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Jeremy S. Williams
The lack of coherent theory of privacy is at the root of the inadequacy of present-day legal measures to afford protection of the indivisible "social space" surrounding each individual Professor Williams, in recog nizing some of the difficulties involved in defining the sphere of an individual's interest in privacy, emphasizes the threat posed by the gathering and dissemination of information about an individual without his knowledge or authority. This threat, says Professor Williams, cannot be neutralized by the individual himself; there must be judicial or legis lative intervention on his behalf. Common law torts, while they do give some protection, are not sufficient: the remedies are both slow and costly, and, of course, are not available to one who is not aware that his privacy has been invaded. Statutory enactments such as those in Manitoba and British Columbia give only broad and general protec tion against invasions of privacy; and other legal protection (which only incidentally affects privacy-intrusive conduct) is both sporadic and limited. rational theory of privacy, the author concludes, is essential to effective protection against invasions ofprivacy.
Jeremy S. Williams, Historical Foundations of the Common Law: By S. F. C. Milsom , Alberta Law Review: Vol 8, No 3
Jeremy S. Williams, A Casebook on Equity and Succession: by J. Tiley , Alberta Law Review: Vol 9, No 2
Jeremy S. Williams, The Forensic Lottery - A Critique of Tort Liability as a System of Personal Injury Compensation: By Terence G. Ison , Alberta Law Review: Vol 7, No 2
Jeremy S. Williams, Equity and The Law of Trusts: By Phillip H. Pettit , Alberta Law Review: Vol 6, No 2
Jeremy S. Williams, Negligence in Modern Law: By M. A. Milner , Alberta Law Review: Vol 7, No 1
Jeremy S. Williams, The Making of Statutory Instruments , Alberta Law Review: Vol 8, No 3
Jeremy S. Williams, Title by Limitation in a Registered Conveyancing System , Alberta Law Review: Vol 6, No 1
Jeremy S. Williams, Law Relating to Nuclear Energy: By Street and Fame , Alberta Law Review: Vol 6, No 1
Jeremy S. Williams, Conflict of Interest in the Public Service , Alberta Law Review: Vol 8, No 3
Jeremy S. Williams, The Infliction of Punishment - Modern Theories - Public Attitude , Alberta Law Review: Vol 7, No 1
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Home » Canadian history • Environment • History and Policy • History in the News
The “Asbestos Issue” Then and Now, Again and Again
July 14, 2011 July 14, 2011 3 Comments on The “Asbestos Issue” Then and Now, Again and Again
By Dr. Jessica Van Horssen
[Re-posted from NiCHE’s Group Blog, The Otter]
This past July 1st, I was fortunate to have been able to attend one of the anti-asbestos protests in London on Canada Day while in the United Kingdom for research. Why was I researching in the UK? Because the first reported death due to asbestos-related disease was a woman who worked in a textile factory outside of Manchester in the late 19th century. Why were there anti-asbestos protests across the UK and around the world on Canada Day? Because there has been global shock and outrage aimed at both Quebec and Canada over the past weeks, months, and years due to the continued support of the province’s asbestos industry.
July 1st was the day Jean Charest planned to make his pledge of $58 million in subsidies to the struggling industry official, which made the Canada Day protests this year especially well-publicized. In the end, and perhaps partly due to international pressure, the $58 million Charest pledged to help establish and maintain 425 full-time positions at the mines in the province’s “asbestos belt” was reduced to $25 million, with a promise to find additional funding in the future, possibly meaning when media interest in the issue fades.
Quebec once provided over 70% of the world’s supply of asbestos, a once-valuable and highly sought after fireproof mineral that was used in everything from insulation to military uniforms to filters for baby incubators. Breathe in deep; if you’re in a major city, you now have asbestos in your lungs—it’s everywhere.
The industry collapsed in Quebec in the 1970s and 1980s due to rising awareness of the health risks associated with the mineral, and the federal and provincial governments have been subsidizing it ever since. Because of this collapse, and despite the subsequent government funding, Quebec fell from 1st to 5th in the global asbestos trade, producing far less of the deadly mineral than Russia, China, Brazil, and Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan!
If this is the case, then why is Canada still an international target for those opposed to the asbestos trade? Is it because Canada’s the only country in the western world that continues to mine and sell the mineral, not to the rest of the western world, (where it’s illegal to buy—though not to sell—asbestos), but to developing countries like India? Does the international community hold Canada to a different moral standard than Russia? Should Canada have a different trade philosophy than China? Is this fair?
Is the international focus on the Quebec asbestos industry actually an expression of global confusion over how Canadian history, culture, and politics work? Is it an attempt by countries with their own suspect relationship with asbestos to shift the blame? What role can environmental history play in a better understanding of this issue? Loretta Lynn has her coal miner’s daughters, Stompin’ Tom Connors has his Sudbury Saturday nights, and Cape Breton has its Men of the Deeps. What does Quebec’s asbestos industry have? What is it about this mineral specifically that makes the world outraged?
While held on July 1st to target Canada specifically, the Mesothelioma Action Day in London this year was aimed more at education than protest. Mesothelioma is fascinating disease: it’s a rare and fast-acting cancer that affects the lining of major organs about 30 years after exposure to asbestos. That’s right: this is one of the few cancers that has a clear cause (asbestos particles are found in the tumours) and a clear cure—prevent anyone, anywhere from being exposed to asbestos. This is an environmental and occupational disease that should be a relic in history, something that once occurred, but doesn’t anymore. Because of Canada’s role in helping to block UN resolutions to ban the trade of asbestos globally, mesothelioma is not even close to becoming an extinct cancer.
Most mesothelioma sufferers (or “victims” as they are often termed) are open about the pain and the cause of this disease, but Chuck Strahl, formerly one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s bosom MP’s, hasn’t had much of a problem with this. Strahl is quite famous in the UK asbestos circles, as he’s been suffering from mesothelioma for years, yet in his political life has supported the government’s decision to keep the asbestos industry alive. One of the few MP’s known outside of Canada, many in the UK are surprised that Strahl is still alive because of how rapidly mesothelioma typically ravages the human body. What they cannot understand—and understandably so—is that in Canada, whether you’re from Quebec or British Columbia, it’s political suicide to come out against the asbestos industry.
I’ve studied the Quebec asbestos industry for 6 years and have often been asked if there are historical factors present in the current debate, and I would say that there are definitely deep and complex issues at play here. When it comes down to it, Quebec’s asbestos industry is regarded as a major factor in the modernization of the province, when it moved from a primarily agricultural society to one where industry reached beyond the limits of major cities and labour groups began to really impact how corporations were run in Quebec. Some historians would say the Asbestos Strike of 1949 was an expression of this change, but it goes much deeper than that, and it’s time historians stopped placing contemporary Quebec into a nice and neat Quiet Revolution box. It goes deeper than this, and lies in a real desire in Quebec society to make decisions for themselves. Isn’t that what democracy is all about? The end to Quebec’s asbestos trade will come, but it needs to do so on local and provincial levels. Canada’s constitution clearly puts the environment in the hands of the provinces and the people of Quebec, (who have a long history of fighting for control of their own territory), not an outside governing body, are the ones who need to choose when and how the industry will end.
Canadian history, Environment, History and Policy, History in the News Asbestos, health, mesothelioma
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3 thoughts on “The “Asbestos Issue” Then and Now, Again and Again”
Neil White July 14, 2011 at 10:14 am
Excellent post on a serious occupational health and safety and public health issue that rarely gains traction in Canada, but has been big news in the United States for decades. Check out David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz’s books Dying for Work and Deadly Dust for background.
I remember hearing somewhere that asbestos was included in one or more of our international free trade deals as a “cultural product,” thus reducing the chances that its sale would be discontinued or banned outright. Anyone know if that’s correct?
Kathleen Ruff July 14, 2011 at 11:43 pm
Would like to be able to contact the writer, Dr Van Horssen. It’s an important topic, but there are a number of errors in the piece. The Quebec government has offered a loan guarantee of $58 million and that figure has not changed. The consortium of anonymous foreign investors (apparently five asbestos products industrialists in India) have to come up with the $25 million to cover the $83 million total needed to complete the underground asbestos mine that was 90% built in the 1990s. The whole of Quebec’s medical and public health leaders, including all 16 of the Quebec government’s own public health directors, have strongly opposed the new asbestos mine project. The battle is between the Quebec asbestos industry (which is bankrupt and about to die out, but hopes that the foreign investors will revive it) and the Quebec Medical Association, the Quebec Public Health Association, the Quebec National Institute of Public Health, the Quebec Cancer Society, the Quebec Lung Association, the Quebec, the Quebec Association for Occupational Hygiene, Health & Security, etc, etc. The asbestos industry calls the Quebec health leaders “a little gang of Talibans”. Quebec can be extremely proud at the courage and integrity of its medical and health community who have, with one voice, loudly and clearly demanded that Quebec’s export of asbestos stop and that the Quebec government stop denying the clear scientific evidence that chrysotile asbestos (which represents 100% of the global asbestos trade) is deadly and cannot be safely used anywhere. The Quebec trade union confederations – the Confédération des syndicats nationaux and the Centrale des syndicats du Québec – have both strongly and publicly called for an end to Quebec’s asbestos export.
Jessica van Horssen July 20, 2011 at 11:07 am
Thanks for your comments, Neil. The Rosner and Markowitz book is an amazing source and their experience with Johns-Manville is really enlightening. You are certainly correct with the “cultural industry” aspect of this story. It happened in 2005 and you can read more about it here: Michael Hahn, “A Clash of Cultures? The UNESCO Diversity Convention and International Trade Law,” Journal of International Economic Law, vol. 6, no. 3 (September 2006).
Kathleen, the information you believe to be incorrect was provided by LeDevoir and I think we’re actually talking about the same kettle of asbestos fish with regards to funding. The purpose of my post was to highlight the importance of a historical perspective on this issue. While the Canadian and Quebec medical communities have come out against asbestos, they did so only recently and both have a long history of collaborating with the companies that owned the Quebec mines in order to alter medical evidence and falsify reports. In fact, aside from a small collective of doctors at l’Université Laval in the 1940s, nothing negative was published on the health effects of asbestos in Canada until the 1980s. The British Medical Journal first published on the dangers of asbestos in the 1920s. This lag has a massive impact on how asbestos is understood and managed in Quebec and the rest of Canada.
As far as the unions go, just three years ago you yourself told me via email that the Quebec unions threatened to campaign against any politician who came out against the asbestos industry, which is why Ignatieff retracted his statement against it oh so long ago. For years I’ve thoroughly researched the interaction between Quebec’s unions, industry heads, and government officials and there is a clear historical pattern of compromise in favour of employment. A recent change in opinion from union heads does not overshadow the long, ingrained effects of this. I understand that in the lobbying world the immediate situation is pressing, but a historical perspective on this issue complicates it in constructive ways.
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Adrian Göllner
Home Art News About
small Trinity, 2016
small Trinity was the title of my MFA thesis exhibition, which was mounted at the Carleton University Art Gallery in the last two weeks of August 2016. For the exhibition, I presented the three series of works in which I attempted to capture the essence of an explosion as a sculpture: the Exploded Vases (2014-15); the Cast Explosions (2015), and the small Trinity series (2016). The objects provided viewers with the chance to examine an explosion in a stilled state, but also to consider the enormous powers we humans can unleash.
For the title series, small Trinity, I set myself the goal of casting an explosion 1/1,000,000th of the power of the first atomic bomb, but this proved easier said than done. The Trinity test was a plutonium-based explosion conducted by the US Army in 1945, with a yield equivalent to 20 kt (20,000,000 g) of TNT (trinitrotoluene). From a conceptual standpoint, 1/1,000,000th is somewhat of a magical division, and one that maintains the mystery of the powers at hand. From a purely practical standpoint, however, it is still a substantial explosion. Wary of this, I started small and ignited a charge 1/1,000,000,000th of the power of the Trinity in a ball of soft clay. The charge created a void within the clay, which could then be filled with wax and later cast in aluminum. I slowly increased the charges by multiples of 5 and 10, but both the technique and the ability to safely create the artwork broke down just beyond the 1/1o,000,000th mark. Fortunately, the Canadian Explosives Research Laboratory at Natural Resources Canada provided assistance and the goal was achieved by blasting a crater in the ground and then casting it with an expanding resin foam.
The small Trinity (2016) sculptures are fractional manifestations of forces well beyond comprehension. Each is formed from an actual, measured explosion, and is therefore not an image of an explosion, but the terrible thing itself. This is true of all the works presented in the exhibition. Whether using a simple firecracker or evoking a nuclear blast, the processes I used allowed for the explosions to take form and be captured, without manipulation. To consider the ramifications of these forms today is to see, perhaps, how precarious our existence continues to be.
An explosion 1/5,000,000th the power of the first atomic bomb
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Alternative Whisky Academy AWA your guide to whisky whiskey and bourbon
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Lowland whiskies come from the area north of the English border, and south of a line drawn between Greenock in the west, and Dundee in the east. Traditionally they have been the source of a lot of the whisky to be used for blends, as such the style is much lighter than other regions, with little or no peat. By the late 19th centaury almost the entire production of the Lowland distilleries went for blending
The growth in popularity and power of the Highland and Speyside distilleries, has been matched by a fall from favour for Lowland producers, to such an extent that today there are only three left in production. By far and away the two biggest whisky distilleries are Auchentoshan and Glenkinchie. The third being Bladnoch, which is also, the most southerly distillery of all.
Auchentoshan Distillery is on the northern edge of Glasgow and was founded in 1800. It has a light, cereal and citrus nose and a clean, dry finish. Glenkinchie Distillery is located at Pencaitland, just outside Edinburgh. Typical of Lowland malt whiskies: fragrant and reserved, with a clean, fresh flavour.
