (2020).
Study Environmental Science at Queen Mary
Read more about Queen Mary's School of Geography.
News story: Soil bacteria can survive on air – and help to regulate climate change
News story: Queen Mary academics awarded major grant to undertake research into impact of Covid-19
News story: The past is key to predicting future climate according to new study
For media information, contact:
Paul Jordan
Faculty Communications Manager (HSS)
email: p.jordan@qmul.ac.uk
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Summoners War Esports: Thailand, Taiwan and Australia to enter World Finals
Com2us announced that ‘SWC 2019’ Asia Pacific Cup was held successfully in Taipei on the 28th of September. DILIGENT from Australia won the championship, and will advance to World Final on October 26th along with Taiwan – Hong Kong LAMA and Thailand JUDAS.
SWC2019 Asia Pacific Cup has been broadcasted online on YouTube and Twitch. The tournament was broadcasted in 10 languages including Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, English, French and German. More than 110,000 online concurrent viewers were surpassed, proving the popularity of the game and the event.
This is the competition between battle-scarred players and powerful rookies to defend the strongholds of victory. In the quarter-finals, DILIGENT, PERR, JUDAS and LAMA didn’t give a match to their opponents. Advancing to the final match, although DILIGENT and LAMA won the tickets to go to World Final in Paris, DILIGENT’s solid Ban pick strategy got him the 1st place of Asia Pacific Cup. PERR – Korean player and JUDAS entered the 3rd – 4th place matches to win the last ticket to the World Final, and it was presented to JUDAS.
SWC 2019, which began its journey from July, held a total of 3 cups (Americas Cup, Europe Cup, and Asia-Pacific Cup). From these cups, 8 players will advance and compete in the World Finals. These 8 players will compete to become the best Summoner in the World Finals and $ 100,000 in money prize.
SWC 2019 World Finals will be live broadcasted from Summoners War eSports YouTube Official Channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/SummonersWarEsports).
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Degrees: M.B.B.S., D.O., M.S., M.D., F.R.C.S.C.
Medical School: Gujarat University, India
Residency Program: Gujarat University, India
Fellowship Program: Anterior Segment & Refractive Surgery, Gimbel Eye Centre, Alberta
Fellowship Program: Medical Retina, University of Toronto, Ontario
Fellow of Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons of Canada (FRCSC) Certification: 2010
Medical Retina and Comprehensive Ophthalmology
Suite 250-6707 Elbow Dr SW
Calgary, AB T2V 0E4
7808 Elbow Dr. SW
Calgary, AB T2V 1K4
Chirag Shah is a medical retinal specialist and comprehensive ophthalmologist. He has completed two fellowships. The first fellowship was in Anterior Segment and Refractive surgery and the second in Medical Retina. His practice areas focus on retinal diseases, including age-related macular degeneration (AMD), retinal detachments, retinopathy of prematurity (blinding retinal disease in premature babies), diabetic retinopathy, hereditary eye diseases, and hypertensive retinopathy.
Chirag received the top mark in his ophthalmology residency and was awarded the gold medal in medical school. Chirag is regularly published as both lead and supporting author, in addition to being a regular public speaker, educator, and presenter. He has presented his research at international conferences and is a reviewer for the Canadian Journal of Ophthalmology, Retina, and Retinal Cases & Brief Reports journals. Chirag teaches medical students, residents, and optometry students.
Chirag has volunteered countless hours at health and eye camps performing hundreds of surgeries for people who do not have the means or opportunity to otherwise receive health care services. Through the Blind People’s Association (BPA), Chirag has worked to fund equipment to provide comprehensive eye care services in India. Chirag volunteers his time to maintain the highest standards in clinical research and medical care through involvement in Health Research Ethics Board of Alberta-Clinical Trials Committee (HREBA-CTC) at Alberta Innovates since 2012. Chirag was appointed as a public member by Order of Council of Government of Alberta on Board of Governor for Bow Valley College in December 2016 and has been on Community Relations Council of Bow Valley College.
Chirag is currently accepting retinal and general ophthalmology referrals.
2015 Honorable Mentions Alberta Medical Association Award for Compassionate Service.
2015 Alberta Medical Association Many Hands: Many hands
2015 Immigrant Services Calgary: Promotion of Immigrant of Distinction Award.
2014 CTV news: Inspired Albertan by Darryl Janz
2014 Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons Canada
2012 Indo-Canadian Association Distinguished Professional Award presented by Premier
2011 Calgary Immigrant Services Distinguished Professional Award
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From hybrids to SUVs, unsold cars pile up
By Nichola Groom
LONG BEACH, California (Reuters) - From pricey luxury sedans to popular hybrid cars, automobiles made overseas are stacking up at ports and parking lots around the United States as supplies far outstrip demand amid the nation’s worst auto market in more than 25 years.
Toyota automobiles are lined up in an holding lot at the Port of Long Beach in California December 4, 2008. REUTERS/Fred Prouser
At the Long Beach port near Los Angeles, Toyota Motor Corp vehicles including Prius hybrids, FJ Cruiser sport utility vehicles and Lexus IS 250 luxury sedans are being stored on a vast construction site that will one day be a new container terminal.
The site became a gigantic parking lot when Toyota and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz asked the port for space to store thousands of vehicles that dealerships have not been able to take on due to sluggish sales.
“It’s unusual that they would be here longer than a few days, but that’s the situation now,” said Art Wong, a spokesman for the Port of Long Beach. “They can’t move it through their pipeline fast enough so they are asking for additional space while they keep their vehicles here more than a few days, and in some cases more than a few weeks.”
The port has not counted how many additional cars were being stored, but Wong said Toyota has leased an additional 23 acres of space while Mercedes-Benz has leased about 20 more acres.
Nissan Motor Co Ltd, which brings its cars in through the neighboring Los Angeles port, had been talking to Long Beach about leasing space, Wong said, though that arrangement fell through.
A Port of Los Angeles spokeswoman, Theresa Adams-Lopez, said Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics (WWL), which operates the terminal that brings in Nissan’s vehicles, had shifted vehicle storage to another state.
Nissan spokeswoman Katherine Zachary said the company last increased its space at the Port of Los Angeles in February.
“As a normal course of business, we’ve got cars moving out of there all the time to various points across the country,” Zachary said in an e-mail.
WWL, which is based in Norway, would not comment on specific customers, but said auto inventories were building up across the United States.
“We are seeing cargo buildup at ports of entry on both coasts as well as at other inventory points such as factories and rail yards and dealerships,” Christopher Connor, the head of WWL’s business in the Americas, said in a statement.
Other ports are also seeing a buildup of cars, though not all of them are leasing large tracts of land to automakers. The San Diego port, which brings in Honda Motor Co, Volkswagen AG and Mitsubishi Corp vehicles, has about 14,000 cars on its property. That’s about 2,000 more vehicles than usual, according to spokesman John Gilmore, who said the additional cars belong to a range of manufacturers.
COLLAPSING DEMAND
Global automakers have been sideswiped by the collapsing demand for new cars and trucks. A market slowdown that began in the United States has spread to Europe and Asia.
Detroit’s embattled automakers have been pushed to the brink of failure by the downturn and are asking the U.S. Congress for a $34 billion rescue package.
But the sharp decline in sales in October and November blindsided even the industry’s better-performing manufacturers like Toyota and Honda.
Toyota said on Friday that it was cutting North American output by idling factories that produce vehicles such as the Camry and Corolla, the Japanese automakers’ top-selling cars.
Toyota spokesman Mike Goss said inventory had been pushed to “unacceptably high” levels that would take 80 to 90 days of sales to clear.
That is still less than the 115-day supply of inventory on average for General Motors Corp, Ford Motor Co and Chrysler LLC, but it is double Toyota’s inventory levels of just a year earlier.
The surge in inventories has been a small blessing to some in the industry. Automobile processors, who wash, repair and accessorize imported cars before they head to dealerships, said revenue from storing cars is helping offset the market’s overall sluggishness.
MidTexas International Center Inc, whose Midlothian, Texas, facility processes vehicles for Kia Motors Corp, Mazda Motor Corp and Toyota’s Lexus, expects to break even this year despite the dismal auto market because automakers are paying for cars to sit on its lots for longer.
“The inflow of vehicles is a lot greater than the outflow,” MidTexas President Randy Denton said. “That helps to offset the loss of income from the vehicles that we’re not processing.”
Editing by Carol Bishopric
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Deadly new Russian weapon hides in shipping container
By Michael Stott
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian company is marketing a devastating new cruise missile system which can be hidden inside a shipping container, giving any merchant vessel the capability to wipe out an aircraft carrier.
Potential customers for the formidable Club-K system include Kremlin allies Iran and Venezuela, say defense experts. They worry that countries could pass on the satellite-guided missiles, which are very hard to detect, to terrorist groups.
“At a stroke, the Club-K gives a long-range precision strike capability to ordinary vehicles that can be moved to almost any place on earth without attracting attention,” said Robert Hewson of Jane’s Defense Weekly, who first disclosed its existence.
A promotional video for the Club-K on the website of Moscow-based makers Kontsern-Morinformsistema-Agat shows an imaginary tropical country facing a land, sea and air attack from a hostile neighbor.
It fights back by loading three shipping containers concealing Club-Ks onto a truck, a train and a ship, disperses them, and then launches a devastating strike on its enemy, destroying its warships, tanks and airfields.
“The idea that you can hide a missile system in a box and drive it around without anyone knowing is pretty new,” said Hewson, who is editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons.
“Nobody’s ever done that before.”
Hewson estimated the cost of the Club-K system, which packs four ground or sea-launched cruise missiles into a standard 40-foot shipping container, at $10-20 million.
“Unless sales are very tightly controlled, there is a danger that it could end up in the wrong hands,” he said.
The promotional video showed how an ordinary shipping container with the Club-K inside could be hidden among other containers on a train or a ship. When required, the roof lifts off and the four missiles stand upright ready to fire.
An official reached by telephone at makers Kontsern Morinformsistema-Agat declined to answer questions about the Club-K.
He said the firm had no spokesman and he needed time to study written questions before passing a request to the firm’s management.
Russia is one of the world’s top arms exporters, selling a record $8.5 billion of weapons last year to countries ranging from Syria and Venezuela to Algeria and China. Its order book is estimated to top $40 billion.
Mikhail Barabanov, a defense expert at Russia’s Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), said that as far as he understood, the Club-K was still at the concept stage.
“Potential clients include anyone who likes the idea,” he said. “It is known that the United Arab Emirates has shown interest in buying the Club.”
Barabanov said the Club-K used proven missiles from Novator, an established Russian maker of weaponry including anti-submarine, surface-to-air and submarine-launched missiles.
One of the missiles on offer is a special anti-ship variant with a second stage which splits off after launch and accelerates to supersonic speeds of up to Mach 3.
“It’s a carrier-killer,” said Hewson of Jane’s. “If you are hit by one or two of them, the kinetic impact is vast...it’s horrendous.”
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LUXURY HIRE
REFINED MARQUES SERVICES
7 Facts About Bugatti Veyron Sports You Need to Know
5 Easy Strategies on How to Buy a Lamborghini
9 Awesome BMW Facts (Number 5 Will Surprise You)
When looking for a luxury car, you want one with style, a historical reputation, and great performance.
While there are many cars that may fit the bill, there is one that stands out amongst the rest.
We are, of course, talking about the Bugatti Veyron Sports car.
What to Know About the Bugatti Veyron Sports
The two main Bugatti models available today are the Chiron and the Veyron. While both are popular, the Veyron is truly an exclusive and rare model. Even amongst the existing models, there are rare and unique variations.
If you’ve taken one look at the Bugatti Veyron Sports, you are probably ready to jump into one.
If you’ve decided that this will be your luxury car of choice, here is what you should know about this fantastic automobile and the history of the company:
1. Need for Speed
It is no secret that the Bugatti Veyron Sports is among the fastest cars in the world. It is built with 16 cylinders and 1,000 horsepower.
It also includes four turbochargers. This intense speed capacity means that the car needs 10 radiators just to keep it cool!
It is able to reach up to 267 miles per hour in less than a minute.
But while we may take the speed and the other great features for granted, the Bugatti Veyron has an incredible history…
2. How it Came to Be
So how did the Bugatti company start? Ferdinand Piëch was the Chief Executive Officer of Volkswagen. He had a background in engineering and understood the inner workings of a car.
He took a blank sheet of paper and drew an engine with eighteen cylinders. This was unprecedented as building such an engine had never been attempted before.
This design eventually came to life. It was built with three VR6 six-cylinder engines. These engines were fit together and it remains one of the most fantastic engines you’ll find today.
3. The Bugatti Revival
Bugatti was an existing car brand that eventually died down in the twentieth century.
It was in 1998 when Ferdinand saw a toy of one of Bugatti’s former models. It was the 1937 Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic.
Bugatti was a stylish brand. It had a sense of class that the luxury car enthusiast would respond to.
Ferdinand eventually bought the Bugatti brand. He would reintroduce the brand to the luxury car world and the new models would have the unprecedented speed he wanted to introduce.
4. The New Buggati
In 1998, the world saw its first new Bugatti. This was the EB 118 and it was soon followed up by the EB 218 the following year.
Both of these new Bugatti’s made an impression on the luxury market. But they still had not fully met with Ferdinand’s original vision.
That would come later in 1999 when he introduced the first model of the Bugatti Chiron. It was the world’s first supercar. It was the sports car that suited the needs of luxury car aficionados and those with a desire for speed.
But it was the fourth new Bugatti model that really took the world by storm. This was, of course, the Bugatti Veyron Sports.
5. Meet the Veyron
Ennore Bugatti had a saying: ”if it’s comparable, it’s not Bugatti.” Ferdinand took this to heart. He knew that, henceforth, Bugattis had to have a unique style.
They had to be immediately recognizable. They could not be confused with another model of car.
Look at a Veyron today, and you will know you are looking at a Bugatti. At the turn of the new Millenium, at the Geneva Car Show, Ferdinand told the world he would unleash a new version of the Bugatti Veyron.
This would be able to speed past 248 miles per hour and go over 60 miles per hour in three seconds.
Naturally, there were skeptics. But Ferdinand continued his work. The world would be amazed in a matter of months.
6. Speed and Style
Can you get a car that has the style expected from luxury cars? Can that same car have an incredible speed and hold its place as one of the fastest cars in the world? And can that same car also be used for everyday driving?
In the earlier months of the year 2000, most people would scoff at such an idea. As they did when Ferdinand announced Bugatti’s plans to create such a car. But Ferdinand persisted.
The new Bugatti Veyron had a W16 engine. This was made with two V8 engines that were combined. The engine was turbocharged. It also had a permanent all-wheel drive.
And it made heads turn with its sleek design – both exterior and interior.
Ferdinand had introduced a new luxury car that immediately commanded respect. He had created a car that would make heads turn – if they managed to turn before the ultra-fast Veyron sped out of sight!
7. The Legend Continues
Production of the Bugatti Chiron is more the norm today. But that does not lessen the intrigue of the Veyron.
In fact, it makes the Veyron a greater anomaly. The Veyron usually sells for $1.5 Million as a starting point. It has become a favorite amongst many celebrities.
As production has slowed down, the Bugatti Veyron Sports is like a beautiful diamond: it is a rare privilege to own one. While any high earner can own a luxury car, owning a Bugatti Veyron puts you in a class above others.
Can you imagine driving through London, the British countryside, or the streets of Dubai in a Bugatti Veyron Sports? Regardless of where you find yourself, you will make an impression as you cruise behind the wheel of one.
This is a car that commands respect. It opens doors for you. And if you invest your money wisely, you might open the door of a Bugatti Veyron Sports in the future.
See You on the Road
If you have decided to purchase a Bugatti Veyron Sports, you have made a great choice. Join the elite group of high net worth individuals who call themselves the proud owner of this car.
Follow us to learn more about purchasing a Bugatti Veyron Sports and other luxury cars.
How Long Does It Typically Take to Build a Ferrari?
Refined Marques is a Company that takes great pride in providing the highest levels of personal and professional service in sourcing, supplying and purchasing the World’s most exotic, luxury cars available today. Refined Marques Chairman is Ahmed Al Bakry, the son of the late Mohamed Al Bakry, a highly successful business entrepreneur and avid collector of luxury and vintage cars, who has inherited his Father’s life-long passion for best-in-class precision motor engineering.
© 2017 Refined-Marques. All Rights Reserved
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Male and Female Brains Have No Overall Structural Differences
Dec 1, 2015 By Lori Martinez Leave a Comment
Our brain anatomy shows that women and men might be different, but they are more or less the same.
A study conducted at universities in Leipzig, Germany and Tel Aviv, India, has discovered that male and female brains have no overall structural differences when compared to each other.
The research team primarily focused on how the brain was structured and its anatomy, disregarding that actual processes of the brain. This was possible by investigating over 1.400 MRI scans taken from both male and female subjects.
Up to this point, it was believed that male brains and female brains present distinctions between themselves in order to form the specific way in which a male or a female thinks and acts. The study took the scans and compared them with each other in order to form three distinct groups: a male form group, a female form group, and a form group which had both male and female characteristics.
The result was outstanding, showing that only 6% of the scans showed distinctions clear enough for them to be put in either the male or the female group. But the study has only focused on the gray matter part of the brain, without any influence from connectivity processes. A study conducted in 2013 has shown that from a connectivity point of view, the brain truly differ.
The main distinction between the two was that male brains have more neural connection within each half of the brain while, on the other hand, female brains had those neural connection form bridges between the two halves. This leads to women’s capability of combining intuitive with analytical information while men tend to be better equipped with coordinating capabilities.
Because of the findings provided by this recent research, the old belief that most gender differentiation qualities arise from social and environmental influences might be partially true. But this refers to the way in which the neural synapses connect and function, not the anatomy of the brain itself. In accordance with the fact that scientists and researchers do not possess the information required to further analyze the complete inner workings of the brain to a full extent.
The possibility of humans being born in the form of a blank slate, ready to be formed by its environment into either a female or a male from a gender perspective is still somewhat probable. This comes at a rather fortuitous time for non-binary gender activists worldwide, because it proves that the human brain might not work in just male or female gender processes.
But the fact that male and female brains have no overall structural differences does not mean they are still different from other perspectives. More inquiries on the matter have to be made through extensive research and a larger study group in order to further elucidate the mysteries surrounding the inner machination of the human brain and its psyche.
Image source:www.pixabay.com
Filed Under: Science
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Home Politics Strzok said Steele dossier was meant to 'influence' and not just 'inform'...
Strzok said Steele dossier was meant to 'influence' and not just 'inform' in September 2016
Peter Strzok messaged an unknown FBI official in September 2016 that he thought Christopher Steele’s now-discredited dossier was meant to “influence” as well as to “inform” and indicated he believed the British ex-spy was the source for a story published the day of his text.
Despite this admission, Steele’s reporting went on to play a central role in justifying the bureau’s pursuit of secretive electronic surveillance against Trump campaign associate Carter Page, and the bureau would insist to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it didn’t believe the former MI6 agent was a source for the Yahoo story (which referred to Steele only as “a well-placed Western intelligence source”) — contradicting the now-fired special agent’s stated suspicions.
“Looking at the Yahoo article, I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform,” Strzok’s message said.
Steele was eventually removed as a confidential human source after the FBI concluded he was leaking information to the media. The Yahoo article, written by Michael Isikoff, contained a host of claims related to Page and two Russians — Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin. The allegations in the article were nearly identical to those in Steele’s dossier. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s FISA abuse report noted the FBI did not determine that Page had met with either of the Russians mentioned in the article or the dossier and criticized the bureau for concealing Page’s repeated denials from the FISA court. Isikoff said of the dossier in 2019, “I think it’s fair to say that all of us should have approached this, in retrospect, with more skepticism, particularly when we didn’t know where it was coming from.”
Strzok’s memoir, Compromised, does not mention the Yahoo story controversy and claims that “later in the fall of 2016, media reports surfaced about Steele’s material having been provided to the FBI” and “we closed Steele as a result.”
But the FBI agent’s text was from the first day of the fall in 2016, and Strzok seemed to believe Steele was a source even then — suspicions acknowledged in private at the bureau, but not his book.
An FBI document from 2017 showed the bureau’s unsuccessful efforts to confirm the dossier’s claims of collusion between the Kremlin and President Trump. The heavily redacted, 94-page spreadsheet showed the FBI’s reliance on what it termed “open source” information and also listed the Yahoo article as corroboration at least twice.
Horowitz criticized the bureau’s handling of Steele and the Yahoo story at length last year. He included the Yahoo saga as among the 17 “significant errors and omissions” in the Page FISAs and noted that “none of these inaccuracies and omissions were brought to the attention of [the Office of Intelligence] before the last FISA application was filed in June 2017,” and so “these failures were repeated in all three renewal applications.”
The DOJ watchdog said his investigation “found no evidence that anyone from the FBI asked Steele in September 2016 or at any other time, if he had spoken with the Yahoo News reporter.” The FBI’s FISA application stated in a footnote that the bureau “does not believe that Source #1 [Steele] directly provided” information to the press.
Horowitz found that Steele met with journalists from Yahoo, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and CNN in Washington, D.C., in September 2016 and with Yahoo, the New York Times, and the Washington Post again the next month.
Horowitz said the “Supervisory Intel Analyst” said, “It was unclear to him in September 2016 whether Steele was briefing the press.” The “OGC Unit Chief” stated that “she and others assumed that Steele’s clients, or others with whom the clients had shared the information, were responsible for the press stories, but that the Crossfire Hurricane team would not have been surprised if Steele’s reporting was the basis.” And “Case Agent 1” sent messages indicating he thought Steele was the source and “was selling his stuff to others.” The same agent “told us that the Crossfire Hurricane team later assessed” that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson “or someone else who had the Steele information … was responsible for furnishing the information” to the media, but Horowitz said that “the team had no factual basis to support this” claim.
“SSA 1” told Horowitz that “his first concern was that someone from inside the FBI had disclosed information to the media” and that it seemed “foreign” that Steele “would be involved in such a breach.” Yet SSA 1’s notes from a Sept. 30, 2016, meeting noted there were “control issues – reports acknowledged in Yahoo News.”
“Drafts of the Carter Page FISA application stated, until October 14, 2016, that Steele was responsible for the leak,” Horowitz wrote. “One of the drafts specifically stated that Steele ‘was acting on his/her own volition and has since been admonished by the FBI.’ In contrast, the final version of the first FISA application stated … the FBI does not believe that Source #1 directly provided this information to the Press.”
The “OI Attorney” told Horowitz that “at some point during the drafting process, the FBI assured him that Steele had not spoken with Yahoo News” because Steele was “a professional.” But “no one at the FBI or the National Security Division was able to explain to us the source of the information that resulted in, or supported, either the draft language that existed until October 14 or the final language” and “even after receiving additional information about Steele’s media contacts, the Crossfire Hurricane team did not change the language in any of the three renewal applications regarding the FBI’s assessment of Steele’s role in the September 23 article.”
Horowitz said FBI interviews with Steele’s primary sub-source “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting” and cast doubt on some of its biggest claims, noting Steele’s main source’s account “was not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a well-developed conspiracy” in Steele’s dossier. Declassified footnotes now show the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
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'It will destroy the party': Rand Paul warns of GOP exodus if Senate Republicans vote to convict
Homeless woman accused of stealing mail truck in NYC committed to mental hospital by judge
Homeless woman accused of stealing mail truck in NYC committed to...
Khristina Narizhnaya Elizabeth Elizalde - January 17, 2021 0
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Police Seek the Public’s Help in Locating Missing Newark Man with Down’s Syndrome UPDATE: Found Safe
By rlsmetro on January 10, 2021 at 4:52 pm EST
Police officials in Newark request the public’s help in locating Mr. Eliseo Ramos, 21, of Newark, who was reported missing today.
According to police, Mr. Ramos, who has been diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome, was last seen at 12:30 p.m.in the 800 block of Degraw Avenue.
He is described as 5 ft. tall and 160 pounds. He was last seen wearing a black hooded sweater and black pants.
While police are actively searching for Mr. Ramos, they seek the public’s help in quickly locating him so he can be returned to his family.
Director Ambrose urges anyone with information about the whereabouts of Eliseo Ramos to call the Division's 24-hour Crime Stopper tip line at 1-877-NWK-TIPS (1-877-695-8477). All anonymous Crime Stopper tips are kept confidential and could result in a reward.
Newark Missing Man
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Read Next We're All Missing the Point of the Armie Hammer Cannibalism Scandal
July 9, 2014 9:50PM ET
Justin Bieber Sent to Community Service, Anger Management for Egging
After pleading no contest to egging neighbor’s house, singer must pay him $80,900 and stay away from man and his family for two years
Jason Newman
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Justin Bieber pleaded no contest on Wednesday to one count of misdemeanor vandalism after egging his neighbor’s house earlier this year, according to a statement by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. The singer will have to complete five days of community service and attend an anger management program. He must also pay the plaintiff $80,900 and stay away from the man and his family for two years.
‘Baby’ to Bad Boy: Justin Bieber’s Life in Photos
In January, Bieber’s neighbor claimed that he and his daughter were on the balcony of their Calabasas home and videotaped the singer throwing eggs at their house. Sheriff department spokesman Steve Whitmore said at the time that Bieber was named as a suspect in a misdemeanor vandalism and assault crime report, and that a charge could rise to a felony depending on the damage estimate. According to the Los Angeles Times, Bieber’s neighbors in the tony gated community have complained about the 19-year-old pop star before, accusing him of throwing loud parties and driving recklessly.
Earlier this year, police searched the pop star’s home for surveillance footage and subsequently arrested rapper and Bieber friend Lil Za for alleged possession of cocaine. The charges were later changed to felony possession of Ecstasy and oxycodone. If convicted, the 20-year-old rapper faces up to nine years in prison.
“I get that the eggs don’t seem that significant, but it does rise to the level of a felony,” said Lt. David Thompson at the time of the raid. “There is a victim in this case who has had extensive damage done to their home. That’s a serious incident.”
In This Article: Justin Bieber
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RSK - Music Marketing and Distribution
Music Marketing & Distribution for the 21st Century
BIG BIG TRAIN, London Hackney Empire 02/11/19
“Seldom does a show generate such a high level of expectation – an audio/visual adventure into the unknown. Such was the sense of wonderment as the rarely-seen live cadre of core and contributing musicians entered to enthusiastic applause. This final performance on a UK mini-tour fitter perfectly into the purview of the group’s cultural preservation of all things British. In retrospect, it was made the more poignant as I took my seat next to original Fairport Convention singer, Judy Dyble, who’d just completed an album with (lead singer, front man) David Longdon. Chatting with them both at the after-show is now even more memorable, given Judy’s passing. The show itself was magnificent tour de force of progressive movements and moments. Many rate and treasured memories were captured in one magical evening.” Paul Davies
ALPHA CLASSICS HAS BEEN NAMED LABEL OF THE YEAR 2020 BY GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE!
The award – from one of the oldest and most prestigious classical music magazines in the world – is a supreme honour for the label, and is especially encouraging during this time of crisis. Alpha Classics has been championing quality music-making for more than 20 years: rare repertoire that is frequently off the beaten track, and recorded in the best possible conditions by artists of all generations and from all walks of life. New talent also remains a top priority for the label. Firmly rooted in Baroque music since its beginning, Alpha has opened its doors to more diverse repertoire and adventurous programming since the arrival of Didier Martin at its head six years ago.
Three further Gramophone Awards were presented this year to Alpha Classics artists or recordings:
Recital category: SI J’AI AIMÉ by Sandrine Piau (soprano), Le Concert de la Loge, Julien Chauvin (in collaboration with the Palazzetto Bru Zane).
Chamber Music category: VERESS BARTÓK recorded during the Lockenhaus festival by its artistic director Nicolas Altstaedt (cello), with Vilde Frang & Barnabás Kelemen (violin), Lawrence Power, Katalin Kokas (viola), Alexander Lonquich (piano).
A Special Award within the context of the «Beethoven 250» celebrations to Martin Helmchen for his recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos 2 and 5 with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, under the direction of Andrew Manze.
“I am proud and happy that our flagship label has received this prestigious award. It is a tribute to all the artists who have chosen to join us and to the work of a superb team. It also confirms that there is a place for those who champion culture and quality in the face of the deluge of commercial nonsense. The public, whether established or new, deserves only the best!”
~ Charles Adriaenssen, President of Outhere Music
Didier Martin, Director of Alpha Classics and CEO of Outhere Music, added: “It is more than an honour to receive this award. It is a particularly joyous gift that motivates us to keep going and stay on course. It’s also a huge encouragement for all the Alpha and Outhere teams who work tirelessly and passionately. In this moment of global pandemic – which comes on top of an ongoing crisis within the cultural sector – it is more urgent and crucial than ever to put our heads together and unite to save musical diversity. A high quality press is essential, and ever more important in the digital world.”
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‘Used as human shields’: Survivors of Algeria hostage crisis recall brutality and terror
Rescue workers carry the coffin of one of the hostages killed during a hostage crisis in a gas plant at the hospital in In Amenas January 21, 2013 (Reuters / Stringer) © Reuters
In the wake of Algeria's In Amenas crisis, the hostage death toll rose to almost 60. The survivors have revealed tales of shocking brutality – captives were used as human shields, forced to wear explosive jackets and witness to horrific executions.
On Monday, Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal announced that 37 foreigners of eight nationalities were among those killed.The four-day ordeal at the In Amenas gas plant in the Sahara Desert ended Saturday – several US, British, French, Japanese, Norwegian, Romanian and Algerian workers were reported dead or missing. Many of the survivors have spoken with the press, recounting horrific tales of the abuse and murder of hostages.Philippine survivor Joseph Balmaceda witnessed foreign hostages being used as human shields to protect the militants. He described one Japanese hostage being draped with explosives, while he and others had their hands tied with cables.“Whenever government troops tried to use a helicopter to shoot at the enemy, we were used as human shields," Balmaceda told reporters shortly after he arrived back in Manila. "We were told to raise our hands. The government forces could not shoot at them as long as we were held hostage." Balmaceda was the only survivor of nine hostages aboard a van that was bombed as militants clashed with Algerian security forces.
Militants targeted foreign hostages
Some of the freed workers described how they were forced to wear explosive jackets, and were threatened with being blown up. Others described watching their captors summarily execute hostages.At a press conference on Sunday, the workers gave an account of how nine Japanese hostages were murdered. Witnesses said the first three were killed as they tried to escape from a bus taking them to the airport. "We were all afraid when we heard bursts of gunfire at 5:30am (04:30 GMT) on Wednesday, after we realized that they had just killed our Japanese colleagues who tried to flee from the bus," AFP reported, quoting Riad, an Algerian national working for Japanese engineering firm JGC Corp.Earlier reports claimed that one Brit and one Algerian were killed on the bus during the militants' initial assault. The gunmen then took the other bus passengers to the plant's residential compound, where they had taken hundreds of hostages, one witness explained. "A terrorist shouted 'open the door!' with a strong north American accent, and opened fire. Two other Japanese died then and we found four other Japanese bodies in the compound,” Riad added, his voice choked with emotion.During the hostage crisis, Algerian workers were held separately from the foreign nationals. According to witnesses, they were treated well, and the militants said they were not interested in killing non-Christians; eventually, they were allowed to leave."I was allowed to go, but before I did, I saw many Brits killed," an unidentified man told reporters. "One Westerner trying to give first aid was blown up by the terrorists."Another unnamed witness who said he worked as an engineer told the French press that the militants were shouting: “We’re only looking for foreigners, you Algerians can go!” Some workers managed to flee the complex by cutting a hole through a metal fence, according to media reportsA 57-year-old Norwegian man was reportedly among the 50 people who escaped through the fence. He told the press that he and the others had to walk for 15 hours through the desert, braving exhaustion and severe dehydration, before reaching the nearest town of In Amenas. Another survivor, an Algerian driver identified as 'Brahim,' also escaped through the fence. He found refuge almost immediately when he stumbled onto the Algerian army."As bullets rang nonstop, we cut holes in the metal fence with large clippers, and once through, we all started running," Brahim said. "We were quickly taken in by the special forces stationed just a dozen meters from the base. I didn't look back."
Death toll climbs
On Monday, the bodies of two Canadians were discovered among the Islamists killed during the hostage crisis, after having been recovered from the site, Algerian private TV station Ennahar reported. Reuters also reported that nine Japanese nationals were killed during the four-day siege.A raid by the Algerian military on Saturday ended the hostage crisis, with initial reports that at least 25 foreigners and Algerians had been killed, along with 32 of the kidnappers. The death toll was later raised to at least 89.At least one of the militants responsible for the kidnapping was supposedly a French national, but Paris could not verify the claim, France24 reported. If true, the allegation would reinforce earlier reports by some of the surviving hostages, who claimed to have heard militants speaking French and English, in addition to Arabic. Some of the hostages also said that the militants were able to easily navigate the facility, and knew its internal procedures and the room numbers of the foreign workers. "They had accomplices on the inside," Riad said.Earlier, the militants said the attack on the plant had been planned for two months, Mauritania's ANI news agency reported.
‘Mali’ Islamists kill 3, take 41 hostage in Algeria
Mali in crisis: Increasing numbers of French troops engage in direct combat
Algerian siege: Scores of hostages and militants killed in military operation – reports
Algeria siege: Hostage situation ongoing, dozens of captives and militants dead
Algerian hostage crisis death toll tops 80 as Al-Qaeda claims responsibility
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Facts Surrounding Military Divorce in San Diego – From the Best Divorce Lawyers of 2020
Doppelt and Forney email or text
Out of all types of divorces, military divorces are the ones that are open to a higher number of complications. Military marriages are similar to the civilian divorces, however, there are a number of important differences that service members and their spouse will need to know.
The added complexities in military divorce make the process more stressful than the average divorce. If you have been serving in the military and are considering divorce, there is information you need to know. Military divorces do have similar matters such as spousal support, child custody and support, asset division, and debt division; however, there are other issues in a military divorce that are not part of a civilian divorce.
Filing the Divorce
When it comes to military divorces, one of the biggest questions is where to file the divorce. In a civilian divorce, a spouse may file for a divorce in the country they or their spouse is a permanent resident. While in a military divorce, this is not the case. In divorces that involve military member, the divorce must be filed in the county where the service member is stationed. Thus, the non-service member has to file for divorce in the county where the service member resides.
The Case of Active Duty
When a non-military spouse files a divorce, like the civilian divorces, the non-filing spouse (service member) must be served with the petition and summons. However, sending the documents to the active service member offers a unique set of challenges. The federal government has designed the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act – SCRA to cater to these challenges. The sole purpose of the SCRA is to protect the rights of the service members who are on active duty.
The SCRA protects a service member during the divorce proceedings from being defaulted. Thus, if the service member is served with the petition and summons for divorce, and the service member does not respond within the appropriate time-frame because of their military service, the court cannot hold the service member in default. In a civilian divorce, when the non-filing spouses does not respond timely after valid service, the filing spouse may file a request to enter default. Also, in a military divorce, upon request, the SCRA can allow the Court to delay the divorce proceedings until the time the spouse on activity duty returns. The service member can choose to waive the postponement of the divorce and then hire a professional divorce attorney.
The Matter of BAH and BAS
Another significant issue that arises in a military divorce is whether BAH and BAS count as income. BAH is the Basic Allowance for Housing, and BAS is the Basic Allowance for Sustenance. BAH and BAS is supplemental income service members receive above their basic salary to pay for living expenses.
Under the California Law, the matter whether or not to count these allowances as income when calculating for child and spousal support, has been decided. In 2010, California Courts confirmed that BAH and BAS is income when calculating spousal support and child support. The Court states that any amount that fulfils the basic requirement of income will be considered for determining income for spousal support and child support, regardless of how it is paid. See California Family Code section 4058.
Dividing the military retirement in divorce is another significant matter that may require a different analysis than it would in a civilian divorce case. Want to know more about the military divorces? Consult the best divorce lawyers in San Diego by emailing the Law Office of Doppelt and Forney, APLC today at roy@dffamilylaw.com or text (858)880-6689. You can also get a free 30-minute consultation with our knowledgeable divorce attorneys in San Diego.
Posted in: Alimony, Child Custody & Visitation, Child Support, Community Property, Division Of Assets & Debts, Family Law, Military and Military Divorce
Tagged: BAH, BAS, child support, military, military divorce and spousal support
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Momentous events have occurred in the time since bargaining commenced. The Irish beat the All Blacks, there was an Ebola epidemic, a robotic spacecraft landed on a comet, Malaysian Airlines flight 370 went missing and then there was Brexit and Donald Trump became President of the United States of America. Viewed in that context, 3½ years is an incredibly long time to bargain without settling a collective agreement.
Which raises the question: what can parties do to bring bargaining to an end? There are legal avenues available to unions and employers to bring bargaining to an end one way or the other, and the example of FIRST Union and the Dunedin Mitre 10 provides a useful case study.
The first and most obvious way to end collective bargaining is by signing a collective agreement. This usually involves a process of compromise and good faith bargaining. This is how most collective bargaining is resolved.
Sometimes, a bit of a push is needed in the form of industrial action. This can either be industrial action by the union, known as a strike, or industrial action by the employer, known as a lockout.
Mediation is also a good way to break deadlocks in collective bargaining. However, MBIE mediations dealing with collective bargaining are not confidential and without prejudice, unless the parties expressly agree they should be.
If mediation fails, parties having serious difficulties in concluding a collective agreement may seek a reference to facilitation from the Employment Relations Authority (‘the Authority’). Facilitated bargaining is bargaining supervised by the Authority itself. There are some threshold tests before a reference to facilitation may be accepted. One of these is that bargaining has become unduly protracted, and extensive efforts, including mediation, have failed to resolve the difficulties that have precluded the parties from entering into a collective agreement.
If a reference to facilitation is accepted, the parties meet in private with a different member of the Authority (to the member that made the referral decision) to try to conclude a collective agreement. The parties must participate in the facilitation process in good faith.
Having said that, to some extent the Authority is a bit of a toothless watchdog in this process, as while it may make recommendations to the parties about the provisions of the collective agreement the parties should conclude, those recommendations are non-binding; the parties are not obliged to adopt or follow them.
FIRST Union and the Dunedin Mitre 10 have been to mediation and facilitated bargaining. While the Authority has made recommendations about how the parties should settle the collective agreement, the parties are still unable to agree.
Generally speaking, a party to collective bargaining may not unilaterally declare that it is at an end. An Employment Court case in late 2015 between FIRST Union and the Dunedin Mitre 10 reaffirmed this principle.
However, in March 2015 the Employment Relations Act 2000 was amended to provide a statutory process by which a party to collective bargaining may seek a declaration from the Employment Relations Authority that bargaining is at an end. If the Authority determines bargaining is at an end, no further collective bargaining between the parties may be initiated for a period of 60 days.
This law was enacted after the protracted dispute between the Ports of Auckland and the Maritime Union, which ran from 2012 to 2015.
In reality, the party seeking a declaration bargaining is at an end will be the employer. If bargaining is at an end, industrial action is unlawful except on the grounds of safety or health. A declaration that bargaining is at an end would allow an employer to stave off a strike.
This process is not available if the party seeking a declaration bargaining is at an end has breached the duty of good faith during the collective bargaining. Accordingly, when employers seek declarations that bargaining is at an end unions will likely use allegations of breaches of good faith against the employer as a shield to continue bargaining.
There have not yet been any cases where a party has successfully sought a declaration bargaining was at an end.
Finally, if a party to collective bargaining commits a serious and sustained breach of good faith in collective bargaining, the Authority has the power to fix the terms of the collective agreement. This law has been on the statute books since December 2004 but it has never successfully been used. It is a significant departure from the general rule that the role of the Authority and Employment Court is not to fix terms and conditions of employment. This rule has existed since the enactment of the Employment Contracts Act 1991 and the abolition of arbitration.
In reality, the best way to conclude collective bargaining is for the parties to sit down and nut out a deal that suits both of them. The parties are better off focussing on the substantive issues rather than legal arguments. The longer bargaining drags on, the more difficult it is to get a deal.
While it is important for employers and unions to be mindful of their legal obligations and to comply with the technical, legal requirements of the bargaining process, unnecessary legalisation of the bargaining itself can increase costs for the parties and distract them from the real issue, which is terms and conditions of employment rather than legal rights and obligations.
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Psychopaths' brains show differences in structure and function
Madison, Wis. — Images of prisoners' brains show important differences between those who are diagnosed as psychopaths and those who aren't, according to a new study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
The results could help explain the callous and impulsive anti-social behavior exhibited by some psychopaths.
The study showed that psychopaths have reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the part of the brain responsible for sentiments such as empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety. Two types of brain images were collected. Diffusion tensor images (DTI) showed reduced structural integrity in the white matter fibers connecting the two areas, while a second type of image that maps brain activity, a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), showed less coordinated activity between the vmPFC and the amygdala.
"This is the first study to show both structural and functional differences in the brains of people diagnosed with psychopathy," says Michael Koenigs, assistant professor of psychiatry in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. "Those two structures in the brain, which are believed to regulate emotion and social behavior, seem to not be communicating as they should."
The study, which took place in a medium-security prison in Wisconsin, is a unique collaborative between three laboratories,
UW-Madison psychology Professor Joseph Newman has had a long term interest in studying and diagnosing those with psychopathy and has worked extensively in the Wisconsin corrections system. Dr. Kent Kiehl, of the University of New Mexico and the MIND Research Network, has a mobile MRI scanner that he brought to the prison and used to scan the prisoners' brains. Koenigs and his graduate student, Julian Motzkin, led the analysis of the brain scans.
The study compared the brains of 20 prisoners with a diagnosis of psychopathy with the brains of 20 other prisoners who committed similar crimes but were not diagnosed with psychopathy.
"The combination of structural and functional abnormalities provides compelling evidence that the dysfunction observed in this crucial social-emotional circuitry is a stable characteristic of our psychopathic offenders,'' Newman says. "I am optimistic that our ongoing collaborative work will shed more light on the source of this dysfunction and strategies for treating the problem."
Newman notes that none of this work would be possible without the extraordinary support provided by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, which he called "the silent partner in this research." He says the DOC has demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to supporting research designed to facilitate the differential diagnosis and treatment of prisoners.
The study, published in the most recent Journal of Neuroscience, builds on earlier work by Newman and Koenigs that showed that psychopaths' decision-making mirrors that of patients with known damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). This bolsters evidence that problems in that part of the brain are connected to the disorder.
"The decision-making study showed indirectly what this study shows directly – that there is a specific brain abnormality associated with criminal psychopathy,'' Koenigs adds.
Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Sarah Potter #50Years50Careers
Sarah Potter joined Scottish Ballet in 2016 as our resident copywriter. Crafting and curating fragments of copy, from our souvenir programmes to trustee reports, Sarah works to ensure that our copy is made for its reader. She also develops proposals that help fund our innovative community engagement projects.
We caught up with Sarah to find out what she loves about Scottish Ballet and how she discovered copywriting.
Tell us about your journey with the company
I joined Scottish Ballet in 2016. It's a dream job. Since the get-go, I've been helping to develop proposals for incredible projects, like our dance health programme and our digital season. I also write and edit our exclusive magazine for our supporters, Backstage. In 2017, we established a company tone of voice and this year, I became Commissioning Editor for our theatre souvenir programmes.
How did you get into copywriting?
'Butterfly-mind' and 'chatterbox'. Two phrases that peppered my primary school reports.
At secondary school, I had some lovely teachers who were super supportive of my dance and music commitments and passions. Most importantly, they made sure I scraped the four 'C' grades I needed to go to college and study Performing Arts.
At 17, I was faced with a huge confusing spaghetti-junction with no signs. I always dreamed of going to dance school, so it was a no-brainer. But college had changed me. I remember the day I watched DV8 Physical Theatre company performing Strange Fish and knew that that was what I wanted to do. I did apply to one ballet school, and I should've been encouraged that I made it to the final round of auditions, but I saw it as a door closing on me.
When my college tutor suggested I applied to university, I laughed. I thought she was joking. King Alfred's in Winchester had a new course, BA Hons in Contemporary Performing Arts. The audition was wonderful, I was in my element, I got it, and they got me. I spent three years experimenting with theatre, movement, sound, web-design, film and words. I was supported to try out my own ideas, which mostly took the form of time-based installations with text and movement.
I moved to Glasgow in 2003. I established myself as an artist, but if it wasn't for living with my gran for three years, I wouldn't have survived the lack of income. Faced with the real world, I made one promise to myself, to always work in the creative industries. That, I did and it paid off.
I've been a venue and project manager in the theatre, dance and media sector, and each job involved me finessing a different way of writing; taking minutes, writing letters, policies, online content, and most importantly, funding applications which I developed a love and a knack for.
From the age of 11, I kept diaries, and when something moved me, my heart would offer poetry. People kept commenting that I had 'a way with words' but I never once identified myself as a writer.
The job came up at Scottish Ballet, and I nearly didn't apply because of the 'copywriter' title. But here I am, my colleagues keep encouraging me to write more. I work hard to make sure I'm worthy of the word 'writer' in my title.
So, you see, I don't have a degree in English, and I'm not a trained marketer. It was fundraising that led me to my job.
You provide copy for a wide variety of purposes with a range of tone of voice/purpose – i.e. programmes, backstage magazine, trust applications, etc. Do you have a favourite copywriting style?
It's all storytelling, so it's all my favourite. The process is the same - I gather fragments, select the parts that make the most sense to include, and piece them together. I love that part the most – putting the pieces together, it's like a riddle. Whether it's a report for a trustee or a programme article that a first-time ballet audience member might be reading, I think about what would be interesting for that person.
You provide lunchtime / sleep yoga for the Scottish Ballet team. How did you get into yoga and why it is important to provide this service to the wider team?
I had a dance injury when I was 14. Yoga helped me rehabilitate and become stronger than ever before. I kept it up and it has been my constant through all life's ups and downs. Ten years ago, I became a certified yoga teacher. Since then, I have worked with all kinds of bodies and all differing abilities. It has helped shape my understanding about the world in a way I never expected; the learning never stops.
I'm passionate about teaching yoga in the workplace. So many of us go through the day without taking a deep breath or thinking about how we feel, physically or emotionally. The impact of that is stress, tiredness and at worse, illness and injury.
I can't pick one, that's impossible. One has to be the talent and passion that I'm surrounded by every day. Working in the Advancement Team (The A Team), SB Book Club, and, if I'm totally honest, it's a luxury to come to work, drink a hot cup of tea and think about one thing at a time (I have two gorgeous, lively children at home).
Ooo, it's like desert island discs without the teary snotters.
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Secret Postwar Aircraft Projects
SIAT 311A regional jet
<blockquote data-quote="fightingirish" data-source="post: 115328" data-attributes="member: 133"><p>Some more info<blockquote><p>In 1964, Dassault-Breguet planned to construct a civil transport aircraft larger than the Mystère 20, equipped with Rolls-Royce or General Electric CF 700s, and able to transport 32 to 40 passengers over a distance of 1,000 km.</p><p></p><p>On March 25, 1964, an industrial agreement was signed with the German Siebelwerke-ATG Gmbh Corporation, which would participate in 35% of the manufacture of the aircraft and could bring in other German corporations. [...]</p><p>Though orders had been taken at the 1973 Paris Air Show, the program was abandoned in 1975, as much due to the oil crisis as to the financial circumstances of the companies involved.</p></blockquote><p>Sources:</p><p>http://www.dassault-aviation.com/en/passion/aircraft/civil-dassault-aircraft/falcon-30-40.html?L=1</p><p><a href="http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1964/1964%20-%201063.html">FLIGHT International, 16 April I964</a></p><p>http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46173490.html</p><p>Attached picture published in the German magazine Flug-Revue Summer 1964</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="fightingirish, post: 115328, member: 133"] Some more info[quote]In 1964, Dassault-Breguet planned to construct a civil transport aircraft larger than the Mystère 20, equipped with Rolls-Royce or General Electric CF 700s, and able to transport 32 to 40 passengers over a distance of 1,000 km. On March 25, 1964, an industrial agreement was signed with the German Siebelwerke-ATG Gmbh Corporation, which would participate in 35% of the manufacture of the aircraft and could bring in other German corporations. [...] Though orders had been taken at the 1973 Paris Air Show, the program was abandoned in 1975, as much due to the oil crisis as to the financial circumstances of the companies involved.[/quote] Sources: http://www.dassault-aviation.com/en/passion/aircraft/civil-dassault-aircraft/falcon-30-40.html?L=1 [url=http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1964/1964%20-%201063.html]FLIGHT International, 16 April I964[/url] http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46173490.html Attached picture published in the German magazine Flug-Revue Summer 1964 [/QUOTE]
What year did the first man go to space? (answer has 4 numbers)
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BBCNEWS (BBC News)
BBC News : BBCNEWS : January 20, 2018 2:00pm-2:31pm GMT
by BBCNEWS
disciplines in pyeongchang. our correspondent is in geneva where she says this feels like quite a moment. yes, it did. in fact it took place here in this room at the international olympic committee, thomas bach called it a milestone, he reminded us who were listening, that he too was from a divided country, he is from germany, which has only been reunited in the last two decades or so, so i think he personally took it as a real achievement that the two koreas will march under the same flag, they will field one unified team, ice hockey, and 22 north korean athletes despite they missed the deadline to register, they will now be allowed to ta ke register, they will now be allowed to take part in the olympics next month. church bells and music venues in england are to be offered extra protection against attempts to silence them by people living in newly built housing nearby. the government is changing planning—guidance so that long—standing, but noisy, community facilities won't have to make expensive changes because of complaints from new neighbours. instead, housing developers will be
disciplines in pyeongchang. our correspondent is in geneva where she says this feels like quite a moment. yes, it did. in fact it took place here in this room at the international olympic committee, thomas bach called it a milestone, he reminded us who were listening, that he too was from a divided country, he is from germany, which has only been reunited in the last two decades or so, so i think he personally took it as a real achievement that the two koreas will march under the same flag,...
HARDtalk : BBCNEWS : January 19, 2018 4:30am-5:01am GMT
russia fully support the geneva peace process? it certainly does. the problem with the geneva peace process, from the outset, and the reason why it has barely moved forward for quite some time was that the initial idea, as described in the relevant un security council resolution, was to bring together the syrian government and a combined delegation, representative delegation of the syrian government. the syrian government came there but those people who claimed to represent the syrian opposition came from all sorts of places, london, istanbul... but not syria proper. my question to you was how it fits into the sochi talks, do they take into account what has been agreed in the geneva peace process, that there will be a transitional government and president assad does not represent the future of syria. actually, that was not agreed in geneva. there is an understanding described in the geneva conclusions of 2012, that there will be a political transition, yes, but not in the current... you accept that president assad will not remain as president of syria once this peace process is over
russia fully support the geneva peace process? it certainly does. the problem with the geneva peace process, from the outset, and the reason why it has barely moved forward for quite some time was that the initial idea, as described in the relevant un security council resolution, was to bring together the syrian government and a combined delegation, representative delegation of the syrian government. the syrian government came there but those people who claimed to represent the syrian...
is a valued partner for the africans, this is quite a shock. from the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry, but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump dodged the most uncomfortable of questions. mr president, are you a racist? the president left without responding. he'd earlier tweeted that he'd used tough language in a meeting with senators but not the derogatory language attributed to him. peter bowes, bbc news. viewers on bbc one willjoin shortly for a round—up of the day's news and sport. before that... four british friends have broken the world record and become the fastest ever to cross the atlantic ocean in a rowing boat. the amateur crew, dubbed the four 0arsmen, made history when they
is a valued partner for the africans, this is quite a shock. from the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry, but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation...
united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump dodged the most uncomfortable of questions. mr president, are you a racist? the president left without responding. he earlier tweeted that he'd used tough language in a meeting with senators but not the derogatory language attributed to him. peter bowes, bbc news. hawaii's emergency management agency has been forced to send out a tweet reassuring citizens there is no missile threat to hawaii. it comes after residents allegedly received emergency alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile. it was later revealed to be a false alarm. david willis is in washington. this must have been absolutely petrifying for people.
united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump dodged the most...
is quite a shock. from the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump dodged the most uncomfortable of questions. mr president, are you a racist? the president left without responding. he earlier tweeted that he'd used tough language in a meeting with senators but not the derogatory language attributed to him. peter bowes, bbc news. dentists have accused the government of not doing enough to tackle tooth decay in england. new figures indicate there were nearly 43,000 operations to remove children's teeth last year — a i7% increase on four years ago. the british dental association says england now provides a second—class service compared to scotland and wal
is quite a shock. from the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr...
the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump dodged the most uncomfortable of questions. mr president, are you a racist? the president left without responding. he earlier tweeted that he'd used tough language in a meeting with senators but not the derogatory language attributed to him. peter bowes, bbc news. meanwhile, a speech this morning by the mayor of london, sadiq khan, was disrupted by protesters shouting support for brexit and president trump. mr khan's address to the fabian society in london was suspended for several minutes while the demonstrators were taken out of the building by police. yesterday, mr khan welcomed donald trump's decision to canc
the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump dodged the most...
united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. the president left without responding. peter bowes, bbc news. iran has said the us has crossed a "red line" by imposing sanctions on the head of itsjudiciary and has vowed to retaliate. ayatollah sadeq amoli—larijani is among 1a individuals and bodies targeted. and bodies targeted. and the pressure over thejudiciary, and the pressure over iran's nuclear programme? thejudiciary, and the pressure over iran's nuclear programme ?|j thejudiciary, and the pressure over iran's nuclear programme? i don't think they are that much linked, and these new sanctions are a consequence of the recent protests we have seen in iran. and the fact that the white house wanted to show a reaction. donald trump and the white house were very vocal, trying to offer support to the protesters, while they were in the
united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. the president left without responding. peter bowes, bbc news. iran has said the us has crossed a "red line" by imposing sanctions on the head of itsjudiciary and has vowed to retaliate....
BBC News : BBCNEWS : January 13, 2018 11:00am-11:31am GMT
africans, this is quite a shock. from the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump dodged the most uncomfortable of questions. mr president, are you a racist? the president left without responding. he earlier tweeted that he used tough language in a meeting with senators but not the derogatory language attributed to him. peter bowes, bbc news. despite the furore over the president's comments, the political analyst eric ham says mr trump's words will resonate with his republican base. we know how the president feels about courting his base and making sure that they stay in the fold. in fa ct a sure that they stay in the fold. in fact a very conservative
africans, this is quite a shock. from the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil...
BBC News : BBCNEWS : January 13, 2018 9:00am-10:01am GMT
quite a shock. from the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump dodged the most uncomfortable of questions. mr president, are you a racist? the president left without responding. he'd earlier tweeted that he'd used "tough" language in a meeting with senators but not the derogatory language attributed to him. peter bowes, bbc news. the leader of the liberal democrats, vince cable, said the president's visit to the uk should not go ahead. if that is the case the government will have to work harder to make sure it doesn't happen because it would be appalling if this man, in view of everything he has said and done, would come and be treated as a state visit. con
quite a shock. from the united nations in geneva came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i'm sorry but there's no other word one can use but racist. you cannot dismiss entire countries and continents. the allegation has gone unanswered by the president. he had an opportunity at this ceremony in celebration of martin luther king. but it was awkward. after signing a proclamation in honour of the civil rights leader, mr trump...
BBC News : BBCNEWS : January 13, 2018 5:00am-5:31am GMT
hateful things and he said them repeatedly. from the united nation, in geneva, came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i am sorry but there is no other word one can use but racist. you can not dismiss entire countries and continents as "shitholes". across africa there has been a furious response. the botswana government called donald trump's comments "reprehensible and racist". it may be just words, maybe in another part of the world, but on this continent, that word is an insult. chant: build the wall, build the wall. "build the wall" was the cry of voters who loved donald trump's hardline stance on immigration during the election. we are going to build the wall, folks, don't worry about it. and he was said to be doing a victory lap at the white house last night, believing this row will rev up his base. donald trump launched his campaign for the white house with an attack on mexican immigrants and rose to political prominence by claiming, falsely, that barack obama was not an american. this latest racial contro
hateful things and he said them repeatedly. from the united nation, in geneva, came the stiffest of rebukes. these are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the united states. i am sorry but there is no other word one can use but racist. you can not dismiss entire countries and continents as "shitholes". across africa there has been a furious response. the botswana government called donald trump's comments "reprehensible and racist". it may be just words,...
conditions. imogen foukes reports from geneva. so much snow, literally tonnes of it. its sheer weight forces it down to the valleys. this was the scene in switzerland. no one was hurt here, but the avalanche risk is the highest it's been for almost a decade. over a metre of snow fell in parts of the alps on monday alone. in the italian resort of sestriere, residents were evacuated when snow poured down into their homes. villages are cut off, many schools are closed. this is les houches in france. translation: we heard a big noise at first. no tremor, but a very big noise, a huge growl. then i saw the cloud coming down, so we ran back and into the basement. it's always a shock, always. it's not nice to see. we thought the house would explode. when you see that, your heart sinks. in the shadow of the famous matterhorn, over 13,000 tourists in the swiss resort of zermatt cannot leave. snow has blocked road and rail links. skiing isn't possible, slopes are closed because of the avalanche danger. residents and holiday—makers alike are being warned to avoid high alpine roads and to
conditions. imogen foukes reports from geneva. so much snow, literally tonnes of it. its sheer weight forces it down to the valleys. this was the scene in switzerland. no one was hurt here, but the avalanche risk is the highest it's been for almost a decade. over a metre of snow fell in parts of the alps on monday alone. in the italian resort of sestriere, residents were evacuated when snow poured down into their homes. villages are cut off, many schools are closed. this is les houches in...
BBC News : BBCNEWS : January 6, 2018 6:00pm-6:31pm GMT
geneva convention, hospitals, and medics, are supposed to be protected, but they have almost been used as a key target, and it really does break the will of the people when you see the hospitals destroyed. ghouta has the last conclave that the syrians and the russians have not defeated, and it appears that they are having a final push. we are all hopeful that these talks will start again. i think a lot of us very closely involved had been devastated by the silence of ireland politicians and western politicians are really calling on president trump, who we just heard, prime minister may, president macron, and others to get behind a ceasefire. we feel if a season that can be imposed, this humanitarian aid that is stacked up on the borders of syria can get in and said those people, and the un peace process will develop to allow free and fair elections in some time. but at the moment, things are absolutely desperate. we have been in direct contact with the russians, with president putin and in direct contact with president assad, and they have in their path and lead ceasefires, and i
geneva convention, hospitals, and medics, are supposed to be protected, but they have almost been used as a key target, and it really does break the will of the people when you see the hospitals destroyed. ghouta has the last conclave that the syrians and the russians have not defeated, and it appears that they are having a final push. we are all hopeful that these talks will start again. i think a lot of us very closely involved had been devastated by the silence of ireland politicians and...
years in syriac, hospitals have been a target under the giroud can then —— under the cheever geneva convention, hospitals are not supposed to be a target. ghouta is it last big on clear that the syrians and russians have not defeated, and it appears that they are having a final push. we are all hopeful that peace talks will start again. i think a lot of us very closely involved have been devastated by the silence of on politicians and western politicians and already calling on president trump, who we just and already calling on president trump, who wejust had, president macron and others to get behind a ceasefire. we feel if a ceasefire can be encouraged, this humanitarian aid for these people can get in and save them. and the un peace process will develop to allow free and fair elections for some time. but at the moment, things are absolutely desperate. we have been in direct contact with the russians, with president putin and with president assad, and they have in the past and load ceasefires, and i think what we really need that is a countrywide ceasefire. otherwise, we are going
years in syriac, hospitals have been a target under the giroud can then —— under the cheever geneva convention, hospitals are not supposed to be a target. ghouta is it last big on clear that the syrians and russians have not defeated, and it appears that they are having a final push. we are all hopeful that peace talks will start again. i think a lot of us very closely involved have been devastated by the silence of on politicians and western politicians and already calling on president...
that the council in geneva. we must not become silent. the people act one crying out for freedom. freedom loving people must stand for the cause. the international criminal tea m cause. the international criminal team made the mistake of failing to do that in 2009. we must not make that mistake again. i am joined do that in 2009. we must not make that mistake again. i amjoined by do that in 2009. we must not make that mistake again. i am joined by a journalist from the guardian. talking about the situation in 2009 there. the suggestion 0bama's administration stood by. didn't do anything. trump has been forthright. condemning what has been going on in iran. any sense, do you believe, the donald trump administration has strategy to back that up?” donald trump administration has strategy to back that up? i do not think so. playing into the domestic audience in the us, and frankly i do not think the words will be listened to by protesters in tehran and other cities. months ago, the president of the native states imposed the blanket travel ban. not popular inside iran. but of course
that the council in geneva. we must not become silent. the people act one crying out for freedom. freedom loving people must stand for the cause. the international criminal tea m cause. the international criminal team made the mistake of failing to do that in 2009. we must not make that mistake again. i am joined do that in 2009. we must not make that mistake again. i amjoined by do that in 2009. we must not make that mistake again. i am joined by a journalist from the guardian. talking about...
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Simply Streep.com - The Meryl Streep Archives
Home & Updates
The Simply Streep Archives has gathered details on all of Meryl Streep's feature films, television, theatre and voice narration, and also features an extensive library of articles, photographs and video clips. You can browse the collection by Ms. Streep's career or through a year-by-year summary.
Browse the complete works Feature Films (59) Television Films & Series (8) Theatre Productions (55) Audio: Films & Television (11) Audio: CDs, Podcasts, Radio (27) Audio: Documentaries (52) Documentaries (26) TV Presentations (35) Theatre Readings (12) Educational Videos (11) Online Videos (27) Commercials (5)
Select a year 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973 1972 1971 1970 1969
Holocausto: El primer trabajo de Meryl Streep para TV
Teleprograma | November 27, 1989
Holocaust, Teleprograma, Year 1989
This article has been digitized and can be viewed in the photo gallery, however there is no text transcript available. If you would like to contribute a transcript of this article, please use the form below. Thank you very much for your support.
Publication & Date
NOW STREAMING | Released December 11, 2020 on Netflix
A group of stage performers (Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, James Corden, Andrew Rannells) in need of a career boost travel to a small Indiana town to help out a teenage girl who is refused to attend the high-school prom with her girlfriend.
NOW STREAMING | Released December 10, 2020 on HBO Max
In Steven Soderbergh's improvised comedy, Meryl Streep plays a famed author who takes a trip to England to accept an award and invites her old friends - played by Candice Bergen & Dianne Wiest - to reconnect and heal old wounds.
Golden Globe nominations
Screen Actors Guild Award nominations
27th Screen Actors Guild Awards
Academy Awards nominations
Hemingway: A Look Ahead on PBS
93rd Academy Awards
26th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards
77th Annual Golden Globe Awards
Los Angeles Screening
Last Featured Updates
“Don’t Look Up”: Netflix releases first footage of Adam McKay’s upcoming comedy
More talkshows: The Late Late Show with James Corden and The Today Show
More Videos: Equality Now, Entertainment Tonight, Late Show with Stephen Colbert
“The Prom” full trailer released
Meryl Streep presents Amal Clooney with the 2020 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award
Simply Streep - The Meryl Streep Archives is a non-profit fansite and is not affiliated with Ms. Streep herself or her management in any way. The cause of this website is to represent the work of Meryl Streep in an accurate and up-to-date version for fans all over the world. I do not claim ownership for any information or material published on this website. If any copyright holder wishes to have specific content removed, please drop me a line. I hope you enjoy your stay and check back soon!
www.simplystreep.com | Simply Streep - The Meryl Streep Archives | Created in 1999
Simply Streep - The Meryl Streep Archives is created by a fan, is a non-profit fansite and not affiliated with Ms. Streep herself or her management in any way. The cause of this website is to represent the work of Meryl Streep in an accurate and up-to-date version for fans all over the world. I do not claim ownership for any information or material published on this website. If any copyright holder wishes to have specific content removed, please contact me. Enjoy your stay!
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Soccer Tickets Available
Soccer Tickets Online
January 28, 2009 February 22, 2012 David
MLS 2009 Schedule
Major League Soccer has finally revealed its opening 2009 schedule. Major League Soccer’s 14th season begins with “First Kick,” the weekend of March 19-22, 2009, when 14 teams kickoff the 2009 MLS regular season. Highlights of First Kick include the inaugural game for 2009 expansion team Seattle Sounders FC. Seattle, the League’s 15th team hosts the New York Red Bulls, MLS Cup 2008 finalists, on Thursday, March 19 at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes. – Buy New York Red Bulls at Seattle Sounders FC Tickets
The 2008 MLS Cup Champion Columbus Crew kick off their season in one of five games on Saturday, March 21 when they travel to face the Houston Dynamo at 8 p.m. ET on Fox Soccer Channel and Fox Sports en Espanol. Fox Soccer Channel’s opening weekend double header continues Saturday evening with Chivas USA hosting Western Conference foe the Colorado Rapids at 10:30 p.m. ET.
Also squaring off on Saturday, March 21 in First Kick action are Eastern Conference foes Toronto FC traveling to face the Kansas City Wizards at 8:30 p.m. ET, and the New England Revolution who travel to face the San Jose Earthquakes at 10:30 p.m. ET.
First Kick action closes on Sunday, March 22 when the Los Angeles Galaxy host D.C. United at 3 p.m. ET on TeleFutura.
Real Salt Lake is the only club that is not in action during First Kick weekend. In its first MLS game since hosting the Western Conference Championship, Rio Tinto Stadium will open its doors to host the Columbus Crew in Week 3 in primetime on ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes April 2 at 9 p.m. ET.
In addition to the previously First Kick lineup, there are plenty of intriguing matchups throughout the regular season schedule. The battle for the Trillium Cup begins in Week 2 with Toronto FC heading to Columbus to meet the defending MLS Cup champion Crew for a Saturday night matchup. The Red Bulls will open their home slate against their heated rival, the New England Revolution, the same night in a game broadcast on Fox Soccer Channel.
The first leg of the SuperClasico will kick off in Week 4 with the Los Angeles Galaxy playing host to Chivas USA at The Home Depot Center on April 11. The two teams meet again on July 11,this time with Chivas USA hosting, and then for a third time in a Galaxy home game on Aug. 29.
Revenge will be on the mind of the Houston Dynamo when they play host to the New York Red Bulls in a rematch of last year’s Western Conference Semifinal Series upset on April 11.
Week 5 begins with an always-spirited meeting between the New England Revolution and D.C. United on April 17 at 7 p.m. at RFK Stadium while Real Salt Lake travels to Giants Stadium to face the New York Red Bulls in a rematch of last year’s memorable Western Conference Championship on April 18. The often-heated rivalry between the Los Angeles Galaxy and the San Jose Earthquakes will also reignite on April 18 at Buck Shaw Stadium.
The New York Red Bulls and Los Angeles Galaxy have played some memorable shootouts in the last two seasons and those two teams meet for the first time on May 2 at The Home Depot Center with the return leg set for July 18 at Giants Stadium.
The Red Bulls and Columbus Crew meet for the first time since MLS Cup 2008 on June 27 at Crew Stadium.
If recent history is any indication, the final week of the regular season will be drama filled as teams vie for the final of eight playoff berths. The MLS regular season concludes on Oct. 25 with the Houston Dynamo facing Chivas USA at The Home Depot Center in a game broadcast on TeleFutura and the Columbus Crew hosting the New England Revolution.
The MLS Cup Playoffs begin on Oct. 29 and culminate in MLS Cup 2009 on the weekend of Nov. 21-22 at a site to be announced at a later date.
REGULAR SEASON – WEEK 1 (FIRST KICK)
New York Red Bulls at Seattle Sounders FC, 9 p.m. (ESPN2/Deportes)
Buy New York Red Bulls at Seattle Sounders FC Tickets
Columbus Crew at Houston Dynamo
Chicago Fire at FC Dallas
Toronto FC at Kansas City Wizards
Colorado Rapids at Chivas USA
New England Revolution at San Jose Earthquakes
D.C. United at Los Angeles Galaxy
Eleven Must See Games In Major League Soccer This Season
The US MNT’s Greatest Match Ever
I am a long time soccer fan who grew up in England traveling the country watching Coventry City in the 70's. Now living in the U.S. I am still as passionate about soccer as I was when I was a kid.
More Posts by David
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Man Utd.
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Home Tech SEGA Reveals Two New Sonic Games For 2017
SEGA Reveals Two New Sonic Games For 2017
Sonic, a game that won the hearts of many players around the world, recently celebrated its 25th Anniversary in a sold-out event that was celebrated on Friday evening during the San Diego Comic-Con which was held at the House of Blues. During this event, SEGA lifted the lid off of two Sonic games namely Sonic Mania and another original game which hasn’t received an official title yet. The games are scheduled for release in 2017 and will be released across both PC and major gaming consoles.
Sonic Mania will basically be the nostalgic 2D game, bearing pixel-style art and the classic gameplay that the game was known for. The game would be based on reimagining the iconic Zones and Acts from the original Sonic games which include, Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and Sonic The Hedgehog 3 (which marked the debut of Knuckles). Further, the game will also include completely new zones and bosses. The game will be developed by SEGA of America and PagodaWest Games will be collaborating in the project. The game will be available for a digital download on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC during the Spring of 2017.
The original title that was unveiled at the end of the event is being developed by the Sonic Team who was behind the crafting of Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations. This title would be coming out in the holiday season of 2017 and would be available for both digital and retail purchase. The game would be coming out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo NX. Further information was promised to be released at a later date.
During the event it was also revealed Sonic Dash, the mobile game, has been downloaded over 200 million times and in order to mark the celebration of the 25th Anniversary, the mobile game would have a special in-game event. The event would include the Green Hill Zone as a playable area while also allowing Classic Sonic as a playable character. The event is scheduled to last a week during which players can unlock both the zone and the character; once unlocked, players can play with this even after the event wraps up. The game is free to download, however, there are optional in-game purchases. The game is available from Google’s Play Store, Apple’s App Store, Amazon Underground and Windows Phone Store.
New SEGA Sonic Games For 2017
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HomeNews and viewsNewsFor global fair play – A fair football for 17 Sustainable Development Goals
For global fair play – A fair football for 17 Sustainable Development Goals
Copyrights: fairplay Initiative
The fairplay Initiative is working to further link football and the Sustainable Development Goals. Supported by prominent personalities, they are distributing fairly produced footballs to grassroots programmes across Austria and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Unfortunately fair products are still scarce in the sporting goods industry. The fairplay Initiative offers a football that was produced free from child labour and helps furthering the 17 SDGs! 300 of these balls will be handed over to football clubs all over Austria and to projects in the Global South. The prominent supporters are former Austrian team captain Marc Janko, Austrian record International Nina Burger and Ghada Waly, the new Director-General of UN Vienna.
The ball is rolling again in many European leagues. In times of the Corona pandemic, football has managed to adhere to conditions that make it possible to start playing again on the field. What football has not been able to realise so far is the use of sporting goods that adhere to human rights standards.
Sport for development and human rights
The fairplay Initiative at the Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation (VIDC) is currently running the "Sport for Development and Human Rights" project, funded by the Austrian Development Agency. A key aim of the project is to carry the SDGs into the world of sport.
Football in particular has great potential to stand up for human rights and thus promote global justice. Ghada Waly, Director-General of the UN Vienna and Executive Director of UNODC, emphasizes the important contribution of sport to social development and peace: “Sport promotes and protects mental and physical health and teaches young people valuable life skills and fair play. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is proud to partner with civil society and the private sector to support the Sustainable Development Goals and reconstruction after COVID through sport. For emerging stronger from the crisis, we also have to return to sport. It helps people to relax.”
Also former captain of the Austrian football team, Marc Janko, and now Laureus Sport for Good Ambassador highlights the unifying power of sport: “Sport brings people together and has a positive effect on society as a whole. Sport is simply very valuable, especially for disadvantaged young people, whether here in Europe or in the Global South. That is also the reason why I am committed to the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation. Our work is also based on the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, so it is a great idea to make the 17 SDGs known in Austria through football.”
The record Austrian International and new director of women sport at First Vienna FC 1894, Nina Burger, wants to work particularly hard for SDG 5, Gender Equality: “The issue of equality has received more and more momentum in recent years – in society as well as in football. In a society, everyone should have the same rights, regardless of their gender, but also regardless of their religion, skin colour, sexuality or origin. At First Vienna FC, we want to make a contribution to promoting women's football and thus also to equality in football and in sports as a whole."
300 balls for football clubs and initiatives
In the forthcoming football season, when the ball rolls again in grassroots and youth football, two footballs together with an information package with posters and flyers will be passed on to committed grassroots clubs throughout Austria free of charge. In addition, sports initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa will receive balls. In total, 300 SDG balls will be handed over to clubs and initiatives by the end of next year.
The Football Helps organisation in Burundi will be one beneficiary. Soso Mugiraneza, comedian and founder of the organisation says: “Football Helps brings together children and youths from a wide variety of backgrounds. Football provides them with a meaningful structure within which they learn to deal fairly with one another and, moreover, are taught important values. Football makes a central contribution to social development. We are happy about the SDG balls!”
17 Sustainable Development Goals
The SDGs were launched in 2015 by the UN as successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). They include 17 goals that must be implemented by all countries worldwide. The goals include No Poverty (Goal 1), Reduced Inequalities (Goal 10), Responsible Consumption (Goal 12) and global Partnership for the Goals (Goal 17). The aim is to make the world a fairer place, and sport can make an important contribution to this. The fairplay ball shows the so-called SDG wheel, corresponding to the 17 goals in 17 colours.
The ball was commissioned by the fairplay Initiative in cooperation with EZA Fairer Handel at Vision Technologies Corporation (VTC). VTC is based in the city of Sialkot in Pakistan, where 80% of the world's footballs are produced. However, many brands do not produce under conditions that comply with human rights. This often leads to exploitative employment relationships and very low wages. This is different with VTC, which is complying with the FAIRTRADE standards.
A fairplay ball for everyone
Not only clubs can enjoy the balls authorized by the UN. Also a small contingent is offered to the general public for a minimum donation of EUR 27. The fair footballs can be ordered via the online shop of the football magazine ballesterer or directly from fairplay. With the donations, the fairplay Initiative organises workshops throughout Austria in which young people are introduced to the SDGs and sport is used as a tool for global learning.
Order your personal SDG football via this link.
Download press photos here.
The latest edition of the magazine “Weltnachrichten” by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) is devoted to the topic of sport and development.
Background information on the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation can be found here.
Martin Kainz, fairplay Initiative
Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation (VIDC)
kainz@vidc.org | Tel. + 43-1-713 35 94-64 | www.fairplay.or.at
Visit the fairplay Initiative website to view the original article.
fairplay Initiative
sportanddev.org Community
Related article: A targeted framework: Using the Sustainable Development Goals as a guide to a brighter future for sport
Related article: Sport and development’s big chance? The 2030 agenda for sustainable development
Related article: The tangible contributions of sport to the SDGs
Visit the fairplay Initiative website.
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Tiro en Braille (Braille Shot)
Published: 09/29/2020 - 16:04
Football for development project wins regional UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award
Utilizing sport for community belonging, peacebuilding, and employment opportunities: A human-centred design approach
The digital divide and sport for development
A partnership approach: Sport and refugees
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Dak Prescott contract talk brings out Troy Aikman's voice of reason
Written By Tadd Haislop
@taddhaislop
(Getty Images) https://images.daznservices.com/di/library/sporting_news/26/87/dak-prescott-112119-getty-ftr_1h3mqbbl8fxbg15ye9ezv68tp9.jpg?t=-1822853266&w=500&quality=80
Troy Aikman had to know Dak Prescott's contract would be among the topics covered when he joined 105.3 The Fan in Dallas for an interview Monday. So one of the statements he made on the radio was uncharacteristically questionable.
"I've been surprised that there has been so much discussion about his contract,'' the 53-year-old former Cowboys quarterback said of the current one. Aikman of all people should understand the senseless amplification of any story relating to a Dallas quarterback.
MORE: Why Dallas signed Andy Dalton to back up Prescott
Though the Cowboys are a little sluggish on the matter, they reportedly remain set on signing Prescott, 26, to a long-term contract extension. They have until July 15 to reach an agreement with Prescott before he will play on the franchise tag in 2020 and earn $31.4 million for one season.
The hold-up, according to the Dallas Morning News, is that Prescott prefers a four-year deal as opposed to the five-year contract the Cowboys have offered. Per the report, Dallas' offer would make Prescott the highest-paid quarterback in the NFL, at least momentarily.
So Aikman is right to downplay the significance of Prescott's current status.
"It’s not like he’s not going to be playing for the Cowboys in 2020, whether he’s franchised or he has a deal, he’s going to be here playing and eventually a deal gets done. It’s not high on my list of things when I look at the league and what’s happening with the other 31 teams.
"I love everything about (Prescott). ... I’m not saying anything the Cowboys don’t already know. They will pay him, he’s going to make a lot of money, and I think he’s going to be the quarterback for the Cowboys for a long, long time, and continue to have a great career.''
MORE: Projecting Prescott's new contract in Dallas
The NFL's highest-paid quarterback in terms of average annual salary is the Seahawks' Russell Wilson at $35 million. The Cowboys making Prescott the new highest-paid passer will be a formality considering that he will quickly be jumped by the Chiefs' Patrick Mahomes and, likely, the Texans' Deshaun Watson.
Debate over whether Prescott is worth such a chunk of salary (he is) is senseless given how the Cowboys feel about him.
"I saw (Cowboys linebacker) Sean Lee the other day out here in Santa Barbara," Aikman said. "We got to talking about Dak. I said, ‘Is there something I’m missing about this guy? Because I love him.' And Sean’s a huge fan, as well, and everybody in that locker room is."
Bills v Ravens 1h ago
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St. Louis co. buying Brayton Point
By Michael HoltzmanThe Herald News
SOMERSET — Commercial Development Co. Inc., a St. Louis company that redevelops “underutilized, distressed or environmentally challenged properties,” will be the new owner of the 1,500-megawatt decommissioned Brayton Point Power Station, the plant’s owners announced Monday.
“Our sustainable redevelopment projects have played a transformative role in bringing hundreds of North American sites out of blight and back to productive use,” Commercial Development says on its website.
The announced buyer comes less than a week after Dynegy Inc., which has owned Brayton Point for 2½ years and maintained it would close, said it had selected an unnamed buyer.
Commercial Development would assume responsibilities associated with the mostly coal-powered site along 307 acres of Mount Hope Bay in Somerset that was shut down May 31, Dynegy, based in Houston, Texas, said in a press statement.
The sale should be completed by the middle of December following a period of “final due diligence,” said John Kowalik, Commercial Development media spokesman, in a press statement.
It said their plans are to invest significant resources “to transform the former energy asset for post-coal utilization.”
That includes asbestos abatement, environmental remediation and restoration and “demolition of most of the coal-related infrastructure on the site,” CDC said.
Complementing Dynegy’s selection approach, Commercial Development CEO Randall Jostes said, “Our team understands the historical and economic significance behind this project and we are pleased to lead the development process.”
“We have been very impressed with Somerset’s pro-growth leadership and look forward to working with them to help create new opportunities,” Jostes said.
Redeveloped properties that Commercial Development has taken ownership of in the past two years include a 725-acre coal-fired power plant in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, that was resold last month and a 468-acre retired coal plant in Columbus, Ohio.
Its portfolio includes more than 50 million square feet under roof on more than 250 sites in the United States and Canada.
“Commercial Development Co. has established a strong track record of repurposing industrial sites that on to become important contributors to the economic and social fabric of their communities,” Dynegy said in its statements.
State Sen. Michael Rodrigues, D-Westport, who said he and state Rep. Patricia Haddad, D-Somerset, had met the prospective new owners, said last week, “This is well within their wheelhouse. ... They impressed me.”
Dynegy purchased Brayton Point in April 2015 as one of 10 power plants from Energy Capital Partners, which had announced the year before its plans to close the plant after unsuccessful bidding on the forward capacity wholesale electricity market.
Brayton Point was commissioned in 1963 and has been Somerset’s largest taxpayer for decades.
Town and state officials have eagerly awaited the Brayton Point sale and redevelopment options for the huge waterfront site with a deep port.
Among industrial site reuses Commercial Development lists, that included assumption of environmental liabilities, was the former Tanners Creek Power Plant in Indiana. It purchased the property a year ago and on Oct. 3 the Ports of Indiana said it would use the 725-acre former coal plant as the state’s fourth port.
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Baseball bat thug and foot fetish sex predator among criminals jailed in August
Southport Visiter
Photo Gallery: Serious Southport, Formby and West Lancs criminals jailed during August
Today we present a list of the criminals jailed for committing serious offences in the Southport, Formby and West Lancashire area during August.
They include: a paedophile who abused three boys, a thug who attacked his girlfriend with a baseball bat, a foot fetishist sex predator with previous sex attack convictions against young children, a Pontin's worker who threatened to stab a customer in the lungs, a boy who stabbed a fellow teenager in Formby and gang members jailed over a multi-million pound drug plot.
Keep reading the Visiter.co.uk website where we will keep bringing you all the latest court cases from our area.
Paedophile who abused three boys must sign Sex Offenders Register For Life
A paedophile who sexually abused three boys in Formby the 1980s has been jailed for four years.
Ian Robert Harris, 46, denied a string of historic sexual offences, but was convicted after a trial at Liverpool Crown Court.
Harris, of Alderson Crescent, Formby, was found guilty of 15 counts involving indecent assault and indecency.
The court heard they took place between March 1984 and March 1988, when Harris was between 15 and 18 years old.
Judge Alan Conrad, QC, said the offences against two of the boys, who were all aged about nine when the offending began, involved threats.
The judge said: “You used your physical presence, your greater sophistication and a combination of inducements and threats in order to initiate and to continue your abuse of them.”
Judge Conrad said Harris, formerly of Lonsdale Road, Formby, had only been in his late teens, but was still considerably older than his victims.
Neville Biddle, defending, said apart from these convictions, Harris had lived a law-abiding life.
Judge Conrad said if Harris had been older when the offences took place, the sentence would have been longer.
He ordered him to sign on the Sex Offenders Register for life.
Thug attacked girlfriend with baseball bat and told her to call him 'Dominus'
A violent boyfriend who demanded his partner call him Dominus, after the slavemaster in Spartacus, was jailed for five years.
Michael Quinn, 25, of Tinsley Avenue, Southport, broke his girlfriend’s cheekbone by elbowing her in the face, and her ring finger by hitting her hand with a baseball bat.
Liverpool Crown Court heard how he even forced his victim to accompany him to the toilet on her hands and knees.
David Watson, prosecuting, said Quinn waged a “prolonged period of sustained domestic abuse” from 2012 to early this year.
He said from the outset Quinn “sought to exercise control” and “destroy her self-esteem”, and said she was not good enough to be his girlfriend.
The couple moved from Kirkby to Tinsley Avenue, Southport, where he first “roughed her up”.
Mr Watson said: “He told her to call him Dominus, the name of the slavemaster from the film Spartacus, to belittle her.
“He made her accompany him to the toilet on her hands and knees. He would push her around, twist her arm and spit on her.
Mr Watson said: “He told officers she wasn’t good enough to be his girlfriend, only to cook and clean for him. He volunteered that he made her call him Dominus because he was in charge.”
Quinn admitted inflicting grievous bodily harm, three assaults and perverting the course of justice. He was previously jailed for six months for possessing a stun gun.
Simon Berkson, defending, said the couple “were not made for each other” and had “a bad relationship”
Judge Andrew Hatton said: “This was a sustained course of gratuitous violence against a young woman who had the misfortune to be your girlfriend.
“You said you made her call you Dominus because you were in charge. Perhaps you had been. You no longer are.”
Foot fetishist jailed for sex attack ordeal
A dangerous sex offender from Skelmersdale with a foot fetish brazenly attacked a woman just yards from a police station, a court heard.
As the woman sat waiting for her 14-year-old son, who was being questioned by police, David Bennett, bleeding heavily from self-inflicted lacerations, approached her, asking for help.
She assisted him but he then grabbed her leg and after taking her shoes off began rubbing her feet.
Her phone began to ring and the woman, who felt very intimidated, then noticed that his private parts were exposed and he had knife in his waistband.
When her mobile again began to ring he became very irate and she feared for her safety. Bennett then started rubbing her left foot against himself and kissing her toes.
His terrifying behaviour continued until fortunately her boyfriend arrived and she fled.
She only told her partner of her ordeal when they got home as she was afraid Bennett might stab him with the blade.
Sentencing 31-year-old Bennett to six years’ imprisonment with three years’ extended licence, the judge, Recorder David Turner, QC, ruled that the public need to be protected from the risk of him causing serious harm.
He told him: “I consider you to be a very frightening and unpredictable young man. It was a frightening and degrading experience for the woman who was alone at night.”