There are some silent stills, whose whiskies are still found from time to time. Rosebank is quite often seen and was generally considered to be the best Lowland malt. Occasionally, but more rarely seen are St.Magdalene from Linlithgow, Littlemill from Bowling Dumbartonshire and Ladyburn, which was housed inside William Grants grain distillery at Girvan on the Ayrshire coast.
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The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international environmental treaty produced at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The objective of the treaty is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
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Sarkis and Alin Nourian Add a Touch of Class to Navasartian Games
2013 Honorary Presidents, Sarkis and Alin Nourian.
BY DONIG L. DONABEDIAN
As Homenetmen followers, we know well what’s entailed in producing generation after generation of exemplary citizens. As willing volunteers, we excel in putting our best foot forward to get things done selflessly. Often, we forget to stop, take a breath, and look around us. This year, though, it’s different and it’s special. We can take a step back and admire the organizational big picture. This year’s Navasartian games have been graced by a young couple, Honorary Presidents, whose respectability would compel anyone to stop unwittingly and take notice. Sarkis and Alin Nourian, this year’s Honorary Presidents, shone at the center of Homenetmen’s universe, the Navasartian Games.
Well known for their unbridled support of the Armenian American Community, Sarkis and Alin have been part of this community since early childhood.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, to Krikor and Jeannette Nourian, Sarkis was the youngest of four siblings, Natalie, Peter and Caroline, with Natalie being the eldest of them all. Sarkis grew up in a very close knit family. His father, himself, an avid Homenetmen Member and Honorary President of the games in 1978, 1980 and 1983 in Beirut Lebanon, has been in the construction business in Beirut, Lebanon, for many decades. Jeannette, his beloved mother, now passed away, was a homemaker and strict disciplinarian. She was, if you will, the school after the school.
Sarkis began his early childhood education in nursery at Mkhitarian, followed by Aksor Kassardjian (’73-’75), where he left after 2nd grade and joined Khanamirian as an elementary school student from 1975 to 1976. Logos English School, British Curriculum, in Cyprus (’76-’86), would be his final stop until he graduated high School, proceeded by his subsequent move to the U.S. in 1987 where he embarked on a career in Jewelry Manufacturing and joined the much vaunted Armenian Jewelers Association in 1997, where today he is its Vice-Chairman.
Before his eventual move to the U.S., Sarkis Nourian’s family life as staunch supporters of the Armenian Community was a common thing. As a result of his family’s fervent involvement in Armenian Organizations, it was a natural fit for Sarkis to be involved from early on. His first involvement in Karekin Njteh’s Badanegan ranks in 1976 propelled him to join the Akhpalian Chapter’s AYF ranks for 10 years, from 1976 to 1985. In the meantime, in Lebanon, Sarkis was a Homenetmen Scout from 1974 to 1982. Once in the U.S., Sarkis joined the Homenetmen South Bay Arakadz Chapter as an Executive Committee Member in 1990, and has been there ever since. It didn’t stop there. His unabashed love for his community transcended all else in those days, and because of that he has been in the ARF’s ranks since 1991 and was even a member of the ANC from 1992-1994. His deep involvement in all matters Armenian drove him to a path that would make his life complete, meeting his future partner in life and soul mate, Alin, whom he met in 1990 and married in 1996.
Alin Baghasarian was born in Beirut, Lebanon, to Hovhanness and Ardemis Baghasarian. Alin moved to the United States with her family in 1974 when she was two years old. She has two older siblings, Hagop and Antranig. They first moved to Hollywood and lived there for five years where Alin went to Alex Pilibos Armenian School until 2nd grade, and eventually ended up moving to Montebello where she went to Mesrobian Armenian School until her graduation from high school in 1989.
In 1995 Alin graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with a degree in Accounting and worked for the family’s jewelry manufacturing and retail business which had roots in Beirut, Lebanon.
Much like Sarkis, Alin came from a close knit family as well, with deep Armenian roots and pride in her heritage. Her father was involved in Homenetmen Montebello as an Executive Committee Member and was on the Board of Trustees of Holy Cross Armenian Apostolic Church as well as the Mesrobian School’s Support Committee. Alin, being an avid supporter of the Armenian American Community’s causes, was herself a Scout Khoumpabed Leader in Homenetmen Montebello from 1985 to 1988.
After getting married in 1996, both Sarkis and Alin built a wonderful home life together and have three beautiful children. Talar, 13 years of age and twins Rita and Hovig, 8 years of age are the pulses that beat their hearts and their “raison d’etre” in life.
While both work very hard to enjoy their successful and fruitful life, their lives are immeasurably enriched by being surrounded by their children and families. At every chance they get, they travel and delve into hobbies they enjoy. Sarkis particularly likes to hunt, go fishing and ride motorcycles; hobbies he enjoyed while growing up in Lebanon.
Sarkis and Alin Nourian draw their inspiration from their children on whose futures they are completely focused and committed. They intend to pass on their heritage and culture as Armenians and community leaders to their wonderful children in order for them to keep it alive at home as well as in the community.
Both Sarkis and Alin exude compassion, humanity, and responsibility, in demeanor and in action, and find it a priority to support the future generations of Armenian youth. They intend to preserve and nurture their heritage, remaining true to the teachings and values of their families, in order to leave behind a legacy that their children and others may follow.
Homenetmen’s future looks bright as Sarkis and Alin Nourian add a touch of class and ignite our passion for Homenetmen while gracing this year’s Navasartian Games and Victory Banquet as Honorary Presidents. What makes it even brighter is the fact that they are a young and successful couple, and focused on Homenetmen’s traditional path of “making history and not living in it.”
As custom has always dictated, the Homenetmen Western United States Regional Executive Committee hosted its annual Navasartian Victory Banquet on Saturday, June 29th, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium with 750 guests, Homenetmen members and supporters and community leaders present to enjoy the lavish banquet. A very tasteful event, where Sarkis and Alin Nourian, as well as this year’s Exemplary Homenetmenagan, Zareh Ekmekjian, were given awards for their unfettered dedication to Homenetmen over many decades. The banquet’s entertainer, the much loved, Harout Pamboukjian, had saved his best for the beautiful occasion and delivered as expected, keeping the crowd thoroughly entertained until the event’s conclusion.
Pingback: Sarkis and Alin Nourian Add a Touch of Class to Navasartian Games | karap.lv
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GRSJ 300 – Culture Jam
McDonald’s Canada Day Culture Jam
The Original Advertisement
This original advertisement was created by a third-party advertising agency based in Toronto for McDonald’s Canada. The ad intends to appeal to feelings of patriotism in Canadian consumers, and is especially relevant in 2017 as government-sponsored Canada 150 celebrations take place across the country at a cost of over $500 million in federal expenditures (Scotti). The first impression of this advertisement is an innocuous message of congratulations for Canada Day. In doing so, the ad’s creators seek to appropriate Canadian history and insert a joint narrative between Canada and McDonald’s. This suggests to consumers that a benevolent restaurant chain has always been a mainstay of Canadian culture, and eating at McDonald’s is an extension of an ambiguous form of essential “Canadian-ness.”
There are many issues with this message. By seeking to capitalize on a celebratory spirit connected with this particular holiday, this assumes a uniformly positive history of Canadian Confederation. It ignores all injurious aspects of our state’s past and subverts the lived experiences of those whom centralized political governance have negatively impacted. Such examples are Chinese-Canadians subjected to the “head-tax,” Japanese Canadians who were interned during World War Two and had their belongings expropriated and sold to finance the racist policy that interned them in the first place, and Indigenous Canadians whose traditional territory was stolen by colonial and post-Confederation governments, who also simultaneously fought to extinguish their entire culture, most notoriously through the residential school system.
I do not mean to suggest that celebrating Canada Day is inherently nefarious, or that any expression of patriotic spirit is essentially an injurious sentiment, but that doing so without considering the way an event like Confederation impacted communities outside the dominant culture only perpetuates their marginalization in public discourse, and therefore the political institutions that govern our country. With that being said, it is difficult to summarize the countless lived experiences in one image, especially if that image is ultimately meant to sell a certain product. While I take issue with this advertisement’s obliteration of history, I acknowledge that the same criticism can be levied at any advertisement, especially those aiming to capitalize on the spirit of patriotism, such as during Olympic Games, or events in history, such as Canada Day. Rather, my culture jamming sought to address the uniquely injurious partnership between institutions such as McDonald’s and marginalized communities in Canada.
The Culture Jam
Having established the macro-level issues of culturally or historically appropriative messaging, while also acknowledging its diffusion into the mainstream of Canadian society, I will elaborate on the particular message my culture jam sought to establish. This related to economic disparity and access to public health within marginalized communities.
McDonald’s, like many fast-food chain restaurants, provides inexpensive, good-tasting and highly unhealthy food. With caloric values far beyond the necessary requirement humans need per meal, and similarly high fat, sugar and sodium contents, fast food is a primary contributor to elevating rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. McDonald’s, which pioneered the commodification of convenient eating and is the most globally recognized fast food brand, is at the center of this movement. As was noted by Dyck and Dossa, fast food is also comparatively cheaper than healthy food options (696), and is marketed towards families as being a legitimate and convenient alternative to home-cooked meals.
This ultimately leads many economically disadvantaged communities to rely on fast food as a primary food source, and negatively impacts their health outcomes. At the same time, while reliance on fast food increases economically marginalized individuals’ likelihood of developing diet-related illnesses, the hierarchy of health care means the racialized or gendered communities who disproportionately rely on fast food are often simultaneously excluded from accessing public health care. As we read in the second and third modules of GRSJ 300, health outcomes in marginalized communities are often highly disproportional, and the ability to gain access to quality healthcare is often difficult of impossible. This was highlighted by Torchalla, Aube Linden, Strehlau, Neilson & Krausz, and Benoit, Carroll & Chaudhry in their analyses of Indigenous access to health care in Vancouver, which illustrated that even when individuals from racialized communities are seeking treatment for maladies that would be considered more “societally appropriate” (ie not related to drug or sexual histories), the structural inequity of health care access can often dissuade individuals from seeking treatment.
My culture jam ultimately aimed to comment on this mutually enforcing vicious cycle by drawing attention to the correlation between fast food and health outcomes. While marginalized communities are often forced to rely on comparatively inexpensive food options whose nutritional content negatively impacts their health, the structurally tiered system of health care often means they will receive lower quality treatment than members of the dominant or majority culture or ethnicity. The confluence of economic disparity and lower access to health care further harms those identifying as LGBTQ2+, and women in a society that still remains fundamentally gendered.
Benoit, C., D. Carroll, and M. Chaudhry. “In search of a healing place: Aboriginal women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.” Social Science & Medicine4 (2003): 821-833. Web. 20 June 2017.
McDonald’s Canadian Flag. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 June 2017. http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print.mcdonalds_canadian_flag.
Dyck, I., and P. Dossa. “Place, health, and home: gender migration in the constitutions of healthy space.” Health & Place 13 (2007): 691-701. 20 June 2017.
Khullar, Dhruv. “Bad Hospital Design is Making us Sicker.” New York Times.p., 22 Feb. 2017. Web. 20 June 2017.
Scotti, Monique. “Canada 150 Celebrations will cost taxpayers half a billion.” Global News. Corus Entertainment Inc., 17 May 2017. 20 June 2017.
Torchalla, I., I. Aube Linden, V. Stehlau, E.K Neilson, and M. Krausz. “Like a lot’s happened with my whole childhood”: violence, trauma, and addiction in pregnant and postpartum women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.” Harm Reduction Journal1 (2015): 1-10. Web. 20 June 2017.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized on June 26, 2017 by BrettShearing.
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The question of Blackness: How conversations about Bruno Mars and Cardi B miss the mark
Culture, Entertainment, Featured, Race
Erasing someone's Blackness rather than interrogating colorism, caste, power inherent to their experience is the wrong direction.
-Briana L. Ureña-Ravelo
by Briana L. Ureña-Ravelo
There has been much conversation regarding Blackness as of late. What it is, when and how it matters, and who can and cannot claim it. At times the conversation has been very illuminating and compelling, but more and more it has become overwhelmingly caustic and mired in elitist, ahistorical, and colonial concepts of borders, identities, and experiences. Thinly-veiled xenophobia and racial antagonism has been levied towards Afro-Latinxs in particular.
Cardi B has, on many occasions, used her Instagram to display her Afro-Dominican and Trinidadian culture, spoken up for Black people and about Black American struggles, condemned racial profiling and police brutality, and discussed anti-Blackness and misogynoir as it concerns stripping and sex work and how clubs are discriminatory towards Black and darker skinned dancers. Bruno Mars, who isn’t faking an afro or the Puerto Rican ancestry that gave it to him, has openly discussed the credit all Western and honestly post-colonial genres of music owe to African Americans.
RELATED: Let’s talk about phenotype and global Blackness
All of this leaves me with questions about why African Americans seem to have an obsessive need to interrogate them and their latest bright, 90s Afrocentric collaboration on the remix of “Finesse”. Their respective Blackness has been questioned at length, even as they each rep their ancestry and show love and support to the African American community, and even though Caribbean and Afro-Latinx music have had great influence in Black music over the centuries, especially blues, jazz, and hip hop.
The major reason seems to be the inability, or perhaps the refusal, to navigate conversations regarding colorism and castem with nuance, and thus a lack of knowledge of where mixed or ambiguous African-descendent people stand or belong, historically and presently.
“You’re either Black or you’re not!” is something that I have heard, over and over. The truth is that it isn’t that simple.
A racial caste system has existed since the creation of racial categories under European colonialism. Mixed, mestizx, metis, morena, trigueña, creole, quadroon, octaroon, mulatto. These are some of the many different names and categorization established for African-descendant people at the varying levels between “Black” and “white.” The different caste position names, their placement, and their power have fluctuated and changed depending on the needs of the colonizer, white supremacy, and the fight that Black people themselves have waged for their freedom and acknowledgement of their people and ancestry.