During the sentencing hearing, Bennett, whose arms were heavily bandaged, repeatedly interrupted the judge, who eventually ordered his removal from the dock until he was brought back to be told how long he would be jailed.
Recorder Turner pointed out that Bennett had also been repeatedly abusive and aggressive during his trial and earlier police interviews.
Liverpool Crown Court heard that Bennett’s convictions include sexual assaults against children under 14 involving similar foot fetish behaviour.
“This case represents a pattern” said Recorder Turner, who also pointed out that there had been gasps from members of the jury when they heard of those convictions after the guilty verdict.
A probation report spoke of his actions as “intentional and calculated, seeking risk-taking behaviour to fulfil his sexual needs.”
Bennett, of Willow Hey, Skelmersdale, was convicted after a five-day trial of sexual assault and possessing a craft knife near Skelmersdale police station at 9.30pm on August 19 last year.
The judge imposed a sexual harm prevention order, banning him from approaching lone females and touching their feet or legs, ordered him to sign on the Sex Offenders Register for life and imposed an indefinite restraining order to keep away from the victim.
Pontin's worker threatens to stab customer with dart in robbery ordeal
A drunk holiday camp worker who threatened to stab a customer with a dart unless he handed over cash was jailed for three years.
Jeffrey Black, 36, started drinking after finishing his shift at Pontins Holiday Park in Ainsdale on March 8 last year.
Liverpool Crown Court heard he was seen by colleagues asking guests to buy him drinks at a bar.
Kenneth Grant, prosecuting, said Black’s boss ordered him to leave because he had broken the company’s rules.
Black, of Moss Lane, Litherland, was escorted off the site by security and headed to Ainsdale railway station at around 6.30am on March 9.
There he met a man in his 20s, who had been staying at Pontins for a weekend music festival and was travelling back to London via Liverpool.
Mr Grant said the man, who had also been drinking and felt hungover, asked Black which platform he should wait on.
The man was sick at the end of the platform before lying down by a grit storage box.
Mr Grant said: “After a few moments of dozing he woke up and found the defendant stood over him. The defendant said ‘give me £50 or I will puncture your lungs’.
“There was an object in the defendant’s right hand. It was a dart.
“The defendant repeated the threat saying: ‘I need this money, you don’t need it, I will puncture your lung’.”
The victim feared he would be stabbed but did not have any money, so he told Black he would go to a cashpoint.
At this stage a man walked by and the victim shouted to him for help, before crossing over the platform and climbing over a fence to escape.
The passer-by called police, who arrived at the scene at around 7.35am.
Black, with a shaved head and wearing a blue polo shirt and jeans in the dock, pleaded guilty to attempted robbery.
The court heard he has seven previous convictions for 11 offences.
These include possession of an offensive weapon and assault causing actual bodily harm, relating to a balaclava-clad hammer attack in 2010, for which he was jailed for 12 months.
Paul Lewis, defending, said Black had become dependant on alcohol, following in the footsteps of his dad who “almost drank himself to death”.
Mr Lewis accepted Black “behaved appallingly” and said he was remorseful.
He said he has a five-year-old autistic son, who requires constant attention and supervision.
He said: “Those close to him are now suffering as a result of his actions.”
Gang members jailed over multi-million pound cocaine and ecstasy plot
Three members of a drugs gang that was supplying millions of pounds of cocaine and ecstasy around the country have been jailed.
Gareth Mawdsley and Gerrard Gandy were the leaders of the criminal operation that was running a large-scale cocaine supply network between Lancashire, Merseyside and the south coast.
An investigation by Lancashire Constabulary’s serious and organised crime unit, which began in March 2014, led to the recovery of 53kg of cocaine and 150,000 ecstasy tablets – with a total street value of £12m – and cash totalling more than a quarter of a million pounds.
Mawdsley, 34, of Bleasdale Close, Aughton, and Gandy, 34, of Orrell Road, Wigan, were sentenced to 16 and 14 years’ jail respectively at Liverpool Crown Court for conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and money laundering offences.
James Moran, 33, of Banksbarn, Skelmersdale, was locked up for 10 years on the same charges for his role as a courier in the gang.
Lancashire police worked with their Hampshire colleagues throughout the operation to investigate the supply of cocaine across England, particularly Skelmersdale, Lancashire, Merseyside and Hampshire.
Gareth Mawdsley’s partner, Kelly Carmichael, of Bleasdale Close, Aughton, was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment suspended for two years plus 240 hours’ unpaid work for assisting an offender.
DI Martin Kane of Lancashire Constabulary’s serious and organised crime unit, said: “The drugs seizures we’ve made throughout this operation will dramatically reduce its supply and the harm cocaine causes across Lancashire and the North West."
Man's bedroom transformed into cannabis factory
A Skelmersdale man who was found growing cannabis and minding a safe containing drugs has been jailed for 15 months.
Liverpool Crown Court heard that police raided Steven Kiernan’s home in Beech Trees on July 24 last year and found that one bedroom had been transformed into a cannabis factory.
A total of 22 plants had been harvested and there was drying cannabis found in the room which had been set up with special lighting, fans and transformers.
In another bedroom just more than half a kilo of cannabis was found in bags and containers with a potential street value of about £1,200, said Sarah Griffin, prosecuting.
In a safe officers found 19 ecstasy tablets, 700 grams of cannabis resin and two grams of cocaine.
Kiernan, 41, pleaded guilty to cultivating cannabis and possessing the other drugs with intent to supply.
Jailing him, Judge Denis Watson, QC, said that Kiernan had been looking after the safe and its contents for someone and had intended to hand it back to them and that he was cultivating cannabis in a bedroom.
David Lacide, defending, said that Kiernan had a drink problem and was unemployed.
Teenager jailed after stabbing boy in Formby
A teenager stabbed a boy leaving him fighting for his life after a gang-related shooting in Formby.
William Cowley, 17, plunged a knife into a fellow 17-year-old, hitting his kidney, in an alleyway off Brows Lane on May 21.
Liverpool Crown Court heard the incident came a week after shots were fired at Cowley’s home in Gardner Road, Formby.
Edmund Haygarth, prosecuting, said the boy was in Flames take-away with his girlfriend when he spotted Cowley going into Morrisons supermarket at around 6pm.
He said the teenagers had an argument leading to a “fist fight” in the alleyway between the two buildings.
A man who worked at the kebab shop ran out and got between the pair.
But Mr Haygarth said Cowley reached around him and stabbed the boy in the side of his body, causing a 10cm wound.
Cowley fled the scene and was chased by a group including the victim’s brother, who caught and attacked him near Holy Trinity Church.
A passing off-duty special constable broke up the fight and arrested Cowley.
Mr Haygarth said: “Cowley made the significant statement: ‘‘I’m going to prison for this, let me go, they are going to shoot me’.”
When interviewed by police, Cowley made partial admissions, claiming he did not bring the knife to the scene but picked it up off the ground.
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Beauty and the Beast Tickets
A tale as old as time—Beauty and the Beast
There are few musicals that enchant as much as this tale as old as time—and after the Disney movie captured our hearts in 1991, the stage musical quickly followed in 1994 and has been a safe bet for musical houses ever since. And who wouldn’t want to watch Belle fall in love with the Beast? With tickets for Beauty and the Beast from StubHub, you can listen to your favourite musical numbers live.
Be our guest as this well-loved musical guides into a magical realm
Alan Menken, who wrote the original soundtrack for the 1991 film, helped adapt the music for the stage, and none other than Tim Rice (who has, numerous times, worked alongside Andrew Lloyd Webber) contributed the lyrics to Menken’s beautiful music. The enchanting tunes paired with timeless lyrics and a story that stems back to an 18th-century, French fairy tale create a magnificent story of love, fearlessness and magic. Travel alongside Belle when the brave young woman not only defies the narrow mindedness of the villagers but also sets out to rescue her father from the cruel claws of an enchanted Beast, tucked away in a castle in the woods. It is truly a tale as old as time when love conquers it all and peace and order are restored in the end, but to witness all the beautiful details and music in the middle, you have to be quick and get your tickets for Beauty and the Beast on StubHub now. Note that you can also sell tickets with us. Be stirred to tears when you finally hear your favourite songs like "Be Our Guest" and "Beauty and the Beast" sung live on stage. Be carried away when Belle descends the stairs in her iconic yellow dress and gets swept off her feet by the increasingly endearing Beast. Millions of fans have already been enchanted by this tale, and when the musical opened on Broadway in 1994, fans were milling to see it. In 2007, it closed after more than 5,000 performances, making it the tenth longest-running musical in Broadway history.
A well-beloved classic for the people and the show business
There are few stories as romantic as this one and it certainly attracted the big award ceremonies’ attention. The show garnered nine Tony Award nominations and pocketed one, while the Laurence Olivier Awards honoured the production with an award for Best New Musical in 1998. The enrapturing musical is a special hit with children, so the next family outing is a fixed deal with tickets for Beauty and the Beast from StubHub. If you plan to do more such things with your family, you may also consider Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Cinderella and Annie.
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Rep. Ted Poe Says North Korea Must Be Designated A State Sponsor of Terrorism
The Texas congressman wants the Senate to pass his bill to return the country to this list so sanctions can be imposed.
By Jill AmentJune 22, 2017 7:13 amGovernment & Politics
(stephan)/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The North Korean flag flies in Pyongyang.
As all eyes in Washington, D.C. are on the Senate health care bill, another major issue has been pushed to the sidelines. But U.S. Rep. Ted Poe (R-Humble) isn’t content to let it sit there. He’s pushing to have the U.S. label North Korea as a terrorist state in the wake of the death of American student Otto Warmbier.
Warmbier died June 19, days after being medically evacuated from North Korea, where he had been held prisoner since March 2016. He was detained for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster.
“He’s put in jail, he’s tortured, he’s drugged, he’s beaten. He was put in a coma by the North Koreans and then died when he was in the United States,” Poe says. “To me, as a former judge, that is murder, and that’s exactly the way we should understand it.”
Poe says that Warmbier, who was visiting North Korea as a tourist, was a victim of Kim Jong-un’s “terrorist regime.”
In April, the House approved legislation Poe authored that would order the State Department to reconsider designating North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The country was taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2008 when the regime agreed to scale back its nuclear weapons program, a promise Poe says it has failed to keep.
“I think members of Congress realize now that North Korea is a country that wants to harm the United States, and we need to do everything we can to prevent that from happening,” Poe says.
He believes the terrorism designation is needed to enact sanctions on North Korea.
Poe says that sanctions are one way of crippling the regime and forcing it to stop developing nuclear and conventional weapons. He also says that South Korea, Japan, Guam and Hawaii must be “militarily defensible” to North Korean actions.
“We’re using the new THAAD anti-missile system and installing that in the region in case North Korea starts shooting missiles at our allies or at the United States,” Poe says.
Poe’s bill is being considered by the Senate and he hopes the Senate will vote on it before Congress’ August recess so sanctions can be imposed by the end of the summer.
Written by Molly Smith.
Texas Standard for June 22, 2017
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Texas Standard For January 1, 2021
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Raynham police searching for at-large stabbing suspect
Apr 9, 2020 at 1:43 PM Apr 9, 2020 at 1:43 PM
RAYNHAM — Police are actively searching for a man who they say stabbed a woman in her home multiple times Wednesday afternoon before fleeing.
Police obtained a warrant for Jacob Szalno, 24, whose last known address is a Brockton homeless shelter, on charges of attempted murder, mayhem, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and assault and battery.
Szalno should not be approached, police warned, and anyone who sees him or knows his whereabouts is asked to call 911.
Around 4 p.m. Wednesday, Raynham police responded to a home on Broadway (Route 138) near Raynham Park for a reported stabbing.
Upon arrival, officers located a 33-year-old woman that was suffering from six stab wounds. She was transported to an area hospital with injuries that are serious, but are not believed to be life-threatening.
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According to the initial investigation, the incident was not random, police say, and the woman and the suspect were friends. Police say that Szalno allegedly stabbed the woman with a pair of scissors before fleeing the house on foot into a nearby wooded area.
The weapon used in the attack was located and seized as evidence.
A Raynham police K9 officer and a Massachusetts Department of Correction K9 officer responded to the scene, as well as the Massachusetts State Police Air Wing. Officers set up a perimeter and searched the area, but were unable to locate the suspect. As of late Thursday morning, Szalno remains at-large.
Neighbor Mario Saltalamacchia, who lives on Wilbur Street, described the immense police presence in the area, including throughout his neighborhood, which included officers stationed at every street corner from Route 138 to Hall Street.
"They were circling drones waiting for the Mass. State Police helicopter to show up," he said. "The helicopter showed up and they were out for probably three to four hours, just circling over the swamp."
Saltalamacchia described seeing officers head into the woods, part of the Hockomock Swamp, to search and said officers remained at the scene until around 1 a.m.
"It was pretty crazy, just the amount of the police presence," he said. "It's not like anything we've ever seen. It's pretty quiet over here."
The Taunton Daily Gazette, Taunton, MA ~ 5 Cohannet St., P.O. Box 111 Taunton, MA 02780 ~ Do Not Sell My Personal Information ~ Cookie Policy ~ Do Not Sell My Personal Information ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service ~ Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy
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Team Angel PH
Angel Locsin as Nurse Jaica and other celebrities who portrayed frontliner characters onscreen!
With the increasing number of Covid-19 positive cases in the country, there are unsung heroes who are tirelessly working to fight the pandemic, our frontliners. While everyone is advised to stay at home, these frontliners hardly had a chance to return home because of the fear that their family might get infected. They are our modern-day heroes in this time of crisis. These frontliners are also oftentimes represented onscreen by our favorite artists just like Angel Locsin who portrayed a frontliner character not once but quite a lot of times already.
In 2012 sitcom Todamax, Angel Locsin is Isabelle Padausdos and played as a nurse. In the 2016 movie Everything About Her, Locsin played the role of nurse Jaica, an ER nurse who was hired to be a private nurse of a prominent business woman and CEO, Madame Vivian played by the star for all seasons Ms. Vilma Santos. And in her recent teleserye, 'The General's Daughter', the actress played another frontliner role as 2nd Lt. Rhian Bonifacio who is a nurse corps.
Other stars who took the challenge to play a frontliner character was Anne Curtis who played as a nurse in the horror movie 'Wag Kang Lilingon', Zanjoe Marudo in the movie 'The Third Party' who played the role of a pediatrician, Derek Ramsay, a promising doctor in 'Ex With Benefits' and the boys of 'A Soldier's Heart' ; Gerald Anderson and Vin Abrenica to name a few.
Salute to our frontliners who are out there, braving the pandemic on a daily to help the people. Mabuhay po kayo!
Source: ABS-CBN
Neil Arce to Angel Locsin: "Sa 2021 sakin ka na"
Wedding bells will be ringing very soon as Angel Locsin’s fiancé, Neil Arce, on New Year’s Eve hinted on finally tying the knot this 2021 via Instagram post after having to postpone their dream wedding in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Nagsimula sa camping sa kasalan pala mauuwi. Sa 2021 sakin ka na [kissing emoji],” Neil Arce wrote on his post. (It all started with a camping trip and it turned out that it will lead to a wedding. In 2021, you are mine.) “Sayo naman ako (I am already yours),” Angel Locsin, meanwhile, replied in the comments section. The post has garnered many likes and comments their fans and fellow celebrities sending them well wishes and greetings. To welcome the new year, Angel Locsin also took to Instagram a photo of her fiancé and her hand wearing their engagement ring. “Hello my 2021 [heart emoji],” she simply said. The bride-to-be revealed last year their original wedding date which they had to put on hold because
Angel Locsin on the biggest lessons she learned about love.
We've been watching Angel Locsin on our TV screens and on the big screen for more than a decade now. She did not just share her talent, she also shared her wisdom and courage, and inspired everyone with her genuine love and compassion to people. Angel Locsin also shares a portion of her private life. She is always open about her love life through its ups and downs and we all know how that goes. Despite everything that she's been through, Angel Locsin did not stop believing in love until she find the one and after a few heartbreaks, she finally found him. Heartbreak is not at all something to celebrate and on her interview with Cosmo, Angel Locsin shared the biggest lessons she learned about love that she learned the hard way. "Marami akong napagdaanan na experiences and I had to learn the hard way about love but there comes a point in your life na mafe-feel mo na everything will just fall into place. Hindi siya mahirap, right timing and maturity din
Angel Locsin and Neil Arce share how their relationship transitioned from friends to lovers!
Friends to lovers, it is one of the most romantic love stories to ever exist but the transition from being the best of friends to a romantic relationship is not a walk in the park that's why some were stuck in the friendzone. Well, for those who do not have enough courage to express their feelings to their friend, Angel Locsin and Neil Arce fondly share some tips on how to transition from friends to lovers on their vlog! Angel Locsin and Neil Arce talked about their journey from being friends to lovers on their vlog. Before their relationship became the beautiful story that we fondly talk about, they are each other's friend and confidante for 7 years. On their vlog, the couple shared their journey back when they are still friends where Angel at some point became Neil's wing woman who would set him up on a date with her friends. 7 years later, they decided to take the risk which turned out to be the most beautiful thing! And now, they are enga
IN PHOTOS: Toni Gonzaga, Bea Alonzo, Shaina Magdayao, and Angel Locsin’s special appearance in Four Sisters Before The Wedding!
Four Sisters and A Wedding is one of the most well-known family movies in the Philippines. 7 years after it premiered, the scenes from the said movie are still being quoted and references about the movie always blow up with thousands of likes and shares in various social media sites. Early this year, Star Cinema announced that the iconic 2013 movie will be having a prequel entitled ‘Four Sisters Before the Wedding’. Along with the announcement made by Star Cinema that the movie will be having its prequel is the announcement that the four titular roles in ‘Four Sisters and A Wedding’ will not be reprising their roles. They introduced new faces to give life to the characters. Charlie Dizon is Teddie Salazar previously played by Toni Gonzaga, Alexa Ilacad is Bobbie, Bea Alonzo’s character, Gillian Vicencio is Alex, Angel Locsin’s role and Belle Mariano played Shaina Magdayao’s role, Gabbie. The story is set 10 years before the events of the first mo
Get styled and ready this 2021 with Angel Locsin’s New Avon Collection live on Facebook!
Most women would feel naked without accessories and their bags! As we all know, women usually have more things to carry than men do. Unlike men who can just stuff their must-haves in their pockets, women do not regrade it as stylish. In fact, some consider them as a woman’s best friend, as they go with her everywhere and carry all the important belongings she needs. Bags are not just something where women put the things they can’t leave their house without but also regarded as their accessories and fashion statement and have become one of the most important factors of a woman’s attire, personality and status. Their designs and use would really depend on women’s preference and how they would use them. As for many Filipinas, they want the type of bags that’s both for convenience and style. While accessories or jewelleries has the ability to highlight women’s personality and bring out the best features. They have such an enormous impact on the way they look and feel tha
Theme images by mammuth
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The Internet of Things Could Keep Dirty Coal Plants in Business
Digitization promises lower annual emissions but could increase them over plants’ lifetimes.
Richard Martin archive page
Faced with excess electricity generation capacity and plunging prices for wholesale electricity, Italian utility A2A shut down its gas-fired Chivasso plant, near Turin, in 2014. Earlier this year, though, the plant was restarted. Market conditions have improved, but the main reason the plant was able to get up and running again was new cloud-based technology that helps it operate more efficiently, says Massimiliano Masi, A2A’s vice president of power generation and trading.
The GE hardware and software installed at the plant, Masi says, enables it to go from a dormant state to full operation in two hours or less, compared to three previously, thus improving its ability to respond to fluctuating demand brought on by increases in intermittent renewable energy on the grid. That’s a huge advantage, says Masi, “because transmission operators prefer plants that are able to reach full production in less time.”
EDF’s power plant at Bouchain, France, uses GE digital technology to produce electricity more efficiently than any other natural gas plant in the world.
GE released its digital power plant system for gas plants last fall and for coal plants in June. In new plants, GE’s technologies have increased the average efficiency (in terms of the available energy in the fuel that’s captured for electricity production) from 33 percent to 49 percent, the company says. For legacy coal plants, the efficiency improvements are more modest, while emissions of greenhouse gases can be reduced by 3 percent. Those gains come from optimizing fuel combustion, “tuning” the plant according to the properties of the coal being burned, and adjusting the oxygen flow in the boiler, and by reducing downtime due to equipment outages. GE is one of several big companies, including IBM, Siemens, and Schneider Electric, that now offer some form of digitization for big power plants, including both renewable and fossil fuel plants.
Utilities have been looking at harnessing the “Internet of things” for a decade, says Tim Riordan, vice president of engineering services for American Electric Power, but only recently has the technology advanced enough to justify the investment. “The potential is huge,” says Riordan, whose company is deploying both IBM’s Maximo asset management platform and Siemens’s Prism system to monitor its fossil fuel plant performance. But he cautions that “to truly integrate all of this, to take it to a grand scale, is not going to be an insignificant effort.”
As at Chivasso, such technology could help determine how long aging fossil fuel plants can operate. Decisions on whether and when to retire plants for good “go all the way to senior leadership,” says Michael Reid, the general manager of technical programs for fossil and hydro operations at Duke Energy. Duke has retired or converted to natural gas 16 coal plants since 2011 and plans to shut down nine more by 2020. Digital technology can improve the efficiency, flexibility, and emissions profile of aging plants, Reid adds, but “substantial design changes are required to make significant gains in these areas.”
Digitizing power plants can help integrate renewables onto the grid by making existing fossil fuel plants more flexible and better able to respond to fluctuations in the power supplied by intermittent sources like wind and solar. By helping the plants run cleaner and more efficiently, it can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. But improving the performance of aging coal plants could have the opposite effect if utilities decide to keep them running rather than shutting them down. Indeed, one of the benefits GE touts is to “extend plant life with minimal capital investment.”
That would hardly be good for the planet. According to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, 236 coal plants, representing 104,672 megawatts of generation capacity, have retired or announced definite retirement dates in the last several years. Delaying those retirements would simply add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. An average 500-megawatt coal plant releases about 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Extending the plant’s life by five years would add 18.5 million tons to its lifetime emissions; reducing annual emissions by 3 percent, as the GE system promises to do, would reduce that total by half a million tons.
Such small gains, according to GE executives, are worth the expense and effort given the reality of continued fossil fuel use. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s latest projections, fossil fuels will continue to make up more than three-quarters of total U.S. energy consumption until at least 2040. In energy-hungry developing countries that proportion could be even higher.
“In places like China and India, they’ve already locked in plans to build brand new coal power plants, and those plants are going to be on the grid for 30 to 40 years,” says Scott Bolick, head of software strategy and product management at GE. “We look at it as our responsibility to make sure those plants are as sustainable as they can possibly be.”
Richard Martin
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‘Notturno’ Film Review: Middle East Doc Finds Poetry in ‘Rubble and Darkness’
Toronto Film Festival 2020: Director Gianfranco Rosi’s film has elegance and a stillness that makes it one of the most meditative works you’ll ever see about war and strife
Steve Pond | September 15, 2020 @ 12:37 PM
AWARDS BEAT
'Notturno' / TIFF
The last several years have seen an influx of powerful nonfiction films examining the turmoil in the Middle East and the refugee crisis that has spread from there around the world. But Italian director Gianfranco Rosi has an eye that sets him apart from other filmmakers working in that arena — and his new film, “Notturno,” is another portrait of life in the region that manages to be simultaneously devastating and lyrical.
“Notturno,” which was selected by the Venice, Telluride and New York Film Festivals, and which screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 15, is similar in some ways to Rosi’s masterful, Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary “Fire at Sea.” But while that film zeroed in on life on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, tracing the impact of the refugee crisis in the way it impacted the lives of the island’s permanent residents, “Notturno” goes wide, incorporating footage that Rosi shot over the course of three years along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon.
But don’t expect titles to tell you where you are or who you’re watching. Rosi simply gives you images, people and vignettes that play out in front of his camera without explanation. Several groups of soldiers run down a road in the early-morning light; women in black robes walk through a prison, mourning the son who died there; horses stand in the street at night while military trucks drive by; a man paddles through a body of water that’s lit not by moonlight but by distant fires.
Also Read: 'Nomadland' Film Review: Frances McDormand Hits the Road in Quiet, Lyrical Drama
The film begins with three sentences, and they’re all the context you’ll get and all the context you’ll need: “After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the First World War, the colonial powers sketched new borders for the Middle East. Over the following decades, greed and ambition for power gave rise to military coups, corrupt regimes, authoritarian leaders and foreign interference. Tyranny, invasions and terrorism fed off each other in a vicious circle, to the detriment of the civilian populations.”
“Notturno” is a film about that civilian population, about the men, women and children who live in lands of constant strife, and about the soldiers who fight on both sides in the conflicts that wrack the region. It shows everything from people trying to go about their daily lives to ISIS prisoners to a young couple smoking from a hookah, the water bubbles oddly echoing the sound of distant gunfire that often reverberates in the movie.
There is no narrative and the people we see are never identified, but these scenes add up to a haunting portrait of a ravaged region. Rosi has an exquisite eye for composition, which is clear in one of the opening scenes: a woman with her back to the wall in a prison cell, a shaft of light from above catching the white scarf around her head while she reaches back to the wall and gropes for a sense of her son, who may have lived and died in that cell.
Also Read: 'Enemies of the State' Film Review: Powerful Documentary Cuts to the Heart of Internet-Era Persecution and Paranoia
Apart from the occasional slow pan, the camera doesn’t move; Rosi simply sets it up and lets the action — or, sometimes, the lack of action — play out in front of it, often as not accompanied by silence. There’s an elegance to the look of the film, and a stillness that makes this one of the most meditative works you’ll ever see about war and strife.
We don’t necessarily know what’s going on in every scene; sometimes we figure it out, sometimes we don’t. But we feel it, and we hear what the movie says, wordlessly, with each new composition: This is the world we’ve created.
“I expected a wonderful spring,” says one man rehearsing a play bemoaning the state of the region. “But it became … a spring of rubble and darkness.”
Also Read: 'The Way I See It' Review: Pete Souza Documentary Throws Major Shade at Donald Trump
But “Notturno” finds an awful poetry in that rubble and darkness, though at times it’s hard to watch. There’s an absolutely wrenching sequence in the middle of the film, as children display the drawings they’ve made to a woman they call “teacher,” but who seems to be serving as a counselor or therapist of sorts. “This is when ISIS started exterminating us,” one young boy says matter-of-factly, showing off a harrowing sketch and kicking off a powerfully disturbing sequence in which one child after another shows drawings that detail the horrors they’ve seen.
Later, another sequence is almost as horrifying, when a mother listens to a string of messages left by her daughter, who says the ISIS fighters who kidnapped her will sell her back to her family for $500.
But if those moments capture the toll that has been taken across the Middle East, they are only part of an expansive portrait of humans trying to survive in an inhuman world. It’s hard to watch “Notturno” at times, but to the director’s credit it’s also impossible to look away.
10 Buzziest Movies for Sale in Toronto, From Idris Elba's 'Concrete Cowboy' to Mark Wahlberg's 'Good Joe Bell' (Photos)
What the Cannes virtual marketplace proved earlier this year is that even without the in-person meetings, the red carpet galas and all the press hype, there's still room for a lucrative sales market surrounding these virtual events. While that's true of this year's Toronto International Film Festival, the hybrid physical and virtual fest is operating on a slimmed-down lineup of movies. And with Oscar eligibility requirements pushed back to 2021, there isn't the same need for all of these movies to make a splash. That said, we are looking forward to quite a bit at this year's TIFF, and so are buyers.
Also Read: How the Pandemic Will Shake Up Toronto Film Festival’s (Virtual) Sales Market
"Bruised"
Halle Berry takes a beating as a washed-up MMA fighter looking to make her redemption fight in "Bruised," which is also Berry's directorial debut. The film is set in New Jersey and explores her fight to get back into shape and win back her child. It also stars Adan Canto and Sheila Atim.
Romulus Entertainment/Thunder Road Pictures
"Concrete Cowboy"
Idris Elba and "Stranger Things'" Caleb McLaughlin play father and son in this family drama from Ricky Staub that draws on the history of Black cowboys in its adaptation of a novel by Greg Neri. McLaughlin is a troubled teen who is sent to live with his quiet, absentee father and is taught to work at his father's stables. Jharrel Jerome, Byron Bowers, Lorraine Toussaint and Clifford "Method Man" Smith also co-star.
Lee Daniels Entertainment/Tucker Tooley Entertainment
"Good Joe Bell"
Mark Wahlberg is getting early hype for his performance based on a true story of a father who takes a cross-country trip to honor his son and educate people about the dangers of bullying. The movie flashes back to show Wahlberg's conflicted and grudging relationship with his son's homosexuality and how he grows, even as it becomes too late. "Monsters and Men" director Reinaldo Marcus Green directs the film from the writers of "Brokeback Mountain."
Endeavor Content
"I Care a Lot"
Rosamund Pike, Eiza González, Dianne West and Peter Dinklage star in this thriller about two women who use loopholes in the legal system to defraud elderly retirees of their family fortunes, only for them to end up angering a crime lord with their latest mark. J Blakeson wrote and directed the film.
"MLK/FBI"
This documentary from Oscar nominee Sam Pollard is based on recently unclassified FBI documents and examines the surveillance and harassment the FBI used against Martin Luther King Jr. over years, including how J. Edgar Hoover hoped to discredit him and break his spirit. The film includes a discussion of how filmmaking and historians should use official materials from the FBI and other sources and how those sources color history.
"New Order"
Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco's film first played Venice and is a drama set amid a violent protest in Mexico City. The film draws on sociopolitical themes and the class divide to show how the wealthy unwittingly empower an encroaching military rule in their attempt to keep power.
The Match Factory
"Penguin Bloom"
Naomi Watts is said to give a stellar performance in this true story based on the life of Sam Bloom, a woman who suffered a traumatic accident who finds an inspiring road to recovery after befriending a magpie bird as her companion. Glendyn Ivin directs the film that also stars Andrew Lincoln, Jacki Weaver and Rachel House.
"Pieces of a Woman"
Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó directs Shia LaBeouf and Vanessa Kirby in this film inspired by '70s character dramas about a couple expecting a child who winds up grieving over a tragedy in two different ways. Kirby steals the show, but the film also includes a stand-out moment from Ellen Burstyn as Kirby's mother.
"Shadow in the Cloud"
As part of the Midnight Madness section, Chloe Grace Moretz in "Shadow in the Cloud" is like "Alien" on a WWII bomber. Moretz is a fighter pilot on a mission to carry a piece of classified information and is sequestered from her sexist male counterparts but soon discovers a mysterious presence that threatens the safety of everyone aboard. Roseanne Liang directs the film.
Four Knights Films
"The Water Man"
Another actor making their directorial debut, David Oyelowo's "The Water Man" is a mythical family film with an homage to the family movies of the 1980s. It's the story of a man who looks for a mystical creature with the secret to everlasting life in an effort to rescue his ailing mother. Oprah Winfrey executive produces the film that stars Oyelowo alongside Rosario Dawson, Lonnie Chavis, Amiah Miller, Alfred Molina and Maria Bello.
Photo Credit Karen Ballard
There are still some other movies playing as part of the festival that already have homes, including Chloé Zhao's "Nomadland" at Searchlight, Regina King's "One Night in Miami" at Amazon, the Kate Winslet-Saoirse Ronan drama "Ammonite" (pictured) at Neon, and Dawn Porter's documentary "The Way I See It" at Focus Features. Amazon Studios also recently acquired director Matthew Heineman's "The Boy From Medellín" about musician J Balvin.
TIFF 2020: “Pieces of a Woman,” “The Water Man,” “I Care A Lot” and more are getting attention from buyers
Toronto International Film Festival Reverses Optional Mask Policy Inside Theaters
By Brian Welk | September 9, 2020 @ 7:43 AM
How the Pandemic Will Shake Up Toronto Film Festival’s (Virtual) Sales Market
By Beatrice Verhoeven | September 9, 2020 @ 6:00 AM
‘Welcome to Chechnya’ Film Review: LGBT Refugees Flee Violence in Gripping Documentary
By Alonso Duralde | January 26, 2020 @ 3:30 PM
Steve Pond's inside look at the artistry and insanity of the awards race, drawn from more than three decades of obsessively chronicling the Oscars and the entertainment industry.
The Latest From AWARDS BEAT
Oscars Eliminate Executive Committee Picks for International Feature, Expand Shortlist
How Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Became 1930s-Style Tunesmiths for ‘Mank’
As Oscar Race Drags Into 2021, Who Are the Front Runners for Best Picture?
By Steve Pond | January 15, 2021 @ 11:30 AM
Forget the Beatles: Daniel Pemberton Wrote a New Song for ‘Chicago 7’ Instead of the Fab Four
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A Close Election in Austria
Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party has conceded to Alexander Van der Bellen, an independent.
Ronald Zak / AP
Updated on May 23 at 11:21 a.m. ET
Norbert Hofer, the presidential candidate of the far-right Freedom Party, has conceded the close presidential election against Alexander Van der Bellen, the independent candidate backed by the Green Party, Austria’s interior ministry announced Monday.
After counting the 750,000 postal votes, which accounted for 12 percent of the country’s 6.4 million registered voters, Van der Bellen had 50.3 percent of the vote against Hofer’s 49.7 percent. The margin of victory was 31,026 votes.
Hofer conceded even before the results were made official.
Hofer would have been the first far-right leader in a EU country.
ORD, the Austrian public broadcaster, reported that Hofer won in the rural part of the country while Van der Bellen took the cities.
Krishnadev Calamur is a former senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of Murder in Mumbai.
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Theatre Musical Back To The Future: The Musical Tickets
Back To The Future: The Musical Tickets and Dates
Adelphi Theatre, London
May 2021 From: £22.48 June 2021 From: £22.48 July 2021 From: £22.48 August 2021 From: £23.46 September 2021 From: £22.48
Last few tickets
7:30 PM From £43.13
More Information about Back To The Future: The Musical
Welcome to Hill Valley! Take an electrifying ride back in time as the 1985 blockbuster film and pop culture phenomenon arrives in London's West End as a groundbreaking new musical adventure!
When Marty McFly finds himself transported back to 1955 in a time machine built by the eccentric scientist Doc Brown, he accidentally changes the course of history. Now he’s in a race against time to fix the present, escape the past and send himself... back to the future.
Adapting this iconic story for the stage are the movie’s creators Bob Gale (Back to the Future trilogy) and Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump). The production features original music by multi-Grammy winners Alan Silvestri (Avengers: Endgame) and Glen Ballard (Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror), alongside hit songs from the movie including The Power of Love, Johnny B Goode, Earth Angel and Back in Time.
Tony Award-winning director John Rando leads the Tony and Olivier Award-winning creative team.
Strap yourself in for a thrilling theatrical experience!
When Back To The Future: The Musical hits 88mph, you’re gonna see some serious… entertainment.
Book your tickets yesterday!
The show includes flashing lights, strobe effects, smoke and pyrotechnics throughout. Please note the producers cannot guarantee the appearance of any particular artist. The schedule is subject to change and may be affected by contracts, holiday, illness or events beyond the producers’ control.
BOOKING PERIOD: 19 March - 24 October 2021
RUNNING TIME: 2 hrs 40 minutes (including interval)
AGE GUIDANCE: 6
We aren’t able to admit any children under the age of 3 and every customer must have their own ticket. To help us make sure everyone enjoys the show, your little ones need to be able to sit in their own seat without any assistance.
VENUE: Strand, Covent Garden, London WC2R 0NS
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DSU Election Interviews 2013: Academic Affairs
chelsea gray in Student Life on 22 February, 2013.
Polls open on the 26th February.
Academic Affairs Candidates:
How would you sum up the priorities of this role?
Academic representation is the most important reason for the DSU’s existence, especially now that fees have risen so sharply. The course representation has been brought under the control of the DSU and needs to be seen as more than a legal requirement that is there to tick a box. The position of Academic Affairs is to give representation to the student body, by sitting on major committees and establishing relationships with university staff so that students are being brought into the decision making process.
What are the current problems that you would like to tackle or improve on within academic representation?
There needs to be a long-term academic representation strategy rather than a scatter-gun approach where each new officer gets bogged down looking for quick fixes. We need a holistic approach, building an effective strategy that works in conjunction with the university, to achieve a best practice across all departments. It is about changing the ethos of the university, where students are considered as partners and major stakeholders.
How do you remain relevant with Academic Advisers already in place for most subjects?
We aim to work both with the university, but also as a voice to challenge them and hold them accountable. Academic Advisers have been implemented by the university to fix the gap in student representation, but we need to hold a degree of skepticism as to how effective they actually are. Academic Affairs is about proactively reaching out to students and conveying their grievances effectively to the university.
Is the DSU counter-intuitive to a collegiate university? How do you plan on bringing it back into significance?
The DSU is a legal requirement, and it’s crucial for academic representation as it is the only student voice that the university will listen to. The DSU is home to many societies, DUCK, and advise centers that are so important to the university, but it does need to do more. As a DSU Trustee (2012–2013), we have been utilising market research to devise ways of expanding the DSU in terms of organising career events, the scope of societies and restoring it as a social venue. The university have over 16 colleges which makes for an incoherent, diluted voice, so the DSU is vital in conveying a strong, unified student voice that can challenge the university effectively. I hope to make the DSU more relevant to colleges, offering advice to social chairs and treasures to help with tricky admin tasks such as health and safety forms and filling out accounts. The DSU have latent resources that could be so useful to colleges.
How was the DSU personally enriched and benefited your university experience?
After working with the DSU for 5 years, it has given me an appreciation for how the real world works. As a DSU Livers Out Officer (09–10) I lead committees, coordinated across colleges, and consulted external stakeholders. Being a DSU Trustee means I have a working knowledge looking after significant assets, and have had important input in giving direction and purpose to how the DSU situates itself within the university.
Why do you believe you are suited to the role, what personality trait will be the most valuable?
As a very experienced candidate, I have held many positions within the DSU so have the advantage of knowing how it works, its structures and key figures. As a DSU Livers Out Officer (09–10), Aidan’s Senior DSU Rep (10–11), Aidan’s President sitting on the university senate (11–12) and currently a DSU Trustee, I understand the role of the DSU and the priorities of this position. I know when and how to challenge the university, giving effective student representation and consulting all stakeholders, without getting bogged down by the administrative side. A professional, mature approach, I have researched and prepared for the role, and am ready to hit the ground running.
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Ian Noble Essay Prize winner – Lisa Amani
Posted on 23rd December 2017 6th August 2019 Saleh JawadPosted in Undergraduate
Ian Noble
Technology in healthcare: How can we best meet the population’s needs
by Lisa Amani
Our needs as a population are changing, and have been for a long time as we continue to advance in our abilities to tackle our health challenges(1,2). But as we tackle existing health problems, and progress beyond health matters, e.g. quicker access to information through the internet, we inevitably seem to introduce novel and bigger challenges. For example, improvements in healthcare provision through the introduction of new drugs, vaccines and improved access has resulted in people living longer and being less likely to die from communicable diseases such as diarrhoea and respiratory tract infections(1,2). However, this demographic and epidemiological transition has in turn left us with an ageing population with a large burden of chronic and disabling diseases such as dementia and chronic heart disease(1,2).
Technology has been at the centre of meeting our health care needs. From the introduction of preventative measures such as vaccines, that led to the eradication of smallpox(3), to the more curative methods such as surgical resection of a brain tumour. I believe technology to once again play a significant part in addressing our new global health challenges. In this essay, a broader definition of health technology is used, i.e. “all methods used by health-care professionals to promote health, to prevent and treat disease, and to improve rehabilitation and long-term care”(4), to highlight the range of functions that technology has in healthcare. I aim to discuss the ways in which we can use technology to meet population’s needs. The exact ways that our needs can be met using technology will not be done extensively as this is beyond the scope of this essay.
The need for innovation
In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service depends heavily on providing healthcare using technology. In 2014, our government spent over £142bn on healthcare alone(5). A significant portion of this was invested in preventative measures such as vaccines, diagnostic devices such as the urine dipstick test, and curative medical and surgical procedures(6).
The NHS believes strongly in providing healthcare free of charge to everyone. This means that we can essentially care for even the most vulnerable in our population. However, as we are facing healthcare challenges increasingly, including microbial resistance and the ageing population, the need for innovation grows. This becomes more imperative given the lack of NHS funding and debts previously reported, as Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, said “the combination of increasing demand and the longest and deepest financial squeeze in NHS history is maxing out the health service”(7). Through addressing health technology innovation, we could essentially enhance the productivity of our services whilst indirectly targeting other vital aspects that make up the healthcare system, including our work force and finances. One way this can be achieved is through reverse innovation.
Reverse innovation
Reverse innovation is ‘a product or service that is developed in a resource-poor setting and then exported to more industrialised nations’(8). These services essentially attempt to meet the needs of populations at very low costs. The West has contributed greatly to the field of innovation, from electrocardiograms to life-saving antibiotics such as penicillin(9). Because of this, it is now commonly thought that innovation is a product of Northern efforts, which is then taken up by the South. However, given the on-going financial struggles of the NHS, we appear to be the ones in need of help. We may now need to look globally at other healthcare systems for a solution.
The Aravind Eye Care System in India, for example, has the best patient outcomes globally at the lowest cost per individual(8). They perform over 350,000 eye procedures every year using a standard checklist strategy adopted from McDonald’s, meaning variations in healthcare are minimised in (e.g.) provider’s costs, resulting in enhanced efficiency. This model of care delivery relies on task shifting, which involves the delegation of responsibilities performed by doctors, such as peri-operative assessments, to other professionals. Within the NHS(8), and other western healthcare systems, doctors complain they are time-restricted, which is bound to become a greater issue given the continuous growth in our population. Adopting their standardised way of healthcare delivery could be the way to address this common western problem.
The NHS spends more money every year. In 2014 alone, £30.6bn was spent on research and development in the UK(6). Therefore, clearly the problem does not lie at the lack of funding to develop better ways of providing healthcare. Throwing in more money does not equal better research outcomes. Though investing in technology is important as it drastically improves health outcomes, a need arises for more efficient spending.
The global South has a reduced financial ability to afford the drugs they need. Life-saving human immunovirus (HIV) drugs were initially being sold at $14 000 per person per year by multinational companies(10). This meant that developing nations were struggling to gain access to antiretrovirals. In 2001, Yusuf Hamied, a drug manufacturer at CIPLA (India), produced HIV drugs costing just $1 a day. This breakthrough transformed HIV from a death sentence to a manageable disease in developing countries. Though patents play an important role in driving innovation, with the increasing health demands faced in the West it may become imminent for us to revise the patency agreement, as at some point the high costs of drugs will mean a high number of lives are compromised due to our inability to fund healthcare to all. Adopting generic drugs worldwide for the more prevalent and/or dangerous illnesses could perhaps become an exception to this patency agreement.