In general, under all racial caste systems, the closer to whiteness, colonial Westernness, and Europeanness you are – in ancestry and/or appearance, power, money, ability to code – and the farther from Blackness, the better. Here in the United States, much like in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and across the Caribbean, Latin America, and wherever else African people were kidnapped to or exploited, people with caste/color privilege could be free, could own enslaved Africans, and could benefit from their white father’s position and money if he had it.
Caste system still unofficially exist today in cultures wherever Black people were kidnapped to. There aren’t just “People who are Black”, all oppressed equally and the same, and “People who are not.” There are Black people of varying levels of African ancestry, class background, nationality and ethnicity, and skin color/phenotype with varying levels of privilege or power on that spectrum, because Blackness is a construct dependant solely on these dynamics and terms.
While Bruno Mars and Cardi B benefit from being lighter skinned, they don’t benefit from having African ancestry that is from the global south, something that African Americans do have. Historically, positions of power and visibility have been dominated by lighter skinned Black people of any nationality or ethnicity. Let us not forget the many passe blancs, mixed, and light-skinned African Americans, Caribbeans, Black Brits, Afro-Latinxs, and Africans in entertainment since the early 20th century. I can think of very few dark-skinned Black people, especially women, prominent in the media until recent years.
We have always had this problem with colorism, but it is one thing to bemoan the way that lighter skinned Black people are given certain preference and privilege and another thing entirely to say anyone with this kind of power within the racial caste isn’t Black or has no claim to Blackness at all.
What’s more, it is wildly revisionist and ahistorical to pretend that this trend of using lighter skinned or mixed Black people is new and that it only happens with those who are perceived as non-Black “Hispanics”. These people are Black, but they are being privileged by an ambiguity that they are able to inhabit like many Black people, including African Americans, before them.
In my experience, conversations about Blackness among African Americans often feel too quick to come for Afro-Latinxs or non-English speaking Afro-Caribbeans in a way that they do not come for others. But even in this, the conversations lack consistency. If we observe our history, from the early days of the kidnapping of Africans until now and find all the notable non-African American or mixed Black figures integral to African American identity, politics, resistance, culture and experience in order to remove them/their Blackness, then we would be without Audre Lorde, Tessa Thompson, Biggie Smalls, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Sidney Poitier, Kuwame Ture, Frantz Fanon, Beyonce, Marcus Garvey, Ceila Cruz, Wyclef Jean, Bob Marley, and so many more.
The fact of the matter is that Afro-Latinxs have always been a huge, unambiguous, integral part of Blackness as it is conceptualized in the U.S., just like African American Blackness has helped Caribbean and Latinx Black people, both in this country and in our homelands, shape our identities and movements.
Erasing someone’s Blackness rather than interrogating colorism, caste, power (or lack thereof) inherent to their experience is the wrong direction. Doing so will leave gaps in one’s own identity.
I am in no way saying that every person with an ounce of African blood is Black, or that passing as non-Black, which many of us can do conditionally, isn’t without its great amount of power. But to say that all African-descendent people who don’t look or act a certain way, or who don’t come from where you think they should, have no claim to Blackness at all erases cultures and people who have had an active hand in the creation and protection of the American concept of Blackness over the centuries.
This conversation creates a false binary in which African Americans are always darker skinned, unambiguous in their background, and sure in their Blackness while all Afro-Caribbeans and Latinxs are lighter skinned, ambiguous and/or passing in their identity and reticent to identify as Black. Not only are there plenty of light and passing Black people here in this country, but there’s plenty of coonery, anti-Blackness, caste violence, colorism and shame historically and now. And in the Caribbean and Latin America, many of us have been aware and proud of our African ancestry and history for centuries and proudly in allegiance with Black people globally.
We’ve been niggas for decades, even centuries before many others were. Our diaspora is older, our movements and history run deep. For every Cardi B or Dascha Polanco there is an Amara La Negra, Monica Veloz, Jessie Woo, Ceila Cruz, or Susana Baca. These conversations that wish to dismiss and erase the Cardis and Brunos because of their Latinidad also erases those of dark, unambiguous Afro-Latinxs like Amara La Negra.
RELATED: From Black Brazil to the Black America: The Importance of Transnational Solidarity
Blackness exists across the world and there are many of us on our journey to reclaim our roots and deeper our Black identity. To police that process and call anything that doesn’t conceptualize Blackness exactly how someone else would want them to is irresponsible. When we call ourselves by our nationality or by our specific background, that does not mean that we do not know that we are Black or that we are not proud of our Blackness.
I refer to myself as Black, Dominican, Afro-Latina, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Dominican. They’re all connected and none of these labels mean that I think myself better or different than anyone else’s Blackness. It means that I am acknowledging the specific place where my diaspora was taken to and that history, all the good and the bad with it. I will acknowledge my privilege and the power I have within the racial caste system based on the lightness of my skin, but I will never relinquish my Blackness just because it doesn’t look the way that you want it to.
Briana L. Ureña-Ravelo. Writer. Community organizer. Errant punk. Ne’er do well. Afro-Dominicana. High Hex Femme.
Afro-Latinxs, blackness, Colorism, diaspora, hip-hop, racial caste system
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes
First ←Older Page 1 2 3 4 Newer→ Last
Kyle Matthews, 09:41 Dec 1, 2011
Some people actually want to ban that completely. I’m positing a slightly less drastic alternative.
Same effect in reality though. What political party is going to let someone run off the list to an electoral by-election, if it means they lose a seat in the house?
Graeme Edgeler, in reply to Kyle Matthews, 14:37 Dec 1, 2011
What political party is going to let someone run off the list to an electoral by-election, if it means they lose a seat in the house?
One that wants to win it :-)
One that doesn't want Judith Tizard or Paul Quinn to return from the list?
But won't they just pick some future star who's a likely for the next election, but didn't make the list cut this year, and make them do it?
But won’t they just pick some future star who’s a likely for the next election, but didn’t make the list cut this year, and make them do it?
At least, that was my theory in the Mana By-election. People were arguing that MPs should be banned from running in by-elections, and I thought that that was unwise.
Hekia Parata ran in Mana in 2008. She had an electorate office and presence in Mana throughout the 2008-2011 term. Having worked up a relationship with the community in Mana it would have been wrong to force National (if it wanted to contest the by-election) to select a new candidate who would contest the by-election only, or to force Parata to resign.
There is no requirement for a list MP elected at a by-election to be replaced as a list MP, but if people have a concern about the process by which the voters of Mt Albert might vote for Phil Twyford and get Judith Tizard, having a rule that this doesn't happen seems to be a good way of doing it. If a party really did want a replacement list MP, it could get one, but only if the list MP resigned to contest the by-election, not if they resigned after winning the by-election.
Rich of Observationz, 14:23 Dec 2, 2011
In that hypothetical situation, people would have elected Phil as an electorate MP and because he is a member of the Labour Party, got their next list person elected, who happened to be Judith Tizard.
If they didn't like that, they could have voted for another candidate. If the Labour party felt that Judith was such a bad candidate, they could have not selected her to the list. (She was my MP when I lived in Auckland, could see much wrong with her. Didn't actually *vote* for her or anything - I voted for Nandor).
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Genocide Revealed
Aleksandar Veljic
Aleksandar Veljic.com
SOOP
Valerie March 4, 2015
March of the Living 2015 Remembers Victims of Novi Sad Raid
It has been 73 years since the pogrom named “Razzia” (Raid) by its perpetrators took place in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad. In January 1942, the Hungarian occupation forces, which had been present in the region for 10 months following the invasion of that part of Serbia, committed gruesome war crimes. The Raid of January 1942 remains the most atrocious barbarity committed by Hungarian soldiers and gendarmerie in the region.
Months prior to January 1942, Hungarian authorities as well as ethnic Hungarians, who have never been either persecuted or wronged before the Second World War, spread rumors that January would be a bloody month for the civilian population, mainly Serbs. The Jews were also stigmatized as supposedly helping plan the Serbian uprising against the occupiers. Of course, none of this was true. The main idea of Miklos Horthy in Hungary was to decimate the numbers of the majority Serbian population and obliterate all the Jews, and then loot their property. Doing so would change the ethnic configuration that would be more favorable to the Hungarian minority.
That January of 1942, the Raid was carried out against the civilians in the surrounding villages. It started on Sunday, January 4, 1942. The Hungarian state first annihilated all the intellectuals — both Serbian and Jewish — in the villages nearby Novi Sad. Then they turned against other civilians, mostly tradesmen and farmers. Entire families were murdered in cold blood and thrown under the ice of the river Tisa. The temperature those days fell to 30 below zero Celcius, so the Genocide perpetrators used mines to create a hole in the ice into which they tossed civilians, either dead or alive. This massacre lasted for two weeks until January 19, 1942. Once it was over in the countryside around the city, where the small Jewish community was annihilated and the Serbian population terribly decimated, the culprits designed carrying out the Genocide in the city itself.
On January 20, 1942, the city of Novi Sad was cut off from the rest of the world. Nobody was able to leave the beleaguered settlement. The next morning, Hungarian patrols composed of gendarmes and soldiers inspected houses and personal documents. The same occurred the following day. The leading officers were dissatisfied about the results. Checking documents was not enough. They wanted a pogrom — rivers of blood on the streets. That is what they demanded happen on the third day. And so it was. The terrible January 23, 1942 was the day when a wholesale genocide was unleashed in the city.
The temperature was around -30° Celcius. In order to conceal the total count of those who were destined to perish, the occupation troops broke the thick ice on Danube surface at the river beach named Strand and placed a wood plank leading to the hole. The ordinary citizens, mostly Serbs and Jews, were driven to the plank and thrown alive under the ice. The small children were tossed into the air to fall on the bayonettes and then be pushed into the freezing water. This was done in the sight of the parents because the perpetrators drew great pleasure in watching the suffering of the powerless parents.
Meanwhile, the unleashed Hungarian troops raged in all corners of the city leaving the dead in the streets, in the yards and in private homes. Later they sent trucks around the city to pick up the bodies and transport them to Strand Beach. Overnight the bodies were dumped into the river. All the documents were destroyed, bodies were disposed of and no trace of crime remained other than deserted homes and quarters in the city.
It is estimated that over 5,000 citizens were brutally murdered in the so-called Razzia. Their homes were looted, their earrings and rings were cut off of their hands and ears and pieces of bodies, hair and pools of blood remained on the snowy streets. The world has never seen such an atrocity before. If the massacre continued, the entire Novi Sad would have been annihilated. It remains unclear as to why the sudden order to stop it arrived. Some ascribe it to energetic protests by a Hungarian MP Endre Baychy Zhilinsky. Or perhaps the head of the Hungarian occupation police (which for the most part did not participate in the atrocities other than inspecting the houses for illegal weapons) protested against the “incidents” committed by unleashed Hungarian military and gendarmes? Also, Horthy’s god-son Nikola Dragoylov was murdered on the street. Could it be that he received the news about that and his stale conscience was awakened? Whatever the case might be, the pogrom was stopped. But the objective had been reached: the number of Serbs was drastically lowered since they had always been the ethnic majority in the city, unlike the ethnic Hungarian minority. Also, the Jewish community had been decimated. Besides this, the anti-Nazis of Russian, German, Hungarian and other descent were also obliterated (Novi Sad has always been an ethnically mixed city).
Following World War II, the facts related to Razzia 1942 have been systematically marginalized and deprived of context. For the majority of citizens this was just a tragic event, but without awareness of the causes and perpetrators. The book “Genocide Revealed” has aimed to set all those records straight and has come as the result of a long-term battle against oblivion and marginalization of the victims. For that reason, a group of citizens in Novi Sad, led by the author of the aforementioned book and students, organized The March of the Living under the motto “Danube looks at you through their eyes”.
The marchers arrived at Strand beach on January 23, 2015, around the time when the order came for Razzia to stop. The participants said The Lord’s Prayer and the Jewish prayer Kadish, and then the president of the municipal chapter of the Holocaust Memorial Society, Aleksandar Gabona, read the poem “Danube”.
Following that, the president of the Society and author of “Genocide Revealed” called on gathered participants to pronounce a verdict against the main perpetrator Miklos Horthy, Hungarian regent — since no institution has ever proclaimed him guilty. The verdict was then pronounced by that one-of-a-kind court made up of ordinary citizens. The verdict is based on five points describing all the crimes that Horthy had committed in the region during World War II, namely:
The Pogrom in April 1941, when Hungarian occupation troops murdered 8,500 peaceful citizens;
8,021 innocent lives claimed by the concentration camp for Serbs “Sarvar”;
Countless dead Serbs and Jews who were sent to the Eastern front as “labor battalions” to aid Hitler’s war campaign against the Soviet Union;
The death of 42,000 Serbs deported to the Croatian death camp Jasenovac;
The January Razzia 1942.
The total count of civilian losses in the Serbian region of Backa, which Horthy occupied in World War II, amounts to around 100,000.
The verdict also established that the Hungarian regent was responsible for the death of over 3,000 Serbs in Novi Sad Razzia 1942, as well 1,363 Jews, 56 Hungarians, 31 Croats, 23 Germans, 22 Russians, 21 Slovaks, 8 Ruthenians, 5 Czechs, 4 Slovenians, 1 Bulgarian, 1 Greek, 1 Italian, 1 Romanian and 1 Muslim. The verdict says that it is not against the Hungarian people. Rather, it has individualized the crime and has pointed out the main perpetrator whose speedy rehabilitation has been going on unabated in Hungary. If this verdict had not been passed this year, Horthy would have most likely remained a war criminal with no sentence in the post-World War II history.
Aleksandar Veljic was born in Belgrade and graduated from Sixth Belgrade High School with a librarianship major. He has lived in London, studied at Francis King School of English and attended Ambassador College in the United States, majoring in English literature. Alexander returned to Serbia in 1996 and embarked on a close examination of the little-known World War II crimes committed by the Nazi Germans and their allies in the former occupied Yugoslavia. His painstaking research has resulted in several works on the genocide against Serbs, Jews, Roma, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Russian emigrants, and anti-Fascists of German, Hungarian, and other descent.
Filed Under: Latest News Tagged: 1942 raid, aleksandar veljic, bloody massacre, danube looks at you, danube river drowning, drowning, holocaust memorial society, hungarian victims, jewish victims, living march, miklos horthy, novi said, peace march, pogrom, serbian victims, serbs, strand beach, world war 2, WWII
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Paintings Over £500
Painting Under £500
Trai Hiscock Sold Works
Around Purbeck
Senior Soulmates
The Square and Compass
Trai Hiscock achieved her ambition to become an artist by a roundabout route. When she was at school careers advisors were less than enthusiastic about her artistic ambitions and like many of us she was persuaded to look elsewhere. The prospect of a career behind a desk loomed before her, as did the need to earn a living. However, driven by both a creative urge and a desire for independence she went off in a rather different direction and opened her own hairdressing and beauty business in 1984. She ran this for twelve years while taking a variety of art courses at local colleges.
In 1996 she became a teacher of English as a second language and after a couple of years in Mexico and Russia returned to the exotic climes of Bournemouth where she also began to study silversmithing. This led her to establish a teaching studio, which enabled others to develop skills in both painting and silver and to show their work. At the same time her own work developed and she began to accept commissions. Trai now divides her time between painting and silversmithing and teaching.
Trai’s paintings are characterised by her love of animals and her slightly warped but affectionate sense of humour. She shares her home with her long-suffering husband John, a 1950s Wolsley and a varying number of dogs. We see her dogs in many of her paintings. John has proved an elusive subject but we have great hopes for the Wolsley.
The Dorset countryside and coast form the backdrop to many of Trai’s paintings as do well known landmarks, for example, the Square and Compass. These scenes have a slightly eccentric population, ranging from naked vicars and policemen to distraught children and affectionate retired couples. What they have in common is that as well as finding humour in her character’s predicaments Trai explores relationships and unlikely juxtapositions in a way that is almost a playful reference to the Surrealists who painted in and around Swanage in the inter-war years.
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The effect of the Libyan Civil War on the relationship between France and Italy
After the Muammer Kaddafi is overthrown in the year 2011; the rival groups’ desire of
obtaining power by controlling the lands and oil resources of Libyan have been increased and
it caused a civil war in Libya. In this process, France and Italy are two of the main political
actors that work for gaining foreign political interests by using the outcomes of the civil war
in Libya. After the elections done in June 25, 2014; the second civil war erupted, and two
independent governments occurred in Libya which divided the state in two regimes. One of
them is called House of Representatives which placed in the far east of the country; Tobruk
and headed by Aguila Saleh Issa. Therewithal, the government against it which is named as
Government of National Accord is established under United Nations through mediation of
Italy and by the guidance of the Libyan Political Agreement that signed on 17 December
2015. Then, on March 30, 2016 the Government of National Accord came to Tripoli with 18
ministers under the leadership of Fayez al-Sarraj. Thereby, the conflicts and disagreements
between two governments has been officially started. The results of conflicts and recent
developments that emerge during the civil war can be easily influenced by the economic and
politic competition between these two countries: France and Italy.
On the side of France, the policies that are implemented during the war can play the
key role about having the control over the Africa’s coastal region by using Mediterranean’s
strategical location and gathering the countries like; Chad, Sudan and Niger which are
neighbours of Libya and under a political sphere to achieve two-staged population area.
That’s why France Government continue to support the Caliph Hafter by increasing its’
diplomatic actions about military and economy in domestic and international level. In
addition, we can show as an example the fact that they gave antitank missiles which made by
United States to Hafter in July 2019. Besides to military and financial aids they did, the armed
struggle that they went into against the Government of National Accord had caused the
French government to reconsider its policies against this civil war. On the other hand, the
Italian administration evaluates the situation under geopolitical reasons by highlighting Libya
is a neighboring country to Italy and the country being the only country where Italy maintains
'private' relations among North African countries. Due to these reasons, Libya has a crucial
role in Italy's foreign policy in terms of economy and security. Italy has been the most
affected European country by the civil war, as it invested heavily in Libya, including in the
energy field. Due to the important role of Italy in Libya, the Macron government aims to
strengthen its relations with Italy in order to achieve its strategic goals. In addition, the
relationship between the two countries has gained importance to eliminate the problems that
emerged in the Rome due to the French stance on Libya and to fill the strategic leadership gap
in the European Union (EU). Although the Italian government has implemented a partial
balancing policy against France, the civil war in Libya has been a key factor in emerging a
strategic and economic competition between Italy and France.
This article written by Yaşar Bora Togo
Tags: France Italy Libya
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2021 5th International Conference on Applied Mathematics and Data Science
May 29-31, 2021, Wuhan, China
中文版 More Conferences
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Days to the Submission Deadline
Become Speakers
Join Committee
ConferenceMay 29-31, 2021
Submission Before Mar. 20, 2021
Notification20-40 days after the submission
Publication15-20 days after the final edition
Email: huiyi123net_may01@126.com
Cell Phone: 0086-18101720867
About Wuhan
Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province in the People's Republic of China. It is the largest city in Hubei and the most populous city in Central China. The name "Wuhan" came from the city's historical origin from the conglomeration of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, which are collectively known as the "Three Towns of Wuhan". It lies in the eastern Jianghan Plain, at the confluence of the Yangtze river and its largest tributary, the Han River and is known as "Nine Provinces' Thoroughfare". Because of its key role in domestic transportation, Wuhan is sometimes referred to as "the Chicago of China" by foreign sources.
May 29, 2021 is the registration time, May 30, 2020 is the keynote session and panel session for the conference, and May 31, 2021 is the time for the tourism. Here is the planned tourism route（8:00-17:00）:
East Lake Moshan Scenic Area(东湖磨山景区) --- Hubei Provincial Museum (湖北省博物馆) --- Yellow Crane Tower(黄鹤楼) ---Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge(武汉长江大桥)--- Hubu Lane (户部巷)
East Lake Moshan Scenic Area(东湖磨山景区)
East Lake is a large freshwater lake within the city limits of Wuhan, China, the largest or the second largest urban lake in China. Wuhan's East Lake covers an area of 88 square kilometers (33 square kilometers of water area). It is one of the 5A tourist zones of China, and admits over a million people yearly. It is one of the largest sites in Huazhong District. It is also the largest "City Lake" in China. East Lake is made of four areas, Ting Tao, Moshan, Luo Yan Island and Museum of Hubei Province. One end of Moshan features a Daoist temple built over the putative site of where one of the characters in Romance of the Three Kingdoms performed special Qi Men Dun Jia rites before the famous battle of Red Cliffs.
Figure 1: East Lake Moshan Scenic Area(东湖磨山景区)
Hubei Provincial Museum(湖北省博物馆)
Hubei Provincial Museum was built in 1953. It is located in Donghu scenic area, Wuchang District, Wuhan City. It covers an area of 81909 square meters, a building area of 49611 square meters and an exhibition hall area of 13427 square meters. It has a collection of over 200,000 objects, including the Sword of Goujian, an ancient set of bronze bells (Bianzhong), which is largest ancient musical instrument exhibition hall in China and extensive artifacts from the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng and the tombs at Baoshan. The particular importance of several of the archaeological items in the museum's collection has been recognized by the national government by including them into the short list of Chinese cultural relics forbidden to be exhibited abroad.
Figure 2: Hubei Provincial Museum(湖北省博物馆)
Yellow Crane Tower(黄鹤楼)
Yellow Crane Tower, located on Snake Hill in Wuchang, is one of the "Three Famous Towers South of Yangtze River. According to records, the tower was first built in 223 A.D during the Three Kingdoms period (220-280). After completion, the tower served as a gathering place for celebrities and poets to party and compose poetry. It was estimated that up to the Tongzhi Reign of the Qing dynasty, as many as 300 poems about the tower had been found in historical literature. Cui Hao, a famous poet during the Tang dynasty (618-907), made the tower well known throughout China with his poem "Yellow Crane Tower". Destroyed many times in successive dynasties, the present tower is a complete reconstruction and is the result of four years of work beginning in 1981. It is regarded as the symbol of Wuhan city.
Figure 3: Yellow Crane Tower(黄鹤楼)
Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge(武汉长江大桥)
The Wuhan Yangtze Great Bridge, commonly known as Wuhan First Yangtze Bridge, is a double-deck road and rail bridge across the Yangtze River in Wuhan, in Central China. At its completion in 1957, the bridge was the easternmost crossing of the Yangtze, and was often referred to as the "First Bridge of the Yangtze".
Figure 4: Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge(武汉长江大桥)
Hubu Lane (户部巷)
Located in Ziyou Road, Wuchang District of Wuhan City, Hubu Lane is one of the most famous streets in Wuhan with over 400 years of history. The 150-meter long street is crowded with various kinds of suppliers, including snack stalls, shopping booths and entertainment venues. It has become Wuhan's official snack street, containing 160 stores that sell 170 types of breakfast foods and snacks. In here, you can try some authentic Re Gan Mian (hot-and-dry noodles), Fried Tofu Skin and shaomai (Steamed Pork Dumplings).
Figure 5: Hubu Lane (户部巷)
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The IKEA journey into space just started
It’s Democratic Design Days, and a great day for travelling into space. Going way back, the notion of space has always been an interesting topic for IKEA. What does comfort mean for compact living? How do we feel in small spaces? This year IKEA is digging a bit deeper…
An IKEA team is looking into how a Mars habitat can become more like home. To tackle the challenge head-on, they’re spending three days at Mars Desert Research Station* habitat in Utah – a confined spacecraft-like environment that simulates the experience of outer space. Real astronauts spend up to three years here to prepare for the real deal. Together with Constance Adams, Space Architect & Engineer, they’re going through a mini-version of the “Mars Training Program”.
“It’s a crazy, fun experience. We’re basically completely isolated for three days to get a taste of what astronauts go through for three years. It’s almost like that misery you feel when you’re out camping. But of course, it’s great to be able to sit down and really spend time with amazingly creative people. That in itself is a luxury,” IKEA Creative Leader, Michael Nikolic says.
The team is curious to find out how this newfound space knowledge might be relevant to the urban life in mega cities, where small-space living, air and water pollution is the norm. If they can find solutions that work on a small scale, what’s stopping them from applying it to a larger one?
“I think that the essence of this collection will be about appreciating what we have on Earth: human beings, plants clean water and air. But also diversity and a sense of belonging – things that we take for granted on a daily basis. After this journey, it’ll probably feel pretty awesome to come home to my own bed,” he smiles.
*Mars Desert Research Station is a program created and managed by the Mars Society.
You’ve seen the teaser, now it’s here…
The IKEA journey to space – on stage about upcoming project (Democratic Design Days 2017) from IKEA Today on Vimeo.
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Civil Liberties, Domestic Policy, Law Enforcement, Politics
Black Lives Matter & the War on Cops
December 15, 2015 jellee 2 Comments
The war on cops is about as legitimate as the war on Christmas. If there were such a war, there is no question whom is winning.
Roughly one thousand people are killed by police every year in America (there’s currently no federal database). In contrast, about 100 cops (unfortunately) die on the job each year. Of those hundred unfortunate deaths, the majority are result of vehicle collisions – not targeted killings.
It is far more dangerous to be a garbage man, or a roofer, a trucker, or basically anyone who deals with heavy machinery, than it is to be a cop in America. We live in literally the safest time to have a career in law enforcement in US history – yet 58% of us believe there is a war being waged against them.
To most of us: Cops killing scores of unarmed black people + black people protesting = war on cops.
Self-described wacko bird Ted Cruz has accused Black Lives Matter of celebrating the murder of cops. Potential fascist-in-chief Donald Trump has condoned the beating of BLM protesters at his rallies (his campaign compared the first incident to Trump supporters interrupting a black church service).
FBI Director James Comey has blamed BLM protesters for frightening law enforcement so thoroughly that they are incapable of doing their jobs, resulting in a (non-existent) spike in inner-city violent crime – dubbed the Ferguson Effect. This is a thinly-veiled threat of violence against the populace. If cops aren’t allowed to violate the civil rights of citizens without criticism, let alone consequence – then they will do all they can to unleash anarchy. Nice little city you have there… Pasty bureaucrats & AM howlers have labeled BLM a domestic terrorist group.
We live in a country where the mere suggestion that perhaps black lives matter as well somehow requires not only a rebuttal, in all lives matter, but an outright counter-movement in blue lives matter.
We are a terribly racist people. It’s historically been our default. Sure, we don’t keep blacks as pets anymore, as they are equal citizens in theory. But all we’ve really done is introduce subtlety into our racist practices. We don’t lock our blacks in chains anymore. We keep them locked away in cages. We don’t have slave patrols or lynch mobs anymore; we have hung-juries, justifiable homicide-by-cop, and an ever-expanding interpretation of the castle doctrine. It is no longer in good taste to use the n-word in public. So we instead call them thugs and we speak of urban culture. We’ve replaced literacy tests & poll-taxes with Voter ID laws, felon disenfranchisement, and shuttering & shortening hours of voter precincts. (Forty percent of black males in Virginia, and 25% in FLA, cannot vote.)