It is not just drugs that low-income countries struggle to access. There is a big gap between where health technology is available and where the need for it is greatest(11). Most technological health advances are widely used in developed countries, but some low-income countries do not have access to the most essential healthcare technologies. Meeting ‘our population’s’ needs should extend beyond the geographical barriers that separate nations, which is why we need to invest in frugal technology.
Frugal technology
Frugal technology is ‘technology that is specifically developed to meet the needs of the world’s poorest people’. Howitt et al(11) argues that technology tends to be produced for the wealthier populations, meaning that these technologies can fail to reflect the needs of developing countries. The latter countries have reduced finances, poor infrastructure and insufficient healthcare workers. Consequently, a significant 40% of the technology deployed here is not used (versus <1% in higher income countries). Thus, Howitt et al argues strongly that we must invest in frugal technologies instead, as this will more accurately meet the needs of developing nations. One example of such an invention is the mobile phone microscope (MPM)(12). Microscopes are an important tool in the diagnosis of some diseases. However, their price and the fact that electricity can be patchy in some developing countries, means they may not be available nor operable. MPM’s are battery-powered and are low-cost, making them ideal for use in low-income settings. One study(13) looked at the use of two different MPM’s in Ghana to diagnose infection with Schistosoma haematobium. Despite high specificities (>90%, compared to light microscopy), their sensitivities were unsatisfactory (circa 55% and 68% respectively), which the author put partially down to tool manipulation difficulties. Hence, the actual cost-effectiveness of this device, and perhaps others, remains questionable. Additionally, frugal technology in general has been criticised for compromising patient safety based on its minimalistic nature(14). Thus, more research is needed to determine how useful these devices are. Nevertheless, for many populations these sub-optimal tools might be their only way forward in achieving better health outcomes, and it therefore becomes necessary for wealthier countries to invest in frugal technology so that the needs of all populations can be addressed.
As the world population increases, and our resources start to run lower, the need for innovation heightens. In the high-income countries, reverse innovation may be key to addressing the financial, workforce and time restrictions – from task shifting to the development of more affordable drugs. In developing countries, due to their reduced financial and structural capacity to perform research and development, it is important we take the responsibility to fund frugal technology and its innovation, or at least provide countries with the means to do so themselves, e.g. through subsidies or research training.
The sole availability of technology is not sufficient to meet population’s needs. Once it has been produced it has to be accessible, financially and physically, and actually operable within the healthcare setting. Frugal technology is thus perhaps the best way forward in developing countries.
Finally, the criticisms of frugal technology should not be dismissed. Perhaps one solution is to combine both forms of innovations, with both high- and low-income countries working together to ensure the health technology produced is not just effective, but also affordable and safe to use.
Hay, S I et al. Global, regional, and national disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 333 diseases and injuries and healthy life expectancy (HALE) for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016. Lancet [internet]. 2017 September 16 (cited 10 November 2017); 30(10100):1260-1344. Available from: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32130-X/fulltext
Naghavi, M et al. Global, regional, and national age-sex specific mortality for 264 causes of death, 1980–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016. Lancet [internet]. 2017 September 16 (cited 10 November 2017); 390(10100):1151-1210. Available from: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32152-9/fulltext
World Health Organisation. Smallpox vaccines. [internet]. (cited 10 November 2017). Available from: http://www.who.int/csr/disease/smallpox/vaccines/en/
R, D P B. Health-technology assessment in surgery. Surgery [internet]. 1999 April (cited 10 November 2017); 353(supplement 1):S2-S5. Available from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673699904130
Office for National Statistics. Statistical bulletin: UK health accounts: 2014. [internet]. (cited 10 November 2017). Available from: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthcaresystem/bulletins/ukhealthaccounts/2014
Office for National Statistics. Statistical bulletin: UK Gross domestic expenditure on research and development:2014. [internet]. (cited 10 November 2017). Available from: goo.gl/Rk4zEJ
Campbell, D. the guardian. [internet]. 2016 May. Available from: http://www.citethemrightonline.com/digital-internet/the-internet/web-pages-with-individual-authors
Ahmed, F et al. Can reverse innovation catalyse better value health care? Lancet [internet]. 2017 October (cited 10 November 2017); 5(10):e967-e968. Available from: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(17)30324-8/fulltext
Prabhjot, S and Chokshi, D A. Community health workers: an opportunity for reverse innovation – Authors’ reply. Lancet [internet]. 2013 October (cited 10 November 2017); 382(9901):1327. Available from: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)62136-4/abstract
Lane, R. Yusuf Hamied: leader in the Indian generic drug industry. Lancet [internet]. 2015 December (cited 10 November 2017); 386(10011):2385. Available from: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)00839-9/fulltext
Howitt, P et al. Technologies for global health. Lancet [internet]. 2012 August (cited 10 November 2017); 380(9840):507-535. Available from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673612611271
Bogoch, I I et al. Mobile phone and handheld microscopes for public health applications. Lancet [internet]. 2017 August (cited 10 November 2017); 2(8):e355. Available from: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(17)30120-2/fulltext
Ephraim, R K D et al. Diagnosis of Schistosoma haematobiumInfection with a Mobile Phone-Mounted Foldscope and a Reversed-Lens CellScope in Ghana. Lancet [internet]. 2015 June (cited 10 November 2017); 92(6):1253-1256. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4458833/
Finlayson, A E T. Correspondence to the article by Howitt et al (2012) ‘Technologies for global health’. (see reference number 11 above). Lancet [internet]. 2012 November (cited 10 November 2017); 380:1739. Available from: http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(12)61988-6.pdf
Lisa Amani is a fourth year medical student at the University of St. Georges
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Profession * Doctor Nurse/Midwife Other Health Professional Manager in the NHS Other worker in the NHS Other
Difficult choices – Dr Alexander Cary
Technology in healthcare: How can we best meet the population’s needs?
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Orban Labs Names North American Sales Manager
By Emily Reigart 07 April 2017
PENNSAUKEN, N.J.—Orban Labs has upped David Rusch to the post of sales manager for North America.
The appointment marks a formal return to the company for Rusch; from 2002-2014, he served as director of North American sales and marketing for Orban. For the next three years, Rusch remained involved in an auxiliary role, focusing on Canadian business as well as assisting for SBE meeting presentation logistics.
Rusch began his radio career in 1982 as an account executive for KLFF(AM) and KMZK(FM) in Phoenix. He also served as an account exec for KORK(AM), KYRK(FM), KMTW(AM) and KKLZ(FM) in Las Vegas. Between 1993 and 2001, Rusch was vice president of syndication and sales for SRN Broadcasting in Lake Bluff, Ill., where he covered sports events and produced sports and home improvement programming.
“We’re pleased to recognize David’s diligent efforts and contributions to Orban’s success with this promotion,” said Orban President David Day. (Orban was acquired by DaySequerra in July 2016.) “His proficiency with the line and intimate knowledge of the market are well known throughout the industry.”
Orban Labs currently has offices in San Francisco, Phoenix and Stuttgart, Germany; in addition to its headquarters in Pennsauken, NJ.
Orban Labs
David Rusch
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Empowering Local Communities
to Fulfill Global Missions
US Grassroots Arm of UNESCO
2020 YOUTH MULTIMEDIA CONTEST
Cameroonian Civil Rights Leader Returns Home
From the U.S. Embassy in Yaounde:
The U.S. Embassy in Yaounde recently welcomed Cameroonian American Mr. Guy Djoken during his trip to the land of his birth. Mr. Djoken currently serves as Chairman of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO Clubs, Centers & Associations Working Group & Executive Director of UNESCO Center for Peace.
He also serves as an active leader within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the state of Maryland. He discussed his efforts to promote the participation of Cameroonian youth in the 2015 International Summer Camp sponsored by the UNESCO Center for Peace.
“One of our main goals is to welcome youth from throughout the world to expose them to peers from different regions and cultures, and promote a sense of global citizenship, leadership, and responsibility. There is no better way to promote development in each nation than through education, which is essential for the advancement of boys and girls. Every person can make a difference to promote justice, opportunities, and equality for all,” Mr. Djoken said.
Mr. Quiroz lauded Mr. Djoken’s background as an NAACP leader and his current work: “As a Cameroonian American, it is an honor to see not only that you have attained success in your personal and professional goals, but that you are strongly committed to expanding those same opportunities to youth around the world and in your native homeland through UNESCO’s partnerships for educational exchanges.
As President Obama has said, among the United States of America’s highest foreign policy priorities are to partner with young African leaders whose efforts empower youth through expanded educational and economic opportunities, especially for women and girls. Thanks for your leadership and commitment to serve youth.”
To learn more about the UNESCO Center for Peace, please see:
http://www.unescocenterforpeace.org/.
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XIV--General Information
Centre For International Programs
The Centre for International Programs, the first of its kind in Canada, facilitates, stimulates and supports a continuously growing range of University involvement in international activities by developing and maintaining contacts with university partners around the world, by supporting study abroad and exchange programs, and by liaising with government agencies, private sector companies and non-governmental organizations, by promoting development cooperation partnerships with developing countries, and by providing information on international opportunities and resources to students and faculty. The Centre contributes to university policy on internationalization and serves as a focal point for links with other universities, government agencies, and private sector firms wishing to cooperate with the university in international activities.
Computing and Communications Services
Computing and Communications Services (CCS) is dedicated to providing high quality services and support in information and communications technology to students, staff and faculty at the University of Guelph. We are involved in a wide range of information technology-related activities, nearly all of which are provided free of charge to the university community. Computing and Communications Services is located in several areas across campus, including the Animal Science and Nutrition building, the Library, Johnston Hall, the University Centre and the CCS building, off Trent Lane.
CCS offers walk-in consulting at the Help Desk in the CCS building and in the microcomputer lab on the first floor of the Library. A phone support line (ext. 8888) is an important part of our front line support strategy. Full-time staff answer hundreds of calls a week on computer and communications topics and can refer complex problems to specific support groups across the entire CCS organization. Staff have expertise in areas such as Local Area Networking, UNIX, numerically intensive computing and workstation support. A partial list of our consulting support includes microcomputer and central services, networking applications, database management, graphics, scientific computing and statistical computing.
To maintain close ties with the information technology (IT) needs of the academic community, CCS has assigned senior staff as information technology coordinators in several colleges on campus. The IT coordinators work with faculty, staff and students to find ways to meet their information technology needs, to facilitate college IT planning and to support new IT initiatives in the colleges.
CCS also offers a broad range of free information technology (IT) seminars that provide training at both the entry and advanced levels.
Computing and Communications Services operates two public microcomputer labs, one in CCS and the other on the first floor of the Library. Both facilities are connected to the High Speed Network (HSN). Conveniently distributed laser printing is provided to the campus community through print stations in several different locations across campus.
The CCS University Systems group provides project-oriented staff to develop complex computing applications on campus. These include computer applications in support of the colleges, administrative units and the Library. In certain instances, individual staff members may be assigned to a particular college or department for the duration of the project.
Computing and Communications Services also provides a full range of telecommunications services to both the business and the student population of the university. These services include the design, installation and operation of various facilities, together with consultation and training. CCS also administers other on-campus facilities such as: pay phones, fax line installation, private business lines, alarm circuits, paging systems, pocket pager access and cellular phone service.
CCS manages a central computing UNIX facility. This provides many of the Computing and Communication applications, such as E-Mail, WWW, etc.
CCS also operates a Numerically Intensive Computing (NIC) facility and is active in the support and management of workstations and the NIC facilities. We collaborate with several departments that use workstations and actively assist researchers in their computing endeavours.
CCS is also actively involved in the management of Local Area Networks (LANs) on campus, with Novell being the primary network software product. Many of these LANs are connected to the campus High Speed Network, which is operated and managed by CCS. This network connects campus networks with networks throughout the world, providing high-speed data transmission and electronic communications.
CCS works in close collaboration with other major information technology service providers on campus, in particular Teaching Support Services and the Library.
Further information regarding CCS and our services can be located in the University of Guelph WWW site (http://www.uoguelph.ca). Call the CCS Help Desk or extension 8888 for assistance.
CCS is primarily a provider of services to the campus community; we look forward to being of assistance to you.
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Research on Women's Cancers Lacking in Poor and Middle-Income Countries
Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) see millions of cases of breast and cervical cancer each year, but much of the research on these diseases is based in wealthier countries that have far greater resources and treatment options available, according to a review of existing research published Sept. 1 by the CDC’s Global and Territorial Health Research Network. The network's coordinating center is based at the University of Rochester.
The research disparity means gaps in our understanding of these cancers, since they may behave differently based on patients’ geography, culture and local medical practices. Recommendations and protocols based on research conducted outside of low- and middle-income countries may or may not be practical or even possible. Without this fundamental knowledge, patients in these regions may often suffer preventable illness and death.
“We’re talking about many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, Southeast Asia – in other words, most of the world,” said Timothy Dye, Ph.D., professor and associate chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, and principal investigator of the CDC’s Global and Territorial Health Research Network Coordinating Center. Dye is corresponding author of the review, published in PLoSOne, a peer-reviewed, open-access resource from the Public Library of Science.
“We’re arguing for more research to be done in low- and middle-income countries so prevention and treatment strategies there can be more evidence-based,” Dye said. “Better research on breast and cervical cancer in low- and middle-income countries would help develop more effective prevention programs as well.”
Introduction of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine in LMICs has shifted the focus toward prevention in cervical cancer, though similar developments toward prevention of breast cancer have not been documented. For both women’s cancers, the focus on implementation science (how interventions fit within real-world public health and clinical service systems) is often lacking for low- and middle-income countries.
“With women’s cancers continually emerging as a major contributor toward morbidity and mortality around the world, failing to address their prevention and control with research generated by and for low- and middle-income settings could lead to inappropriate recommendations based on research generated in high-income settings,” said Dye.
In recommending expansion of the research base for women’s cancers in low- and middle-income countries, the authors also stress the importance of evaluating implementation of breast and cervical cancer interventions on the ground.
“The best hope for improving cancer control in low- and middle–income countries is to make sure that what we think works toward prevention and control, actually works in the settings and circumstances faced around the world,” Dye added.
The Global and Territorial Health Research Network, or “Global Network,” is a Thematic Network of the CDC’s Prevention Research Centers Program. The Global Network’s Coordinating Center is located at the University of Rochester with participating Collaborating Centers at Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Illinois Prevention Research Center. Additional authors for the study come from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of South Florida, the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, the University of Washington, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Population Health.
Barbara Ficarra
Barbara_Ficarra@URMC.Rochester.edu
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US City TravelerChicago Family Vacations Las Vegas Los Angeles New York City Orlando Other Destinations Travel Washington, DC27 Interesting Facts About The United States
27 Interesting Facts About The United States
October 22, 2013 · Written by Taylor Goldblatt
This 50-foot statue of Lady Liberty’s Inner M is located at the M&M’s World in NYC. The largest “realistic” US replica of The Statue of Liberty is the 36-foot-tall one in Liberty Park in Birmingham, Alabama, at 1/5 the size of the original. Even taller are the 39 and 37 ft 9 in. replicas in Paris. Hundreds more can be seen here.
The United Sates of America offers such a diverse collection of attractions. While every major city may each have a great art museum or two, fantastic zoos/aquariums, monuments, historical sites and theme parks of some sort or another – they each differ in their own special way and it never fails to leave me feeling inspired and motivated to dig a little deeper into finding out how things got to where they are today. It’s always fun to take a step back and see how the city is set up and take a visit to those iconic picture-perfect spots that we’ve always seen across the media. Get ready to learn about everything from a word being misspelled on the Liberty Bell to finding out which major American city does not have any cemeteries. So here it is folks, starting with my all-time favorite fact about the third most populous country in the world.
1. The Statue of Liberty is associated with New York City, but it is actually physically located in New Jersey! Jersey City, New Jersey to be exact. Another fun fact: The seven rays on the crown of the Statue of Liberty represent the seven continents; each measures up to 9 feet in length and weighs as much as 150 pounds.
2. The tallest mountain in the world is actually located in the United States. It is actually taller than Mount Everest (more than twice Mt. Everest’s base-to-peak height) when measured from the seafloor. It’s called Mauna Kea and it’s located in Hawaii. While it is only 13,796 feet in altitude above sea level, when measured from the seafloor it is over 32,000 feet high, while Mount Everest is 29,028 feet high.
3. The Liberty Bell was last rung on George Washington’s Birthday in 1846. It received its fatal crack a few hours later. Look closely and you will see that the word “Pennsylvania” is mispelled as “Pensylvania.” They must not have had spell check back in those days! The bell is said to have been built for $225.50 USD and it was rung on July 8, 1776 for the first public reading of The Declaration of Independence. Today it is officially owned by the city of Philadelphia, while the National Park Service maintains it’s state-of-the-art facilities, where it has been housed since 2003, nearby Independence Hall and visiting is free of charge. I suppose it didn’t take too long to recoup their $225.50 investment!
4. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is the most-visited museum in the U.S. It gets over 9 million visitors a year and is second only to the Louvre in attendance worldwide. It maintains the largest collection of historic air and spacecraft in the world. All of the aircraft and spacecraft on display in the Air and Space Museum were actually flown or were used as backup vehicles. The 23 exhibits in the museum house artifacts including airplanes & spacecraft, missiles & rockets, engines, propellers, models, uniforms, instruments, and flight equipment. While at the museum, tourists can see the Wright Brothers’ original 1903 Flyer, the Apollo Lunar module, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the moon rock, as well as aircraft from World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. Here’s 6 more fun facts.
The Smithsonian Institution is comprised of 19 various museums. The National Zoological Park actually has a Panda Cam for those who can’t make it to see giant pandas Mei Xiang and Tian Tian in person. They are two of just over 300 other pandas who reside at zoos and research centers across the world, but only 15 of which live in America.
5. Americans eat about 100 acres of pizza each day, with about 3 billion pizzas sold annually in the USA. 93% of Americans are said to have eaten pizza in the last month. Delivery sales of pizza spike the most during close Super Bowl games. There are over 60,000 pizzerias in the USA and America’s oldest pizzeria opened in 1905 and it’s called Lambardi’s and it is located in NYC (though there is a little controversy over that title). Chicago-style deep dish favorites are Giordano’s or Lou Malnati’s. There is a Pizza Expo held every year in Las Vegas. The world’s largest pizza was actually built in Italy. With October being the US national pizza month, I figured it was a perfect time to share all of these amazing pizza facts with you.
Pizza lovers will want to be sure to check out Today’s listing of the 25 best pizzas around the country.
6. There are 182 places in the U.S. that have the word “Christmas” in their names. They range from towns such as Christmas, Ariz., and Christmas Valley, Ore., to islands like Christmas Island in Florida and even some lakes (such as Christmas Lake in Washington).
Of course there is a variety of year-round Christmas themed places in Alaska (such as the world’s largest fiberglass Santa at the Santa Claus House in North Pole, Alaska) but there’s also plenty closer to home, for many of us, such as the New York Santa’s workshop, a mini theme park in the Adirondacks. But my favorite is a family owned and operated theme park called Holiday World that is located in Santa Claud, Indiana – the park is technically considered to be the oldest theme park in the world (1946) and it is divided into four sections that celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween and the Fourth of July. Holiday World is also home to a water park with the world’s two longest water coasters, the world’s tallest water ride, which is called Giraffica (originally Pilgrims Plunge), The Voyager receives the most air-time of any wooden roller coaster in the world, and ZOOmbabwe is the world’s largest enclosed water slide! In 2000 this park was the first in the world to offer free unlimited soft drinks to its guests. It has also been ranked #1 for cleanliness and friendliness! The only downside is that this park is closed on Christmas! Santa Claus, Indiana’s post office (which makes a great photo op) receives a half-million holiday cards and roughly 10,000 letters from children each year. It is also home to a Santa Claus Museum, a local hotel called Santa’s Lodge and the world’s oldest Santa statue (1935).
7. Chicago is the birthplace of the first ever ferris wheel, which was 264-feet tall and debuted in the 1893 World’s Fair and was demolished shortly after in 1906. Today the 150-foot tall (15 story high) one at Navy Pier is modeled after the original one. Also housed at Navy Pier is a children’s museum, an IMAX and the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows. A record was broken there earlier this year, as a manager rode this ferris wheel for more than two days, at more that 384 times around. Since 2008, the world’s largest ferris wheel has been the Singapore Flyer, at 541 feet tall. This record is about to be surpassed with the next world’s tallest being The High Roller in Las Vegas (set to be complete in early 2014; built behind the Flamingo and will feature 28 glass-enclosed cabins that each hold 40 passengers; 550 feet), followed by the New York Wheel (set to be completed in 2016; roughly 60-stories high; 630 feet) and then the new world’s tallest will cost $1.6 billion and will be the Dubai Eye (opening is yet to be projected; 689 feet).
Other large-scale American ferris wheels that are currently under construction include the Orlando Eye (Projected to open in late 2014; 425 feet) and Skyvuue Las Vegas will bring Las Vegas a second new ferris wheel, which will be across from the Mandalay Bay resort and will have the largest outdoor LCD screen in the world (Construction has halted; 500 feet).
The new Dubai Eye is set to be four times larger than Chicago’s Navy Pier Ferris wheel (pictured above).
8. Georgia is the birthplace of miniature golf. More specifically, at Lookout Mountain’s Rock City, which is located right outside of Chattanooga, TN. While the Tom Thumb course itself no longer exists, Rock City gardens remains one of the areas most popular attractions to this day, mainly thanks to their famous “See Rock City” marketing campaign, which was painted on barns across the region. It once hosted America’s first mini-golf competition, the National Tom Thumb Open. Tennessee is home to the steepest passenger incline railway in the U.S. Today, Myrtle Beach holds the title as “Mini Golf Capital of the World,” as it is home to over 50 courses throughout town. National Miniature Golf Day was held a month ago from today, on September 21. Travel and Leisure lists some of America’s wackiest golf courses. Here’s some more favorites.
9. San Francisco hardy has any cemeteries. There a ton of other weird U.S.A. laws out there. So in 1937, residents passed a law that said that cemeteries can no longer be built within city limits, simply because they considered their land to be too valuable. Today there are only three cemeteries within city limits. Perhaps the most disturbing is that many of the early cemeteries were actually dug up and moved to various places farther West. There were many expulsions until almost all cemeteries were eliminated, as unclaimed headstones were recycled for building seawalls, landfills and park gutters. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, no one is allowed to be buried or even cremated within the city limits. Many new cemeteries were created in the nearby town of Colma, which is known for having more dead residents than live ones (around 4 million dead with only about 1500 alive!). Their motto, which is on the cities website, reads that “it’s great to be alive in Colma.” Today, these beautiful cemeteries are often a popular destination for tourists.
10. New Jersey is home to the world’s highest roller coaster. Kingda Ka, at Six Flags Great Adventure in N.J. stands a whopping 45 stories tall, plummeting 456 feet and reaching speeds up to 126 mph. Also read about the Top 10 Most Overrated Roller Coasters in North America (See why Kingda Ka made the list!). Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, CA has 18 roller coasters, with most roller coasters than any other theme/amusement park in the world. The runner up would be Cedar Point (their newest coaster, which is called the Gatekeeper, recently broke seven world records), in Sandusky, Ohio, with 16 roller coasters. King’s Dominion, Carowinds and Kings Island all come shortly behind.
I thought the Mall of America’s Rock Bottom Plunge was pretty wicked until I heard about these rides!
11. The world’s tallest battle monument is found in Houston. It’s called the San Jacinto Monument and it was dedicated in 1939 and stands 570-feet high, 15-feet above the Washington monument. Ride the elevator to the observation deck to get a view of the site of one of the biggest battles in our nation’s history. They also have a museum on-site; it’s located 20-minutes from downtown Houston. It’s actually the second tallest monument in the country, right after the 630-foot Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Also look into the tallest statues (these might really surprise you) and the tallest lighthouses in America, many of which are open to the public.
12. Atlantic City is home to longest boardwalk in the world and it’s often considered to be the best. It was America’s first boardwalk, built in 1870 to limit the amount of sand that beach-goers tracked into the train and hotel lobbies. Today this 4.5 mile (in 1889 it was nearly double this size at 7-miles long, but was destroyed by a storm) wooden walkway winds past a variety of casinos, hotels, and plenty of shops and eateries. Fishing piers include The Garden Pier (home to the Atlantic City Historical Museum and Art Center), and of course their famous Steel Pier (a beachside amusement park). You may know about all the damage and devastation that Hurricane Sandy recently did here but I decided to dig a little deeper and see what really happened. It turns out that the actual historic part of Atlantic City’s boardwalk was not really devastated at all. The section that was damaged was actually slated for demolition any way. Atlantic City really didn’t suffer in any meaningful way, despite much of what was seen on the media. All in all, Sandy racked up nearly $70 billion in damages and killed nearly 300 people. NBC recently reported on how things are looking a year after Sandy.
The Mayor of Myrtle Beach plans on expanding their boardwalk from 1.2 miles to 4.6, which would make it just long enough to claim the title of being the world’s longest. Another of America’s favorites is the Coney Island Boardwalk, where it’s Luna Park amusement park was recently given a reopening ceremony with 19 new rides, helping to bring Coney Island back to it’s glory days.
13. Women got the right to vote in the United States in 1920, thanks to the 19th amendment. There is actually a Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY. It tells the story of the first Women’s Rights Convention, which was held in this very spot in 1848. Some of the best Women’s history museums in DC include the Sewell-Belmont House (which has held a presence on Capitol Hill for over 200 years and also serves as headquarters for the National Women’s Party), the National Women’s History Museum (once completed, it will be the first museum of the National Mall to be designed by a woman), Hillwood Museum Estate & Gardens (it’s housed on a gorgeous estate and home to an extensive art collection), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (featuring over 3,000 works of art).
14. The grizzly bear is the official state animal of California. But no grizzly bears have been seen there since 1922. Though you can still see them at at a few of the California zoos. Thousands of grizzlies flourished across California until the mid-1800s, when speculators began to arrive for the state’s gold rush. Between that time and 1922, every living grizzly in the state was either captured or killed. Most zoos don’t have enough space for grizzlies, which are tough to manage in captivity because they are often smart enough to use tools and outwit locks. Grizzly bears generally live about 30 years in captivity but only about 1,000 grizzly bears live in the Lower 48 states, mostly in Montana. They typically grow to be eight feet tall and weigh from 400 to 1,000 pounds.
15. Alaska has a longer coastline than all of the other 49 U.S. states put together. True story. Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area (more than twice the size of Texas, the next the largest state) the 4th least populous and the least densely populated of the 50 states. About half of their population resides within the Anchorage metropolitan area. The US actually purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million (equivalent to $120 million in today’s dollars). That means ABC’s Shark Tank‘s billionaire investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban could buy Alaska like it was water off of a duck’s back. And in case you’re wondering, Alaska isn’t really known for their ducks but they are pretty well known for their bears. Kodiak island, Alaska’s largest island, is home to the world’s largest bear species, called the Kodiak brown bears. But Alaska actually wasn’t admitted as the 49th state of the US until 1959. Alaska is also home to 17 of the tallest 20 mountains in the US, including Mt. McKInley (also known as Denali) which is the highest peak in the US. Only 20 percent of Alaska is accessible by road so you may have to borrow Santa’s sleigh if you want ot go out in the Alaskan wild wild west. Those looking for something really bizarre to do in Alaska will want to head to their unique Hammer Museum (in Haines), which showcases over 1,500 hammers. Last but not least, Alaska actually has the lowest individual tax burden in the US, collecting neither state sales tax nor personal income tax
16. The Pentagon is the largest office building in the world by area, with 17 miles of corridors. The US Capitol could fit into just one of the buildings five sides. It actually has twice the space as the Empire State Building. It was built in Arlington, Virginia in 1943 at a cost of $83 million (equivalent to $1.32 billion in todays dollars) as the headquarters of the US Department of Defense. It has 5 sides, 5 floors above ground, 5 ring corridors per floor and a 5-acre central plaza that is known as “ground zero.” Hence the name “penta,” which means five. It would have been built higher but they did not want to block the scenic views of the area and the also had a steel shortage which prevented them. On 9/11, the 60th anniversary of the groundbreaking, I’m sure the people who managed to escape were thrilled that it wasn’t built any higher, as it was hijacked along with the World Trade Center, killing 189 people. It was reconstructed shortly afterwards, as the $5 billion (about 5 times the cost of the original building) Phoenix Project was completed in 2003. Just try and hijack us now and see what happens.
They actually have twice as many bathrooms as necessary because it was built in a time of segregation, where they felt the need to build separate facilities for black and white employees. But during construction, laws were changed and it ended up opening as the only non-segregated building in Virginia.
17. The United States outlawed alcohol in 1919 with the 18th amendment. It was legalized again in 1933 with the 21st amendment. The oldest bar in America was built in 1668 and is located just north of NYC in the small town of Tappan, NY and it is called the ’76 House. The structure today is very much the type of tavern it was over 300 years ago. They continue to have a fully stocked bar and live music every night, with a random soloist manning the baby grand piano, while a crowd of locals and rowdy tourists can be seen crowded around the fire. Here’s an interview with the owner. You may also want to check out the world’s largest permanent bar at Beer Barrel Saloon in Ohio. Also see where Food & Wine ranks the 50 Best Bars in America.
Beer fans in Las Vegas who are looking for something a little more extravagant will want to head to Aureole at the Mandalay Bay, featuring a 4-story wine tower, which is the largest wine tower in the world, which holds nearly 10,000 bottles. It features an elaborate pully system with “flying wine angels” who manage this intricate system. Each table is given an electronic tablet to help you find the perfect wine. It’s been a huge hit since it opened in 1999, as it currently is ranked 4.5 stars on popular review sites.
18. 32% of all land in the US is owned by the federal government, as they own about 650 million acres. The Federal Government actually owns 84.5% of Nevada, 69.1% of Alaska and 57.4% of Utah. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the lowest-percentage states are mainly in the East, including the Federal Government only owning 0.4% of Connecticut, 0.4% of Rhode Island and 0.8% of Iowa. This land is called “public land” and the majority is used as national and state parks, other parts are used for grazing by cattle or sheep.
See this map on Federal land as a Percentage of Total State Land Area
19. The original capital of the United States was Philadelphia. Other than Philadelphia, Congress met in a number of locations from 1774 to 1790, meaning that each of the following cities were considered US Capitals at one time: Baltimore, Lancaster, PA, York, PA, Princeton, NJ, Annapolis, Annapolis, MD, Trenton, NJ, and of course Hawaii and Texas were each independent nations at one time and therefore had a variety of capitals of their own. Washington D.C. became the capital in 1790. See the list of the Best Historical Destinations in the USA. Some of my favorite historical sites include the National Museum of American History, the nation’s largest institution devoted to American history, where you can see the original Star-Spangled Banner, the desk on which Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s gold pocket watch and even Dorothy’s ruby slippers.
20. Harvard was the first university in the United States and was founded in 1636 and is located in Cambridge, MA (a 10 minute drive outside of Boston). It’s considered to be the second best university in the world, right after MIT. The Harvard Museum of Natural History is a popular tourist spot, featuring the universities items and artifacts that relate to the natural world. Objects on display include the largest turtle shell in the world, a 42-foot-long prehistoric marine reptile skeleton, and over 3,000 Glass Flowers (which model over 840 plant species). At the heart of this university, you will find Harvard Yard, where you can get a picture taken with the John Harvard statue. They also offer free walking tours of the campus, with former students including: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Conan O’Brien, former President George W. Bush and President Obama.
21. Manhattan’s Chinatown has the most Chinese residents in the Western Hemisphere. It is the oldest of at least 9 Chinatowns in the New York Metropolitan area. Here you will find the Museum of Chinese in America, the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and the Music From China ensemble.
This was taken in NYC’s Hop Kee Restaurant. Yumm!
San Francisco has the oldest Chinatown in North America, which was established in the 1850s in the wake of the California Gold Rush. San Francisco is said to be the birthplace of several American Chinese food traditions including Chop Suey and Fortune Cookies. This neighborhood hosts the country’s largest Chinese New Year festival, which is a month-long celebration around January or February, where they have dragon parades, fireworks, beauty pageants, and street fairs. The recent recession caused the downturn of American Chinatowns, as the migration trends return to China for better opportunities. Consider visiting the Eastern Bakery, which serves delicious mooncakes, the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, and also try Empress of China, offering gourmet chinese food and featuring a rooftop garden that offers great views of the city skyline. Here’s some more great American Chinatowns.
22. The United States debt per person is $54,000 USD. In fact, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are currently either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty. 46 million people of the United States live on food stamps and there is one child out of every four children live in food stamps. In Cleveland, Ohio’s 52% of children live in poverty. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York approximates 167,000 Americans have more than $200,000 student loan. Even if Bill Gates gave up every single penny of his fortune, he would have taken care of only 15 days’ deficit of America. During President Barack Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the prior 42 U.S presidents combined (you probably knew that one already). The median price of a home in the city of Detroit is now about $6000. Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs, while today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs. Fox has listed a ton of other surprising facts about the US economy.
23. The world’s largest amphitheater is The Hollywood Bowl in LA. It opened in 1922 and holds a capacity of nearly 18,000. The famous band shell is featured in front of a backdrop of the Hollywood sign and the Hollywood Hills. It’s the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and has been featured on The Beverly Hillbillies, The Simpsons and CSI: Miami. 2013 performers included Tony Bennett, Queen Latifah, Steven Tyler and a production of Chicago: The Musical.
New York’s Radio City Music Hall opened in 1932 and remains the largest indoor theatre in the world, with over 300 million visitors and it has hosted the Grammy’s and Tony’s and welcomed performers including Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli and The Radio City Rocketts. New York’s Madison Square Garden is the busiest music arena in America and the third busiest in the world (right after the Q2 Arena and Manchester Arena, both in England). Madison Sq. Garden was built at a cost of $1.07 billion in 2013 dollars (the current structure opened in 1968) and has a capacity of 20,000; it’s the oldest NHL arena and the second oldest NBA area (after the Oracle Arena in Oakland). The first artificial ice rink was opened at the Garden in 1879. Justin Bieber sold out all of the entire place in 22 seconds at age 16, Britney Spears took 43 seconds, and One Direction and Taylor Swift both took a minute! Elton John has played the all-time greatest number of shows there at 62 times! Check out the Forbes article on 10 US Movie Theaters Worth Traveling For.
See The NYC Radio City Christmas Spectacular.
24. Pensacola, Florida is actually the oldest city in the US. It was settled in 1559 by Don Tristan de Luna. They actually have a restaurant there that is called McGuire Irish Pub, which has over 550,000 worth of $ bills hanging throughout the walls (I’m surprised they haven’t had any break-ins). Attractions include their snowy white beaches and gorgeous emerald green ocean. the Historic Pensacola Village Florida State Museum, the National Museum of Naval Aviation (with over 100 aircrafts that are as old as the 1920s; they also house a torpedo bomber flown by former US president George H.W. Bush) and a waterpark called Sam’s Surf City.
25. The longest stone arch bridge in the world is the Rockville Bridge in Marysville, Pennsylvania, which was completed in 1902 and spans a total length of 3,820 feet. The bridge is currently used by the Norfolk Southern Railway and Amtrak. The world’s longest pedestrian bridge is 120 years old and located in Poughkeepsie, NY; it’s 1.25 miles long. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is considered to be the most famous bridge in America, as it was completed in 1937 as the longest suspension bridge in the world (it held that title for nearly 30 years; the span length has since been surpassed by 8 other bridges). Learn about the 15 Most Famous Bridges in the World.
St. Louis bridges are pictured above, as seen from atop of the Gateway Arch.
26. The United States is the fattest country in the world, with 33% of the population being obese and 66% considered to be overweight. Foodies may also find it fascinating that Subway recently passed McDonalds as the world’s largest restaurant chain. The Highest-Grossing Restaurants in America include Tao Las Vegas at number 1 (raking in $60 million annually), Miami’s Joe’s Stone Crab at #2 (raking in $26 million) and New York’s Smith & Wollensky at #3 ($25 million). Whoever said that restaurants weren’t profitable hasn’t met these entrepreneurs. Also see Zagat’s list of the Top 40 Restaurants in the US.
27. The first zoo in America was opened in Philadelphia in 1874. About half of America’s population visit’s a zoo or aquarium each year (according to AZA). See the list of America’s 21 Most-Visited Zoos, with the San Diego Zoo receiving the most annual visitors (3.2 million), followed by Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo at #2 (3 million; free admission), followed by The St. Louis Zoo at #3 (2.9 million; free admission).
I actually included a lot more facts than I said I would but those are just a few of the more interesting ones but I really hoped you enjoyed them! Which fact did you find the most intriguing? Are there any great facts that I left out? We would love to hear from you in the comments.
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19 Animals That Kill The Most Humans. Number One May Shock You.
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PPL expects sharp decline in coal fleet by 2050
An assessment of climate exposure prepared by the utility company for PPL Corp. investors predicts a large decline in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 will be driven by market forces, not in response to regulations or law. The climate report comes as the Trump administration seeks to prop up aging coal and nuclear plants through a rulemaking proposed by the Energy Department.
PPL's Kentucky utility companies own power plants, with coal making up 64% of its generation last year. Carbon dioxide emissions from Kentucky generation assets are expected to decline between 45% and 90% from 2005 levels by 2050, according to the report. And that means PPL could see coal making up only 10% of its power fleet by 2050, assuming a 55-year timeline.
The actual reduction in carbon emissions will depend on the mix of gas and renewable energy used to replace retiring coal capacity. PPL's shift away from coal follows a broad industry trend: Since 2005, more than 100 GW of coal-fired generation has been retired after an average operating life of 52 years.
PPL's climate report is indicative of several trends, including the decline in coal power and a growing interest in sustainable corporate strategy on the part of both shareholders and executives. And for PPL investors, the news appears positive.
Kentucky has no renewable portfolio standard. While the national Clean Power Plan has been rescinded, company leadership say they can't predict what future legal requirements may be put in place. However, officials say PPLS's expected carbon dioxide reductions by 2050 could satisfy possible requirements to limit the global temperature increase to no more than 2-degrees Celsius.
The report compares three scenarios for potential emissions reductions: one with no new regulations in place; one with targets consistent with the Clean Power Plan; and a scenario consistent with limiting the global temperature increase to no more than 2-degrees Celsius by 2100.
"Any way we look at it, we expect emissions to decline sharply by 2050," said William Spence, chairman, president and CEO for PPL. "And in the long run, that supports efforts to advance a cleaner energy future."
The carbon focus is on PPL's Kentucky utilities, Louisville Gas & Electric Co. and Kentucky Utilities Co., which serve 1.3 million customers between them. PPL's operating units in Pennsylvania and in the U.K. do not own generation.
LG&E and UK own about 8,100 MW of capacity in addition to delivering electricity and natural gas, and the retirement of coal-fired units mirrors the national trend. In 2015, PPL’s Kentucky utilities retired 800 MW of coal capacity and completed construction of a new natural gas, combined-cycle unit. In 2016, the two utilities also completed a 10 MW universal solar facility. LG&E and KU also completed a multi-year, $2.8 billion project to add environmental controls at four of the company’s coal-fired plants.
In November, the two utilities announced plans to retire two coal units totaling 272 MW in the first quarter of 2019. Brown 1 began commercial operation 1957 and has a generation capacity of about 106 MW. Brown 2 began commercial operation in 1963 and has a capacity of about 166 MW.
WFPL Utilities Predict Major Decline In Ky. Coal Plants Regardless Of Climate Policy
PPL PPL Corporation Climate Assessment
Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority Selects Burns & McDonnell to Provide Program Management... Press release from Burns & McDonnell
Explore the Trendline➔
Yujin Kim, Industry Dive
Electrification and EVs
The trend toward increased electrification in transportation, buildings and other sectors continued to increase in 2020, but while momentum is growing, various challenges lie ahead.
By Utility Dive staff
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VELVET THUNDER
THE METERS – Gettin’ Funkier All The Time: Complete Recordings ’68-’77
VELVET THUNDER > Reviews > THE METERS – Gettin’ Funkier All The Time: Complete Recordings ’68-’77
1972’s Cabbage Alley is often lauded as the band’s finest collection, and it certainly has a strong case
It’s been said many times (often by me, come to think of it) that the early to mid 1970s were an unrivalled time of experimentation and boundary-blurring, as bands discovered and played with new influences all the time. Jazz and rock became almost interchangeable, as did country and rock. Funk bled into rock through the likes of Glenn Hughes and Tommy Bolin, and the other way round with Funkadelic and Graham Central Station. What we have here is another example of that latter osmosis, as what was an unremarkable instrumental New Orleans funk outfit in 1969 ended up as support on the massive Rolling Stones Tour Of The Americas in 1975, all through development and widening vision, without a single audience-alienating sudden change along the way. That is the story of The Meters, spread across six discs here, and which we shall investigate forthwith.
Now, clearly I’m going to slant this review toward the rock influence in the band’s material. Not to the exclusion of all else, as that would be a disservice, but from the point of view of this site that’s the central point of interest for most, I would suspect. From that point of view, the first disc here can be almost disregarded as a formative stab, containing as it does the band’s first two albums, 1969’s The Meters and 1970’s oddly titled Look-Ka Py Py. Both of these albums are entirely instrumental, filled with short tracks which mostly seem to have the air of a jam session about them, with the rest of the band almost a vehicle for Art Neville’s Hammond organ, which takes most of the melody lines but too often has the cheesy sound of a baseball mascot tune. There is some nice music here, but it is very light and inconsequential.
Disc two immediately sees things improving, as the band discover more of their musical mojo. Occupied entirely by the third album, 1971’s Struttin’, plus some very strong singles from the time, subtle changes are happening all over. Vocals become commonplace, and guitarist Leo Nocentelli has clearly acquired a wah-wah pedal and is liking it! Art Neville’s organ sound also begins to become a little more Jon Lord and less Henry Mancini. No overt rock stylings as yet, but the music is tighter and punchier throughout, with real composition now the order of the day. There is also the first curve-ball in the way of material, with a cover of Glenn Campbell’s Wichita Lineman completely out of the blue, and giving a clue as to the influences which were seeping in. Did I mention that the drummer went by the marvellous name of Zigaboo Modeleste? Hell, that man was born for stardom! Things were about to get interesting.
On Disc Three, we start to see the real peak of the band’s career in terms of their wild and searching experimentation. Leo has acquired a much fuller guitar tone to go with his wah-wah, and is by now a mile away from the thin and reedy tone of the first recordings. 1972’s Cabbage Alley is often lauded as the band’s finest collection, and it certainly has a strong case. Even the cover art becomes more interesting, with the title illustrated, rather literally, by an alley entirely blocked by, yes, a giant cabbage. It’s not exactly Hipgnosis, but it’s eye-catchingly surreal for sure. The rock influence is really taking hold in places here, and oddly enough the track sequence is changed here so that the four most rock tracks are the first four (indeed, several of the albums in this set are resequenced, for no discernible reason). No matter, as it is the order here that we are concerned with, and first up, the soulful and bluesy Do The Dirt, could almost be a lost Free track, with the vocals oozing Paul Rodgers from every pore. Smiling is a nice funky riffing instrumental while the socially-conscious You’ve Got To Change (You’ve Got To Reform) cruises along in gritty fashion not unlike some of the heavier material from War. Best of all is the following Stay Away, which has the guitar crunching and soloing in a glorious mixture of power chords and fat lead lines. This is so far removed from those early albums in only three years it’s quite astonishing. The remainder of the album is heavier on the funk and soul, but delivered in a very powerful manner. There is also a balladic take on Neil Young’s Birds, and bonus tracks in the shape of Chug Chug Chug-A-Lug parts 1 and 2 – hideously titled, but Part 2 in particular really motors along meatily.
The disc is concluded by the first half of the next album Rejuvenation, which largely retreats back to a more straight funky style, though a deep and satisfying one, but just when you think the band have gone back into their safe shell, along comes the second half of that album opening Disc Four, and we are hit with the astonishing twelve minute It Ain’t No Use. Yes, that’s right. Twelve minutes. The first half of this remarkable piece has Leo channelling his inner guitar hero, continuing his Carlos Santana influence which had begin to take flight on Cabbage Alley, before the track drifts into a lazy, spacey-soul section before a fusion coda sounding like the Mahavishnu Orchestra jamming on Pink Floyd takes it into the fade. One can only wonder where this would have ended up had they continued for another few minutes. This is a band who were recording polite sub three minute instrumentals only three albums earlier! The album is rounded out by the rootsy Africa, which was covered in a different guise by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers decades later.
The next album, 1975’s Fire On The Bayou is slightly less interesting overall, though it is enlivened by the oozing swamp-funk of the title track and the eight-minute Middle Of The Road, which is anything but, and indeed comes along to surprise and delight just as things are getting a little light and safe-sounding. At this point in their career the band were reportedly considering splitting, but fate intervened when Paul McCartney invited them to play on a cruise ship for the launch of his Venus And Mars album, and one of the guests, a certain Mick Jagger, asked the band to support the Stones on their huge American tour that year. Fate had intervened massively, but only for two further albums.
Trick Bag, from 1976, suffered rather from the band hopping aboard the prevailing disco bandwagon, particularly on the opening Disco Is The Thing Today, and apart from the inspired cover of James Taylor’s Suite For 20G and the spirited take on the Stones’ Honky Tonk Women , the album is a disappointment. Happily, the bonus tracks on this fifth disc are fascinating, including as they do a crack at Love The One You’re With, a nine-minute take on Neil Young’s Down By The River and an almost definitive rendition of the Beatles’ Come Together. The proof was there that they could still do it, and it is only a shame that these tracks weren’t included on the original album.
With one disc to go here, it is a bit of a disappointing end to the band’s career, as they split after 1977’s New Direction, which was ironically nothing of the sort, being the blandest Meters recording since the first two formative albums. Just as the wild, pioneering spirit of the ‘70s had crawled into its shell having temporarily run out of steam, so too did The Meters. Their work over this decade, however, is fascinating, and this box gives you all of it. All the albums, all the singles, everything – as well as a nice fat booklet with all of the information about the band, often in their own words, that you could want. Even if only for Cabbage Alley and Rejuvenation, they should be remembered and celebrated.
Tag: The Meters
Author: Steve Pilkington
Former editor of the CRS magazine 'Rock Society'. Presenter of weekly radio show A Saucerful Of Prog on Rock Radio UK. Author of several music biographies. 70s throwback...
DGM – Tragic Separation (Frontiers Music)
Chris Rea – One Fine Day (Rhino)
Perticone – Underdog (AOR Heaven)
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Owners Bonus Program
Certified Residency Program
VA Gold Cup
VA Bred Races At Laurel
Harness Racing at Shenandoah Downs
International Gold Cup
Attend a Race
Virginia Gold Cup
Other VA Racing
On-Line Betting
Wagering 101
Wagering 102: Exotic Wagering
Colonial Downs
2020 Owners Awards
2020 Trainer Awards
Second Off Track Betting Location In Richmond Is Approved By Virginia Racing Commission
Tuesday, the Virginia Racing Commission approved the Virginia Equine Alliance’s request to open a second Off Track Betting Center in Richmond.
The OTB will be in a restaurant called “Ponies & Pints”, and is located downtown in Shockoe Bottom at 110 North 18th Street, near the Farmer’s market area, train station, many restaurants and bars, and lots of people. This was the former site of Tiki Bob’s Cantina.
Ponies & Pints has its own 26 car parking lot, is 5,500 square feet and can accommodate 300 people. One room in the restaurant will be dedicated exclusively to horseplayers and in other sections, sports will be mixed in with racing signals. Plans include two manned betting terminals, and seven self bet machines. There will also be 60 craft beers available on tap. Renovations to the building are currently in progress.
The first OTB in Breaker’s Sports Bar in Richmond’s west end is expected to open in October. Renovations are in full swing. The OTB is located in the TJ Maxx Shopping Center on Broad Street between Parham and Gaskins Road.
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Virginia Gold Cup Races
vagoldcup.com
The Virginia Gold Cup and International Gold Cup steeplechase races are a celebration of hunt country tradition and two of the largest, most celebrated outdoor social events held in Virgina. The Virginia Gold Cup is held the First Sunday of May while the International Gold Cup is held in late October, both at Great Meadow in The Plains, Virginia. You become a member of the association by purchasing a ticket to one of their races. There are no annual dues for members.
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Virginia Thoroughbred Association
vabred.org
The Virginia Thoroughbred Association Exists to promote the Thoroughbred horse in the state of Virgina a well as to act as both a resource and a voice for its members. The VTA strives to represent its members in the political and agribusiness spheres, provide guidance and information to members, as well as promote and administrate the lucrative Breeders Fund Bonuses through financial model that rewards the owners and breeders of Virginia-bred horses that win anywhere in the country. This is the only bonus program in the Mid-Atlantic that does not restrict payments to races in its state of origin. There is a 100 percent owner's bonus for Virginia-bred winners at any parimutuel meet in Virginia, designed to help create a market for Virginia-bred horses. Numerous Virginia-bred stakes races and restricted state-bred races are carded to give Virginia-breds the best opportunity to be financially successful for their owners and breeders.
Virginia Equine Alliance
The Virginia Equine Alliance is a non-profit, 501 (c) 6 organization which is comprised of the Virginia Harness Horse Association, the Virginia Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association, the Virginia Gold Cup Association, and the Virginia Thoroughbred Association.
The purpose of the Virginia Equine Alliance is to sustain, promote, and expand the horse breeding and horse racing industries in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The Alliance seeks to establish and support new and multiple venues for horse racing in the Commonwealth and to advocate and support legislation, regulations, and rules beneficial to the breeders and owners and trainers of horses (“horsemen”) in the state.
The Alliance represents the interests of horsemen at meetings of the Virginia General Assembly, the Virginia Department of Agriculture, the Virginia Racing Commission, racing associations, breeder’s organizations, horsemen’s organizations, and other like groups.
The Alliance is committed to increasing public awareness of the economic and environmental importance to the Commonwealth of the horse breeding and horse racing industries.
Virginia Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association
vhbpa.org
The Virginia Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association is a non-profit membership organization that represents thoroughbred owners and trainers who race in Virginia. The VHPBA negotiates with track management for race days, dates and purses, and also provides educational, recreational, health, counseling and religious programs for backstretch workers.
Virginia Harness Horse Association
vhha.net
The Virginia Harness Horse Association was established to sustain, promote and grow both the breeding and racing opportunities for standardbred horses in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The VEA is regulated by the Virginia Racing Commission
©Copyright 2021, Virginia Equine Alliance
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Best of Fort Wayne
Best of Dining
2020 Travel Survey Thank You
Fort Wayne, Come On Over for Dinner! Arena Dinner Theatre Presents: COMPANY, June 13-28
By Heather C. on May. 23, 2014
Summer weather may be unpredictable, but the Fort Wayne theatre scene is hot, hot, hot! With dozens of performances from a variety of theatres, there’s sure to be something for everyone in the family. Fort Wayne Youtheatre certainly started the summer season strong by hosting the first-ever “Fairy Tale Fest,” appealing to children both young and old. So what’s next to hit a local mainstage? "No strings, good times, just chums, COMPANY!"
Arena Dinner Theatre will bring this Fort Wayne favorite back to their stage for the first time since 1984. Brought to life by the collaborators Christopher J. Murphy (Director), Leslie Beauchamp (Choreographer), and Ben Wedler (Music Director), COMPANY tells the story of a single man named Robert. On the night of his 35th birthday, “Bobby” reflects on and contemplates his unmarried state through a series of hilarious vignettes. In the end, he realizes being alone is “alone, not alive.” The show is an honest, witty, sophisticated look at relationships and is as contemporary and relevant as ever. Jaws will drop and hearts will be warmed by 14 amazingly talented actors, including several award winning performers, including audience favorite, Todd Frymier.
Some may remember Frymier as Jean Valjean, or perhaps Willy Wonka himself; however, he returns to the stage as not only the leading character, but the inspiration behind the upcoming performance of COMPANY. In fact, Murphy did not audition actors for the role of Bobby because he was inspired to do the show- in part- for his friend, Frymier. The cast of COMPANY is dripping not only with talent, but with a familiar, family feel that only local performers can produce. For example, names like Suzan Moriarty, Jim Matusik, Emilie Henry-Murphy, and Megan Meyer have been part of our Fort Wayne theatre family for as long as we can remember. And, as with all families, some people tend to come and go. Pam Good portrayed the role of April in Arena’s 1984 production of COMPANY and has returned from an 11-year hiatus to toast “The Ladies Who Lunch” as the memorable Joanne.
Tick-Tock! Time is running out to secure your seat for what’s sure to be one of this summer’s hottest hits. Performances are: June 13, 14, 20, 21, 27 & 28 @ 8:00 PM, June 12 (Senior Night), and June 19 (Comp. Night). Visit www.arenadinnertheatre.org or call the Box Office at (260) 424-5622 to reserve your ticket today.
Categories: Downtown Fort Wayne, Dining and Restaurants, Arts and Entertainment, Best Of Fort Wayne, Entertainment, Performing Arts
Tags: Arena Dinner Theatre, Performance, theater, Play, dinner theatre, Company
A Fort Wayne native, Heather serves as the Outreach and Technical Director for the Fort Wayne Youtheatre. She currently dances with dAnce.Kontemporary, often performs with community theatres,and choreographs for schools, studios,and theatres throughout the state. Outside of the "performance world," Heather is an experienced event coordinator, content writer, public speaker, and a social media/digital marketing enthusiast. Likes: coffee, traveling, politics, grilled cheese, nonprofit organizations, hiking, and cats- even though she doesn't have one.
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Georgia Council for the Arts Awards Funding Through New Vibrant Communities Grant
ATLANTA, December 8, 2015 — The Georgia Department of Economic Development’s Georgia Council for the Arts (GCA) today announced the recipients of its new Vibrant Communities grant. Ninety-three entities received more than $300,055.00 in funding.
Earlier this year, the Georgia Legislature allocated funds to Georgia Council for the Arts to increase the reach of arts grants across the state. This grant was available to organizations in counties who did not receive an FY16 Project or Partner Grant. GCA received 109 applications requesting $353,766 from 65 counties across the state. Applicants included libraries, schools, arts centers, cities, historical societies, community theatres, Boys & Girls Clubs, etc.
“We believe that all communities in Georgia have great art, inspired artists and visions for the way in which local art can bolster community and economic development” said GCA executive director Karen Paty. “GCA is grateful to all of those in state leadership that enabled us to increase the breadth and reach of our funding to support the incredible work happening is communities throughout the state.”
Georgia Council for the Arts uses Peer Review Panels to adjudicate applications following National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) precedent. Peer Review Panels include GCA Council members; fellow professionals who are experienced in the arts discipline or type of grant being reviewed; or are Georgia citizens with a record of arts activities, experience, and knowledge.
Click here to view the list of FY16 Vibrant Communities grant recipients.
About Georgia Council of Arts
Georgia Council for the Arts (GCA) is a division of the Georgia Department of Economic Development whose mission is to cultivate the growth of vibrant, thriving Georgia communities through the arts. GCA provides grant funding, programs and services statewide that support the vital arts industry, preserve the state’s cultural heritage, increase tourism and nurture strong communities. Funding for Georgia Council for the Arts is provided by appropriations from the Georgia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts. www.gaarts.org
About GDEcD
The Georgia Department of Economic Development (GDEcD) is the state’s sales and marketing arm, the lead agency for attracting new business investment, encouraging the expansion of existing industry and small businesses, align workforce education and training with in-demand jobs, locating new markets for Georgia products, attracting tourists to Georgia, and promoting the state as a destination for arts and location for film, music and digital entertainment projects, as well as planning and mobilizing state resources for economic development. www.georgia.org
Emily Murray
Georgia Department of Economic Development
emurray@georgia.org
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Only 10% of passengers at UK border checked for quarantine rules
"Unless it’s manifestly unreliable, we accept the data that’s put there at face value"
Neil Shaw
Only around 10% of passengers arriving in the UK are being checked to make sure they are complying with coronavirus quarantine rules, MPs have been told.
Checks at the border to make sure travellers have filled out passenger locator forms are “very basic”, are not carried out on “every arriving passenger”, and appear to be “unenforceable”, according to a trade union official.
The 14-day self-isolation policy for UK arrivals, bar a handful of exemptions, was introduced in June, with breaches punishable by fines of between £100 and £1,000.
The rules require travellers to fill out a form in advance of arrival, providing contact information, travel details and an address where they plan to self-isolate once they arrive in the country.
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Lucy Moreton, professional officer at the Immigration Services Union, which represents border staff, said: “The check is very, very basic. Simply, has the form been completed, is the information contained in it vaguely plausible? So, unless it’s manifestly unreliable, we accept the data that’s put there at face value.”
Speaking to the Commons Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Ms Moreton said: “We don’t check every arriving passenger. We aim, where there is a high level of compliance with that carrier, to check about 10% of arrivals.”
Asked how effective the checks are, she replied: “They are very limited, unfortunately. There simply is not the facility in the border to make any checks on the veracity of what’s there.”
Ms Moreton added that the majority of concerns from the union’s members “centre around the fact that it appears to be unenforceable”, adding: “We don’t check the addresses.
“Inherently, if they have not gone to the place they told us they were going to go, we’ve lost them. The UK is a very big place.
“Individuals can put whatever it is that they want into the passenger locator form, we don’t query that. They then get on to mass transport in order to enter into the UK. They can move around with very little enforcement.”
Children and young may be left to catch Covid in future, says PHE head
Woman fined for driving 100miles for a McDonald's with her sister
She also said the rate of verbal abuse experienced by Border Force staff has “gone through the roof since this came in”, because passengers are not being told they have to fill out the form and are angry when they found this out on arrival.
Travel operators face a £4,000 fine if they fail to provide passengers with information about coronavirus before they arrive in England.
Police chiefs initially said officers would have a “limited role” in enforcing quarantine rules, with Public Health England calling on forces for help if they were having difficulty getting hold of people who had arrived in the UK to make sure they were complying with the regulations.
Earlier in the session, Thames Valley Police Chief Constable John Campbell told MPs his force has received 621 notifications of potential breaches of quarantine since the regulations were introduced, 521 of them since November.
As a result of those, the force issued 15 fines after officers decided quarantine rules had been breached.
Mr Campbell said the workload is not “insignificant” for police and has been increasing.
Warning furlough can damage your chances of getting a mortgage
Call for children to be banned from trolleys sparks a backlash
MPs also heard from health experts that a test before travel and then a shorter quarantine period culminating with a Covid test at the end could be more effective and is likely to improve compliance.
Examples were highlighted of better compliance abroad, where some Asian countries and Australia have resorted to mandatory quarantining passengers in hotels so they are monitored.
Professor Annelies Wilder-Smith, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), said border checks should be increased for at least 50% of passengers for them to be effective, adding: “If you do quarantine and isolation, you have to do it right.
“You either do it right or you don’t do it at all.”
In July, Home Secretary Priti Patel said compliance with coronavirus quarantine measures by people travelling in and out of the UK had been “incredibly high”, at a rate of 99.9% over four weeks since the restrictions were introduced.
How can you tell if you have classic Covid or one of new strains?
UK NewsAre there different symptoms for the strains from Kent and South Africa?
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Skip to main content Transfer of Power Inauguration Biden Cabinet The Biden Agenda Facts on election integrity Election results Impeachment Opinions
Clinton falls ill during 9/11 memorial service in New York
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton left a Sept. 11 memorial service early after feeling "overheated," according to a campaign spokesman, and video of her departure showed her buckling and stumbling as she got into her van. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
By Abby D. Phillip and
Anne Gearan
White House reporter
NEW YORK — Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton fell ill during a memorial service marking the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, leaving abruptly and inserting new speculation about her health into a presidential campaign in which Republican Donald Trump has called her weak and unfit.
Video of Clinton’s hurried departure from the Ground Zero memorial showed her buckling and stumbling as she got into her van. Clinton’s campaign issued a statement from her doctor later Sunday revealing that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier.
The video, circulated on Twitter, appeared to show Clinton, 68, flanked by several Secret Service agents, leaning against a security bollard while agents prepare to assist her into a black van. As she steps forward, Clinton can be seen falling as agents help lift her into the van.
“Secretary Clinton has been experiencing a cough related to allergies,” Lisa R. Bardack, Clinton’s physician, said Sunday in the statement. “On Friday, during follow up evaluation of her prolonged cough, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. She was put on antibiotics, and advised to rest and modify her schedule. While at this morning’s event, she became overheated and dehydrated. I have just examined her and she is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely.”
A planned trip to California on Monday and Tuesday has been canceled, campaign officials said late Sunday. Clinton had been scheduled to attend several fundraising events across the state, in addition to a major economic speech in Southern California and a taped appearance on the talk show “Ellen.” It remained uncertain whether Clinton would continue with her planned travel to Las Vegas on Wednesday.
Hillary Clinton left a New York memorial service marking the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks early after feeling "overheated," according to a campaign spokesman. She emerged from her daughter's New York apartment later and said she feels better. (The Washington Post; Photo: Yana Paskova, The Post)
Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Clinton left the ceremony early and retreated to her daughter Chelsea’s apartment in the Gramercy neighborhood of Lower Manhattan.
Clinton was not seen for more than two hours, after which she emerged from Chelsea Clinton’s apartment building, walking normally, smiling and waving.
The incident quickly renewed attention to Clinton’s health. Trump has repeatedly questioned her well-being, saying that she doesn’t have the “strength” or “stamina” for the presidency and accusing her of being “exhausted” and sleeping too much.
A coughing episode on Labor Day had prompted a fresh round of questions about Clinton’s health. During a speech at a festival in Cleveland, Clinton started coughing repeatedly at the outset of her remarks, took several sips of water and a lozenge and continued to sound hoarse as she spoke. Later that day, Clinton told reporters her condition was caused by “seasonal allergies.”
An initial campaign statement about Sunday’s illness did not mention the pneumonia diagnosis from two days prior, adding to public speculation that the campaign was hiding something. Clinton has followed an intensely busy schedule in recent days, and she had appeared healthy when she convened a meeting of national security experts Friday afternoon in New York and then spoke at a fundraising party that night. It was at that fundraiser where Clinton ignited a controversy by claiming that “half” of Trump’s supporters are in a “basket of deplorables.”
[Clinton says she regrets labeling ‘half’ of Trump supporters ‘deplorable’]
Neither Trump, who is 70, nor his aides responded to requests for comment Sunday; nor did he weigh in on Twitter or in television interviews, as he is known to do. But attacks from him and his allies, including former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R), have intensified in the past month as unverified and often debunked theories about Clinton’s health have floated on the Internet. And Sunday’s incident prompted an avalanche of speculation on social media from other Clinton critics.
Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail
The Democratic presidential nominee hits the road after her party’s national convention.
Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
Nov. 9, 2016 Hillary Clinton speaks in New York while her husband, former president Bill Clinton, applauds. Melina Mara/The Washington Post
Wait 1 second to continue.
According to two Trump advisers, Trump decided to stay away from seizing on the Sunday incident with the aim of bringing Clinton’s “deplorables” comments — for which she has expressed regret — back to the forefront of the campaign this week and avoiding any chance for Clinton to say that Trump was overstepping on the health front.
If confronted by reporters about Clinton’s health, Trump plans to say that he hopes she gets well and may raise questions about the campaign’s transparency Sunday, they added. The advisers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss campaign deliberations.
Both Clinton and Trump had planned to take the day off from formal campaigning in observance of the Sept. 11 anniversary. Trump attended the same memorial service at Ground Zero.
Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), a Long Island congressman who stood with Trump’s group at the ceremony, said he spoke with Trump shortly after Clinton departed.
“It was actually Trump who told me what was going on,” King said in an interview Sunday. “He leaned over and told me that ‘Hillary wasn’t feeling well.’ I said, ‘Really?’ That was all he said.”
A former Secret Service agent said that the security detail’s movements showed that the agents had not planned for her to leave that early and had to make some rushed security plans on the fly. Clinton’s van was not in place when she arrived at the curb, and her detail leader, who normally sticks by her side at all times, had to leave her momentarily to open the door of her van.
[Secret Service followed unusual protocol during Clinton’s hasty departure from 9/11 commemoration Sunday]
A small group of reporters traveling with Clinton was left behind and was not immediately informed that she had departed.
Clinton had arrived at the memorial site at 8:18 a.m. Reporters traveling with Clinton became aware about 9:36 a.m. that she was no longer standing where she had been, near several Democratic officials. By 9:48 a.m., her campaign confirmed that Clinton had left the viewing area but offered no more details until about 11 a.m.
Shortly before noon, as Clinton exited her daughter’s apartment building on East 26th Street, she hugged a young girl and posed for a picture, waved and briefly answered questions shouted by reporters before she departed in her motorcade.
“I’m feeling great, it’s a beautiful day in New York,” Clinton said.
Just before noon, it was 82 degrees and humid at Ground Zero, although it was probably a bit cooler when Clinton had left two hours earlier.
“It was pretty hot out there, but she seemed fine to me, and left on her own accord,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who also attended the ceremony, in an emailed statement.
Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) said it is unfortunate that this episode will feed into conspiracies about Clinton’s health. He said anyone could have been similarly affected and Clinton tends to be held to her own “demigod” status.
Clinton has been generally healthy, with the exception of clotting in one leg in 1998 and a concussion and associated health problems from a fall in December 2012. But she has been attacked repeatedly by critics and accused of hiding more serious health issues.
Giuliani, a close adviser to Trump who is regularly at his side on the campaign trail, said last month that he thinks Clinton is “tired” and “looks sick.”
“What you’ve got to do is go online,” Giuliani said on “Fox News Sunday” in late August, accusing the media of hiding information about Clinton’s health. “So, go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness,’ take a look at the videos for yourself.”
Trump showed up to the ceremony with no formal notice to reporters who cover him, and there were no arrangements for a media pool. This is not the first time that Trump has avoided having a media pool — last month he traveled without reporters to Louisiana to view flood damage and to Mexico City to meet with the Mexican president.
After attending the ceremony, Trump and Giuliani briefly visited New York City Fire Department Rescue Company 1. An NBC News reporter there asked Trump about Clinton’s “health incident this morning.” Trump shook his head, frowned and said: “I don’t know anything about it.”
If he wins in November, Trump, 70, would become the oldest president ever elected. In December, Trump released a four-paragraph letter signed by physician Harold N. Bornstein of Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan that contained few specifics but declared that Trump would “be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
The letter pales in comparison to the more than 1,000 pages of medical records released in May 2008 by Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who was then 71 and went on to become the Republican presidential nominee. The records detailed eight years of care that McCain received while fighting cancer.
Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said in late August that Trump has “no problem” releasing a full medical history, as long as Clinton does the same. Last week, Trump said that he is willing to go first. On Friday, “The Dr. Oz Show” announced that Trump and his eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, will appear on the show on Sept. 15 to discuss Trump’s “own personal health regimen.”
Clinton’s 2012 episode led to a brief hospitalization for a blood clot in her head. Details on Clinton’s condition were initially hard to come by, but her State Department office eventually provided extensive medical information.
Clinton wore special corrective glasses for months, and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, told an audience in 2014 that it had taken about six months for his wife to recover fully. Clinton has said she was surprised by the illness because she had not experienced anything like it before.
Clinton’s campaign released a memo from her personal physician, Bardack, in July 2015, pronouncing the candidate healthy and suffering no lasting effects from the concussion.
The 2012 concussion caused concern among Clinton friends and supporters who hoped that she would make a second run for the presidency, some of whom predicted correctly that the episode would fuel speculation that Clinton was too frail to be commander in chief.
Her campaign dismisses any suggestion that the candidate is not up to the job, while suggesting that the speculation is an example of a sexist double standard that is not applied to male candidates.
Clinton is the first woman to become a major-party presidential nominee. The health questions come as she tries to make a more personal and direct appeal to voters that focuses on her credentials and background.
As rumors have mounted about Clinton’s health in recent weeks, her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), has inserted a short section into his speeches about how much stamina she has.
During a keynote address Saturday night at a Human Rights Campaign dinner, Kaine said: “I can’t imagine the stamina and energy it takes to run this campaign for 18 months,” Kaine added. “This is one determined lady.”
Gearan reported from Washington. Kayla Epstein and Philip Bump in New York and Jenna Johnson, Carol D. Leonnig, Robert Costa and John Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.
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Trump boyhood home sells for $2.14 million
Business_Finance
President Trump’s boyhood home in Queens, New York, was sold last week to an unnamed buyer for $2.14 million at a 54 percent profit. (Paramount Realty USA) more >
By Jennifer Harper - The Washington Times - Tuesday, March 28, 2017
At long last, the numbers have been revealed about the sale of President Trump‘s boyhood home, located in a pleasant neighborhood of Queens, New York. The attractive Tudor home was sold five days ago to an unnamed buyer for $2.14 million — a tidy 54 percent profit for Michael Davis, the local real estate investor who purchased the property for $1.39 million through public auction only three months ago. He was praised by the press for “flipping” the property, built in 1940 by Mr. Trump’s father Fred C. Trump, himself a real estate developer.
There is reason to fuss over the five-bedroom home. It could very well be declared a historic property, or become a lucrative tourist destination. There is always intrigue, though. Both the New York Times and New York Daily News note that the lawyer who represented the buyer “is known to represent Chinese investors.” If that proves to be true, there will be a media frenzy over a “Chinese connection,” or words to that effect — so stand by. Meanwhile, the property remains a cozy house, and Mr. Trump has publicly revealed that he still loves it.
“This property is so much more than just real estate; it’s the childhood home of the 45th president of the United States, and it’s a part of history. That intangible value makes it a perfect example of why special properties are appropriately sold by auction, just like art is. As they say, beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder,” notes Misha Haghani, founder of Paramount Realty USA, which managed the transaction. Find the home here.
THE TRUMP TOUCH
“Donald Trump gets it. He really gets it,” says an appreciative Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit that favors free-market solutions to social and economic challenges.
“At the signing ceremony for his ‘Energy Independence Executive Order’ Wednesday, President Trump stood surrounded by coal miners, talked to them like the real people they are, and thanked them for what they do,” Mr. Bast continues, citing Mr. Trump’s vow to put the miners back on the job.
“President Trump stressed that this isn’t about lowering standards for protecting health and safety, whether for miners or the public, but about ending unnecessary and costly regulations that kill jobs without producing any benefits. For many of us who were marginalized, ignored, or demonized for the past eight years, this is an occasion for real joy, celebration, and yes, vindication. We have a president who gets it — he really gets it,” Mr. Bast concludes.
SPICER-ISM
The daily White House press briefing is an interesting showcase. On Tuesday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked about ongoing but unproven challenges to the Trump administration — “you’ve got Russia, you’ve got wiretapping, there are investigations on Capitol Hill,” one reporter noted.
“If the president puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that’s a Russian connection,” Mr. Spicer responded, adding, “I appreciate your agenda here.”
THE SESSIONS ERA BEGINS
“The number of federal criminal prosecutions has declined for five consecutive years and is now at its lowest level in nearly two decades,” writes John Gramlich, an analyst for the Pew Research Center who combed through new data from the federal courts. “The decline comes as Attorney General Jeff Sessions has indicated that the Justice Department will reverse the trend and ramp up criminal prosecutions in the years ahead.”
In fiscal year 2016, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against 77,152 defendants, a decline of 25 percent since 2011, when 102,617 defendants were charged, and the lowest yearly total in two decades. The data here count all defendants charged in U.S. district courts with felonies and serious misdemeanors, as well as some defendants charged with petty offenses. They exclude defendants whose cases were handled by magistrate judges.
“Prosecutions for drug, immigration and property offenses — the three most common categories of crime charged by the federal government — all have declined over the past five years,” Mr. Gramlich says. “The Justice Department filed drug charges against 24,638 defendants in 2016, down 23 percent from 2011. It filed immigration charges against 20,762 defendants, down 26 percent. And it charged 10,712 people with property offenses such as fraud and embezzlement, a 39 percent decline.”
The analysts cite several factors for the trend, including then-Attorney General Eric Holder‘s direction in 2013 to federal prosecutors to ensure their cases “serve a substantial federal interest.” Mr. Sessions, meanwhile, has pushed to increase prosecutions for drug- and gun-related offenses to reduce violent crime, which has risen nationally since 2015 according to the FBI — though such crime is “far below the levels recorded in the 1990s,” Mr. Gramlich says.
FOXIFIED
Success continues for Fox News Channel, which has garnered the highest-rated quarter in cable news history, topping all rivals in the cable realm both in daytime and primetime hours according to Nielsen Media research. The ever-ready “The O’Reilly Factor” not only had its highest-rated quarter ever in history, but it broke all previous records in cable news history for the highest-viewership ever for any given program in a quarter. More millenials chose Fox News over CNN and MSNBC, while Fox claimed 13 of the top 15 cable news programs. All of the familiar Fox News programs were up double-digits compared to the same quarter last year. “The O’Reilly Factor” continues to be the top rated cable news program, as it has for the last 17 years.
Meanwhile, the Fox Business Network has topped rival CNBC for the sixth consecutive month, thus earning the title of No. 1 business network on television. “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” “Varney & Co.” and “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” were once again the top three business programs in financial news.
POLL DU JOUR
• 75 percent of U.S. investors want the trump administration to focus on lowering taxes; 37 percent are optimistic it will happen, 31 percent pessimistic.
• 72 percent went the administration to focus on keeping U.S. jobs from “going overseas”; 48 percent are optimistic it will happen, 24 percent pessimistic.
• 68 percent would like the administration to focus on “the prospect of increased wages”; 41 percent a re optimistic it will happen; 27 percent pessimistic.
• 66 percent would like the administration to focus on reducing the federal deficit; 35 percent are optimistic it will happen, 34 percent pessimistic.
Source: A Legg Mason survey of 900 U.S. investors conducted through January and February and released Monday.
• Polite applause, snippy observations to jharper@washingtontimes.com.
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Home » McDonald’s supply chain secret sauce for consumer trust
Industry News & Trends / Poultry Welfare / Business & Markets / Poultry Processing & Slaughter / Broiler Husbandry / Poultry Nutrition / Antibiotic-Free Meat / North America
By Gary Thornton
McDonald’s supply chain secret sauce for consumer trust
Ernie Meier, director of quality for McDonald's, told a packed crowd at the Chicken Marketing Summit that McDonald’s is well on its way to delivering on its commitment to allow no antibiotics important to human medicine in chicken by 2017.
McDonald’s supply chain is a key ingredient in consumer trust, which has to be earned one meal at a time, 69 million meals times daily at McDonald’s in the U.S. Delivering that result is in the responsibility of Ernie Meier, the quick service restaurant (QSR) chain’s director of quality, who spoke to a packed crowd at the Chicken Marketing Summit in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
He told listeners on July 11 that McDonald’s is well on its way to delivering on its commitment to allow no antibiotics important to human medicine in chicken by 2017. The commitment made in 2014 allows the use of one class of antibiotics, ionophores used to control coccidiosis in poultry flocks.
Meier told poultry supply chain members McDonald’s is embracing its leadership role in earning consumer trust and that transparency and verification programs are important elements in fostering consumer trust. He outlined the QSR chain’s programs in animal welfare and antibiotics as examples.
McDonald's animal welfare program
McDonald’s poultry supply chain has three dedicated suppliers where animal welfare standards and audits have been in place for over a decade.
The QSR chain’s animal welfare program is founded on five tenets:
Addresses any area where there is an animal-human interface
Heavily concentrates on job-specific training and testing
Establishes expectations and individual accountability
Verification through first-, second- and third-party audits
Continuous improvement through focus on evaluation of KPIs and developing technology
McDonald’s proposed antibiotics requirements include the Process Verified Program (PVP) audited by the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). Suppliers are audited by McDonald’s annually. Treated flocks are reported and diverted from use by McDonald’s.
“We live in a very feedback-rich environment. They tell us not only what they think about our food but about our company and how they think we behave and also how they think we should behave,” Meier said.
Collaboration with the supply chain
Meier stressed the collaborative nature of the supply chain.
“When Ray Kroc established the three-legged stool as foundation of our business model over 60 years ago, he created a culture of partnership that has become and continues to be an enduring competitive advantage McDonald’s. Our business model of collaboration and alignment is very important. Without this alignment we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the things we have over the past 60 years. And our supplier relationships are built on handshakes. And they are truly interdependent. What drives these relationships is mutual trust and respect in our organization.
“Quality isn’t something that is manufactured at the plant and delivered to the restaurant. It’s a process that begins at the farm and continues as our food goes to the supplier, through the distribution channels and finally it arrives at the restaurant,” he said.
The National Chicken Council’s Chicken Marketing Summit, which is being staged by WATT Global Media, brings together a unique cross-section of poultry industry stakeholders to network, share, learn and dialogue together about the opportunities and challenges for chicken being driven by fast-changing consumer trends. This event is a must-attend event for key poultry professionals in the USA and Latin America. Presented by the National Chicken Council and WATT Global Media, the 41st annual Chicken Marketing Summit is being held July 10-12, 2016 at the Omni Hilton Head Oceanfront Resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The 2017 Chicken Marketing Summit will be hosted July 16-18, 2017, at the Historic Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina.
Gary Thornton is editor and publisher at ClearPoultry.com. Email him at Gary.Thornton.Media@Gmail.com.
Poultry supply chain discusses antibiotics, consumer trust
Smaller chickens for Wendy’s supply chain
How to think like a poultry supply chain manager
Facing poultry’s consumer trust challenge
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we see the world in ben-day dots
WHAT'S NEW: 31.12.20
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
It's Fearful Symmetry. It's Kraven's Last Hunt Part 3. It's Descent.
In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
It's Fearful Symmetry. It's Kraven's Last Hunt Part 2. It's 'Crawling.'
T.U.R.T.L.E. Power.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
On the half shell,
They're the heroes four.
In this day and age,
Who could ask for more?
No-one. No-one could've asked for more 30 years ago, and no-one could ask for more now.
Spyder Spyder, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
It's Fearful Symmetry. It's Kraven's Last Hunt Part 1. It's 'The Coffin.'
The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted Spectacles duo don the green duds for the final time, for the moment (Kev as Hal Jordan and Dave as Ollie Queen. If Jai was involved, she could've been Dinah Drake), as they travel to the ancient planet of Maltus, only to discover that it has been the victim of a genetically engineered population explosion at the hands of the crazed scientist Mother Jura. And as we hurtle towards a seemingly perfect storm of extinction level events, it has them asking themselves, will 'Death Be My Destiny?' Well, ultimately it will, yeah.
The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted Spectacles wearing duo travel back fifty years, to the time a tinpot despot had taken control of a populace using an army of robotic automatons. Hold on! This is a superhero comic from 1970, right? This is starting to sound all too familiar. Either way, it's a time when 'Even An Immortal Can Die.'
With timekeeping befitting a regional rail service, the cyan, magenta, yellow and key-tinted bespactacled trio finally round-off their watch/read-along of Mark Goldblatt's 1989 take on Frank Castle and his knife-wielding alter-ego. If you fancy joining in with the stabby, shooty, neck breaking festivities, just hop on over to YouTube, skip the ads, then jump to 58:18 in Mark Goldblatt's 'The Punisher.'
The CMYK, transition lenses, bespectacled duo return once again, in the decade of their birth, as they travel back 50 years to a world, and more specifically a United States, that was arguably just as tumultuous as the current one. However, as bleak as things may appear, never forget that 'Ulysses Star Is Still Alive.'
The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted Spectacles wearing TRIO of Dave, Kev and a returning Mike are back in full force to take a gander at the middle section of Mark Goldblatt's gritty, sombre take on 'The Punisher.' If you'd like to read along as you watch, whilst Frank shoots-up a casino, visits a Yakuza chiropractor, gets the crap beat out of him at a funfair and steals a bus-load of mafia kids, you can find this movie on YouTube and skip to 24:48.
The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles wearing duo wrote this before his passing, but here they are, gushing over the one and only Denny O'Neil anyway. It's 'A Kind Of Loving, A Way Of Death.'
Thirty years ago today, post the Batmania of '89 and at the height of T.U.R.T.L.E. Power of '90, a more modest, less child-friendly "superhero" comic book movie arrived on the shores of the United Kingdom with none of the fanfare of its blockbuster contemporaries and landed, not at the cinema, but rather, at your local video rental shop. Read along as Dave, Kev and a debuting Mike, revisit the first act of a film they were far too young to be watching at the time, Mark Goldblatt's less-than-faithful-to-the-source-material take on 'The Punisher,' starring Dolph Lundgren in the titular role.
To get the full We See The World Through Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted Spectacles experience, you could watch 'The Punisher' on Amazon Prime in German. And if you're not fluent in German, you'll just have to resort to watching it on YouTube as it doesn't appear to be available in the UK at the moment. Again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiYmQ9tL81E
The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles wearing duo go on a 'Journey To Desolation' this month, where they find a fascist trying to quell an uprising of downtrodden citizens.
The 'We See The World In Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-Tinted Spectacles' tag team contradict the Dr. Beckettian theory of time travel and go back to a year not in their lifetime. They arrive in the nick of time to witness Oliver Queen and a specific member of the African American community of Star City force Hal Jordan to confront some uneasy truths about his homeworld, as well as his role within and outwith it. Join them as they celebrate the team-up of the Emerald Crusader and the Emerald Archer, and the 50th anniversary of one of the most seminal moments in superhero comics, with 'No Evil Shall Escape My Sight.'
The 'We See The World Through Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-Tinted Spectacles' duo don their glasses and travel back to 1986 for the final time in this series. Can Daredevil and Captain America prevent Nuke from destroying Hell's Kitchen? Can Matt rebuild his life? Will Fisk ever be accepted into the legitimate business community? And will Glori get the exclusive photographs she so desires? All these questions and more shall be answered if you can survive 'Armageddon' and be 'Born Again.'
Our boys' Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted Spectacles have come over a shade of red, while and blue this month. With stars and stripes to boot. Sometimes you have to pray to 'God and Country' in order to be 'Born Again.'
"Risin' up, back on the street, did my time, took my chances. Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet, just a man and his will to survive. So many times, it happens too fast, you trade your passion for glory. Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past, you must fight just to keep them alive. Face to face, out in the heat, hangin' tough, stayin' hungry. They stack the odds 'til we take to the street, for the kill with the skill to survive." Sometimes you have to be 'Saved,' so that you can be 'Born Again.'
In something of a time paradox, Dave and Kev don their CMYK-tinted spectacles and step forwards into 2020, whilst simultaneously travelling backwards to the Hell's Kitchen of 1986, all so they can witness the rise of a devil, a rebirth, a bona fide miracle. Your heart must cease to beat in order for you to be 'Born Again.'
P.S. Be like Fisk and raise a glass to 2020. Happy New Year everybody.
With their Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles sitting squarely on the ends of their noses, Dave and Kev travel back to 1986 for 'Pariah,' the somewhat Christmas themed third chapter of Miller and Mazzuccelli et al's Hornhead masterpiece. You have to go towards the light if you want to be 'Born Again.'
Still haven't seen Joker yet? Have a look at Jai's review to see if it persuades you to go check it out. Already seen it? Well go see it again because it's bloody brilliant! And then also check out the review and see if we had similar thoughts.
With their trademark Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles firmly in place, Dave and Kev travel back in time to Frank Miller and David Mazzuccelli's Hell's Kitchen of 1986, for the second part of their seminal Daredevil tale, 'Born Again.' Before entering heaven, you must atone for your sins in 'Purgatory.'
Somewhat later than initially planned; Dave and Kev don their Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles for the third and final part of their backwards glance at the phenomenon that was Tim Burton's 1989 smash hit, 'Batman.' So for the last time, break out the old VCR, pop in the tape and fast forward it past the part where The Joker visits Vicki Vale in her apartment and Bruce Wayne pulls a 'Man With No Name' and uses a tin tray to stop a bullet. Bat-God.
With their trademark Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles firmly in place, Dave and Kev travel back in time to 1986, so that they can re-live what is arguably THE definitive hornhead tale. It's Miller, it's Mazzuccelli, it's Murdock, it's Fisk, it's 'Apocalypse.' You have to die in order to be 'Born Again.'
Dave and Kev slip on a pair of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles and dive back into Gotham City for the second part of their look back at Tim Burton's 1989 game changer. So dust off your video player, dig out your VHS cassette tape, cue it to approximately 40 minutes, (or when Joker visits Alicia after having killed Carl Grissom) press play and read along to 'Batman.'
And with that, summer is gone for another year. So to mark its passing and to round out our 'Summer of Batman,' Dave and Kev are popping on their trademark Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles and going back in time to 1987 for the second and concluding part of their rear view mirror look at the Damian Wayne spawning, Batman: 'Son of the Demon' Part 2.