The city of Chicago has a multi-million dollar restitution fund for the years of physical torture levied against young black males in the city. Not during the 1960’s – this century. Chicago police still use a literal black site to disappear suspects, specifically (unofficially, of course) used to violate the civil rights of its citizens. The Homan Square site has been used for torture (including anal assault), and is generally used to keep suspects from having a lawyer present during questioning, or from making phone calls.
Police reports show that Laquan McDonald stabbed the tire of a police cruiser, and lunged at officers with a knife. He never stabbed the tire. He was shot twice while standing, and fourteen more times on the pavement. His murder by Chicago police was covered up by the entire corrupt system. From the terrified & poorly trained Jason Van Dyke, who murdered Laquan in cold blood. To the other eight cops on the scene who not only remained silent, but went back and erased video evidence from a nearby Burger King. To internal review, the police union, the chief of police – all the way up to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and State Attorney Anita Alvarez. Officer Van Dyke was allowed to keep his tax-payer-funded job (on desk duty) for 13 months. Alvarez finally filed charges, hours before dash cam evidence was released. Unwillingly of course, it took thirteen months, repeated judicial orders, and numerous FOIA requests.
Mike Brown punched an officer seated in his cruiser, was shot, and ran. We were led to believe that he suddenly morphed into super negro, and decided to charge the officer after fleeing over 150 ft. The prosecutor blatantly threw the case, forcing the grand jury to let Darren Wilson walk.
Twelve-year old Tamir Rice was murdered in cold blood by Cleveland police. He had a toy gun in an open-carry state. They claimed he refused repeated commands to drop the gun. Video evidence shows was shot within two seconds of officers arriving. His sister was handcuffed, and thrown into the back of the cruiser as he died. A year later, still no charges.
Eric Garner was choked to death on video. His crime was breaking up a fight, and being known for selling un-taxed loosies. Officers escalated and escalated, until he was choked him to death as he pleaded for air. The only person charged has been the guy who captured the video.
John Crawford was killed for having a toy gun slung over his back while talking on his cell phone to his mother in an (again, open-carry) Ohio Walmart. Cops say he was pointing the gun at customers, and refused commands to drop the weapon. They interrogated his girlfriend, and attempted to get her to say that he brought the gun with them to the store. Video once again proved they were lying. Once again, no consequences.
Time after time we are assured in contemporaneous reports that officers were justified because of this or that. We are assured that they will investigate themselves, that we must simply be patient. Then it’s the silent treatment. Ongoing investigation.
If people are upset, the media go about demonizing the deceased, who can no longer defend themselves. They must have smoked weed that one time. We found a picture where he looked scary. He was wearing a hoodie. She should have followed directions better. Or faster. Why did he do this? Why did he say that?
Why is he dead! Why is he dead?
Mounting video evidence supports the claim that we do not simply have a few bad-apples with a callous indifference to life. It is, in fact,the bunch.
It is true that a relatively small percentage of officers are responsible for the majority of complaints. However, those bad-apples are rarely, if ever, charged. They rarely even lose their jobs! Even then, they usually are allowed to resign and find a job in another precinct (like the priests). Internal investigators are considered snitches. Good cops in bad neighborhoods are weeded out – harassed & left without backup until they (if their lucky) find work in a nice white neighborhood where they don’t have to worry about moral decisions on the job.
It’s the culture. The thin blue line. It’s the system. The entire system. Thanks to the SCOTUS, cops are legally justified in using lethal force so long as they claim within reason that they got scared. When local judges who are elected are confronted with police brutality cases, they can’t afford to have police unions in opposition for holding their members accountable. Same goes for prosecutors, who have symbiotic relationships with the cops, who are often star-witnesses & evidence gatherers. When all of the stars align, and a particularly blatant case finally does make it to trial, overwhelmingly-white juries simply take the word of cops as bond and rarely find them guilty.
Bill Bratton
Blacks are far more likely to be stopped & searched by the cops. Being comparatively random, searches of blacks are far less likely to turn up contraband. When drugs are found, blacks are far more likely to be charged than whites. Blacks are given stiffer charges for the same offenses. They are more likely to be found guilty at trial. They are given harsher sentences when found guilty of the same crimes. They serve longer time in prison, even when receiving the same sentences. They are more likely to receive a death sentence.
Many states won’t let felons vote, or let them qualify for a Pell Grant, or live with someone receiving food stamps (SNAP) or living in public housing. We make them check a box on applications so they can’t even get an interview. We assign exorbitant fees for post-release supervision. We make them feel like second class citizens, and make it as tough as possible to make money legally. We push them right back into jail.
UNDATED: This undated photo provided by the U.S. Court of Appeals shows Judge John G. Roberts. President George W. Bush nominated Roberts on July 19, 2005 to fill the vacancy that will be created by Justice Sandra Day O’Conner when she retires from the U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo by R. Strauss/Smithsonian via Getty Images)
We have a supreme court which has said that racism is both a thing of the past, and has spread throughout the country. They’ve gutted the Voting Rights Act – crown jewel of Civil Rights Era legislation. In the process of eliminating race as a standard for Affirmative Action, Justice Scalia suggested that blacks don’t belong in good colleges because they learn slower.
Racism is like a liquid. It’s amorphic. It accumulates at the bottom. Worst of all, it makes up part of all of us. We are all bombarded with the same stereotypical portrayals of people of color (POC) by a melanin-deficient entertainment industry. We all see a similarly-pasty news media describe & depict black victims as drug/gang adjacent ne’er-do-wells; and white murders as troubled formerly –adorable adolescents, or head-cases who are in no way reflective at worst.
We all have implicit biases & in-group favoritism. In simulations where we shoot armed individuals, blacks are shot much quicker than whites, both when armed and unarmed. It takes longer for us to associate positive terms with black faces. Ebay auctions with items held by black hands receive lower bids. AirB&B requests by
black sounding names are more likely to be denied. Job applications with black sounding names get fewer responses. Beginning at the age of 11, black children are perceived as 4.5 years older, and assigned more culpability.
Black people are far more likely to be in unemployed or in jail. They are far less likely to be a politician, a CEO, a professor, or an engineer. They have far less wealth/lower incomes. They even live shorter lives.
Yet some of us look at all of this and say, What’s wrong with the blacks? We point to Oprah & Obama, and ask why they don’t all simply lift themselves by their bootstraps. We blame the culture. We blame the fathers. We blame the music. We blame them for drugs. We blame their work ethic (ever since they stopped working for free).
We blame black-on-black crime. Why isn’t Jessie Jackson in Chicago!?! As though every ethnic group (aside from Native Americans) aren’t victimized by their own. As though we have a problem with Tyrone getting the benefit of doubt all along the way, and eventually going free, after admittedly killing someone.
In rich white neighborhoods, the police provide customer service. They’re a bunch of Andy Griffiths, and that is how rich white folks view the cops. Stands to reason. They aren’t likely to be harassed for trivial actions such as grilling meat or catching a bus. Their kids aren’t harassed for looking suspicious. When white kids in nice neighborhoods are caught doing something wrong – well, that could be a judge’s kid, or the mayor’s nephew. Roughing them up, or even holding them accountable for their actions, could be a big mistake. White kids in small towns – well their uncle could be the local pastor, or on the town council.
If rich white people know any blacks, they are likely to also be wealthy, and thus more likely to share their conservative views of those people. Poor, rural white people want to hold onto the antiquated notion that everything right with America is sepia toned. We want to hold believe that we are superior to someone, anyone. We go to great lengths to deny racism, to deny white privilege. We take it as an attack- an attack on our personal accomplishments, an attack on our ability to sense the world around us. We see a zero-sum game. The ascendance of anyone else toward realized equality must inherently require a decline of whites. The decline of America. We can’t let it happen. We want our country back.
In recent polling, seventy-eight percent of voters chose all lives matter, to eleven prevent identifying with black lives matter.
What we fail to recognize, is that all lives do not face the same threats that black lives are forced to endure in America. Specifically, when dealing with interactions with the police, blacks are far more likely to die than whites.
Do we think black people have simply been lying all of this time? They’ve all been brain-washed by Al Sharpton?
Consider how we treat protest & civil rights movements the same manner in which we did in the 1960’s. We still monitor their communications. We still infiltrate them undercover agents (both for intel, and to incite riots during protests). We still rough-up & arrest peaceful protesters for inhabiting public spaces. We still call them agitators. We still blame anyone movement-adjacent for a handful of vandals, footage of whom is played on a loop in the media.
The current situation is untenable.
Captain Johnson
Respect is something which our police forces require. Trustworthiness is something we must require of them. We give them a gun, and with it the ultimate authority to end a person’s life. Those responsibilities must be taken seriously. The police literally work for us. They must be trained to protect the lives of civilians at all cost, not protect their own hind-quarters at all cost. They need to be trained to deal with sometimes difficult mentally ill people. They need to jettison the view of disrespect as the ultimate crime.
They need to stop killing us. This is not normal. This is not acceptable.
Cops must no longer be used to wage a racially charged war on drugs, ensnaring black and brown people into a system which is difficult to escape.
Law enforcement must have proper civilian oversight, not simply internal investigators. We need to incorporate more cooperation with community watch programs – not simply more money for more cops – in urban communities. The majority of cops should be required to live where they work. They should see the same community they serve at the grocery store, in church on Sunday, and at the football game on Friday night. They should have both dash & lapel cams, which they should not be allowed to simply & unilaterally disable on a whim (same goes for the audio).
Officers are trained in deescalation roughly 5% of the time that they are trained on firearms & defensive maneuvers. They use simulators in which citizens jump from cars immediately shooting. They are trained that anyone within 21 feet is a danger.
They apparently need to be trained not to shoot people in the back, shoot people who are hand-cuffed, people who are in the fetal position, people with their hands in the air, people who are naked and obviously unarmed, people with butter knives, et cetera.
Unfortunately, poorly-trained cops are given military equipment & quotas and unleashed upon the community, who are seen as potential threats, as the enemy, and cops the occupying force.
There is no war on cops. There is a demand for better trained cops, and for accountability to the people. For justice.
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2 thoughts on “Black Lives Matter & the War on Cops”
“Yes, they say it, there will be a race war.” the host stated, adding that “The Black Lives Matter movement isn’t enough,” yet admitting an affiliation with activists within that movement.
Tena Frevert says:
Very good blog post. I certainly love this site. Thanks!
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Home » Arts and Literature » Literature » Narrative Fiction » Mary McNeil Fenollosa
Alabama Literature
This Goodly Land: Alabama's Literary Landscape
Mary McNeil Fenollosa
John H. Hafner, Spring Hill College
Mary McNeil Fenollosa (1865-1954), publishing primarily under the pseudonym Sidney McCall, was a popular novelist and poet in the early decades of the twentieth century. She grew up in Mobile and at different times in her life lived and wrote there. Several of her novels are set in Alabama. Today, she is remembered, if at all, as the wife of Ernest Fenollosa, a scholar of Asian culture and an art collector. But her well-constructed fiction deserves attention because it stands out from the mostly sentimental, plot-driven work of her contemporaries at the beginning of the twentieth century and because she creates believable and complex characters and places them in settings that effectively evoke the atmosphere of their time and place.
Mary McNeill (she later dropped an "l" from her name) was born on March 8, 1865, in Wilcox County on her grandparents' plantation, the oldest of five children. Her father, William Stoddard McNeill of Mobile, was a lieutenant in the Confederate Army, and her mother, Laura Sibley, fled Baldwin County to her parents' home after Union troops burned the family's home. The family reunited after the war, and Mary grew up in Mobile and was educated at the city's Irving Female Institute.
With her family in difficult financial circumstances, she married Ludolph Chester at the age of 18, and the couple had a son, Allen Chester. Ludolph died two years into the marriage. Upon hearing of her loss, former suitor Ledyard Scott wrote to her from Tokyo with a proposal of marriage. Mary accepted and sailed for Japan in 1890 with her infant son, marrying Scott shortly after her arrival in Tokyo. The marriage was not a happy one, however, and Mary divorced Scott and returned to Mobile in 1892, now with two children, after the birth of her daughter, Erwin Scott. Despite the difficult circumstances, Mary developed a love of Japanese culture and art and continued to pursue her interest in it upon her return.
In 1895, Mary, now 30 years old, heard about and applied for a job in the Asian art division of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and began working with Ernest Fenollosa, the most prominent scholar of Asian art of the time. Ernest soon divorced his wife to marry Mary, causing such scandal in Boston society that the newly married couple decided to move to New York. They then moved to Japan in 1897, after Ernest was appointed the official arts commissioner to the Japanese emperor.
In Japan, the Fenollosas became the center of a group that included Japanese artists and scholars as well as fellow expatriates such as author Lafcadio Hearn and visiting Americans such as renowned historian Henry Adams and artist John LaFarge. Ernest researched Chinese and Japanese art, acted as a purchaser for the Boston museum's Asian collection, and advised fellow collectors (including Charles Freer, whose collection would eventually become the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution); Mary began writing poetry and fiction.
In 1899, Mary published her first collection of poems, Out of the Nest: A Flight of Verses. Reviewers praised her imagery, especially that contrasting East and West. In 1901, she published her first novel, Truth Dexter, under the pseudonym Sidney McCall. The novel tells the story of a southern wife, the title character, whose marriage is threatened by a lustful Boston socialite. Fenollosa decided not to use her real name because, having written the novel as a cure for homesickness and without thought of publishing it, she was afraid that the negative views of Boston society and the "big-city" wiles of the antagonist would reflect badly on her. Truth Dexter was an immediate and major success, selling extremely well and receiving positive reviews in both popular and critical magazines. Also in 1901, she published a long essay accompanied by color plates entitled Hiroshige, the Artist of Mist, Snow and Rain, under her own name.
Her second and third novels, The Breath of the Gods (1905) and The Dragon Painter (1906), were both set in Japan. Breath of the Gods, published as Sidney McCall, centered on an American senator sent as ambassador to Japan, his wife and daughter, and the daughter's Japanese fellow student, whose story of returning to Japan is the center of the novel. It was a huge success and was adapted as a Broadway play, a film, and an opera. The Dragon Painter, the only novel published under her real name, tells the story of an aging Japanese artist who fears the introduction of Western traditions to his homeland and wants to pass his traditional approach to art on to an artist of the younger generation. The novel also was adapted as a film.
Fenollosa published six more novels as Sidney McCall, as well as a book of children's verses, Blossoms from a Japanese Garden (1913), under her own name, but she never repeated the success of her first three novels. The later novels are notable for their departure from Japanese subjects. Red Horse Hill (1909), an attack on child labor in the textile mills of Alabama, is interesting despite a melodramatic plot too dependent on coincidence; it was filmed in 1917 as The Eternal Mother, with Ethel Barrymore in the lead role. The Strange Woman (1914) is a novelization of a play of the same name by William J. Hurlbut. The Stirrup Latch (1915), a love story set in Mobile and Spring Hill, avoids the overly romantic and sentimental tone and plot that characterized many novels of the time and ranks in artistry with her first three novels, but it did not share their success. Ariadne of Allan Water (1914), Sunshine Beggars (1918), and Christopher Laird (1919) also met with little success.
Mary also contributed to her husband's major work, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic Design; she completed it after his untimely death in 1908, returning to Japan to check on dates and other factual details. Epochs was published in 1912 and was immediately recognized as the authoritative study on its subject. Mary Fenollosa stopped writing after the publication of Christopher Laird. In 1952, she returned to southern Alabama, settling in Baldwin County, where her mother's family, the Sibleys, had lived. She died on January 11, 1954, in Montrose, Baldwin County.
Works by Mary McNeil Fenollosa
Out of the Nest: A Flight of Verses (1899)
Truth Dexter (1901)
Hiroshige, the Artist of Mist, Snow and Rain: An Essay (1901)
The Breath of the Gods (1905)
The Dragon Painter (1906)
Red Horse Hill (1909)
"Foreword" to Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic Design (1912)
Blossoms from a Japanese Garden: A Book of Child-Verses (1913)
Ariadne of Allan Water (1914)
The Stirrup Latch (1915)
Sunshine Beggars (1918)
Brooks, Van Wyck. Fenollosa and His Circle and Other Essays in Biography. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962.
Chisolm, Lawrence W. Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
Delaney, Caldwell. "Mary McNeil Fenollosa, An Alabama Woman of Letters." Alabama Review 16 (July 1965): 163-73.
Dyer, Anne H. "Mary McNeil Fenollosa." In Library of Southern Literature, edited by Edwin Anderson Alderman et al., vol. IV, pp. 1591-94 (New Orleans: Martin and Hoyt, 1913).
Rittenhouse, Jessie B. "Mary McNeil Fenollosa." In The Younger American Poets. Boston: Little, Brown, 1904.
Published: July 16, 2009 |  Last updated: July 24, 2012
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lululemon athletica inc. Updates Revenue and Earnings Expectations for the Fourth Quarter Ahead of the ICR Conference
VANCOUVER, British Columbia–(BUSINESS WIRE)–lululemon athletica inc. (NASDAQ:LULU) today announced the company now expects revenue and earnings to be at the high end of its prior range of expectations for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 ending January 31, 2021.
Calvin McDonald, Chief Executive Officer, commented: “We’re pleased with the momentum over the holiday period as our investments in lululemon and MIRROR allowed us to connect with guests both physically and digitally. We remain confident about our opportunities in 2021 and committed to our Power of Three growth plan.”
For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019, the company now expects the growth rate in net revenue to be at the high end of its mid-to-high teens expectation. The company also expects the growth rate in adjusted diluted earnings per share to now be at the high end of its mid-single digits expectation.
Members of the management team will be meeting virtually with analysts and investors at the ICR Conference on January 11-13, 2021.
Please refer to section below entitled “Non-GAAP Financial Measures.”
About lululemon athletica inc.
lululemon athletica inc. (NASDAQ:LULU) is a healthy lifestyle inspired athletic apparel company for yoga, running, training, and most other sweaty pursuits, creating transformational products and experiences which enable people to live a life they love. Setting the bar in technical fabrics and functional designs, lululemon works with yogis and athletes in local communities for continuous research and product feedback. For more information, visit www.lululemon.com.
This press release includes estimates, projections, statements relating to the Company’s business plans, objectives, and expected operating results that are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. In many cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “outlook,” “believes,” “intends,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “potential” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements also include the Company’s guidance and outlook statements. These statements are based on management’s current expectations, but they involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements as a result of risks and uncertainties, which include, without limitation: the Company’s ability to maintain the value and reputation of its brand; the current COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and related government, private sector, and individual consumer responsive actions; its highly competitive market and increasing competition; increasing product costs and decreasing selling prices; its ability to anticipate consumer preferences and successfully develop and introduce new, innovative and updated products; its ability to accurately forecast guest demand for its products; changes in consumer shopping preferences and shifts in distribution channels; its ability to expand internationally in light of its limited operating experience and limited brand recognition in new international markets; its ability to realize the potential benefits and synergies sought with the acquisition of MIRROR; its ability to manage its growth and the increased complexity of its business effectively; its ability to successfully open new store locations in a timely manner; seasonality; its reliance on and limited control over third-party suppliers to provide fabrics for and to produce its products; the operations of many of its suppliers are subject to international and other risks; suppliers or manufacturers not complying with its Vendor Code of Ethics or applicable laws; its ability to deliver its products to the market and to meet guest expectations if it has problems with its distribution system; increasing labor costs and other factors associated with the production of its products in South and South East Asia; its ability to safeguard against security breaches with respect to its information technology systems; any material disruption of its information systems; its ability to have technology-based systems function effectively and grow its e-commerce business globally; an economic recession, depression, or downturn or economic uncertainty in its key markets; global economic and political conditions and global events such as health pandemics; its ability to source and sell its merchandise profitably or at all if new trade restrictions are imposed or existing trade restrictions become more burdensome; changes in tax laws or unanticipated tax liabilities; its ability to comply with trade and other regulations; fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates; imitation by its competitors; its ability to protect its intellectual property rights; conflicting trademarks and the prevention of sale of certain products; its exposure to various types of litigation; and other risks and uncertainties set out in filings made from time to time with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov, including, without limitation, its most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. You are urged to consider these factors carefully in evaluating the forward-looking statements contained herein and are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which are qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements. The forward-looking statements made herein speak only as of the date of this press release and the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update such forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances, except as may be required by law.
Non-GAAP Financial Measures
The adjusted earnings per share expectation continues to exclude certain integration and acquisition-related compensation costs incurred in connection with the acquisition of MIRROR, and the related tax effects. The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP.
The following table reconciles expected growth in adjusted diluted earnings per share, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019, with the most directly comparable measure calculated in accordance with GAAP.
Percentage Growth in
Diluted Earnings Per
GAAP results
Low-Single Digits
MIRROR integration and acquisition-related costs, net of tax
2% to 3%
Adjusted results (non-GAAP)
Mid-Single Digits
lululemon athletica inc.
Howard Tubin
ICR, Inc.
Joseph Teklits/Caitlin Churchill
Erin Hankinson
Eleanor French
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SECOND NEW HEART FOR 15 YEAR OLD
Posted on September 2, 2020 by keywestlou
Somewhere in this great land of ours is a 15 year old young lady living brightly with a new heart. Not her first. The first came when she was 2 months old.
It worked good till Mother’s Day this year when she had a heart attack. Followed by 13 more. Widow maker ones.
She had been an active teenager. In fact, her whole life found her involved in normal activities. She participated in school sports. She was particularly adept at dancing and was a member of her high schools’s state dance team.
Doctors said time for a new heart.
She waited 10 days in the hospital till a compatible one was found.
She is back in school and intends to participate in the same events she had before her recent heart attacks. Both she and her doctors have given her a clean bill of health.
Bright and cheerful before and after. She has gained a new perspective on life: “Always remember that there is this light that’s always gonna come to you.”
Ah, the religious in life. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Liked and disliked.
The French Revolution began in 1789 and lasted 10 years. The people took over the government. Hated the royalists who had governed earlier and any who sympathized with them.
The religious for whatever reason seemed to side with the royalists.
The September Massacre took place September 1792. “Mobs” put many to death. Savagely. No guillotine. Three Roman Catholic Bishops were slaughtered, together with more than 200 priests.
Their political leanings and not belief in God the cause.
I have written for several years re U.S. preparedness to militarily engage. I questioned whether the U.S. was still the strongest nation in the world. Came to the conclusion it was not. China was.
I wrote a lengthy article some years ago comparing the strength of the U.S. and China. China was ahead in every respect. Especially as regards a Navy.
I also wrote several times over the years questioning where all the allocated monies for the military in the U.S. budget were being spent. Pointed out several audits reflecting billions of dollars were gone and could not be accounted for.
Even Trump saw how behind we were. From the time he took office, he has sought and received significantly increased monies to build up the military.
I am not impressed with what has been done in 3 1/2 years.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s 2020 annual report to Congress on Chinese Military Power spelled out how far behind the U.S. was, especially concerning the Navies of both.
The report stated in effect China had the world’s largest Navy. One which was getting better.
A comparison revealed China had 350 naval vessels. A good number new. Whereas the U.S. 293. Most older.
The U.S. was stronger regarding carriers. Eleven to six. However the report suggested carriers would not be the primary naval weapon of the future. China’s ships were of better technological quality.
China superior re anti- ship missiles. Some of which had the capacity to travel faster than Mach 5. Some believed to have the capacity to reach U.S.shores.
Trump basically got all the money he has requested for the military. How has it been spent. We should be advised.
Some short time after taking office, Trump met with China’s President Xi. It was reported at the time that Xi told Trump the U.S. had wasted money on Middle East wars for 17 years and gained nothing. Meantime, China had stayed out of wars and put their money into developing their military and infrastructure.
Labor Day 1935 fell on September 2. The Hurricane of 1935 struck that day.
It was the most intensive to ever pass over the U.S. It hit landfall near Islamorada. A category 5. Winds 200 mph. Tides 18-20 feet.
The Overland Railroad was being built. Right were the hurricane hit. The workers mostly immigrants.
Living accommodations for the workers were tents.
There was some prior warning a bad storm was on the way. A train lefty Miami to rescue the workers before the hurricane hit. It was almost to them when the hurricane struck with such strength that it blew most of the railroad cars off the track.
Four hundred were killed.
It was the end of the Overland Railroad. Already hurting financially, there were no monies to resurrect the project.
This is the 186th day of my self-quarantine. Twenty six weeks. One half a year. I have only left the house for doctor visits and hospital tests.
I’m getting edgy.
Over the years, I have developed a dislike for holier than thou persons who in back rooms sin like hell.
The most recent to be identified is Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife Becki. Jerry having been till most recently President of Liberty University. The son of Jerry Falwell now deceased.
Sex seems to be the problem.
Larry Flynt first published Hustler years ago. Photos of naked women, sensual stories, etc.
Jerry Falwell went after Flynt. Big time! Sinner! Fornicator, etc!
Flynt retaliated with a photo of Falwell and some words Jerry Falwell would never speak.
Falweell sued. The case went to the Supreme Court. Falwell claimed he had been defamed. The Supreme Court said the picture and words were not actionable. Freedom of speech applied.
Flynt wrote one time re religious leaders: “They actually work to increase the sum of human suffering. They are peddlers of religious snake oil.”
Modern day Elmer Gantrys.
Some of Trump’s utterances bring to mind…..You can’t fix stupid.
The Kenosha shooting. A police officer putting 7 bullets in the back of a black man.
Trump when questioned about the Kenosha shooting and others involving police and black persons responded in an unbelievable fashion. He said the police were under stress. He compared their shooting blacks to missing “a 3 foot putt.”
In the various shootings, he suggested the police “clutched.” There was no intent to harm the black person.
The World Health Organization announced 170 countries had joined under the auspices of WHO to work together to find a vaccine for coronavirus.
Trump refused to join. He said the group were to be led by the “corrupt” WHO and China.
I suspect the real reason Trump refused to join is he wants to go down in history as the person responsible for the discovery of a Covid-19 vaccine. Perhaps receive a Nobel Prize as a result.
Kentucky Derby saturday. I will be watching it alone at home sipping a Beefeaters. I generally watch at Don’s Place. Not this year.
Tuesday Talk last night. A good show. A different show.
I wanted to mention Trump as little as possible. Give everyone a break.
I did it! Only mentioned him a few times with regard to one topic.
People have to be tired of Trump, politics. etc. A big world out there. Many things happening.
Posted in Key West Lou | 13 Replies
13 comments on “SECOND NEW HEART FOR 15 YEAR OLD”
LLT on September 2, 2020 at 11:20 am said:
Fauci knowingly allowed Trump to bully him into not emphatically recommending people wear face masks, when the Covid Pandemic firs hit back in January/February 2020. This should forever disqualify Fauci from ever running for president, having failed to have protected the American people when it mattered and could have made a difference.
sandy feet on September 2, 2020 at 1:15 pm said:
Nancy has no Mask. But She wants me to were one. Typical liberal socialist leader. Does Nancy care about those who are trying to follow the rules on covert 19. Will Joe follow the rules?
Anonymous on September 2, 2020 at 2:01 pm said:
Sandy, who with his pseudonyme Sergey and others, is a foul mouthed, persistent pest, who only trolls Lou’s website for some sort of Perverted “jollies” His attacks on Nancy Pelosi are frequent, gratuitous and only exceeded by his attacks of Jews and the Chines (as he likes to call them) but never on the communist Russians. In the past he has attacked her for wearing a mask and now for not wearing a mask. He only wants to start a fight, never adding anything useful.
sandy on September 2, 2020 at 5:32 pm said:
You are funny. A Nancy quick study. A joke.