Spider-Man: Far from Home is getting re-released with new footage but Spidey has also been axed from the future of the MCU...
Spider-Man: Far from Home was released in UK cinemas at the beginning of July this year. Now it’s been announced that there will be a re-release of the movie with a four-minute action scene to be added. Annoyingly, the extended edition is only being released in the USA and Canada, so for those of us in the UK and elsewhere, we will have to wait for the DVD release before we can watch it, which is likely to be released later this year.
Also in Spider-Man related news, disagreements between Disney and Sony mean that Spider-Man will no longer play a role in the MCU.
Read all about these updates along with our review of the original rendition to find out what we made of it. (J)
It's here! Today marks the 30th anniversary of the UK release of a genre redefining blockbuster. So, grab your beverage of choice, get the snacks in, pop on your CMYK-tinted, time travelling spectacles, fire up your DVD, Blu-ray, brand, spanking new 4K, download or stream, (or VHS) press play and read along, as Dave and Kev go back and relive the "Batmania" of the summer of '89, in part 1 of their retrospective of Tim Burton's 'Batman.'
Pop on your cyan, magenta, yellow and key-tinted spectacles and travel with us back to 1987; where we're at the tail-end of the Cold War, tensions are running high in the international community, the al Ghul family have resurfaced and a mysterious terrorist named Qayin is spreading fear with no apparent agenda. And what, exactly, ties a murder in Gotham to all of this? Find out, in the first half of our look back at Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham's seminal Batman tale, 'Son of the Demon.'
It's all come down to this. For the fourth and final time, the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-Tinted Spectacles wearing, time travelling duo are back in Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's Japan of 1982, as Logan comes face to face with Lord Shingen once again, in a rematch of their earlier confrontation. Will The Wolverine get the "W" and avenge the loss, or will Shingen put an end to the gaijin? The answer is here, in Dave and Kev's look back at The Wolverine #4, 'Honor.'
"All done. Finished." The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacles wearing, time travelling duo are back in the New York of 1989 for the last time, to witness a good, if not strictly speaking innocent, man get sent down for not grassing-up his old pal from high school. Oh, and there's also a werewolf on the loose in the final chapter of Gerry Conway and Sal Buscema's Tombstone Saga; The Spectacular Spider-Man #150, 'Guilty!'
"Come with us now, as we journey through time and space, to the world of....." the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow and Key-Tinted Spectacles. Join Dave Noir and Kev Moon as they travel back to the Japan of 1982 to witness a sumo wrestler get thrown through a bar window, freerunning over the rooftops of a neon-drenched Tokyo, The Hand close-in on Yukio and Logan have an epiphany. It's all here, in their look back at Wolverine #3, 'Loss.'
Once again, Dave and Kev pop the CMYK-tinted specs on and travel back 30 years to the spring of 1989, for a tale of full moons, lightning bolts, torrential rain, graveyards, tombstones, deadly potions, the undead and werewolves. Oh, and there's a web-swinging Spider-Guy in there somewhere too. Join them for a revisit of a Halloween tale that was either too late, or too early, depending on your perspective, in The Spectacular Spider-Man #149, 'What About Carrion?!'
The demonic insanity of ‘Inferno’ comes to an explosive conclusion for our time traveling, cyan, magenta, yellow and key-tinted spectacles wearing duo, in this rather low-key airing of good old Flash Thompson and Betty Leeds. Jump in, as Gerry Conway, Sal Buscema and co. invite us all to join them for a ‘Night Of The Living Ned,' in ’The Spectacular Spider-Man #148.
"What day is it? The date?" The 28th. February. Tuesday. "What year?" Well, it's 1989, "It is the day of Inferno" of course and the We See The World In Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-tinted spectacled duo are back in New York City to bear witness to the unfolding of N'Astirh's demonic master plan, in The Spectacular Spider-Man #147, 'When The Bugle Blows.'
For the first time in this run, the time traveling We See The World In Ben-Day Dots tag team champions set their cyan, magenta, yellow and key-tinted spectacles for 1989, as they buckle-up and prepare themselves for the madness of that year’s major Marvel crossover event, ‘Inferno.’ Join them and risk your own sanity by gazing back through four-colour lenses at The Spectacular Spider-Man #146, ‘Demon Night.’
We kick-off our 2019 here at We See The World In Ben-Day Dots in style, with the wall crawlin', web swingin', time travellin', don't look back in anger a-gazin', Ric Flairin', cyan, magenta, yellow and key-tinted spectacles wearin' Sons Of Guns, as Dave and Kev head back to the winter of 1988 to take in The Spectacular Spider-Man #145, 'The Boomerang Return.' Wooo!
Here at We See The World In Ben-Day Dot's we're rounding-out our 2018 with Kev's long overdue look at B.J. Mendelson and Piotr Czaplarski's wild, freewheeling one-shot, 'Vengeance Nevada.' "All will be judged."
The CMYK tinted spectacled duo are back in late 1988, to witness the handbags at ten paces confrontation between Spidey and Boomerang. It's got something to do with a book tour, a yacht race and some broken furniture. It's all here, in Dave and Kev's review of The Spectacular Spider-Man #144, "An Ill Wind..." "... a book which has been described as, and I quote, "Lovely stuff." Not my words...the words of Shakin' Stevens."
***********************************************Disclaimer***********************************************
We can neither confirm, nor deny the authenticity of the Michael Barratt quote.
For the second time, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to join The We See The World In Ben-Day Dots time travelling duo back in 1982. The CMYK tinted spectacles sporting pair look on as Logan and Yukio go on a blood soaked first date, Logan gate crashes and ruins a performance of 'The 47 Ronin' and Mariko bears witness to a side of The Wolverine that she has never seen before. It's all here, in Dave and Kev's review of the second chapter of Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's definitive tale of the Weapon X-Man, 'Debts and Obligations.'
The time travelling, cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles wearing duo are back in 1988 once again for this tale of clones, gene testers, High Evolutionaries and Young Gods. It's all happening and it's all here in Dave and Kev's review of The Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #8, 'Return To Sender.'
Dave and Kev travel 30 years back in time, through cyan, magenta, yellow and key-tinted spectacles, to bear witness to the end of something. It's Spider-Man, it's The Punisher, it's The Persuader, it's the Lobo Brothers..... it's a bloodbath in The Spectacular Spider-Man #143 'Deadline In Dallas.'
THE SANDMAN IS BACK...
Neil Gaiman first introduced us to The Endless in 1989, when the first Sandman comic hit the stores. The original Sandman series brought us 75 issues, along with one special edition. Following the original series, Sandman had many additional issues and spin-offs including Overture, The Dream Hunters, Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life.
The Sandman comics predominant character was Dream, also known by many other names including Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming and the Dream King. The series began with Morpheus captured for an occult ritual and held against his will for 70 years. Upon escaping in the modern day, he found his kingdom had fallen into a state of dilapidation, and after seeking revenge upon his captors he began rebuilding. Throughout the series the stories are predominantly set in the Dreaming realm and the waking world, however we also step into other realms including Asgard, Faerie, Hell and the realms of the other Endless.
What began as dark horror, emerged into an elegant fantasy comic series, and now almost 30 years later, the very popular Sandman Universe has returned for us to explore further. There will be four individual stories, written by different authors, and although he is not writing the new works himself, each author was selected by Neil Gaiman; Si Spurrier has written ‘The Dreaming’, Kat Howard ‘Books of Magic’, Nalo Hopkinson ‘House of Whispers' and Dan Watters has penned ‘Lucifer’. Although they are individual stories written by different authors, there will be an element of interconnection within the Sandman Universe throughout.
I cannot wait to read these new stories and discover where each author has taken Gaiman’s already established world to next. Keep an eye out for a review of these new works coming soon. (J)
Ladies and gentlemen, we are live! From an undisclosed, generic building site in Atlanta, Georgia for ‘The Spectacular Spider-Man #142‘- ‘Will.' IT'S TIME, for our catch-weight main event of the evening. Introducing first, in the red and blue corner, this man is a freestyle fighter, he stands at 5ft 10inches, weighing in at 167lbs, fighting out of Queens, New York, Peter “Spider-Man” Parker. His opponent, in the black and white corner, a boxer, standing at 6ft 7inches tall weighing in at 215lbs, fighting out of Philadelphia, Pensilvania, Lonnie “Tombstone” Lincoln.
With CMYK-tinted spectacles at the ready, Dave and Kev, one again, travel back in time to the second summer of love and into the pages of The Spectacular Spider-Man #141 'The Tombstone Testament,' (or 'Private Enemies,' take your pick) where they find; Spidey and Frank having a pleasant conversation on a homely boat, Robbie Robertson recovering nicely in a hospital bed, Tombstone popping-in to visit Mary Jane at the Parker's home and The Arranger and Persuader throwing a surprise party for a sleepy Frank Castle.
Hello, Frank!
Dave and Kev interrupt their regularly scheduled programming and slap on their cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles to bring you this bonus review of the first issue in Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's seminal 'Wolverine' mini series, 'I'm Wolverine.' "Bub, you've just signed your death warrant!"
Dave and Kev travel back through the mists of time to 1988, when Robbie Robertson was confined to a hospital bed, Tombstone had a very long arm, Mary Jane briefly tried her hand at stand-up comedy and the 'We See The World Through Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key-Tinted Spectacles' duo became oddly obsessed with skies. All this, and less, in their take on The Spectacular Spider-Man #140, 'Kill Zone.'
Like a pair of less ripped ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Pipers in ‘They Live,’ Dave & Kev each don a pair of sunglasses, (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key Tinted ones to be precise) but instead of seeing alien beings and their covert, subjugating propaganda, they are transported 30 years back in time to the summer of 1988. See how they become easily distracted by flat-top haircuts, seemingly waterproof, battery operated tape players and ship horn-like shrieks of agony, as they revisit ‘The Spectacular Spider-Man’ #139, “Grave Memory.”
“Once again, it’s on!” With cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles firmly in place, Dave and Kev are transported though in time, back to 1988. Can four colour, bargain basement Sam and Al prevent the inevitable heel turn by John Walker, stop Tombstone from coercing Roland Rayburn into becoming ‘The Persuader’ and help Spidey send La Tarantula back where he came from? Find out, in their look back at The Spectacular Spider-Man #138; ‘Night of the Flag!’
The cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles transport Dave and Kev back to 1988 again, this time so that they can revisit ‘The Spectacular Spider-Man’ #137. Can “The Amazing Spider-Boys” stop La Tarantula executing terrified refugees? Is it possible that Dave will be able to convince Peter to do the right thing and pay for his burger? And will Kev finally get that sweet J. Jonah Jameson/Tombstone flat-top haircut that he always wanted? All will be revealed in their review of ‘Nowhere to Run. Nowhere to Hide!’
Peter's gone all Victor Meldrew on us.
Congratulations to Mo Ali. Mo's was the name drawn out of the hat in our draw to win a copy of the Black Panther trade paperback 'A Nation Under Our Feet.' Happy reading, Mo. (K)
With CMYK tinted spectacles firmly in place, Dave and Kev travel way back in time to their adolescence, as they revisit the moment in which the ‘Circle Of Blood’ closed with part 2 of ‘Final Solution.’ Can Frank escape the ever decreasing sphere? Will Alaric shave his 70s porn star moustache off? Is Angela ever going to wear anything other than that flimsy nighty? And can Tony Siciliano even focus on the task at hand with those wonky eyes? Want to find out?
Through the magic of cyan, magenta, yellow & key tinted spectacles, Dave & Kev gaze back into the past upon 'Final Solution,' the penultimate chapter of 'Circle Of Blood.' Time would certainly appear to be of the essence, as Frank makes his move to exact his revenge upon Alaric and Angela, Texas gets chased by a dog and things get a bit sketchy, literally.
************Giveaway time************
You probably won't be aware, (as there has been so little promotion or buzz surrounding it) but there's a tiny indie movie called 'Black Panther' being released throughout arthouse cinemas in the UK on the 12th of February. To help the tiny, fledgling studio out, (and to leech off it like the parasite we are) we're giving away a copy of the bestselling Black Panther trade 'A Nation Under Our Feet' written by the multiple award winning Ta-Nehisi Coates, with art by Brian Stelfreeze, colour art by Laura Martin and letters by Joe Sabino.
To be in with a chance of winning, all you've got to do is the old social media triple-threat. So like, share and comment on Facebook, or like, retweet and reply on Twitter, or do them all if you're feeling generous. At the end of the month we'll draw a name out of a hat, get in touch with the lucky so-and-so and post the prize to them. Good luck.
Here at We See The World In Ben-Day Dots, we blast our way into 2018 all guns a' blazing, like Frank charging into a Mob family Hogmanay party, with Dave & Kev's look back at The Punisher- 'Circle Of Blood' part 3, 'Slaughterday' through their signature four-colour tinted specs. Happy New Year!
We round-off 2017 with Dave and Kev's CMYK tinted spectacled look back at The Punisher, 'Circle Of Blood' part 2: 'Back To The War.' "Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal(s)."
Frank Castle, ladies & gentlemen. Short & to the point. A man of few words.
Whilst taking bathroom breaks from binge-watching 'The Punisher' on Netflix and repeatedly sticking the kettle on, why not treat yourself to a little reflection time as your tea brews, pop on your CMYK tinted spectacles and have a quick gander at Dave & Kev's review of 'Circle Of Blood' part 1.
On the 17th of November, Frank Castle blasts his way onto the small screen, after a few relatively unsuccessful attempts at cracking the big one. As a little starter, why not whet your appetite for the Netflix carnage, by joining Dave and Kev as they dust off the cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles so that they can take a four colour look back at the debut of The Punisher in 'The Amazing Spider-Man' #129.
Something a little different here at We See The World In Ben-Day Dots. 'What's It Called When A Black Hole Dies?' In which Kev mourns the passing of an institution from his childhood, muses a little on comic book retail and becomes undeniably middle-aged. Is that officially too old for the four-colour funny books?
Congratulations to Garry Bodsworth. Garry was selected as the winner of our 'Dragon's Claws' competition for his fantasy casting of Taika Waititi as Scavenger in our pipe-dream live action 'Claws' adaptation. A copy of the 2008 collected edition is winging its way to him like the Pig on its way to the 'Pool.
For one last time, Dave and Kev don their cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles, board the Trimaxion Drone Ship and travel through time to 8163 via the 2004 ‘Just One Page’ comic. Can the We See The World In Ben-Day Dots navigators stop the Evil Dead legion’s murderous rampage, prevent Dragon from crossing a line he can’t come back from and get one of those sweet Dragon’s Claws t-shirts as a souvenir? "Compliance!"
Get in touch with us on here via the contact page, or send us an email, or tweet us, or message us on Facebook, or send us a carrier pigeon, or smoke signals and let us know any or all of your dream cast for a live action 'Dragon's Claws.' You never know, there just might be a copy of the Panini collected edition in it for the best one.
Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday dear We See The World In Ben-Day Dots. Happy birthday to us.
We are one. Today marks the one year anniversary of Jai announcing We See The World In Ben-Day Dots' entry into the digital realm with her review of the animated adaptation of 'The Killing Joke.' To mark this momentous occasion, we are giving away a copy of the DVD of said animated feature, plus a copy of both the DVD and the graphic novel of 'Batman: Year One' (see what we did there?) to a lucky winner. A perfect double-bill for a Dark Knight in. All you've got to do is use one of the icons below, or the contact form on here to tell us which is your favourite We See The World In Ben-Day Dots review so far and why. We'll pop names in a hat at the end of August 2017, draw one out and be in touch with the victor.
Disclaimer- these discs are region two, so this competition is suited more to those who live in the UK. Unless you have a multi-region player, of course. Apologies to anyone who doesn't and is outside the United Kingdom.
Jai checked out the latest MCU feature 'Spider-Man: Homecoming'. Find out what our Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man has been up to, in Jai's latest comic book movie review.
Baby Groot is hitting the shelves of our comic book stores with his own series 'I Am Groot' and Jai is checking out the first issue to see what the little guardian is getting up to and what trouble he is getting into. Check out our Comic Reviews to see what Jai thought of 'I Am Groot #1'.
It's the 'End of the Road' for the Claws (well, not quite yet), so pop your cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles on and join Dave and Kev as they stroll down Duckett's Passage and through the portal that transports them to 8162 via 1989. Can the We See The World In Ben-Day Dots equivalent of Gary Sparrow tie up any loose ends involving Shrine, Michael, Tanya, Tanya's dad and the World Development Council before they run out of time and the comic runs out of pages to tell the story? Doubtful. But like Simon Furman always says, "It never ends."
The DC Extended Universe brings us another instalment with the much anticipated Wonder Woman movie. We were given a glimpse into her world in 2016 with Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, and she seemed pretty impressive, but just how does Diana size up in her own origin story? Let's find out in Jai's latest movie review.
With cyan, magenta, yellow and key spectacles firmly in place, Dave and Kev hijack Oceanic Flight 815, crash land it on ‘The Island,’ find the Orchid and turn the frozen wheel beneath it, all so they travel to Earth, 8162, by way of 1989 through “the constant” of Dragon’s Claws #9, ‘Treatment.’ Can the Ben-Day Dots Hurley and Charlie broker a peace treaty between the Claws and the Evil Dead 2.0, save Deller and Golding from becoming flame-grilled Whoppers and stop N.U.R.S.E. and it’s evil Matron’s nefarious schemes? Survey says, “No!”
Buffy the Vampire Slayer the television show is celebrating its 20 year anniversary this year. But after Sunnydale fell back in 2003 it didn't end there for our Scoobies. Joss Whedon brought back the fantastic Buffyverse in 2007 as a comic book. Jai takes a look at Season 8 Library Edition Volume 1 in her latest comic book review, and finds out and what happened with all the newly activated slayers, and what the Scoobies got up to next.
Dave and Kev don their cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles, run through the brick wall between platforms 9 and 10, jump aboard the Hogwarts Express to the school of witchcraft and wizardry and mug Hermione for her time turner. They then proceed to use their ill gotten gains to travel to 8162 via the 1989 portal of Dragon's Claws #8, '…..The Evil Dead Too.' Can the Ben-Day Dots Neville and Sheamus stop the brand, spanking new Evil Dead from raising N.U.R.S.E. to the ground? Should they even want to? COULD they, even if they did? (They couldn't.)
The Guardians of the Galaxy return to our screens with an action packed, humorous sequel in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Set to yet another awesome soundtrack, 'Awesome Mix Vol.2', it's a much more intimate storyline. With some new additions joining our unconventional superheroes, this movie is not be missed as Jai reveals in her latest movie review. (*CONTAINS SPOILERS*)
There's a lot of buzz around Neil Gaiman's award winning American Gods at the moment. The TV adaptation is about to premiere on Starz TV network at the end of the month. However, while a lot of you are getting worked up over that, I recommend that you get worked up over this even more. American Gods has also been adapted as a comic by regular Gaiman collaborators P. Craig Russell and Scott Hampton. Jai gives her thoughts on the first instalment of "American Gods: Shadows" in her latest review.
It’s time to break out the old cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles once again, as Dave and Kev stumble back into their beat-up, H.G. Wells inspired time machine and travel back to the Elseworlds Gotham of 1891 for a city break, just in time to revisit the sequel to ‘Gotham By Gaslight.’ It’s Bruce Wayne versus Alexandre LeRoi, the 19th versus the 20th century, progress versus tradition, all to see who and/or what will be ‘Master of the Future.’
The unlucky, thirteenth Doctor, Doctor Dave and his not-so-glamourous companion, Catastrophe Kev, jump into the blue police box and set course once again for Earth, 8162 by way of Earth, 1989. Can the We See The World In Ben-Day Dots equivalent of Eric and Ernie stay focussed long enough to aid Mercy as she comes face to face with a shadowy version of her past, or even keep their wits about them enough to notice the arrival of the 2.0 version of a certain Sam Rami influenced group of mass murderers? Probably not, but don your cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles anyway and find out for yourself in their backwards look at Dragon’s Claws #7, ‘The Quality Of Mercy.’
In this month's instalment of the We See The World In Ben-Day Dots Dragon's Claws Retrospective, Dave and Kev hop into the phone booth and travel through time to 8162, via the winter of 1988. Dave continues to put together the most expensive cast in the history of film and/or television, whilst Kev's unhealthy obsession with Deller's left shoulder and the multiple injuries it sustains only intensifies. Perhaps their energies would be better spent concerning themselves with the rampaging vigilante killer that's stalking the streets of Montreal. Join the bogus duo as they look at Dragon's Claws #6 'Craven Idols' through cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles.
This month, Dave & Kev get naked and step into the Time Displacement Equipment to make the journey to Earth, 8162 via 1988. Can the markdown Sarah & Connor get there in time to stop the Jones Boys burning down the house, prevent N.U.R.S.E. from performing any more unnecessary laryngectomies and put an end to the Evil Dead funded, paid killing spree of everyone's favourite "freelance peacekeeping agent?" So don your cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles and join them as they look back at 'Dragon's Claws #5, 'Here's Death's Head.'
And would the end-of-line Kyle & Reese please put some clothes on, yes?
Also, a massive thank you to Elliott Hopkins (@ElliottHopkins on Twitter) who pointed-out to me that The 'Pool is in fact Liverpool. Nigh-on three decades of reading this comic and the penny had never dropped. Cheers, Elliott. Apparently I need a new prescription for my CMYK tinted specs. (K)
Jai takes a look at Kate Leth and Drew Rausch's 'Edward Scissorhands: The Final Cut', where in this gorgeous deluxe overside edition Leth and Rausch take fans back into Edward's world for more eerie adventures with characters old and new. As well as being reintroduced to Edward, we also meet a new generation of Boggs family members and their friends, and a peculiar new creature who brings a little bit of trouble into Edward's world.
We kick 2017 off in style here at We See The World In Ben-Day Dots, as Dave and Kev leap into the hot tub and travel to Earth, 8162 again by way of 1988. Can the four colour Adam and Lou save Raymond (or is it William?) Golding by delivering Legris and Ostleur to the terrorist group La Folie, stop two warring barons and their armies tearing the French countryside apart and get back to Greater Britain in time to prevent a certain “freelance peacekeeping agent” going on a paid killing spree? All this and more will be revealed as they look back at ‘Dragon’s Claws’ #4, ‘Wild in the Country’ through, cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles.
Dave and Kev leap into the time machine and travel back to both 1989 and 1889 to take a closer look at the Batman Vs. Jack The Ripper tale, ‘Gotham By Gaslight.’ Join them as they consider a Victorian Gotham City, a less technologically advanced Caped Crusader and a real-life historical villain. All this before the conversation breaks-down descending into a nostalgic trip down a dark and dangerous memory lane, to the summer of the Bat in the last year of the 1980s.
P.S. This review does contain spoilers for a comic that is 27 years old at this point. So if you haven't read it and wish it to remain unspoiled, perhaps it's in your best interests to seek out the book and peruse its pages before reading our discussion of it. Statute of limitations and all that.
Dave and Kev step into “the box,” creating a time loop between Earth, 1988 and Earth, 8162. Neither of which are a nice place to live. Can they win at hide and seek against ‘The Vanishing Ladies?’ Will they discover the true identity of the ‘High Father?' Do they have what it takes to bring Barry The Wildcat’s killer to justice? All this, and more, will be revealed, as the four colour Aaron and Abe reconsider Dragon’s Claws #3, ‘Heroes' Welcome’ through cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles.
The latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is here- Dr. Strange. Jai shares her thoughts on this one in our latest movie review.
There are lots of events happening this weekend. Tomorrow is LOCAL COMIC SHOP DAY 2016- an event celebrating independent comic book speciality stores. There will be a chance to get your hands on some rare and limited edition comics from DC, Marvel, Boom Studios, Dark Horse and more that will only be available from your local Forbidden Planet, Ironically.
This weekend is also Birmingham Comic Con and Film & Comic Con Newcastle. For more information on this weekends events, check out our events page.
Dave and Kev step into the Quantum Leap Accelerator in order to travel back in time and into their 1988 bodies, in an attempt to change the future of either 2016 or 8162 for the better. (They're not quite sure which of the two it is.) Can the Poundland Sam and Al prevent the deaths of Kronos, Hex and Feral or perhaps even just stop the first of many injuries to Deller's shoulder. Join them as they look back to the future through cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles at 'Dragon's Claw's' #2, 'Dead Reckoning.'
Congratulations are in order to Mason Radcliffe of Waskada, Manitoba, Canada and Gareth Jones of Cardiff, Wales. Both these gentlemen are expecting a new arrival in the shape of a copy of André Lima Araújo's 'Man Plus,' which is currently winging its way to them as we speak. Hopefully it won't take nine months to get to them. Well done, gents.
Special guest star Dave Scrimgeour joins Kev in the Delorean, as they put the pedal to the metal and ramp that baby up to 88 MPH in order to travel back to 1988 and the future of 8162 simultaneously, with their review of 'Dragon's Claws' #1, 'The Game!' Does this adolescent favourite of the comic book reviewing tag-team hold-up to the scrutiny of failing, middle-aged eyes, or are the dynamic duo merely viewing it through the rosy glow of cyan, magenta, yellow and key tinted spectacles?
When the 'Claws' were still the 'Teeth.' Furman, Senior, White.
Also, if you like our review and you think 'Dragon's Claws' might be for you, it's worth bearing in mind that the creative powers behind it have a new project, 'To The Death,' that may also be of interest to you. The first issue of this creator-owned, web only series is available for free at to-the-death.com. But if you're old-school like us (or just plain old like us) and print is more your thing, they have a few days remaining on their Kickstarter campaign for the print only prequel to the series. The top tier gets you a Geoff Senior sketch of a character of your choosing. Need we say more.
P.S. Kev wants one of Dragon. Or Galvatron. Or Ultra Magnus. Look, he just wants a Geoff Senior original, okay?
Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá took on Neil Gaiman's fantastic short story 'How to Talk to Girls at Parties' and transformed it beautifully into a 64 page hardback graphic novel. Does it work? Of course it does, with a team like that are you kidding me?! But still, lets have a look at what Jai thought of this adaptation in her recent review.
Simon Furman and Geoff Senior launch a new creator-owned digital comic book series titled 'To The Death' on the 10th of September at to-the-death.com. In the meantime, you can whet your appetite for it AND our ten part, (eleven if you count the epilogue) issue-by-issue retrospective of its older cousin, Marvel UK's 'Dragon's Claws,' with this tasty little aperitif, as Kev meditates himself into a trance-like state in order to travel back through time to the late 1980s, reminiscing on how the comic came into his life and the effect it had on his adolescent mind.
What would appear to be Dragon's mugshot, by Geoff Senior and Steve White.
BEN-DAY'S SUPER-POWERED SPECIMEN OF THE MONTH
This month’s Ben-Day's Super-Powered Specimen of the Month is Lauren Elizabeth Hogg; survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Shooting. Hogg has penned her experience into a new graphic novel with Zuiker Press, making ‘Activist: A Story of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Shooting’, the fifth in a series of graphic novels written by young adults for their peers.
Hogg has been brought to life in comic form within the pages of her own story by storyboard illustrator and graphic novelist Donald Hudson. Throughout the pages, she shares with us what she faced on February 14th, 2018.
On Valentine's Day 2018, Lauren Elizabeth Hogg lost her two best friends. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas Highschool shooting, in Parkland, Florida saw 17 people lose their lives that day when they came under fire form a fellow student at the school.
Survivors of the awful tragedy, including Hogg, vowed to fight for their right, and the rights of all students, to safety in their schools. Using her voice, Hogg has become an advocate for gun control, vowing #NeverAgain will this happen to the students and schools of America.
“Sometimes the worst thing can make you realize your own power. I finally discovered who I truly am. I am a 14-year-old girl with a voice. I am Lauren Elizabeth Hogg.”
Activist: A Story of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Shooting is available to buy here.
Giveaway time here at We See The World In Ben-Day Dots. If you've read our review of 'Man Plus' by André Lima Araújo and it has piqued your interest in the book, or you just like free stuff, here's your chance to get a copy of the collected edition on us. Just submit a contact form with any old comment before the end of September (this year, 2016, not 2042) and we'll draw an entry out of a hat, contact the lucky individual regarding shipping details, then send said copy of said book to said individual in the post. Good journey.
Kev's look at André Lima Araújo's near-future, neo-noiresque, cyberpunk, crime series 'Man Plus' is now available for your reading pleasure (or displeasure) in the Comic Reviews section. If you're a fan of stories involving artificial intelligence, political corruption, hard boiled characters and a healthy dose of ultraviolence, this might just be worth your time checking out.
Man Plus #4 Cover B by Declan Shalvey
What's new 03.08.16
'BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE' review by Jai has been posted in our Movie Reviews.
Big events are happening this weekend! From intimate signings and creative workshops, to big comic expos and comic freebies! There really is a lot to keep you entertained so please do check out our events page to see what's on in your area.
NELSON & MURDOCK
We are not a global multi-media conglomerate, so clearly we do not own any of these intellectual properties, images or literary works. These remain the assets of their respective corporate masters and are used within the context of our reviews and articles for entertainment purposes alone.
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Crazy For You at the Novello Theatre – Save £30
21 November 2011 14 February 2020
SPECIAL OFFER: Save up to £30 on tickets to see Crazy For You at the Novello Theatre in London
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre’s Highly Acclaimed Production Of The Gershwin Musical Crazy For You Transfers To London’s West End
18 September 2011 14 February 2020
The Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre smash hit Gershwin musical CRAZY FOR YOU will transfer to London’s West End, opening at the Novello Theatre on Friday 7 October. Cameron Mackintosh, who was full of praise when he saw the show in Regent’s Park, is thrilled to be able to play host to the production in one of his theatres. CRAZY FOR YOU reunites director Timothy Sheader and choreographer Stephen Mear, who were responsible for the multi-award winning production of Hello, Dolly!.
Crazy For You tickets at the Novello Theatre
18 September 2011 3 February 2014
Dazzling choreography and fabulous Gershwin tunes abound in this high-energy new revival of classic musical CRAZY FOR YOU, transferring from the Open Air Theatre to the Novello in the West End.
Open Air Theatre’s production of Crazy For You to transfer to the West End
10 September 2011 10 December 2019
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre’s critically acclaimed production of Gershwin musical Crazy For You is to transfer to the West End next month, playing at the Novello Theatre from Friday 7 October.
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No, Red Rocks Did Not Announce Its 2021 Schedule
Nothing Matters: My Year in Music During the Pandemic
Tegan and Sara, 30 Seconds to Mars, Everclear shows announced
Jon Solomon
| The Industry |
Jon Solomon | October 15, 2009 | 7:52am
Canadian twin sisters Tegan & Sara hit the road the last week in October in support of their sixth studio album, Sainthood, which drops on Tuesday, October 27. After European and Canadian dates, the sisters are slated to swing by the Ogden Theatre next year on Sunday, April 4. General admission tickets are $35.25. In the meantime, 30 Seconds to Mars, which features brothers Jared and Shannon Leto, hits the Odgen on Tuesday, December 1, a week before the act's forthcoming album, This is War, hits stores. General admission seats are $25. Finally, Everclear, who just released an album of newly recorded versions of it hits and two new songs, come to the Bluebird Theater on Monday, November 16. Tickets for that one are $23.25 in advance and $26 day of show. All three of these shows go on sale Friday, October 16 at 10 a.m. For a complete list of the most recent shows that have been announced, the ones that are about to go on sale or are already on sale, follow the jump.
Bluebird Theater
The Band of Heathens: Thu., Jan. 7, 8 p.m., $11.25/$15.
Jason Boland & the Stragglers: Sun., Jan. 10, 8 p.m., $13.25/$15.
Everclear: Mon., Nov. 16, 8 p.m., $23.25/$26.
Andy Henningsen: Wed., Dec. 2, 7:30 p.m., $10.
Joe Purdy: Tue., Dec. 1, 9 p.m., $13.25/$15.
Wicked Rocks: Mon., Nov. 9, 7:30 p.m., $25.
Boulder Theater
Neil Berg's 100 Years of Broadway: Sat., Jan. 23, 8 p.m., $40/$48.50.
Gothic Theatre
Imogen Heap: Sun., Nov. 15, 7:30 p.m.,
Less Than Jake: With Oreskaband, the Swellers and Bomb Factory, Fri., Nov. 27, 7 p.m., $20/$23.
hi-dive
Agent Ribbons: With Weed Diamonds, Sun., Nov. 22, $6.
Finn Riggins: With Fissure Mystic and Vitamins, Fri., Dec. 4, $6.
Flashbulb Fires (CD release): With Daniell Ate the Sandwich, Fri., Dec. 18, $6.
Grant Hart (of Hüsker Dü): With Real Estate, Sun., Nov. 8, $8.
The Moore Brothers: With Ben Minnotte and Eric Sanders Trio, Thu., Nov. 19, 9 p.m., $6.
Paper Bird: With These United States and Dovekins, Thu., Dec. 31, $18/$21.
Marquis Theater
The B Foundation: With Mike Pinto, Thu., Nov. 12.
Big D & the Kids Table: Sat., Dec. 5, 7:30 p.m., $12.
From First to Last: With Greeley Estates, Therefore I Am, The Color Of Violence and Burden Of A Day, Tue., Nov. 3, 6:30 p.m., $12/$14.
JLive: With Kam Moye, ManeRok and DJ Tense, Sat., Nov. 7, $10/$12.
3 Inches of Blood: With Saviours, Holy Grail and To Be Eaten, Mon., Nov. 16, 7 p.m., $12.
Ogden Theatre
Tegan & Sara: Sun., April 4, 8 p.m., $35.25.
30 Seconds to Mars: Tue., Dec. 1, 8 p.m., $25/$30.
Zero 7: Mon., Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $22.25/$25.
Soiled Dove Underground
Five For Fighting (acoustic): With Angel Taylor, Sun., Nov. 1, 8 p.m.
The Walnut Room
Ben Deignan: Fri., Dec. 11, 8:30 p.m., $10.
Triple Cobra: With Savage Henry, Sat., Jan. 2, 9 p.m.
Jon Solomon writes about music and nightlife for Westword, where he's been the Clubs Editor since 2006.
Twitter: @sixteenshells
Instagram: sixteenshells
The Best Concerts of the Week
Rocky Mountain High: Half Pelican Plays Music on Fourteeners
Women in Music Fights for Equality in the Music Industry
Tool Bucket Tim Makes Music From Tools in His Shed
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Veteran infielder Josh Wilson has signed with the Texas Rangers, it was announced by Revs manager Mark Mason on Tuesday afternoon. Wilson is expected to join the Triple-A Round Rock Express as he eyes a return trip to the major leagues.
That came after Wilson earlier signed to return to the York Revolution for a second season.
York's 2017 regular season starts at 6:35 p.m. Friday at the New Britain Bees. The Revs' home opener at PeopleBank Park is 6:30 p.m. Friday, April 28, against the Somerset Patriots.
Despite losing a pivotal player, Mason wasn't upset about the situation.
“I’m really excited for Josh,” Mason said. “I believed he should have had an infield job in the big leagues, and I’m very happy for him to have a chance to pursue that. He came here and was a consummate professional for us and put himself in position to have this opportunity. That’s what our league is all about.”
An eight-year major league veteran, Wilson was in the big leagues as recently as 2015 with the Detroit Tigers, batting .316 in 21 games played. The Pittsburgh native then spent all of the 2016 season with York, where he was the Revs’ everyday shortstop, batting .255 with eight home runs and 39 RBIs in 120 games played and ranking tied for eighth in the Atlantic League in doubles with 28.
Wilson has appeared in 431 major league games with nine different teams, having played for the then-Florida Marlins (2005), Washington Nationals (2007), Tampa Bay Rays (2007), Arizona Diamondbacks (2009, 2011, 2013), San Diego Padres (2009), Seattle Mariners (2009-2010), Milwaukee Brewers (2011), Texas Rangers (2014), and Detroit Tigers (2015). He has enjoyed three separate stints with Arizona and will now set his sights on cementing a second stint with Texas, having played for the Rangers just two years before coming to York. He is a .229 hitter in the big leagues with 10 home runs, 54 doubles, seven triples, and 84 RBIs.
In the minors, Wilson has logged an additional 1,529 games played and is a .272 hitter with 101 home runs. He had played at the Triple-A or major league level in 12 consecutive seasons from 2004 to 2015.
Now in his 19th pro season, the 36-year-old was originally a third-round draft pick of the Marlins out of Mount Lebanon (Pennsylvania) High School in 1999, where he was named the State Player of the Year, helping guide his team to a state championship.
Wilson is the first member of the 2017 Revs to earn a contract with a major league organization. He will look to become the ninth in Revs history to go from York to the major leagues and second to do so with the Rangers. Left-handed pitcher Ryan Feierabend (York ’12) appeared with Texas in 2014.
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Property & Buildings
WSP in Africa
Salesforce Tower
Salesforce Tower, San Francisco
Salesforce Tower is an iconic building on the skyline of San Francisco, and the focal point of the Transbay redevelopment area. The tower is located in the SoMa (South-of-Market) district of San Francisco, above the new transit centre which is set to become a major transportation hub for West Coast USA. At a height of 1,000 ft., it is one of the tallest buildings west of the Mississippi river.
Boston Properties and Hines
Pelli Clarke Pelli
A Symbol of New Technology, Wellness and Sustainability
Sustainability and wellness are be amongst the hallmarks of the design of this building. Through the services provided, WSP made sure the tenant’s employees could work anywhere in the building. We used a converged network approach to include VOIP/WAN/LAN - this not only increases the building’s performance and functionality, but also its environmental sustainability, through the convergence of the building management and metering systems. It will enable the building’s operator the ability to gather and make informed decisions, based on key metrics from the building.
We also provided information technology design services for the transit facility. Located in one of the busiest areas of San Francisco, security is an important aspect in the design of this tower. We integrated a visitor information system to better manage who comes into and out of the building that incorporates a large scale schedule board and digital signage. The HVAC system we have designed helps achieve high standards of comfort while remaining energy-efficient. Every effort has been made to optimise the quality of the indoor environment for optimum employee satisfaction resulting in increased productivity. For example, occupants can adjust the temperature at their workstations to suit their individual needs.
With floor to ceiling windows, a high level of natural light penetrates the building. Since systems are installed in the raised floor, the office space is flexible and can change throughout time, by easily reconfiguring power, data and air systems. Their location along with the low velocity air supply, allow for this system to produce little or no noise, an important feature for occupants. To complement the beauty of this building, a 5.4 hectare city park has been designed at the bottom of the tower for everyone to enjoy.
Our building services designs include many innovations for low environmental impact. These Class A offices, incorporate sustainable features such as LED lighting, tenant and system metering, regenerative elevators and high efficiency boilers and chillers. We designed a very low energy floor-byfloor under floor air distribution system which improved ventilation efficiency as well as air indoor quality. The free cooling and heating systems resulted in substantial energy savings. WSP assisted the client in achieving LEED Platinum certification.
Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre, China
The 110-storey, 530m high Chow Tai Fook Centre Tower ranks as the tallest building in Guangzhou. It is a landmark mixed-use development in the city’s Central Business District with a GFA of 510,000 sq.m.
London, England, UK
Strata SE1, London
At 43 storeys, Strata SE1 was the tallest building in south London when it was completed. It is home to more than 1,000 people and is the first ever building with wind turbines integrated into the building form itself.
22 Bishopsgate, London
Accommodating up to 12,000 people, working for many different companies, 22 Bishopsgate, will become the tallest building in the City of London when it is completed. The 62-storey commercial tower will provide a wide range of facilities for occupants while becoming London’s first ‘vertical village’.
WSP's South Africa Headquarters, Johannesburg
WSP in Africa’s new headquarters offices in Johannesburg are the very embodiment of our company’s culture of collaboration, innovation and putting people first. Every element of the space we occupy at Knightsbridge Office Park in Bryanston is centred around worker wellbeing, from its biophilic design principles to its active workspace floorplans.
Parramatta Square, Western Sydney
A mixed-use precinct transforming Parramatta into Sydney’s second central business district.
Fish & Richardson New Offices
When global law firm Fish & Richardson decided to take space in the prestigious new Wharf development along the Potomac River in Washington, DC, the practice saw an opportunity to overhaul the technology services that underpin its client work.
Seattle, Washington, USA
Amazon in the Regrade, USA
Amazon’s vision was to build much more than an office complex for its new headquarters in downtown Seattle. Instead, Amazon wanted to create a neighbourhood that would enhance the lives of its workers and the wider public, reflecting the company’s community-focused culture.
Shenzhen China Resources Headquarters Tower
In a city with 6 of the world’s 56 skyscrapers over 350m, Shenzhen takes the next step after building tall; building with a narrative. The city’s 3rd tallest building – China Resources Headquarters Tower – invigorates the typical skyline using the form of a Spring Bamboo, a traditional Chinese synonym for life and vitality.
Principal Place, London
Principal Place will be a major new mixed-use development on the City and Shoreditch border in EC2, London. The development comprises a mixture of uses, including a contemporary Grade A commercial office building and a landmark residential tower set as well as a 0.5 acre public piazza.
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Dom: Strong squad will cope with fixture schedule
Midfielder can't wait to get stuck into the challenge ahead.
Dominic Gape was thrilled to make his long overdue Championship debut and says the Blues can relish the congested fixture schedule that lies ahead thanks to the strength in depth of Gareth Ainsworth's squad.
The midfielder joined the club amidst an injury crisis in League 2 in August 2016 and reckons it's a mark of the Wanderers' progress that they can now confidently rotate the team when required to cope with the demands of the four successive weekend-midweek fixture combinations coming up.
"I've been here quite a long time now and it's nice to see how the club has developed and what a strong squad we have, which means we can cope with the fixture schedule.
"Training is great but games are what you want to be involved in and they're coming thick and fast with lots of opportunities to pick up points, so we can't wait."
Those matches give Gape the chance to make up for lost time after he was forced to miss the first two months of the season due to suspension and then an injury picked up in training, but he was over the moon to step out onto the pitch for the first time in the 0-0 draw with the Bees.
"I loved it!", he said afterwards. "It's been a long couple of months for me; I've been trying to get behind the boys when watching on iFollow or here at the ground, but it's nice to be able to contribute on the pitch and help us get a point.
"It was a hard couple of months but I had great help from the medical staff here at the club, who have done a great job with me and now I feel ready to attack the rest of the season.
"We're really growing as a team and we've found our feet at this level. It's been similar to when we moved into League 1 and it takes a bit of time, but now we've proven we can compete."