Nancy got her hair done while breaking the law. It’s ok for Nancy but not for you.
Serge on September 2, 2020 at 3:24 pm said:
Sandy! Where have you been, dude? These people have been accusing you of being me, or vice versa, for weeks now. It was amusing at first, but it’s getting tiresome. It’s time for them to call YOU school playground names again!
Nancy on September 2, 2020 at 4:11 pm said:
Mask UP boys, even in the school yard. You know it’s right and safe too.
Nancy, you are wasting your time. He’s just a troll with intent to harm by somehow starting chaos. Truth is they’re a bit of a laughingstock on Lou’s blog. Probably do more harm for anything they’re trying to influence.
They are tiresome and just follow the layers line . They do not know me from you so dumb they are. Their beach has been taken away and they do not care.
OMG, forever incoherent!
sandy feet on September 3, 2020 at 3:37 am said:
I would like a 15 year old to enjoy a Friday night game than have a old lady, using her white privilege, sinking in the back door , to get her roots done with out that lawful mask on be the number 3 in power.
The old wrinkled fart has shown to us all that she is just about her own place in life. At least AOC is not so vain.
Anonymous on September 3, 2020 at 7:14 am said:
I wonder what happened to the person they took that heart from?
I that that was Sandy Feet, judging from his post just before yours. He obviously has no heart and his mind is gone too.
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100 Years of Latin Love Songs
Paquito D’Rivera
Take a collection of the best Latin love songs of the last 10 decades, add the talents of one of the jazz world’s most respected reed players, a Grammy Award winning producer and a lot of strings and you come up with one very outstanding result. Paquito D’Rivera’s new release “100 Years of Latin Love Songs” uses this blend to lend a fresh perspective to 100 years of sensual ballads and romantic dance tunes from nine different Hispanic countries by such notable artists as Antonio Carlos Jobim, Alejandro Sanz and actor/singer Ruben Blades.
Recorded under the guidance of producer/arranger Bob Belden, this work revisits such globally popular tunes as “Ay Ay Ay” and “Acercate Mas” (first introduced to U.S. music fans via Nat King Cole’s rendition titled “Come Closer To Me”). Historical background on each of the disc’s ten songs, plus a brief “tour” of Latin America via maps and fascinating facts about each nation represented (including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela) are also included on the enhanced portion of the new CD.
As its full title suggests, Paquito D’Rivera with Strings — 100 Years of Latin Love Songs was recorded with a full string orchestra and features D’Rivera taking turns on clarinet, alto and soprano saxophone. Other musicians lending their talents to the sessions include pianist Dario Eskenazi, bassist Oscar Stagnaro, guitarist Fareed Haque, drummer Mark Walker and percussionist Luis Conte. The diverse instrumentation also includes Aquiles Baez on the cuatro (a Venezuelan guitar) and Roberto Perera on Paraguayan harp.
An icon in the world of Latin jazz, Paquito D’Rivera has recorded more than two dozen albums, including the 1997 Grammy Award-winning “Portraits of Cuba.” Born in Havana, he was one of the most prominent musicians to defect from his homeland following Castro’s rise to power. In recent years, in addition to his work with the Caribbean Jazz Project (with Dave Samuels and Andy Narell), D’Rivera has helmed his own Havana-New York Quintet and Dizzy Gillespie’s famed United Nation Orchestra.
. For more information visit the Heads Up Records Website
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The Bad Plus – Never Stop
E1 Music – September 2010
Recorded in Minnesota, NEVER STOP does just what the title says. It’s a rapid-fire succession of engaging performances by three musical explorers operating as highly skilled individuals — bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer David King — and as a seamless unit at the same time. NEVER STOP is a strictly instrumental affair and, as a result, is a 180� departure from the group’s previous release, For All I Care, which featured alt-rock vocalist Wendy Lewis on covers of rock classics, along with re-imaginings of 20th Century classical compositions by Stravinsky, Ligeti and Babbitt.
“We approached the recording of this album more like a jazz record from the ’50s or ’60s,” says King. “To eliminate studio separation as much as possible, I set up in the same room as Ethan, with Reid in plain sight. It created a really free atmosphere, as if we were playing a show.”
For the past 10 years The Bad Plus have created an uncompromising body of work by shattering musical convention. Rolling Stone called their amalgam of jazz, pop, rock and avant garde “about as badass as highbrow gets,” while The New York Times said the band is “better than anyone at mixing the sensibilities of post-’60s jazz and indie rock.” Few jazz groups in recent memory have amassed such acclaim, and few have generated as much controversy while audaciously bucking musical trends.
While the bulk of their output has been originals, they have famously deconstructed covers in the pop, rock, electronic and classical idioms. Their belief in a band ethos and “avant-garde populism” has placed them at the forefront of a new instrumental music movement, resulting in ever-larger audiences.
The threesome has been exchanging musical ideas since their teenage years. In the late ’80s, Anderson and King were two Minnesota high schoolers playing in fledgling rock bands and digging records by Coltrane and The Police. Anderson met Iverson in 1989. All three played together on one occasion a year later before going their separate ways for ten years.
They reconvened for a gig in Minneapolis in 2000. Sparks flew, studio sessions for an indie release ensued, and suddenly The New York Times called their maiden voyage one of the best releases of 2001. The band signed with Columbia, where they released These Are the Vistas in 2003, followed quickly by Give and then Suspicious Activity? In 2007 they released Prog, an album which balanced originals with spellbinding covers of Bowie, Bacharach, Tears for Fears and Rush. For All I Care, with its intriguing juxtaposition of rock and classical sensibilities, followed in 2009.
Ten years ago, not one of these musicians could have predicted where The Bad Plus was going, how long it would last, or what it might become along the way. What they were sure of, though, was a fierce sense of commitment that has blossomed into artistic success.
“We’ve always believed in our ideas,” says Anderson. ” We’ve always believed in making music that sounds like us, and we always thought there would be an audience for it.”
NEVER STOP showcases the band’s range as well as its three distinct personalities. From gentle and melodic to fierce and abstract, from swing to ’80s techno, NEVER STOP is the result of a group sound that embraces diversity as strength.
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Charles Darwin as a young man (circa 1840)
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."
One of the greatest thinkers of nineteenth century science, and a man whose legacy of ideas has so shaped the understanding of the world in which we live, Darwin replacing the static Judeo-Christian cosmos with a dynamic scientific-materialistic one.
A wide-ranging thinker, Darwin made contributions to human knowledge not only in his theory of evolution (surely one of the greatest ideas ever formulated), but also in geology, soil science, experimental botany and the study of animal behavior.
Darwin's ideas can be traced to his experience with domesticated animals (Darwin had bred domestic pigeons) and his familiarity with the work of the geologist Lyell and with Malthus' ideas about populations. Darwin devoted years of study to collecting information about problems within various species. Furthermore, he developed explanations and mechanisms for what he considered the "transmutation of species." In his famous voyage aboard the Beagle , he became aware of geographic variation within species, and kept notes on the natural history and geology of the countries he visited.
Of especial significance was his visit to the Galapagos Islands. This is a group of volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean on the equator and 600 miles west of Ecuador. The land animals and plants that were able to colonize there in isolation have developed into new species. Many unique species evolved here, such as giant tortoises (many of which have sadlty been driven to extinction by the predation of sailors, whho used them as source of fresh meat), iguanas, and finches. Not only are these species different from nearby continents, but they also exhibit differences among the various islands.
The finches are particularily important; these small birds lived on different islands in a complex, inter-related group of species now called "Darwin's Finches."
One of a series of Royal Mail Mint Stamps issued in Darwin's honor
reproduced from Stamp One
click on graphic for finch birdsong
Darwin's study of characteristics of species on isolated islands such as these Galapagos finches, and of fossil animals, led him to conclude that evolution had occurred. The mechanism for this that he hit upon was termed natural selection. He coined the term because he knew that humans had long taken advantage of natural variation to select for breeds (artificial selection). When this occurs as a process in nature therefore it is "Natural Selection". Contrary to popular belief, Darwin himself never used the word "evolution".
On November 4, 1859 his classic work, Origin of Species (full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life). was published. This work was a great success. The initial printing sold out on the first day of publication, but Darwin's theory eventually lost some of its original popularity. Although field naturalists preserved Darwin's emphasis on the role of geographical factors on evolution, many were tempted by the theory of Lamarckism. It was some time before the mechanism of variation and inheritence (genetics) was discovered (by Mendel).
There is a rumor - propogated by Christian Creationists, that Darwin renounced his theory on his deathbed. This rumour, like so many others, is completely false.
EFF "Evolution" Archive - includes Darwin's Origin of the Species and Decent of Man and Wallace's On New Species and On the Tendency of Variations to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type papers (in simple ascii format)
Charles Darwin by Adrian Desmond - a very interesting essay on Darwin in the context of the tensions of 19th century English society - part of Darwin - the man and his legacy
THE DARWIN PAGE - Biography - Bibliography - Information - Links - Dr Robert A. Hatch - assorted links and material
Charles Darwin - the Truth?
"what were the true origins of The Origins? Was it all Darwin's own work, or were there other influences in play? Why did it take Charles Darwin more than 20 years to publish his ideas on evolution? And what really motivated him to finally write his magnum opus? This is the story of not one but four men - Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, Charles Lyell and Alfred Wallace. Each of them played a crucial role in the development and eventual publication of The Origin, but maybe not the ones we are familiar with."
What really happened with Galileo and Darwin? - John Polkinghorne debunks some of the popular myths about Galileo and Darwin.
images not loading? | error messages? | broken links? | suggestions? | criticism?
content by M.Alan Kazlev
Finch wav from A Case Study in Evolution: Darwin's Finches
page uploaded 15 April 1999
last modified 2 December 2000
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Sports Reports: SoFi in Talks for Inglewood Stadium Naming Rights
Reports: SoFi in Talks for Inglewood Stadium Naming Rights
Published on Thursday, 30 May 2019 15:30
Written by City News Service
City News Service
Personal finance lender SoFi could be nearing a multimillion-dollar deal to attach its name to the under-construction Inglewood stadium that will be home to the Rams and Chargers, according to multiple media reports today.
The company, formally known as Social Finance, has not commented on the reports, which began on Venuesnow.com. The website reported Wednesday morning that SoFi has already signed a naming-rights deal for the stadium, with the price estimated at $20 million a year for 20 years.
The Los Angeles Times, citing an unnamed source, confirmed that SoFi was in talks for naming rights, but reported that a deal had not yet been finalized. Fox Business also reported that a roughly $20 million-a-year deal with SoFi was in the works but not signed.
The stadium is being built on the 300-acre former Hollywood Park racetrack site in Inglewood, spearheaded by Rams owner Stan Kroenke. The Chargers will share the stadium as a tenant.
The cost of the stadium was originally estimated at $2.6 billion, although that cost has likely risen. The Hollywood Park project, which will eventually include retail and entertainment venues along with residential and office space, is estimated at $5 billion.
The stadium had been scheduled to open this year, but was delayed by a year due to the unusually wet 2016-17 winter season. The stadium will host the Super Bowl in February 2022.
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Turkish drillship said to be moving out of Cyprus’ EEZ
The Turkish drillship Yavuz was leaving the island’s exclusive economic zone and heading back to Turkey, Greek Cypriot media reported on Sunday.
The reports said the departure of the Yavuz was likely linked to behind-the-scene diplomatic efforts, especially by Germany to ease tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean.
According to Phileleftheros, during long discussions at the European Council, Angela Merkel had asked President Nicos Anastasiades not to insist on the issue of sanctions and promised him that moves would be made by Turkey.
Among those moves would be that she expected Turkey would not renew its Navtex for activities in the region, and the possible withdrawal of one or both drilling rigs from Cyprus’ EEZ.
The paper said Nicosia, according to its information, was closely monitoring the course of the Yavuz in order to determine whether it was in fact returning to Turkey or changing position. It was positioned south west of the island.
According to marinetraffic.com on Sunday afternoon, the drillship was currently sailing at 8.4 knots in a northerly direction.
At the EU Council meeting on Thursday, Anastasiades had been pressing for EU sanctions against Turkey for repeatedly violating Cyprus’ EEZ, at one point linking them with proposed EU sanctions against Belarus.
But under strong pressure from other EU leaders, Cyprus late on Thursday agreed to a compromise that the EU review Turkey’s behaviour in December and impose sanctions then if its provocations did not stop.
Anastasiades said that leaders had discussed how to create a climate that would allow a strategic relationship between the EU and Turkey based on the principles and values of the EU and international law.
He highlighted the ‘unanimous position’ that a precondition was Turkey ending its illegal actions against the sovereign rights of Cyprus and Greece. A number of proposals, including immediate sanctions or giving time for diplomatic initiatives, were discussed.
Also, Nato allies Greece and Turkey set up a mechanism to avoid accidental clashes in the Eastern Mediterranean, Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday, part of efforts to defuse the dispute over energy resources in the region.
Noble Energy shareholders approve $4.1 billion sale to Chevron
EATC, VW, AOI Mull Partnership to Launch Natural Gas-Based Vehicles
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Barnes v. Costco Wholesale Corp.
MARGARET BARNES, Plaintiff,
COSTCO WHOLESALE CORPORATION, Defendant.