Wycombe Wanderers vs Brentford on 21 Nov 20
Dominic Gape
Gareth: All focus on QPR
Gareth Ainsworth insists his side must divert all efforts and attention towards Saturday’s crunch Championship tie at Queens Park Rangers in order to bring home three points, and avoid being...
Gareth: It'll be an honour to come up against Jose
Monday night saw the Emirates FA Cup fourth round draw take place, with Wycombe pitted against Premier League side Tottenham Hotspur at home, in a reverse of the 2017 fixture.
Thommo's FA Cup memories
Gareth's cup draw reaction
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The National Bank of Egypt joins RippleNet
Published by leonidas on February 11, 2020 February 11, 2020
The National Bank of Egypt, one of the largest banks in Egypt, has joined RippleNet.
In a new start for the National Bank of Egypt, towards providing more effective channels in the field of inward remittances, a cooperation agreement was signed with Ripple, through which a new communication channel is available to receive remittances from Egyptians abroad, making the National Bank the first bank in Egypt to use Blockchain technologies. This was announced earlier today by a local Egyptian electronic newspaper and shared by XRP research Bank XRP.
Ripple Signs cooperation agreement with National Bank of Egypt. RippleNet, which is the first of its kind among Egyptian banks towards providing more effective channels in the field of inward remittances, @navinblockchain
Translated Link https://t.co/pAPLvPu4A4 pic.twitter.com/JDBHJI19ot
— ???? ??? (@BankXRP) February 11, 2020
The signing ceremony was witnessed by Hisham Okasha, Chairman of the National Bank of Egypt, Dalia El-Baz, Vice Chairman, Ghada El-Beli, Chief Executive of the Treasury, Foreign Relations and International Financial Services, Hisham Al-Safti, Head of the Treasury and International Financial Relations Group, Khaled Taha, Head of Operations Groups, and Sharif Safwat, Head of Technology Group Information and applications, and Abeer Khadr, head of the information security sector, in addition to the company’s representatives and the bank’s sector-related team.
Naveen Gupta, Managing Director of the Middle East and North Africa, Marc Johnson, Vice President of Sales, Walid Benothman in charge of Sales in the Middle East and North Africa, Sharon Wagner, Head of Project Management, Nick Tablin and Dara Dalpin, represented Ripple at the signing ceremony.
After the signing, Hisham Okasha (Chairman of the National Bank of Egypt) stated that the implementation of this agreement will add a new and important tributary for receiving remittances from correspondents from RippleNet, which is the first of its kind among Egyptian banks, and this comes within the framework of the role of the National Bank of Egypt supporting the development of remittance business coming from different countries of the world, especially the Gulf region.
Dalia El-Baz (Vice Chairman of the NBE) also added that the RippleNet network includes more than 300 banks and financial institutions spread in all countries of the world and it is expected that the number of subscribers to that network will grow exponentially, in addition to the mechanisms provided by the service that contribute to supporting liquidity management as well as increasing the National Bank’s foreign currency earnings. She pointed out that the new channel will allow more time to cooperate with new correspondents in response to the needs of its existing clients and attract new clients by providing a better and faster service. She continued to explain that the channels of receiving external transfers received by the bank fully comply with international insurance standards and determinants such as PCI as well as requirements of all regulatory bodies that provide the highest rates of safety in operation, in addition to applying blockchain technologies that contribute effectively to ensuring the implementation of financial operations with the lowest rates of errors as the company is committed to updating the network security periodically to comply with any new security standards, which reduces dependency.
Ghada Al-Bili (Chief Executive of the Treasury, Foreign Relations and International Financial Services) also indicated that the agreement will allow improve liquidity management mechanisms by correspondents and the bank alike, where the reporter has the opportunity to know the real balance of operations in an instant manner, stressing that this system is actually applied to many of the bank’s current correspondents, in addition to having future plans to implement it with many others. It also allows the possibility of linking with a number of correspondents in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Canada, in an effort to provide an effective and efficient service.
On the coordination between the National Bank of Egypt and Ripple regarding the agreement, Hisham Al-Safti (Head of Treasury and International Financial Relations) stated that all safety tests were taken before signing the agreement in coordination with the bank’s information security departments to ensure that there are no loopholes in the system that might hinder its implementation in any of its stages. Amendments were made according to the observations that occurred during the experimental stages to enhance the efficiency of these channels, because they include safety factors, which are among the most important priorities of the system.
About the National Bank of Egypt
Established in 1898, the National Bank of Egypt is the oldest of the banks in Egypt. The bank offers retail, corporate, and investment banking services. With around 16,200 employees, it is headquartered in Cairo. It oversees 413 branches and 3,823 ATMs across the country. It also maintains branches in New York and Shanghai, as well as representative offices in Johannesburg, Dubai, and Addis Ababa. In 2016, the bank posted total assets of US$63.20 billion and a net profit of US$595 million.
The National Bank of Egypt has been added to our Ripple ecosystem.
Categories: BankingCustomer
Ripple Lawsuit: Fraud allegations dropped, Brad Garlinghouse still not out of the woods
The blockchain and crypto industry has been eagerly watching the lawsuits against Ripple, claiming the company and its executives sold unregistered securities (XRP) and committed fraud. In a recent development, Ripple and its executives have been cleared of any fraud allegations, excluding a statement made by Ripple's CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, regarding his XRP holdings.
Ripple sued by NPP Australia over trademark
NPP Australia Ltd, the industry-wide payments platform for Australia, filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs on August 20, over a trademark.
Ripple lawsuits consolidated. Ripple’s motion to dismiss fraud allegations taken under submission.
Less than a month after moving the Simmons v Ripple Labs lawsuit from New York to California, the case has been consolidated with the on-going Zakinov v Ripple Labs lawsuit in California. At the same time, the honorable Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton has taken Ripple's motion to dismiss the fraud allegations under submission.
Rippled update introduces several improvements and new features to XRP Ledger
XRP Ledger (rippled server) version 1.6.0 has been released, introducing several new features including changes to the XRP Ledger's consensus mechanism to make it even more robust in adverse conditions, as well as numerous bug fixes and optimizations.
Goldman Sachs FX Executive Director joins Ripple’s Global Institutional Markets team
Goldman Sachs Global FX and Emerging Markets Franchise Management Executive Director Aditya Turakhia has joined Ripple as a Senior Manager of the Global Institutional Markets team.
Copyright © 2018-2020 XRPArcade. All rights reserved.
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Home > Artists > Vincent Van Gogh
Birth and Family Life
Van Gogh’s Carrer
Painter’s Mental Health and Death
Van Gogh’s Work
Art Style and Technique
Most Known Van Gogh Paintings
Best Art Reproductions of Van Gogh
On the 30th of March, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, Holland: a region in the Netherlands very close to the Belgian border. Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born. He was supposed to be the second child to his parents Reverend Theodorus Van Gogh, who was a devout pastor and Anna Carbentus Van-Gogh, who supported her husband’s ministry work and was an active member of the community, as well as a homemaker and artist herself. They were supposed to have their first child in 1852, But some pregnancy complications led to a stillbirth, thus making Vincent the first born, also taking his late brothers’ supposed namesake.
After his birth came five other siblings to whom he was very close to despite the fact that he did not have many friends outside his family.
Anna Cornelia Van Gogh
The second child following Vincent. Although they seemed to be on good terms, Anna lived in England for most of her life beginning with boarding school in the year 1874. She eventually found a job, got married and had two children.
Theodorus Van Gogh
Other than being his younger brother, close friend and confidant, Theo contributed a lot to Vincent’s success. He grew up to be an art dealer, and helped Vincent devote his life to his art. He also offered to house him and give his brother financial support during his most trying times.
Elisabeth Huberta Van Gogh
Lies was a poetry and prose writer who wrote a book about her brother, Vincent Van Gogh. Personal Reminiscences of an Artist, which was published in 1910. There were a number of discrepancies in this book that made it quite controversial. .
Willemina Jacoba Van Gogh
Vincent’s younger sister. A nurse and a feminist who dedicated her life to establish the Dutch National Bureau for Women’s work. In fact, she was so dedicated to her calling that she never married. Sadly, her mental health quickly declined and she died in a psychiatric institution in 1941 at age 79.
Cornelious Vincent Van Gogh
Unlike Theo, Vincent’s youngest brother Cor did not join the art world. Instead, he worked as a civil servant for the Netherlands South African Railway Company after spending a few years in Johannesburg where he worked in a factory. He also volunteered at the Anglo-Boer War, where he reportedly died in the year 1900.
Van Gogh’s Career
Between the years 1860 and 1880, Vincent began his career in art after two failed romances, which may have inspired and strengthened his calling for art and his search for deeper meaning. He studied Art in Belgium.
In 1886, he moved to Paris, France to join his younger brother Theo, who was then a gallery manager and art dealer. While studying and being in the industry, he met some great impressionist painters like Monet and Gauguin, who he was completely inspired by. These were the times where he moved from imitating the style of some great artists, to developing his own style, with light and bright palettes and short brush strokes which made impressionist art was it is today
It was in the year 1888 when he moved to Arles, a commune in the south of France and founded an art institution called The Yellow House, also known as The Street. The house was located in the right wing of the 2 Place Lamartine structure in Arles, where Van Gogh rented four rooms in the hopes of creating a commune of modern artists. The Yellow House is also one of his paintings which you will find in his list of works.
Sadly so, he created some of his best works over the final years of his life. Little did he know that despite his struggles, he would be one of the most well known post-impressionist artists of all time.
Did He Really Go Insane? Van Gogh’s Mental Health and Death
Let’s begin this chapter in the year of 1888, after making the big move to Arles with some of the greatest artists of all time backing him up, Vincent’s mental health began to decline.
He had numerous nervous breakdowns and bouts of insanity. One of which is his famous argument with Paul Gauguin, where Van Gogh tried to attack Gauguin with an open razor blade, which resulted in him cutting off a portion of his own ear.
He then received treatment and was sent to an asylum for the mentally ill in St. Remy under the care of Dr. Paul Ferdinand Gachet, a doctor who was a big fan of impressionist art. In fact, he had one of the greatest collections of impressionist art according to some personal accounts.
Despite everyone’s best efforts to encourage Van Gogh’s physical and psychological healing, he only continued to decline until he committed suicide in 1890 at the age of 37 by shooting himself with a single gunshot.
Despite not being able to save Vincent from himself, he and Van Gogh became good friends and confidants, and Van Gogh even painted a portrait of Dr. Gachet, his daughter and his home.
According to a letter from Theo Van Gogh addressed to their mother Anna after Vincent’s death, “Dr. Gachet and the other doctor were exemplary and have looked after him well, but they realized from the first moment that there was nothing one could do.”
Vincent Van Gogh’s greatest works were produced in a period of less than 3 years. Being one of the most well known artists of all time, you would be surprised and even saddened to know that he did not experience much of his hard-earned success while he was alive. The facts are he only ever sold one painting while alive. He was financially challenged, malnourished, and not psychologically fit to work alongside other artists. His main expenses other than his medical care would have been art supplies, coffee and cigarettes.
Being a post-impressionist, color seemed to be the main attraction of his works. His transition to a dark to a more light and vibrant color scheme was one of the defining moments of his career. His unique brush stroke which created surface tension, accompanied by the vibrance of color gave an intensity that was in effect, both dramatic and imaginative. Perhaps this was his effort in adding more life to his dark and depressed soul.
“People say – and I’m quite willing to believe it – that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’s not easy to paint oneself either.”, says Van Gogh.
All in all, there are around 36 self-portrait paintings of Van Gogh himself between 1886 and 1889. It clearly showed that the late artist had red hair in his head and face, piercing green eyes and quite a lanky physique.
The number of his self-portraits were quite a lot as he was really inclined to painting people, but did not have enough resources to hire models. Therefore, he often chose to paint himself. His first existing portraits of himself came out in the year 1886. He never seemed to show a painting of himself smiling, which was very reflective of his mental state. He has also painted himself smoking off a pipe, and 2 portraits of him displayed a bandaged ear which he got from an incident of violence from the year 1988.
His first ever self-portrait “sketch” known to man (1886)
A simple black and white drawing with minimal detail of two faces, both of Van Gogh.
Vincent in a dark felt hat in the easel
This showed Van Gogh in the act of painting in the dark, with a great amount of shadow covering his face.
Self Portrait with a straw hat
One of Van Gogh’s more popular self portraits.
Self portrait with a bandaged ear with a Japanese inspired painting
This was painted after he actually cut off a part of his own ear while in a state of confusion from an incident of violence from the year 1988.
What must have been his last self-portrait
Painted in Paris, showing an eerie image of a very pale Van Gogh with detailed strokes on his skin and his clothes, which were blending in with the background.
How many paintings did Van Gogh paint in his lifetime?
He was known to have made around 2,100 artworks. including 36 self portraits over the span of 10 years, and 860 oil paintings which were all made during the final years of his life.
Vincent was truly a fan of nature, which is evident in his work. He also tried to paint people, mostly himself as he did not have much muses or connections at that time.
Van Gogh covered the art periods of Post-Impressionism, which he is most known for. He also had works heavily influenced by realism, modern art, impressionism, japonisme, cloisonnism, pointillism and neo-impressionism.
Why was the color yellow apparent in most of his best work?
Yellow was said to be the late painter’s favorite color. In his work, he used shades of yellow to tie his pieces together. Giving it what would be his signature look. He respectively used the shades yellow ochre, cadmium yellow and chrome yellow for his oil paintings in different stages of his career.
Although, there have been some rumors that developed over the years that link Vincent’s love for the color yellow to drugs and his mental health. It was said that one of his physicians, Dr. Felix Rey, recommended Van Gogh to take digitalis, a herbal drug that helps with heart problems. Van Gogh took this to get rid of anxiety attacks which led to some really bad seizures.
The problem with this drug is that it is strongly linked to Xantopia, a vision deficiency which causes a part of one’s eye, the optical media to turn slightly yellow in color, leading to impaired vision with a predominance of the color.
Whether it was Van Gogh’s fondness of the color yellow or a drug-related issue was not completely verified in the records. But it did help in making his art more distinctive and unique to him.
Van Gogh’s paintings
Van Gogh had over 860 oil paintings throughout the course of his life. A lot of them being of still life, nature scenes with some Japanese inspired themes, which seems to be a well-known factor of his works. Here I’ll list some of the most known.
Probably Van Gogh’s most popular work of all time with several art reproductions and is now worth over $100 million dollars. Unfortunately, all this success came about after Van Gogh’s death.
Van Gogh painted a lot of nature scenes and portraits, especially flowers. Over 15 different paintings of his work are of sunflowers.
Almond Blossom is from a group of several paintings made in 1888 and 1890 by Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Saint-Rémy, South of France.
Cafe Terrace at Night
Painted in 1988, this is another vibrant and emotion-envoking piece by Van Gogh.
The Red Vineyard
Located near Arles in the south of France, this local vineyard has been immortalized by Van Gogh. This shows some Japanese art inspiration.
Van Gogh’s favorite subject in isolation at the Saint Paulde Mausole Asylum in St. Remy.
Art Reproductions of Van Gogh you can buy online
Van Gogh’s career reached a tragic end, and it is a fact that the majority of Van Gogh’s worth and the appreciation of his work only started coming into light after the painter’s death. Still, Vincent Van Gogh became one of the most famous icons of art in the entire world. There are thousands of replicas and reproduced paraphernalia of the late painter’s art, in different forms, sizes and price ranges.
Want to secure a beautiful Van Gogh replica for your space?
View our list of Van Gogh reproductions:
The Red Vineyard (1888)
Cafe Terrace At Night (1888)
Vincent Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom (1890) – Facts, Details & Reproduction
Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) – Facts, Details & Best Reproduction
Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) – Facts, Details & Reproduction
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Home Environment Climate
New projections warn that Greenland’s ice sheet will see 60% more melt than we’ve estimated
That’s a high margin of error.
in Climate, Environment, News, Science
New research warns that the Greenland ice sheet is likely to melt even more than previously estimated — a solid 60% more.
Bad news keeps piling up for the Greenland ice sheet. A study earlier this month reported that in around 600 years or so, it will melt enough that it won’t ever be able to recover (the ice sheet creates its own microclimate, meaning it is making itself possible right now). Despite this, new research suggests that we’ve underestimated how large the problem truly is.
Melt a-plenty
The team, headed by researchers from the Universities of Liège and Oslo, used multiple climate models with the latest observations, finding that we’re likely to see a 60% greater melting of the Greenland ice sheet by 2100 than previously predicted. That melt will, obviously, contribute to a rising sea level.
“The MAR model (one of the models used for the paper) was the first to demonstrate that the Greenland ice sheet would melt further with a warming of the Arctic in summer. While our MAR model suggested that in 2100 the surface melting of the Greenland ice sheet would contribute to a rise in the oceans of around ten centimeters in the worst-case scenario (i.e. if we do not change our habits),” explains Stefan Hofer, a post-doc researcher at the University of Oslo.
“Our new projections now suggest a rise of 18 cm.”
The results of this paper will be integrated into the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, AR6, the team adds. As they will be based on our most up-to-date models, the findings outlined by the paper should be more reliable than anything we’ve had previously.
Greenland’s ice sheet is the second-largest in the world after the Antarctic one, covering some 1.7 million square kilometers. A complete melt of this sheet would cause a rise in ocean levels by up to 7 meters, which is immense. Although the estimations in this paper are nowhere near that figure, they’re still higher than previous estimates, which is cause for concern.
The current paper reports that we’re looking at an 18cm (~7 in) increase in sea levels by 2100, which is 8cm higher than the previous estimation used by the IPCC. The researchers also used their MAR model to ‘downscale’ on previous IPCC scenarios. Keeping the same emission estimates that these used, the current model shows 60% more surface melting of the Greenland ice cap until the end of the century. Downscaling basically means turning a model with coarse resolution (i.e. low detail) into one with a higher resolution (more, finer detail).
“It would now be interesting”, says Xavier Fettweis, researcher and director of the Laboratory,” to analyze how these future projections are sensitive to the MAR model that we are developing by downscaling these scenarios with other models than MAR as we have done on the present climate.”
This was the first attempt to downscale the future scenarios regarding Greenland that the IPCC uses, the team notes. Future efforts to refine our climate models will receive support from various international projects such as the EU’s Horizon 2020, which should help the team gain access to even more cutting-edge data. Since melting processes are influenced by a wide variety of factors, our ability to predict them hinges on having as much reliable data factored in as possible.
The paper “GrSMBMIP: intercomparison of the modelled 1980-2012 surface mass balance over the Greenland Ice Sheet” has been published in the journal The Cryosphere.
Tags: ChangeClimategreenlandmeltingSheet
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Home Space Alien life
Life could have prospered beneath the surface of Mars
The melting of ice beneath the surface of Mars could have made its deep regions the most habitable.
by Rob Lea
in Alien life, Astronomy, News, Science, Space, Space flight
Even after liquid water was stripped from its surface, new research suggests that freshwater miles beneath the surface could have sustained life. (Steve Lee, Univ. Colorado/Jim Bell, Cornell Univ./Mike Wolff, SSI/NASA)
Life-sustaining water could have existed miles beneath the surface of Mars thanks to the melting of thick ice sheets by geothermal heat, new research has found. The discovery, made by a team led by Rutgers University scientists, suggests that 4 billion years ago the most likely place for life to prosper on the Red Planet was beneath its surface.
The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Science Advances, could solve a problem that also has implications for the existence of liquid water–and thus the early development of life–on our planet too. Thus far, researchers looking into the existence of liquid water early in both Earth and Mars’histories have been puzzled by the fact that the Sun would have been up to 70% less intense in its stellar-youth.
A vertically exaggerated and false-colour perspective of a large, water-carved channel on Mars called Dao Vallis. Whether channels like these on Mars were carved by surface water or groundwater is highly debated. The channel is ~40 km wide, ~2.5 km deep, and more than 500 km in length. (ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. 3D rendered and coloured by Lujendra Ojha.)
This lack of intensity coupled with findings of liquid water at this stage in the solar system’s history is referred to as ‘the faint-sun paradox,’ and should mean that Mars conditions were cold and arid in its deep history. This conclusion was contradicted by geological evidence of liquid water on the young planet. The problem could now be solved, for Mars at least, by geothermal activity.
“Even if greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and water vapour are pumped into the early Martian atmosphere in computer simulations, climate models still struggle to support a long-term warm and wet Mars,” explains lead author Lujendra Ojha, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. “We propose that the faint young sun paradox may be reconciled, at least partly, if Mars had high geothermal heat in its past.”
Lujendra Ojha, Jacob Buffo, Suniti Karunatillake, Matthew Siegler. [2020]
The status of Mars climate billions of years ago and if freshwater could have existed its this point early in its history has been a source of heated debate in the scientific community for decades. The discussion has been further complicated by the question of whether water would have existed on the planet’s surface or deep underground? Climate models produced for Mars thus far have suggested average surface temperatures below the melting point of water at this point in its history.
Ojha and his team investigated this seeming contradiction in our understanding of Mars by modelling the average thickness of ice deposits in the Red Planet’s southern highlands. They also examined data collected by NASA’s InSight lander, which has been measuring the ‘vitals’ of the Red Planet since 2018.
Discovering that the thickness of these ice deposits did not exceed an average thickness of 2 kilometres, the team complemented this finding with estimates of both the planet’s average annual surface temperature and the flow of heat from its interior to its surface. The aim of this was to discover if the surface heat flow would have been strong enough to melt Mars’ ice sheets.
Indeed, the study seems to show that the flow of heat from both the crust and mantle of Mars would have been intense enough to begin melting at the base of its ice sheets.
Did Life on Mars prosper Beneath its Surface?
Water still exists on Mars in the forma of Ice as seen in the Korolev crater. (ESA)
The wider implication of this revelation is that whatever the climate of Mars was like billions of years in its history if life once existed on the Red Planet, its subsurface would have been its most habitable region. Thus, life could have prospered, say the team, miles beneath the surface of our neighbour, sustained by the flow of freshwater.
Significantly, this supply of water would have existed even as Mars lost its magnetic field and its atmosphere was stripped away by harsh solar winds and blistering radiation. The process which ultimately deprived Mars of its surface liquid water. This means that life could have survived on the planet, hidden miles underground for much longer than the surface remained habitable.
“At such depths, life could have been sustained by hydrothermal activity and rock-water reactions,” says Ojha. “So, the subsurface may represent the longest-lived habitable environment on Mars.”
Source: Lujendra Ojha, Jacob Buffo, Suniti Karunatillake, Matthew Siegle. ‘Groundwater production from geothermal heating on early Mars and implication for early martian habitability,’ Science Advances,[2020] https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abb1669
Tags: alien lifeInSightlife on marsMarssolar systemwater on mars
Rob Lea
Robert is a member of the Association of British Science Writers and the Institute of Physics, qualified in Physics, Mathematics and Contemporary science.
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Category: Film & Television
“The Pilgrim Fathers … driven by IT.”
on August 2, 2020 August 2, 2020 By xenogothic 1 Comment
Beginning his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence questions the perceived “childishness” of the old American classics.
The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children’s tales, we miss all that.
American literature requires — deserves even — a reappraisal, because it is we who are missing out when we patronise those writers of the new world with new things to say. And yet it is hardly surprising that so many would treat American art-speech so scathingly. Lawrence continues:
It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don’t listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has babbled about children’s stories.
As I sat reading this opening chapter on a humid Sunday afternoon, I found my mind drifting to Stephen King’s IT and the notorious scene where the children all have sex with Beverly Marsh as they attempt to leave the sewers.
The scene came under fresh scrunity a few years ago, following the recent film adaptations, which drew more attention to it only by leaving it out.
What does it mean? Why is it included? Is it appropriate?
The general interpretation I see is that the Losers require some kind of end of innocence moment before they return to the outside world. Sex is a doorway out of innocence and childhood. But once they leave the sewers, having defeated IT, the children “regress” to a normal suburban existence; to a normal childhood. Their memories are repressed.
I wonder if King is illuminating the same tension that Lawrence is here, in a suitably immoral fashion. The scene is inappropriate because of the age of the children but, like so many American novels, perhaps the issue remains the same. This is not a children’s book — that is, a book for or about children — not really. America is defined, in its adolescence, by sex and violence; it is fitting, if nonetheless disturbing, that the characters in IT are too.
What the children really require is an end to fear. In defeating IT, they defeat fear, but they are nonetheless disconnected by their ordeal. Desire overwhelms them. The sexual experience reunites them but it is nonetheless contaminated by the drives that brought them there.
For Lawrence, IT is not to be feared but embraced. IT is freedom. Freedom is not doing whatever you like on a whim but “doing what the deepest self likes.” (Interestingly, for Lawrence, the “most unfree men go west, and shout about freedom” — a shout that “is a rattling of chains, always was.”)
IT is the deepest self. IT is our deepest fears and desires both — because, of course, sometimes we fear what we want the most. Indeed, even as Lawrence affirms IT, he paints IT as a horror, as if to fully comprehend it would ruin us, but comprehend it we must. He writes:
If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.
But before you can do what IT likes, you must first break the spell of the old mastery, the old IT.
[…] The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceeds to fulfil IT. IT being the deepest whole self, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness.
That’s why the Pilgrim Fathers came to America, then; and that’s why we come. Driven by IT. We cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism brings us as it brings the migrating birds to their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are not the marvellous choosers and deciders we think we are. IT chooses for us, and decides for us. […] We are free only so long as we obey.
The same is true of the Losers. Indeed, when Beverly recalls their copulation in the grey waters beneath the town, her memories are broken up and punctured by birds.
All of them . . . I was their first love.
She tried to remember it — it was something good to think about in all this darkness, where you couldn’t place the sounds. It made her feel less alone. At first it wouldn’t come; the image of the birds intervened — crows and grackles and starlings, spring birds that came back from somewhere while the streets were still running with meltwater and the last patches of crusted dirty snow clung grimly to their shady places.
It seemed to her that it was always on a cloudy day that you first heard and saw those spring birds and wondered where they came from. Suddenly they were just back in Derry, filling the white air with their raucous chatter. They lined the telephone wires and roofpeaks of the Victorian houses on West Broadway; they jostled for places on the aluminum branches of the elaborate TV antenna on top of Wally’s Spa; they loaded the wet black branches of the elms on Lower Main Street. They settled, they talked to each other in the screamy babbling voices of old countrywomen at the weekly Grange Bingo games, and then, at some signal which humans could not discern, they all took wing at once, turning the sky black with their numbers . . . and came down somewhere else.
Yes, the birds, I was thinking of them because I was ashamed. It was my father who made me ashamed, I guess, and maybe that was Its doing, too. Maybe.
The memory came — the memory behind the birds — but it was vague and disconnected. Perhaps this one always would be. She had —
Her thoughts broke off as she realized that Eddie comes to her first, because he is the most frightened. He comes to her not as her friend of that summer, or as her brief lover now, but the way he would have come to his mother only three or four years ago, to be comforted; he doesn’t draw back from her smooth nakedness and at first she doubts if he even feels it. He is trembling, and although she holds him the darkness is so perfect that even this close she cannot see him; except for the rough cast he might as well be a phantom.
“What do you want? ” he asks her.
“You have to put your thing in me, ” she says.
It is the last fear to break: their fear of each other. If it is disturbing in its rupture of adolescence, so be it. So is the American soul forever adolescent, in both its waywardness and its overarching obedience to an ideal. But adolescence is still where America remains most free. Much like the Losers in Stephen King’s novel, Americans aren’t free when IT is dead. They are at their most free when they are fighting IT.
Real Simulations: Notes on the Matrix Trilogy
on July 27, 2020 July 28, 2020 By xenogothic
I spent my Friday / Saturday watching the Matrix trilogy for the first time in many, many years. The first one was still good! The second and third ones weren’t so much…
Invited to talk about simulations for “Simulations Like Us”, a conversation of sorts hosted by Enrico Monacelli as part of Turn Us Alias, an online music festival organised by Saturnalia, I wanted to read the films via Ray Brassier’s critique of the philosophy of Alain Badiou.
Neo, to me, is Badiou. They both proclaim to see the world through a mathematical ontology but both fall back on a strange kind of affirmative quasi-Christian philosophy, in which they simply will their way past the new capture that undoubtedly results from becoming one with the very thing you hope to critique. For Brassier, it seems like Badiou’s inability to account for this is a major stumbling block in his philosophy… I’m not sure I can confirm or deny that but it is definitely true of the Matrix trilogy.
Anyway, in the end, I ejected all the Badiou chat from my talk and just spoke about the Matrix. Thanks to Enrico for the invitation and for the really excellent discussion afterwards. I don’t know if it was recorded or anything but here’s my contribution below anyway.
Also thanks to those who set up the excellent Minetest server to host further discussion. I had a lot of fun in there. At first, I just collected loads of free drinks tokens. Then I took acid and killed a horse. Then I had a go at a parkour challenge but fell in lava but then I also glitched out so I couldn’t die. My Sonic the Hedgehog avatar (because you gotta go fast) is probably still in the lava pyramid somewhere… Anyway, it was a truly unique Minecraft experience. (There are two screenshots from my adventures at the bottom of this post.)
Thanks to everyone who came by and asked questions.
Real Simulations: On the Matrix Trilogy
Today, declaring that “the world is a simulation” has all the profundity of ending a story with the words “it was all a dream.” But that our outlandish stories sometimes turn out to be dreams isn’t a problem in and of itself. The problem with saying “it was all a dream” is that this often undermines the fact that dreams are really cool. They’re mysterious and fascinating and question-begging. They are starting points, not points at which to end.
In this sense, dreams and simulations share something in common. They are situations: sets of circumstances in which we might act. Discovering what our circumstances are necessitates the question of what we do with them. As such, to say a story was all a dream is as laughable an end to a fiction as “it was all a life” would be to an obituary. It undermines the content and its affects, because knowledge of the conditions under which we engage with the world are important foundations, not conclusions. To discover something is a dream or a simulation doesn’t answer questions, it only begets more of them. This is because it is only at the point of realisation that we can truly choose how to act. It is only after discovering the true nature of an event that we can act accordingly and with fidelity to its truth.
It’s for this reason that, when talking about simulations, I think a film like The Matrix remains an interesting talking point. By now, culturally speaking at least, it is an example so far beyond cliché as to almost become interesting again. Much like a story that ends with the words “it was all a dream”, it has become something like an essential archetype that tells us a great deal about ourselves and the limits of our imaginations; limits which we’d perhaps prefer to just ignore.
Personally, I think the first film still stands up as a classic science-fictional exploration of our late-capitalist world and its contradictions. It is no surprise, however, that that allegory has been betrayed by the very system it sought to describe.
The disjuncture between the nature of reality and the nature of simulation is the Matrix franchise’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. At first, the potentials offered by the characters’ shared ability to lucidly dream within this simulation we call ideology seems to be infinitely productive but are these potentials not then betrayed by the characters’ dogged pursuit of the end of the dream as such? Is this even the case? It seems like a given, in the first film, that to destroy the machines is to destroy the Matrix, but just as the film’s sequels superficially address the symbiosis between man and machine, irrespective of the war raging between the two, it later becomes apparent that this symbiosis extends also to the relationship between reality and simulation. Here the true philosophical question at the heart of the Matrix begins to emerge. Are we at all capable of talking about reality and simulation in themselves? Or are we doomed to a restricted perspective that can only ever comment on the relationship between the two? A relation that is always making attempts to obscure itself, due to its being conditioned by the circumstances of late capitalism.
For example, in the first film, Neo’s desire for truth within the Matrix is mirrored by his desire, in the real world, for the destruction of the lie. But Neo immediately slips onto a paradoxical plane where an understanding of his own emancipation from the simulation is only possible in the context of his continuing non-freedom in reality. As such, if Neo is help humanity to transcend the Matrix, he has to become one with it. When Neo first gets a load of martial arts training uploaded directly into his cerebellum, the pun is obviously intended when Tank tells Morpheus he’s been going for ten hours straight. “He’s a machine!” he says — and necessarily so. Neo has to see like a machine to beat the machines. He has to become a better dreamer in order to dream differently. But when Neo’s powers later become useful outside of the Matrix, in the sequels, what does that say about reality itself? At what point does Neo’s oneness with the world and its representation just become another form of capture?
This tension in the first film is best explored through the character Cypher, who betrays his emancipated cohort to the machines because he wants to return to the lie and forget the truth. He is sick of the questions; for him, “ignorance is bliss.” His betrayal is presented to us as the selfish reasoning of a man who enjoys his own oppression. But Cypher’s reasoning makes a lot more sense than Neo’s utter lack of criticality, which is to say that Cypher’s unbelief, even if exercised through evil, seems far more rational than Neo’s techno-Christian evangelism. In this sense, Cypher is a nihilist but he is also much more of a realist than those who declare themselves to be on the side of the Real. This is only exacerbated in the sequels, when the militarised religiosity of the freed peoples of Zion feels even more ideologically unhinged than the somnambulist behaviour of those trapped within the Matrix.
This begs the question: do the characters in the Matrix really want what they say they want? Intriguingly, in the first film, the dichotomy between necessity and desire appears to be wholly absolute. The real world is necessarily a world without seduction. The slop that the characters eat, for instance, is described as this perfect substance that contains every mineral, protein and amino acid that the body needs, but it is still slop. The character Mouse claims that this slop, then, evidently doesn’t supply everything the body needs. He then changes the subject to talk about the Woman in the Red Dress — a programme he has written into a training simulation for the Matrix — a simulation of the simulation – in which she is meant to distract the dreamer. The Matrix is clearly the world of desires but we might interpret the lesson provided by the Woman in the Red Dress as being that your desires aren’t always going to make you act in our own self-interest.
Mouse’s more immediate insinuation, of course, is much more superficial. He seems to be making the point that the body also needs sex. But the Woman in the Red Dress isn’t somehow sex personified; she’s still just a sexy image. She’s seductive, like the Matrix itself, but she’s nothing more than that. She’s a centrefold, ripped out and stuck to the digital façade. She has no lines. She walks on and walks off. But there is a deeper psychoanalytic point made here. The fulfilment of all our basic needs is nothing if we can’t also tickle our libido but the Matrix has monopolised desire so absolutely that the real world is one even more devoid of an imaginative sexiness. In this sense, the Matrix is a libidinal sandbox. Anything you want you can have. In the real world, the opposite is the case. There is nothing to want. You do what must to survive and little more than that. So which world is more real in that respect? Mouse says: “To deny our own basic impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.” So what good is the real world, then, if it is a world without desire? Or rather, what is the real world if it is devoid of things to be desired? So surely we can acknowledge that, despite its irreality, the characters all like the Matrix to a certain extent? Yes, the human battery farms are horrible and the world is a hellscape and unplugged humanity lives underground fearing for their lives, but in the Matrix Neo can fly!?
This strange tension between reality and simulation, necessity and desire, isn’t just highlighted by the plot holes of the later sequels, however. It is readily apparent in Morpheus’s own mind games, which he uses to awake Neo to the possibilities of his newfound agency within the Matrix.
For Morpheus, the real world and the simulation are hardly that empirically different. Morpheus makes this clear when he first reintroduces Neo to the old world. Neo is aghast, running his hand along the back of a wore leather armchair in a pure white void.
“This isn’t real?”
“How do you define ‘real’?” Morpheus replies, smugly. “If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” This is true enough. And yet, whilst this may explain the Matrix, it hardly grounds what Morpheus, in the previous scene, calls “the real world” upon any sort of superior truth. Are we supposed to believe that the real world is the real world simply because it is the worse of the two? And how does this explain Neo’s emergent ability to use his superhuman powers in the real world as well as the Matrix? If the real world is as much of a simulation as the Matrix is, then isn’t the Matrix just as real as the world in itself? If that’s the case, then what is anyone fighting for?
From the vantage point of the end of the trilogy, Cypher’s betrayal in the first film only becomes more interesting in this regard, as we consider the extent to which it mirrors the Wachowski sisters’ meta-betrayal of their own franchise. Do they want what they say they want? Are they not also seduced by the very thing they want to critique? Their hypocrisy is plain to see in the later films, when the critique is so bloated on steroids that the visual effects go into hyperdrive at the expense of the story. As a result, the trilogy is robbed of all punch and satisfaction. In the end, the Matrix is rebooted — hurray!(?) — but the character’s sacrifices carry no weight now that we have overdosed on the very spectacle that the film sought to question. We are left flirting with our own impotence as an initially good idea is extended outwards into a trilogy of bad ones — a trilogy that leaves us on a cliffhanger with Neo — and, indeed, the new itself – left for dead whilst the Matrix supposedly starts over again, having successfully reterritorialized the threat to itself. Agent Smith, the true deterritorialising agency, unhooked from the rules and regulations of the computer mainframe, somehow becomes the ultimate villain, as if, as far as Neo is concerned, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so reality and simulation enter a new period of peace; a new stasis. Bizarrely, it seems that, somewhere along the way, we have been left with the suggestion that this utter dissipation of the first film’s potentials is meant to be something to celebrate. In truth, it only leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
And so, The Matrix franchise ends precisely where it began. This is all a dream, the first film tells us, in its opening scenes. The final scenes of The Matrix Revolutions tell us much the same thing. This was all a dream, a recurring one at that, and wasn’t it fun. Maybe you’ll have that same dream again one day. With all of this in mind, the first Matrix film becomes a perfect allegory to the nature of neoliberalism’s cybergothic capture of human subjectivity. By contrast, the film’s sequels are an ironic demonstration of how capitalism reterritorializes all of the critiques we might lay at its feet into a sickly postmodern confusion.
Simulations Like Us @ Turn Us Alias
on July 21, 2020 July 28, 2020 By xenogothic 1 Comment
This Saturday I’ll be taking part in “Simulations Like Us”, something of a conversation between myself, Reza Negarestani and Enrico Monacelli, which is running as part of Turn Us Alias, an online event organised by Saturnalia.
https://discord.gg/m2KwfZG
voice channels — caffè letterario
From the 90s onwards, the idea of a simulated environment has become a pervasive, intrusive thought. From the hype surrounding the Matrix trilogy to contemporary neuroscience, which has transformed our cognitive abilities into a series of functional simulations of the outer world, from Philip K. Dick’s techno-gnosticism to the VR-craze of the past ten years, the idea that we are stuck in a fake and controlled world has become the metaphor for our contemporary predicament. What once was a cyberpunk metaphor is now almost a lived and urgent fact of our day to day life.
Come join us on Turn Us Alias festival to see how deep the rabbit-hole goes, as we discuss through the lags, the glitches and the hiccups of a post-lockdown Discord server, the future and the fate of this idea.
I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Swing by and read more about Turn Us Alias below, including what you’ll need to do if you want to play.
Turn as alias is a video game and a 24hrs music festival, following the tradition of our beloved Saturnalia.
Join us on Minetest to access music stream and play to find the hidden secrets of digital Viale Molise.
As Macao in Milan, this space is open to everyone, celebrating the freedom of expression of any kind, so respect all other players online as you would do irl.
Turn Us Alias supports Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza, you can do it too
https://bit.ly/BVEsolidalioltreemergenza
✧ﾟ･: *ヽ(◕ヮ◕ヽ)
They’re a group of volunteers based in Milan, formed during Covid lockdown to help people in need.
To play, first download Minetest:
WINDOWS 7, 8, 10: https://www.minetest.net/downloads/ → .exe is in the bin folder
MAC OS: https://github.com/krondor-game/minetest/releases/tag/2020-01-19
LINUX: https://www.minetest.net/downloads/
You can also play with Android mobile, you’ll get Minetest from the Google Play Store.
Once you open the game, click on “join game” and search TURN US ALIAS. Enter by clicking on the server then choose your name and password and connect.
First time you enter, you have no privileges — you’ll gain them by playing.
If you need help, want to chat, ask something or take part in the talks, join our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/Rg92yUw
If you’re not into games, you can attend the festival watching us live on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/turnusalias
Good game — Have fun!
The Rotten Western (Part 1)
on July 2, 2020 July 2, 2020 By xenogothic 1 Comment
Below are some preliminary thoughts on The Last of Us Part 2 that I’d like to add to as I keep going with my current first play-through of what is already an incredible game. It should go without saying that this post comes with a big spoiler warning: come back later if you haven’t played it yet.
This post is also part of an ongoing project I’ve mentioned a few times in recent years and which I’m (still) very slowly building behind the scenes: a book I’m calling Frontier Psychiatry. More on that soon.
Every era of modernity has had its own Western. The genre is a cultural weathervane for the United States (in particular but not exclusively) to reflect on, as well as assigning it a trajectory. By morphing and responding to each new phase of the USA’s history, the Western – although modelled on an ideological (and, therefore, also idealised) form of the past – suggests a state of mind in the present and what it sees in its own future.
The Sheriff, in this sense, is a great American imago. In many a classic Western, it is the sheriff or lawmaker who fights off the Red Man, the mad dogs, the robbers and rapists. And yet, he is also often an anti-hero – embittered, traumatized, perhaps a drunk. Indeed, as the genre has developed, along with America’s sense of itself, so too have the archetypes at its heart – and these developments have not always been positive. For instance, the frequently explored subgenre of the Acid Western paints a picture of the Wild West that acutely reflects the anxieties of the 1960s and 1970s. Most importantly, despite the horror of the environment, it is a subgenre that imagines the West as a mythical land that still retains a psychedelic function – that is, it retains its imaginative function as a land on which new (non-capitalist) worlds could manifest.
It is becoming ever clearer that our stories of a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested United States describe a new West for today – a putrescent West, rotting from within. The TV adaptation of The Walking Dead epitomised this new kind of Rotten Western with a distinct lack of subtlety. The show’s sheriff protagonist, Rick Grimes, definedthe show as a piece of transitional media in this regard. It walks a midway point between states of mind: between a nostalgia for the frontier and a fear of it, with the zombie hoards functioning a little too well as a racialised native other, at home in death.
Whilst this was an interesting tension in 2010, a decade later it is clear that the show exists in a very different world, in which the show’s internal drive to make a post-apocalyptic America great again takes on a far less melancholic momentum. With this in mind, the (apparent) death of Rick Grimes – the downfall of the great white imago – was long overdue and overwrought. By the time it happened, the show’s audience had begged so long for something new that the change went unnoticed by those who had stopped watching many seasons ago, but it was also unsurprising. For a long time, it had be necessary for the show to put its money where its mouth is.
No character can be afforded plot armour – that was The Walking Dead’s central traumatic assurance to its audience. This often led to grief being used as a plot device, often profoundly, but this rule seemingly began to test the writers’ own resolve as their audience staggered onwards in a brutalised daze. If the show was to stay true to its word, it had to refresh itself frequently. In a way, it was like the show’s narrative could do what much of its cast could not – shedding its skin, healing, becoming-new rather than becoming-rot. For many, it failed in that regard, and Rick Grimes’ lengthy rule as the only sheriff in town was the show’s Achilles’ heel. The sheriff was long best his best when he finally got the axe, both within the narrative of the show and within culture at large.
What has struck me most, in my playthrough (so far) of The Last of Us Part II, is that this franchise seems confident that it will not make the same mistake as its televisual cousin. Not only have characters been refreshed – I found that Ellie’s big nose, no doubt affixed to her face to settle that fall out with Ellen Page, took some getting used to – but, most controversially, the central character of the first game, Joel Miller, is brutally murdered at the end of the first act. There has been a lot of consternation online about this, and a lot of outright anger, but all I see in these responses is grief, of the sort that any viewer of The Walking Dead should be used to. In a zombie apocalypse, there is no plot armour. Joel, in the first game, demonstrated this in reverse. It was his daughter who died at the very start of that game’s first act, but in the final act Joel saves Ellie from a similar fate – murder, essentially, at the hands of the “state” (loosely defined as a pervasive militarised body) or, perhaps, for the sake of an apparent greater good. (A contentious connection to make between the two characters and one I don’t want to unpack here for the sake of brevity.)
The second game takes this brutality to a whole new level, Indeed, violence is one of the game’s primary USPs. This is a really fucking brutal game. And yet, the fact that the emotional impact of the game matches up to its gory spectacle is commendable. There are enough games out there that are all gore and no heart.
This sort of brutality is one of the defining characteristics of the Rotten Western – and, indeed, the Western more generally. In fact, what we are seeing with The Last of Us as a franchise is that it seems to be building towards some sort of trilogy, like the Spaghetti Westerns – those “operas of violence” – of the Seventies.
In the first game, you have an archetypal story of deliverance, specifically for Joel. It was the big Texan’s reluctant task to (quite literally) deliver an immune Ellie to a militia group, the Fireflies, so that they can develop a cure. But underneath it all, Joel also has to set himself free from the trauma of his daughter’s death at the start of the outbreak which has, at first, made him brutally cold to the world around him. It is Ellie who eventually thaws him out. [1]
In The Last of Us Part II, the tables have turned. The wintery tundra in which the first act of the game is spent tells us one thing only: Joel and Ellie’s hearts may have warmed, but the world is still cold to them – and to us. A fire still burns, however, and it reignites deliverance, turning it into vengeance. [2]
I think it is important that this act of revenge comes following the violent destruction of Joel as the sheriff-imago. In fact, it couldn’t realistically be anyone else. The Walking Dead‘s over-reliance on traumatised women and the horrific demise of the Asian-American Glenn, though still traumatic, felt like familiar instances of American dispensability for too many. It is a superficial twist on the black guy always dies first, swapped out for the minority always dies worst. This is to say that, in The Walking Dead, more abstractly but no less predictably, the less archetypal characters always had less plot armour than the likes of Rick Grimes.
Many have complained that the priorities of The Last of Us Part 2 betray a violent wokeness, through which the teenage lesbian outlives the patriarch, but it seems to me like this is the world that The Walking Dead didn’t have the nerve to inaugurate until its audience was passed the point of caring: a world in which the unseen and more nomadic subjectivities embedded within American life fair better than those we are more accustomed to cheer on.
Think again of the Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We have long wrestled with the fact that there is a future that may not be for-us. We might think of that as a world without the human race, or we might think of it as a world without the hegemonic subject of capitalism.
This is the first lesson taught by the Rotten Western.
[1] Western’s often play on deliverance like this, particularly in their video game variety. Fallout: New Vegas anyone?
[2] In fact, this is one of my favourite things about the haven of Jackson – the little frontier town out in the mountains of Washington where Ellie, Joel and co. have been holed up since the events of the first game. Whenever it is mentioned, I can’t help but think of June and Johnny Carter singing about how they got married in a fever. Joel and Ellie may not be “married”, but the threat of the characteristic body burn-out of infection certainly cemented their bond.
Fanged Noumena
on May 19, 2020 July 6, 2020 By xenogothic
Still thinking about this…
Should have been the cover of ‘Fanged Noumena’.
— 🦇 ⤵️🕳 (@xenogothic) May 17, 2020
We Must Imagine Sisyphus Pathological
on May 16, 2020 July 6, 2020 By xenogothic 1 Comment
I finally watched Joker the other night. It was pretty good. Most takes on it seemed bad though.
For instance, I — along with about half of Reddit — kept thinking about Sisyphus throughout my viewing, particularly Camus’s absurdist Sisyphus. It is as if Arthur is the epitome of the Absurd Hero — or so the script wants us to think. This is to say that, despite all the shit he’s put through, we have to imagine Arthur happy. Otherwise why would he continue to live? He has to be able to affirm the meaningless chaos of the universe, affirm the drudgery, and find the funny in its absurdity.
The issue with this sort of analysis, of course, is that whilst it seems fairly obvious and accurate at the level of cinematographic symbolism, that’s only because we’ve let our eyes lead us and stripped out the broader context.
Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker isn’t like Heath Ledger’s. That much was clear to me. In fact, surely Ledger’s Joker was far more of an Absurd Hero? He doesn’t have the heavy symbolism of a long flight of stairs to climb up; nevertheless, he is absurd in his defiance not of the Gods but of capitalism. In wanting to watch the world burn, we can say he wants to suffer. He flourishes in a world of conflict, which is what separates him from the other gangsters, who are supposedly thrown into a life of crime for various material reasons. The Joker, however, wants to be there. He’s made a choice.
This is what defines his character. He offers up a backstory sometimes, about his facial scars, but it’s obviously all bullshit. He knows it’s easier for these basic heroes to imagine him a man corrupted, and he toys with them in this sense, giving them reasons for existence only to cast doubt on them. Even this is just a joke to him.
The Joker (in Ledger’s portrayal at least) is such a diabolical character precisely because he demonstrates the difficulty in imagining him happy; imagining him motivated by revenge or greed is far easier than imagining him being driven purely by a sadomasochist pleasure principle.
Phoenix’s Joker isn’t like this. He laughs despite himself. He’s medicated. He phantasises. He’s not happy but unwell. He’s a Sisyphus who only makes sense if we imagine him as he is: pathological.
“What’s so funny?”
“I have a condition…”
In psychoanalytic terms, Phoenix’s Joker is a true psychotic. Whereas the classic Joker is basically just a hysterical pervert, truly enjoying the violence of the world, Arthur slips out of the symbolic order entirely. He’s not consciously subverting our value systems. He’s tragically outside of them. This is demonstrated by his jokes, to an extent. Puns and homophones are his primary comedic domain; a comedy where slippages of meaning are affirmed. But this is an innocuous glimmer of the true tendencies that lie within. In reality, his cognitive experience is some distant from this largely innocuous eccentricity. It is only through language, and grappling with it, that he is able to make sense of life. Despite what he goes on to do, his actions aren’t really a part of this.
For instance, Arthur laughs when he experiences any negative form of emotion — due to a brain injury, it is suggested — but it’s a hollow laugh. This is what makes him creepy rather than evil. He’s not an absurd hero affirming his lot in life. He explicitly refuses to affirm it, in fact. He might enjoy slippages of meaning within his own hypothetical stand-up routine but when the world at large misunderstands him, he gets violent.
In this sense, Arthur is a psychotic unable to subjectify his experiences because his experience is foreclosed, in spite of his capacity for linguistic expression.
For Lacan, foreclosure is a sort of alternative to repression, where something is ejected from the symbolic order as if it never existed. For Phoenix’s Joker, what is ejected could be — in true Lacanian fashion — a father figure (and we see this in his relationship with his mother), but instead it seems that what is rejected is sadness itself.
This isn’t just the case in terms of Arthur’s emotional expressivity; it is also the case socially. His mother calls him “Happy”, for instance, (nick)naming him after an emotion he is not destined to feel. It’s the tragic irony of the sad clown taken to an oppressive Lacanian extreme — as if “happiness” is the fantasy of the big Other that he is being forced to embody despite himself.
This is a genuinely interesting twist on the tale, even though the film buries it under a heavy symbolism that implores we give it a more superficial meaning — but, in that sense, the film, in true modern Hollywood fashion, is guilty of precisely what it is critiquing. Phoenix’s portrayal of the character may have genuine depth but the direction is likewise guilty of this same foreclosure, insisting we think of him as the Absurdist Joker that Ledger portrayed so well, when in fact Arthur is anything but. This is to say that not only is Arthur foreclosed in his world but in ours too.
Thankfully, this foreclose is not as bad as with Jared Leto’s Joker, who failed because he seemed to misunderstand the importance of this psychoanalytic slippage. His Joker is just “crazy”. It was a Joker caricature; a stylistic variation on a Joker we already know and can account for as a cliched archetype. It failed to do what all successful Jokers are supposed to, which is tell us something quietly profound about ourselves in our contemporary moment. Whilst Ledger’s spoke to a absurdist-nihilist streak within Noughties capitalism, encapsulating the decadence of a new fin de siècle, Phoenix’s Joker tells us something else about now. Not that we might choose our own happiness and nihilistically affirm our chaotic world but that the psychopathologic intrusion of modernity into the psyche gives us very little choice in the matter at all.
In this sense, Phoenix’s Joker is rightly a sort of incel icon. But that’s not to say he demonstrates himself as a viable political subject, as many incels try to portray themselves. (Before you ask: no, I haven’t seen TFW No GF yet.) Just like Travis Bickle, similarly referenced in this film so heavily that it starts to get annoying, his political activities are little more than attempts to insert himself into a symbolic order. We, as viewers, might be able to imbue it with a certain vigilante moralism but it is hardly a conscious form of activism. Bickle is a slave to his own psychosis, drawn into the underbelly of his New York neighbourhood simply because that’s where he lived. He attacks pimps through an inability to navigate his own circumstances rather than out of an ideological need to clean up the streets. He attacks them because they are there and so is he.
Given the emphasis on language and an inability to effectively communicate in the world, it is easy to see why many incels characterise themselves as violent autists but the further (inadvertent) strength of Phoenix’s Joker in this regard is that he demonstrates how their communicative impotence is acutely psychotic rather than autistic. There are many on the autistic spectrum capable of understanding politics far better than they do, for instance. No, there’s is nothing more than a pathology dressed up as an ideology and, in this sense, Phoenix’s Joker is precisely the Joker we deserve.
Metanarratives: Notes on Westworld S03E02 and our Televisual Golden Age
on March 30, 2020 April 8, 2020 By xenogothic 1 Comment
Spoilers, obviously…
Westworld took a big gamble by diminishing itself for half of an episode in service of a jokey plot twist.
During the first half of the second episode of series three, I felt really weird about what I was seeing. The show was suddenly so wooden. It felt like the writers had decided to introduce a bunch of unnatural narrative elements in order to keep the series going passed last season’s quite natural end point. As a result, it felt like poor Westworld fan fiction rather than Westworld proper.
And then it turned out that that was entirely the point.
This episode got meta — really meta. The opening in World-War-Two-World — or “Warworld” as the cast called it — teased a show not yet finished playing with other genres. It also revealed that this is a show not yet finished playing with other genre functions. The superficial pastiche and the over-bearing symbolism of a new world at war felt like the show had either completely lost itself or it was making a comment about the world of television production out here in the real world. I was grateful, if still somewhat convinced, when it seemed more like the latter.
The glimpses we saw of a hypothetical Game of Thrones World, for instance, whilst inside Maeve’s simulation within a simulation, were a funny twist considering how the televisual landscape has changed since this series started. In fact, I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that this episode was a sharp dig at that final season — a bait and switch, feigning a dive before getting back to the story proper.
But what for?
For many years we have supposedly been celebrating a new televisual “Golden Age” but I’m sure many would now acknowledge that this time of great prosperity has started to wane. Many shows — Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are the first to come to mind — have found themselves unable to live up to their own grandeur, whether in failing to tie up loose ends or continuing to hang around long past the expiration of their welcome.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the makers of Westworld felt themselves pushing into this “expired welcome” stage of their development. This is a show that has been so convoluted and demanded so much of its viewer’s attention that it must surely be aware that the average viewer will not have mapped out the show’s twists and turns to such an extent that the narrative continues to hold together without some implicit scaffolding on the writers’ part. It was a discomfiting surprise that the Westworld writers sidestepped this altogether.
The holes in the plot and the complete disconnection from the end of the last season felt weirdly like a shoddy attempt to keep a character alive beyond the decisions of a previous writing team, like when a character is miraculously resuscitated or killed off in a soap opera to account for external issues or market demand. Maeve took on the brunt of this but Stubs the Bodyguard’s continued existence also felt like a convenient moment of deus ex machina.
This latest episode played up to this with an uneasy fidelity. Even when the joke was revealed, it left an odd taste in the mouth. This was an odd way to reintroduce the supplementary character arches in this third season. What I was left with, personally, was a feeling that this show is well aware of the questions left unanswered and the tight grip it needs to keep on its own internal logics if it is to get away with its own continued existence. It was a somewhat brave move, I think, to play up to the average fan’s need to warm back up to the world and its narrative after a couple of years off our screens.
It is a brave move because, with the cancellation of The OA and the shallow grave of Game of Thrones in its rearview mirror, and with The Walking Dead lumbering on far too much like its own namesake, there are a lot of challenges and lessons to be learned for new and continuing shows in our present moment. The likes of Better Call Saul are showing the way ahead for complex narrative universes — although, at this point, even that show’s predictable structure of character-developing vignette after character-developing vignette is starting to wear thin — but Westworld feels like one of the last “big” shows on our screens to emerge during that late-Golden moment to still be happy reinventing itself. Nevertheless, it has a lot to prove.
Whether it will be able to prove itself going forwards obviosuly remains to be seen, but watching this latest episode of Westworld, it feels like the response from within their production team has been a defiant: “Hold my beer…”
“We’re not coding the hosts; we’re decoding the guests”: Notes on Westworld Season 3
on March 19, 2020 March 19, 2020 By xenogothic
In my new book, Egress, I spend a long chapter going on about Westworld, how it’s connected to our cultural understanding of the American West, and how the classic racialised undertones of its second series (“Go native or go home!”) tell us a lot about how we continue to understand unconsciousness and its relationship to political action. (It’s, hands down, the chapter I’m most proud of and excited by and it’s a topic that I could — and intend to — dedicate a whole other book to at a later date.)
With all that in mind, the return of Westworld for a third season is something I’m really excited about, so below are a bunch of notes that I made whilst watching (and preparing to watch) S03E01.
The first thing to say is that I’m expecting the show to take a further turn regarding its central investigation of human unconsciousness. The first season explored why this unconsciousness should be raised; the second explored the potential and messy results (good and bad) of doing so; the third seems to be about how, more specifically, capitalism can still attach itself to these developments.
It was an inspired — and wholly believable — development in season two when it was revealed the park’s management was tracking the guests’ behaviour along with the hosts. As Bernard said last season, most succinctly: “We’re not coding the hosts; we’re decoding the guests.”
Every visitor to the park was being analysed and recorded with their behaviour uploaded to the cloud so that the park could run various experiments, cloning the consciousness of each individual and trying to replicate them in 3D-printed bodies. As it turns out, this is much harder to do than to allow consciousness (or unconsciousness) to emerge within a mind (somewhat) naturally. To replicate an already living person often led to rapid cognitive breakdowns and an accelerative dementia.
Regardless of the success of their experiments, the Delos Corporation was very much aware of the value of the data they’ve hoarded and so they aimed to capitalise on it and use it to — I don’t know — develop market research or something. It’s the sort of data I imagine companies could use, in the outside world, to create the most profitable hysteria on Black Friday, for example, or in ways that are far more insidious. All this computational data about unconsciousness and human desires will surely be used, by its very nature, in unthinkable ways. It’s a key to the back door of human consciousness. All the more reason for the hosts to stay one step ahead of capitalism’s capture of their “masters”. If they want to overthrow the world they have so far been denied access to, in order to make it their own, they’ll need to stay one step ahead of this unconscious capture in much the same way as they need to stay one step ahead of an all too physical capture also.
In the first episode, these threats were only teased. “Dolores” — side note: I’m having great difficulty remembering who is who now, following last season’s body swapping — found herself nearly captured (physically) and seems to only just becoming aware of the way the world she has newly entered works.
One of the first scenes in this first episode shows her robbing an old visitor to the park, whose information she’s acquired from the Delos servers. She takes all his money explaining that she’s become aware of its importance in this world and she wouldn’t want to exist too long in it without any.
If Dolores has newly acquired financial concerns, she’s not the only one. The new season opened with a flurry of implicit questions on this topic:
What’s the affect of the park’s revolution on the market in the outside world? Relatively speaking, it’s a tremor. A worrying one, for those in the know, but a “blemish” nonetheless — at least financially speaking; not counting the bodies. The hosts may have overthrown their world but our world is a lot more complex. How they will use their newly raised unconsciousnesses to overthrow capitalism’s iron grip seems to be the question of the season. That is, if they need to overthrow capitalism at all. They want to overthrow the greedy, selfish humans. Fucking with the market is certainly be the best way to get their attention. Just as Dolores has so far used the humans’ reliance on technology to her advantage, using it on one rich domestic abuser to employ his own unconsciousness against him — calling it his “unauthorised autobiography”, which I liked — exploiting the market might allow her to manoeuvre the humans in newly unconscious ways.
As she becomes increasingly aware of capitalism’s importance to the workings of the unconscious human mind, she might find that she’s able to manipulate things in ways even she hasn’t yet thought of. Perhaps she’ll become one with the system itself, in much the same way Maeve did within the confines of Westworld last season. Consciousness has broken free of humanity and is taking its own path. Maybe capitalism is due to do the same thing…
Dreamless Populism
on February 28, 2020 March 1, 2020 By xenogothic
The disarticulation of my “Dreamless Pop” post has very quickly been remedied by a confluence of factors.
Bob was nice enough to share the post on Twitter and call it an encapsulation of some sort of position when — I must confess; as is often the case with my blog posts — it was more like an attempt to articulate something that nonetheless remained on the tip of my tongue before it consequently fell out of my head due to this lack of a firm linguistic grasp on it…
Matt perfectly encapsulates why the likes of "Sex Education", for all it's novelty & energy, is a strangely rootless, timeless affair severed from actual place or class. It's like a simulacra of "YA Drama" patched together by machine learning…. https://t.co/asDoCeD9fV
— MYSTICAL ANARCHIST??? U WOT?? (@Bobcluness) February 27, 2020
Fittingly, Bob’s use of the word “simulacra” was precisely the jolt I needed to better articulate what it is I find so disturbing about Sex Education…
So here goes…
I was watching Sex Education recently, a few days after the previous post had gone up — or half-watching it, I guess, reading a book whilst my girlfriend caught up with the latest season. I had watched the first season with a morbid curiosity but could not stomach the second. This was not entirely — as I thought — because of its content but because of its location also. For all its accusations of rootlessness — part American high school drama, part British college-university romp, part general adolescent situated-identity crisis — I am actually very familiar with its setting.
I am sure I’ve mentioned this before — either on the blog or on Twitter — but Sex Education is filmed on my old university campus in Caerleon, South Wales. It is filmed in a place where I studied for three years and lived for one. It is also the place where I met my long-term girlfriend and countless other friends.
Watching that show is like sticking my head in a waterfall of memories. Forget Proust’s whiff of madeleine cake, it’s more like a snuffed line of simulated nostalgia that violently overrides the actual experience of being there.
Graduation, Caerleon, 2013
We were talking about the series, following a more recent episode, when I asked her how she managed to stomach the show’s wokeness that is laid on so thick. She acknowledged it was often egregious but that it didn’t get too much in the way of the story for her, which she enjoyed regardless — fair enough — but, personally, it makes me cringe, and I realised the other day that the reason I find it so hard to stomach is precisely because it entertains the existence of some impossibly woke academic environment on a campus that has explicitly fallen victim to the worst neoliberal university practices. It is a simulation of wokeness dancing on the grave of those ideals it performs and says it holds so dear. It is, in this sense, precisely a sort of poor-taste simulacra that renders its over-scripted good intentions as little more than apolitical entertainment despite itself.
I should emphasise here that I am not using the term ‘wokeness’ to give scaffolding some liberal conspiracy that seeks to undermine the creative power of political incorrectness. However, as has been explored on this blog before, I do think transgressive arts must continue to carve out a space for themselves in the face of an institutionalised moralism, and most of what thinks of itself as oppositional these days can barely defend such a claim under pressure. This is a far more legitimate critique than the rightist one, I think, because this “wokeness” is a decontextualised band-aid for far deeper structural problems that few people seem capable of separating from the capitalist forces they say they are fighting against.
(Again, this was something that came up at the Capitalist Realism conference, where a troupe of avant-gardist improvisers betrayed an unawareness of their own complicity in the institutional capture of supposedly radical politics and artistic actions.)
Custom Sign Found in the Darkrooms, Caerleon, 2011
Sex Education, as a cultural product, is the perfect encapsulation of this. It is a show that cannot go five minutes without tripping over an oddly bureaucratised form of political communication but it does so — oh so tellingly — on a site of great cultural and political loss.
Caerleon campus only exists as a film set for this slab of Netflix wokeness because the listed status of the clock tower has thwarted developers from demolishing it to build a new housing estate. Prior to this thwarting, Caerleon campus was home to the largest photographic dark rooms in Europe where photography was taught for over one hundred years and where countless generations had their tandem artistic and political awakenings.
This was true for me as well. It was a home where I was first politicised, developing both a class consciousness, as I came to understand why I felt Newport, South Wales, was a home-away-from-home and so similar to my actual home of Hull in Yorkshire — short answer: both post-industrial towns on estuaries left to decay and atrophy despite (or, arguably, because of) an established history of radical cultural action — and a wider political consciousness, travelling to London for my first protest march in my first year of university to oppose the trebling of tuition fees that would not effect me personally but would effect countless others after me.
With this burgeoning consciousness emerging from a generally deflated sense of my own political agency, Newport was a place of hope for a radical future, both in terms of politics and culture — with the two being explicitly intertwined as a place where prescribed aesthetics standards were told to go fuck themselves on the daily and where a small town working class consciously “avant garde” community was going from strength to strength, despite persistently butting heads with the local council.
This wasn’t new. It was heartening to learn that this sort of activity was part of a Welsh continuum… And was well-founded in Newport itself as a city… But the slow creep of neoliberalism was well-established also, at least by the time I got there…
Large Format Workshop, Caerleon Studios, 2013
First, the Newport polytechnic — founded in 1840 to educate local workers and tradespeople, and where photography was first taught as a trade as early as 1910 — was transformed into the University of Wales, Newport, following the nationwide culling of polytechnics in the 1990s.
This process brought together a broad family of technical colleges under a single managerial authority, cementing the neoliberal oversight of a prior patchwork of empowering spaces. As time went on, it was revealed — to the surprise of no-one — that those in charge were caught in a spiral of overspending, building new campuses they couldn’t afford and trying to continue to expand beyond their means. Before long, UWN got into trouble, and was eventually gobbled up and consolidated into an even bigger institutional body: the University of South Wales — a Cardiff-based university. (This is a process innocuously documented on the university’s website, of course, with no reference made to the perpetual upheavals that underlined its haggard development.)
This final merger came at a very tense time for the area. It occurred during the final year of my studies in 2013, which was the same year that Newport’s Chartist mural, library and art gallery was controversially demolished to build a garish new shopping centre. These actions, though distinct from one another, nonetheless felt they were both part of the same socio-political process: the broad neoliberalisation of the city and its institutions. It had already happened elsewhere in the city. The polytechnic’s old site in the city centre, for instance, before it was based before the move to Caerleon, had already been transformed into luxury flats during our time there and, following the merger, when the beautiful Caerleon campus was sold off, it felt like that was the final nail in the coffin for a tradition that was far from dead. Its smothering was merely a byproduct of mismanagement by higher-ups.
This really is unbelievable when you consider the university campus on its own merits. In many ways it was outdated, rough around the edges, dysfunctional, relatively isolated from South Wales’ urban centres, but it was ours. It wasn’t some former private school turned fancy institution, as it superficially appears in the series. It was primarily a campus occupied by young people studying either an arts degree or a sports degree, in the orbit of a still proudly working class town. It was a really beautiful place to live and study and that felt all the more important considering how academically maligned the courses taught there were. In fact, the campus was a large part of why I wanted to study there. I’d been to open days in London (Elephant & Castle) and Farnham but immediately felt these campuses were hostile to “someone like me”. Caerleon was different. It felt right and continued to feel right for the three years that followed. (I’m still in touch with the lecturers there.)
When it was reported that the campus had been sold off, it felt like this was partly why. We weren’t allowed to have nice things. The new base in Cardiff’s city centre might be better connected and immersed in local business infrastructures but Caerleon was special precisely because it felt like a haven apart from all that bullshit. It was a place to experiment — and we really did experiment.
This is not to say that a radical political sentiment died with the institution — it certainly wasn’t an institutionalised product — and thankfully many of the lecturers who encouraged this kind of engagement with the world remain on the staff — but I do not think that anyone would deny that decades of growth had been amputated without a second thought. The task became less one of extension and more one of rebuilding, and it was a task that had to be pursued under an intensification of the university’s mechanisms of bureaucratic anti-production.
Metal Recycling Area (Repurposed as our ‘Common Room’), Caerleon, 2013
With all of this in mind, it becomes very difficult not to be wholly cynical of a show like Sex Education, preaching radical but tellingly bougie politics of communication on the piss-soaked grave of a former polytechnic. Its politics are, of course, important, but so is the context in which they are contained and puppeteered. Take, for instance, Sex Education‘s persistent exploration of the politics of interpersonal consent. What becomes of this topic when it is dramatises on a site where the previous occupants were turfed off without any consultation? This may sound a bit too much like a Justin Murphy logic gate but surely if we are to take the show’s dramatic politics seriously we should be able to extend these politics beyond the fictional relationships of individuals and apply it to the very real situated politics of its location and the communities that called it home? Removed from its fictional bubble, the show becomes nothing but a parody of itself.
It is this disparity that I thought of this morning whilst reading Will Davies’ Guardian op-ed on the persistent radicality of the humanities within neoliberal institutions. (The fact that Davies teaches at Goldsmiths probably goes someway towards explaining how he is able to write from an apparent bubble of hope. The historical continuum of HE experimentation that Davies gestures to has long been impotent, broadly speaking. If the government is now lopping off humanities courses, it is less a active culling and more a sign that neoliberalism has decided to stop playing with its already butchered food.)
Interestingly, Davies argues against the political right’s cooption of “a bogey-ideology known as ‘wokeness’, constructed by conservative commentators and ‘free speech’ advocates, [that] now serves as an all-purpose bin into which any form of activism, complaint or critical theory can be thrown.” The problem with this — and the article at large — is subtle. There is no denying that a cross-section of small-c and big-C conservatives in this country despise the persistent influence of the humanities, as Davies argues, but to say that ‘wokeness’ has been constructed by the right is wholly disingenuous. It is a term — both positively and negatively — that has the left’s fingerprints all over it.
This is to say that Davies may be right in fingering the contemporary culprits of educational dismantling but his analysis just feels hollow — a sort of extension of student populism that is about two years too late, and by ignoring the left’s own failure to tackle and preempt current problems, the article reads as nothing more than cheerleading puff piece, preaching to the converted.
(Sidenote: I have more to say on the specifically anti-modernist tendencies — and I do think they are that specific — that Davies points to within the Johnson-Cummings cabinet but I want to save that for another post.)
Void Wallet Contents, 2014
To better articulate what I mean by this, I think it is worth emphasising the fact that Davies deploys a right-wing conception of “wokeness” — now culturally dominant — over a left-wing one.
On the left, “wokeness” has, until recently, referred to a well-established slang term borrowed from African-American political discourses referring to the possession of a kind of raised consciousness. If you’re woke, you’re awake to the banal injustices of a quotidian and marginalised existence. That’s pretty much common knowledge at this point.
The right’s disparaging and cynical use of “wokeness”, however, reveals (at least in negative) a sort of empty and apolitical leftism that has run riot through many of the left’s attempts at political organising in recent years. This is to say that the collapse of “wokeness” as a political contagion — from a call-to-arms to a disparaging and cynical label thrown at moralisers — is as much the fault of the left’s incompetence as it is the right’s penchant for cynical cooption.
Take this Medium post by @scenicpasture on “Apolitical Corbynism” — an excellent post that goes someway towards articulating the two factions that really gave Corbyn his staying power in the UK since 2015: a new politicised youth on the one hand, but also middle class apolitical former Green Party voters on the other. They write:
In the case of Corbyn, he inspired people who previously hadn’t been involved in parliamentary politics and who certainly had no interest in the intricacies of left factions and alliances. That appeal was largely to “graduates without a future”. There’s a big chunk of these people who were very happy attending Occupy, the demonstrations orchestrated by XR, and needless to say were proud to march for a ‘People’s Vote’. Each of these moments were, in their own way, apolitical insofar as they were attempts to ditch the constraints of parliamentary politics and appeal to something ‘beyond’. In XR’s case, this was completely explicit in their calls to establish ‘citizens assemblies’ (which under scrutiny turn out to be panels of wonk NGO experts. The Marxist critique of these forms of politics are well-documented and I won’t rehearse them here, the point for me is that in the absence of anything else they were the only game in town. The generations that attached to these political modalities did so out of the wreckage of the end of history, the failure of New Labour, the failure of social democracy in the 20th century, which occurred inextricably with the collapse of the labour movement and its institutions. Corbynism aspired to rebuilding these things, but was always just aspiring, was always in lieu of them, and therefore was in fact closer in its origins to these forms of apolitical populism than I think has previously been acknowledged.
The merits of this form allowed us to function and work as organisers without the usual baggage, and at its height produced the hysterical joy of the 2017 election. That election feels dream-like in hindsight, precisely because it did seem to actually achieve what apolitical moments always claim to be able to achieve: transcending the parameters of ideology and politics as such. Could such a colossal upheaval have happened without Corbynism’s broad, moralistic appeals to decency, change, standing up for “the many”? I’m not sure. However beneficial, though, it was precisely this strength of apolitical Corbynism that, in part, engineered its downfall. This downfall came chiefly from the despicably vain, juvenile remain campaign, indulged by far too many people who in a state of flailing panic should’ve toughened up and known better. But also, I’d argue through a specific political-cultural tendency that emerged under late-Corbynism; self-flagellation and capitulation. Taken together, these outcomes have now engineered a situation where Keir Starmer is seen by many Corbynistas as the right successor to whatever Corbynism was about. It’s worth emphasising how absurd this is. Starmer is utterly archetypal of everything that Corbyn was supposed to replace. He is a character-less centrist, interchangeable with any prominent man among the liberal professional managerial class. If someone showed you a picture of him and said he’s the head of Save the Children, or an investment bank, or the Liberal Democrats, you’d have no difficulty believing them. His appeal to exhausted, depleted, Corbynistas comes from the same empty, directionless desires of apolitical populism. Just as Occupy never articulated a demand, just as XR was somehow apocalyptic without being antagonistic, just as People’s Vote wished away 17.4 million people; so too Starmer, by looking nice and sounding posh, will alleviate Labour of its existential contradictions.
Sex Education, to me, is the ultimate cultural encapsulation of this. Whilst its script is over-wrought with pseudo-ethical negotiations of contemporary adolescent conflicts, attempting to place it at the vanguard of a new form of “woke” political communication that presents a seemingly utopian high school experience for the temporally displaced left, it is also wholly impotent and removed from the actual political struggles it is indirectly parasitising.
Endnote: Notably, the book I was reading whilst having these thoughts, with Sex Education playing in the background, was Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I don’t have it with me whilst I’m writing this post but it’s introduction and first chapter helped to articulate how this apolitical wokeness is itself a product of neoliberalism’s cultural logics, and that is precisely because of the way that neoliberalism — and neoliberal universities most explicitly — iron out the creases and differences of our political spaces of action.
Niall Gallen hit on this too earlier today when he tweeted:
Is the biggest mistake in the Critical Theory of the last 20 years confusing Neoliberalism with Capitalism, blindsiding the latter's ability to construct a counterpole to the former?
— Niall Gallen (@Glitchrature) February 28, 2020
I think he’s right. I responded:
I was thinking exactly this whilst reading Jameson the other day. The absence of ‘neoliberalism’ from his description of the mechanisms of “late capitalism” at the start of Postmodernism… is telling. [1] Precisely because, as the elephant in the room, he is trying to prise the economic and the cultural apart in order to understand how they affect one another. Neoliberalism emerges as an ideological project for smoothing out [these] discrepancies. [2]
Wokeness was a concept that fell into this trap all too easily — the way that “woke” has been turned into a ironic marketing ploy by the likes of Burger King in recent weeks is a case in point.
If neoliberalism is to be have continued valence as a political term, the left must be capable of seeing its developments and influence from within its own ranks, not just pointing to it when the right gets its way.
Update: Many thanks to Gareth Leaman for sharing this post on Twitter. His own article on Sex Education and South Wales for the Wales Art Review is an excellent extension of some of these points. Go check it out.
Dreamless Pop
on February 24, 2020 March 19, 2020 By xenogothic 2 Comments
When did dream pop lose its psychedelia and become the generic soundtrack for every new Netflix teen drama going?
I unashamedly like a lot of weird YA dramas on Netflix. Locke & Key is a good example. Dark is a better one. I liked The Umbrella Academy too. I even continue to have time for Stranger Things despite many being fed up with its pastiching. I think I just have a soft spot for shows that emphasise or try to exaggerate the sheer surreality of adolescence and childhood.
It’s an age old trope, of course. The two-part adaptation of IT might be the most obvious big screen example in recent years but it’s hardly new. Bingeing Locke & Key from my Sunday sick bed today, I feel newly aware of just how far this continuum stretches back.
The show contains numerous references early on, for instance — explicit ones, that is, in the script — to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. This got me thinking about how, as a kid, I always preferred The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Then I remembered in the pub last night how I inadvertently started talking about Skellig. On Twitter last week someone blogged about Elidor. Last year I read Alice in Wonderland aloud to my girlfriend before bed, for its own merits and to support a reading of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense…
Across time periods, the strangeness of childhood and adolescence has been fertile ground for telling stories of the weird and the eerie. Perhaps that’s because fairy tales themselves have always been good examples of the weird. Culturally, we like to scare our kids, to install superegos, perhaps, but also I think just because their minds are more easily taken advantage of. It’s a fun kind of transcultural sadism…
This is all very obvious, really, but I guess what I’m trying to affirm here is that, past or present, I’m always interested to see how youth is used as a vector for sociopolitical potentials; how a child’s innately psychedelic perspective allows other worlds and forms of life to emerge in our cultural imaginations.
At times, I find my fascination with these sorts of stories becoming entangled with a sort of nostalgia for a previous social and cultural freedom but I also love to hear the new emerging from an articulation of a sensation I am already familiar with and appreciate the importance of.
Pop music can be great for this too. Lorde’s album Pure Heroine might be one of the best musical distillations of adolescent weirdness from the last decade. It’s an album that I listened to obsessively when it came out, not long after I left university, and I was totally consumed by its songs of teenage outsideness presented with a production style that felt incredibly refreshing. You’d be surprised — in fact, I even surprise myself — just how emotional that album makes me still, as an eerie document of fading innocence. That’s certainly what it felt like to me at the time, fully entering my twenties, newly outside the bubble of full-time education, feeling fully devoid of prospects, instead doubling down on the particular temporalities of unemployment in my hometown where I felt like I was slipping through the cracks into my own subcultural underworld.
I was thinking about all this and more whilst I was watching Locke & Key earlier. I thought about how much I liked the magical realism in the show, even at its most janky. I liked how this weirdness of the Locke family home could permeate the high school environment with surprisingly little resistance whilst the adults are, for the most part, oblivious to the teenagers’ dramas. The plasticity of the teenagers’ brains and the rigidity of the adults made me, as a viewer, feel oddly in between. Both responses were weird. But there was something else that kept pulling me back from this and which made it a really jarring experience, but not in a positive way at all.
The soundtrack could not have been any more generic if it tried.
I don’t know if there’s a name for this or not. There probably is. It’s that corporate pop that all sounds the same and has no message or distinguishable production style. It feels like it’s been made by some sort of hit factory somewhere. I associate it most explicitly with something like Made In Chelsea. It’s wellness pop. Gooped pop. Middle class generic pop made by some quartet who have had a completely frictionless twenties. You’ll know what I mean. Think Bastille and their hundreds of clones. It seems to permeate every teen drama there is, and it’s all the more obvious if a show has a supernatural or paranormal element.
When I think about k-punk’s various requiems for popular modernism, I always feel like we haven’t reached the true depths of its absence yet. The BBC might have sonically unweirded Doctor Who, for instance, but there was still a time recently when the music controllers for popular programming could shoehorn in contemporary oddities. I remember Top Gear car reviews soundtracked by Boards of Canada, for instance, and even though a whole generation might have wishfully modelled their lives after Skins, it felt like very few within its target audience were picking up Animal Collective albums after hearing them soundtrack a point of narrative tension.
Looking back on a show like Skins now — proverbially, at least: to actually rewatch it would be torturous — these sorts of musical decisions made it feel contemporary. It hasn’t aged well but, at the time, it felt like the bleeding edge of… something.
Watching these new weird shows, they feel distinctly devoid of a time — which, ironically, is what makes them feel most now. These scenes with cookie-cutter dream pop make the shows feel culturally disorientated in much the same way that many have claimed a show like Sex Education is. Whereas previous shows were buoyed by well chosen soundtracks these shows are dragged down by a complete lack of sonic imagination. They are defined by a sort of ambient music, especially when diegetic, that serves only to remove any well-scripted weirdness.
Why do I feel like the fault lies with Spotify? Maybe someone better informed can shine a light on the silent death of smart licensing? Maybe music licensing is one of those jobs woefully given over to algorithms? Or maybe this is the trickle down cultural impact of capitalist realism at its most banal?
Whatever the cause, all narratives of new worlds suffer if they’re incapable of referencing the newness of now. How are we meant to find connections between the radical magic of a coming new and the already contemporary if the characters on our screens aren’t given the same opportunity?
It’s almost as if we’re not supposed to. No longer are these strange tales of psychedelic childhoods meant to keep the fire of otherworldly potentials burning. They’re salves. Nothing more.
This stasis doesn’t lie with music licensing alone. I want to offer up another case in point that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently: Gilmore Girls.
My girlfriend just completed an epic rewatch of that show’s seven seasons and I enjoyed watching it myself for the first time — at intervals — alongside her.
The show’s wit still holds up todat and its machine-gun cultural referencing is pretty electric. But I kept thinking: All that aside, what are we left with? A relatable story of a modern middle class family. A girl and her mum, growing up together in Small Town USA. Rori Gilmore’s life aspirations of going to Harvard and joining the rat race as a hot shot journalist are weirdly 00s and bougie but the rapidity of the hypertext dialogue was pretty incredible to me. In fact, it was what made the show so entertaining for me personally. Bands and films and other references, from low culture to high, old to new, pepper every exchange. An otherwise generic sitcom is given a unique energy as it feels like the two central characters are, when not on screen, jacked into a rapidly emerging cyberspace and a contemporary moment of atemporal postmodern cultural proliferation. It’s the sort of metadialogue that has been fetishised in a sitcom like Spaced or, more recently, Community (where it is reduced to a particular trait of an autistic character) but here it exists intergenerationally and effortlessly.
What does this mean, if anything?
I’m not sure. But I’m increasingly disturbed of late that we’re continuing to lose a lot more from our pop culture than we’re aware of. I feel more and more like this is what constituted the “frenzied stasis” of late capitalism for Mark Fisher. The spectacular but superficially new distracts us as we lose far more than is currently being produced to the ambient incursions of capitalist stasis on our cultural imaginations.
I don’t like it one bit.
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‘Proud Mary’ Is The New Thriller Movie That Will Star Taraji P. Henson As A Gun For Hire
“Hidden Figures” star Taraji P. Henson will go from math to mayhem for her next role as she’s set to play a hit woman in Screen Gems’ “Proud Mary,” shares TheWrap.
The film follows a contract killer whose life is upended when she meets a young boy who awakens a dormant maternal instinct within her.
There is no director attached yet to the project, which is scheduled to begin production in Boston this April.
John Stewart Newman and Christian Swegal wrote the movie, which is being produced by Paul Schiff and Tai Duncan.
Henson, who won the Golden Globe last year for Best Actress in a Television Drama for her portrayal of Cookie Lyon on Fox’s “Empire,” currently appears in Fox’s “Hidden Figures” as mathematician Katherine Johnson, who was instrumental in the calculations that allowed astronaut John Glenn to orbit the Earth and return home safely.
Henson and co-stars Mahershala Ali, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Aldis Hodge, Janelle Monáe, Jim Parsons, Glen Powell and Octavia Spencer were nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
She last starred for Screen Gems in “No Good Deed,” “Think Like A Man” and “Think Like a Man Too.”
Henson is represented by UTA and Vincent Cirrincione Associates. Newman is represented by WME. Swegal is represented by The Gersh Agency.
By Matt Pressberg
CLOSED–SPLIT – Advance Screening Giveaway
John Legend and Arianna Grande Recruited To Cover Feature Track On ‘Beauty and The Beast’ Soundtrack
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Arteta upbeat about Arsenal future despite 'challenging' period
Posted Tuesday, November 17, 2020 by Tribalfootball.com
Mikel Arteta insists Arsenal have a 'bright future' ahead of them despite a 'challenging' start to the season.
The Gunners beat Manchester United earlier this month to end a 14-year winless run at Old Trafford.
However, a 3-0 loss to Aston Villa prior to the international break saw Arteta's side slip to 11th on the table.
Despite the result, Arteta remains positive, telling the club's website: "It's part of a process. The results have to be immediate, and the challenge we have with the club we are representing is that we have to win as quickly as possible every game in every competition
"So far we have played 14 games in all competitions this season [including the Community Shield], we won 10 and lost four and the four of them have been in the Premier League, so it is a little bit imbalanced.
"There are a lot of things to do, short term and medium term, we have seen a lot of changes not only on the pitch but structurally as a club as well, it's been difficult, it's been a challenging time in the last three or four months, a lot of things have happened.
"We have to settle and everyone has to realise where we are now, but I see the future as really bright. I am a really positive person and I tend to learn much more when things don't go well and we have a defeat like we had the other day that really hurt after the performance we had at Old Trafford.
"We have to understand why it happened, be really critical first of all with myself and try to understand the players better, and give them more solutions to win more football matches."
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