James K. Bredar Chief Judge
Plaintiff Margaret Barnes ("Plaintiff') brought this action against Defendant Costco Wholesale Corporation ("Defendant"), asserting a negligence claim arising from a slip-and-fall accident at Defendant's store in Arundel Mills, Maryland. (Compl, ECF No. 1-3.) Now pending before the Court is Defendant's Motion for Summary Judgment (M.S.J., ECF No. 32) and Plaintiffs Motion for Leave to File a Surreply (Mot. Sur., ECF No. 35.) The motions have been fully briefed. No. hearing is required. See Local Rule 105.6 (D. Md. 2016). For the reasons set forth below, the Court will grant Defendant's Motion for Summary Judgment and deny Plaintiffs Motion for Leave to File a Surreply.
I. Factual Background
On May 7, 2017, Plaintiff went to the Costco Warehouse located in Arundel Mills, Maryland. (Barnes Depo. 72:2-9, ECF No. 32-4.) She arrived around 5:15 p.m. (Id. 72:19.) She shopped for approximately 45 minutes and as the clock approached 6:00 p.m., the loudspeaker announced that customers should start making their way to the checkout area because the store would be closing soon. (Id. 79:18-22, 80:1.) As Plaintiff searched for Tilex-the final item on her shopping list-she walked through the store's flower display area. (Id. 83-84.) The flower display area is an open-air bay that is not physically enclosed or covered. (Francis Aff. ¶ 3, ECF No. 32-5.) Customers are not required to seek Costco employee assistance to retrieve flowers stored in the buckets of water there. (Id. ¶ 7.)
As Plaintiff walked through the flower display area, she slipped on a wet spot and fell. (Barnes Depo. 93:12-22.) Plaintiff had not seen any liquid on the floor prior to her fall. (Id. 90:18-22, 91:1-3.) She also had not seen any signs warning customers about the wet floor. (Id. 103:5-5, 104:5-8.) Several Costco employees stated they did observe two yellow caution signs near Plaintiff at the time she fell. (Costco Interrogs. 6, 20, ECF No. 32-2.) Photographs of the scene taken immediately after the incident show two yellow caution signs near the spill, though it is unclear whether the signs were placed before or after Plaintiffs fall. (Opp'n Mem. Ex. 3 at 7-10, ECF No. 33-3.) After the fall, Plaintiff could not definitively identify the liquid or its source, but speculated it was water that had come from a sprinkler in the flower display. (Barnes Depo. 96:4-13.) According to Costco, the flower display is not equipped with any sprinklers, nor do Costco employees manually change or refill the water in the display's buckets. (Francis Aff. ¶¶ 5-6.)
Costco employees typically conduct hourly floor inspections to look for potential hazards in its stores. (Costco Interrogs. 4, 19.) When an employee uncovers a potential hazard, procedure calls for them to remain at the location of the hazard, report the problem to management, and either remedy the problem or await assistance. (Id.) A Costco employee conducted such an inspection between 5:01 p.m. and 5:44 p.m. and did not report any hazards in the flower display area. (Opp'n Mem. Ex. 3 at 3.) The employee did report one spill in another part of the store, but it was cleaned up at 5:35 p.m. (Id.) Plaintiff has no sense of how long the liquid was on the floor before she slipped on it: it could have been "one hour" or "a whole day." (Barnes Depo. 98:1-4.)
Costco contends Plaintiffs lack of evidence about the source of the wet spot or the length of time the liquid was on the floor means Plaintiff cannot establish a prima facie case for negligence. (M.S.J. Mem. Supp. 8-15, ECF No. 32-1.)
II. Summary Judgment Standard
"The court shall grant summary judgment if the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law," Fed. R, Civ. P. 56(a); Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S.317, 322 (1986) (citing predecessor to current Rule 56(a)). The moving party bears the burden of demonstrating the absence of any genuine dispute of material fact. Adickes v. S.H. Kress & Co., 398 U.S. 144, 157 (1970). If sufficient evidence exists for a reasonable jury to render a verdict in favor of the non-moving party, then a genuine dispute of material fact exists, and summary judgment should be denied. See Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S.242, 248 (1986). But, the "mere existence of a scintilla of evidence in support of the [non-moving party's] position" is insufficient. Id. at 252. The non-moving party may not rest upon the pleadings but instead must, by evidentiary showing, set out specific facts showing a genuine dispute for trial. Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(c)(1). Where a genuine dispute exists, the facts and inferences derived therefrom must be viewed in the light most favorable to the non-moving party. Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 380 (2009).
III. Motion to File a Surreply
Courts have discretion over whether to allow a party to file a surreply, see Local Rule 105.2(a), but they are generally disfavored. See Chubb & Son v. C & C Complete Servs., LLC, 919 F.Supp.2d 666, 679 (D. Md. 2013). "Surreplies may be permitted when the moving party would be unable to contest matters presented to the court for the first time in the opposing party's reply." Khoury v. Meserve, 268 F.Supp.2d 600, 605 (D. Md. 2003). But where the arguments in a reply are "merely responses to new arguments" made in an opposition brief, a surreply is not appropriate. Aguilar v. LR Coin Laudromat, Civ. No. RDB-11-02352, 2012 WL 1569552, at *2-3 (D. Md. May 2, 2012); see also EEOC v. Freeman, 961 F.Supp.2d 783, 801 (D. Md. 2013), aff'd in part sub nom. E.E.O.C. v. Freeman, 778 F.3d 463 (4th Cir. 2015) (denying the plaintiff a surreply where the "new" arguments in the defendant's reply were "more correctly characterized as responsive arguments to the claims raised in the [plaintiff's] opposition brief.") Surreplies are generally not permitted where they merely identify inaccuracies in the opposing party's reply brief. See Khoury, 268 F.Supp.2d at 606 (denying the plaintiff a surreply where the plaintiff wished to correct "[defendant's misrepresentations" of the record and the law).
Plaintiff contends she is entitled to a surreply because Defendant's Reply is "built on the new, unfounded, and contradictory supposition that there were no caution signs at the time Plaintiff fell." (Mot. Sur. at 6.) But Defendant's Reply did not raise the issue of the yellow caution signs for the first time-it was Plaintiff who first raised the issue in her Opposition. (Opp'n Mem. at 8-12, ECF No. 33.) Defendant's discussion of the matter was "merely responsive" to Plaintiff's argument on the matter, and responsive arguments in a reply do not warrant a surreply. See Freeman, 961 F.Supp.2d at 801. It is true that Defendant mischaracterized the record in its Reply: it stated multiple times that the evidence was "undisputed" that the yellow caution signs were only put in place after Plaintiffs fall, even though Defendant's own interrogatory responses stated the opposite. (Reply at 2, 4-5, ECF No. 34; Costco Interrogs. 6, 20.) But a plaintiff is not entitled to a surreply merely to identify inaccuracies in the opposing party's reply. See Khoury, 268 F.Supp.2d at 606.
As such, the Court will deny Plaintiffs motion to file a surreply, and will not consider the contents of Plaintiff's proposed surreply.[1]
IV. ...
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At Monstro Ventures, we seek to invest in technology companies that we’re proud of. Despite its simplicity, this statement gets to the core of our investing philosophy. We want to foster inventive products, services or processes that positively impact the world. Whether it is having more fun playing with your friends - or saving lives through technological prowess, we want them all to have a positive impact, be forward thinking, make money, and ultimately… wait for it… ultimately make the world a better place.
Not only do we seek companies that we believe exhibit these qualities, we seek founders who are stubborn in the belief of their success – who are smart, calculated and driven enough to make it almost inevitable.
We invest when we’re just as inspired and passionate about these companies as their founders are and feel honored by their choosing us as well. This is where the Monstro Ventures value proposition comes full circle and where we bring more than money to the table. Before Monstro Ventures came to be, we were Monstro the ad agency specializing in video storytelling. Our goal for a significant percentage of our investments is to use the agency to craft an engaging story promoting and marketing your product to share that same passion and inspiration to its potential users, customers, partners, and future employees to as broad a swath of its target as possible.
We comb through the details, ensuring we truly understand the essence of our clients' pursuits. Their goals become ours. We direct all of our collective resources toward their success.
A Wealth of Expertise
Our backgrounds in in television, journalism, filmmaking, online video, visual effects, consumer behavior and advertising combined with our successful entrepreneurial experience are the perfect combination to provide significant marketing value.
We are very fortunate and appreciative to enjoy a vast network of friends, colleagues, investors, and advisors that help strengthen our investments and opportunities.
SOME EARLY INVESTMENTS
David Prager
David Prager is a founding partner of Monstro as well as an advisor and investor in consumer internet, enterprise, and media technology companies including Yardsale, FOBO, XDN (acquired by Fortinet), Zuckerberg Media, and Simplehoney (acquired by OpenCoin)...
David Prager is a founding partner of Monstro as well as an advisor and investor in consumer internet, enterprise, and media technology companies including Yardsale, FOBO, XDN (acquired by Fortinet), Zuckerberg Media, and Simplehoney (acquired by OpenCoin). He is also a co-host and frequent guest on various technology and culture based web shows and podcasts.
Previously, Prager co-founded Internet television network Revision3 with Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, at some point managing everything from finance and operations to business development, distribution, sales, and programming. As a pioneer in the emerging medium of Internet video-on-demand programming, Prager built and executed one of the industry’s first functional models in monetizing live, streaming, and on-demand video. Revision3 was acquired by Discovery Communications in June 2012.
Prior to Revision3, Prager was a seasoned television producer and technology writer at such reputable outlets as ZDTV, TechTV and Comcast’s G4 Media with hundreds of hours of live daily production, documentary and field productions under his belt.
Mauricio Balvanera
Mauricio Balvanera is an award winning strategic storyteller, with a 16 year career spanning traditional television, film, web and video games. From music editing on CBS’s Criminal Minds, sound design on Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 2, Editor and Producer at Discovery Digital Networks...
Mauricio Balvanera is an award winning strategic storyteller, with a 16 year career spanning traditional television, film, web and video games. From music editing on CBS’s Criminal Minds, sound design on Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 2, Editor and Producer at Discovery Digital Networks to Executive Producer and Director on a multitude of marketing spots for companies such as Gap, Ford, Coin, Athos, and countless other promising silicon valley startups, Mauricio holds down the monstro fort with a hands on “yes and… “ collaborative approach.
Dalton Crosthwait
Monstro is the evolution of Dalton’s original creative endeavor, a design and animation team that he started while in college in 2007, which has joined forces with the other incredible teammates shown on this page. With his team he has won numerous awards...
Monstro is the evolution of Dalton’s original creative endeavor, a design and animation team that he started while in college in 2007, which has joined forces with the other incredible teammates shown on this page. With his team he has won numerous awards, attracted millions of views on networks like YouTube and across the internet, and worked with organizations like the United Nations, Google Ventures, and the Post Carbon Institute.
In his commitment to a vast and growing list of clients he stresses creativity and attention to detail in everything that he produces, often with a focus on organizations, programs, and inventions that will change the world for the better. His strong desire to leave the world a better place than he found it motivates the majority of his efforts, and he loves developing strategies around getting the right kind of attention for his clients.
Aside from his obsession with improving his surroundings, Dalton also has an incredibly strong affinity for burritos, his bicycle, and filling his sketchbooks with whatever pops into his head. He’s an environmentally and socially driven storyteller that looks forward to each new opportunity to inform the world of the great things that great minds are doing to make life better.
Thanks for your interest in partnering with Monstro Ventures, we are grateful for your attention. If you don’t know us personally, our best suggestion is to get introduced by a mutual connection.
Alternatively, correspondence can be sent to hello@monstro.vc - including press and media inquiries. Apologies in advance for any delays in response.
If you’re interested in the independent services of our sister creative agency, please don’t hesitate to visit monstro.tv and get in touch via hi@monstro.tv.
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Russia’s large amphibious assault ship Ivan Gren LST at sea for first time during trials
Russia’s Project 11711 large amphibious assault ship Ivan Gren built at the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad in west Russia has gone to the Baltic Sea for the first time during its running trials, shipyard spokesman Sergei Mikhailov told TASS.
Russia’s Project 11711 large amphibious assault ship Ivan Gren at sea for the first time
Picture taken on 06.25.2016. Source: RoyalJib / forums.airbase.ru
"The large amphibious assault ship Ivan Gren went to the Baltic Sea for the first time at 10:30 local time [11:30 Moscow time]. The ship will pass at sea several days," Mikhailov said.
According to the spokesman, "the ship’s propulsion engines and radar, as well as its running characteristics will be tested".
On June 17, the large amphibious assault ship Ivan Gren left the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad to arrive at the acceptance base in Baltiysk and start undergoing shipbuilders’ trials. The trials are expected to last through September. After that, the ship will start undergoing state trials. If they are successful, the ship will join Russia’s Navy.
The large amphibious assault ship Ivan Gren was laid down in December 2004 and floated out in May 2012. In October 2015, the ship started undergoing dock trials. The Yantar Shipyard will build another Project 11711 large amphibious assault ship Pyotr Morgunov on order of Russia’s Defense Ministry. The ship is planned to be delivered to the customer in 2018.
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Researcher Shows How Phone Shows Ads Based on Conversations It Hears
While social media companies have spent years denying that their apps are recording your private conversations, the truth is finally coming out.
For years, smartphone users have been growing increasingly suspicious that their devices are listening to them to feed them advertisements and to “enhance their experience” on third-party apps. Companies like Google and Facebook have consistently denied these claims, saying that targeted ads and messages are merely a coincidence, and that data for these services are taken in other ways.
However, earlier this year during the Cambridge Analytica scandal we began to see some of the first hints that our phones may actually be listening to us.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie says that they have probably been listening all along. During an appearance before the UK parliament, Wylie said, “There’s audio that could be useful just in terms of, are you in an office environment, are you outside, are you watching TV, what are you doing right now?”
Since the scandal, experts who have studied this possibility began revealing their surprising results.
In a recent interview with Vice, Dr. Peter Hannay, the senior security consultant for the cybersecurity firm Asterisk, explained how third-party apps exploit a loophole to gather the voice data from your phone.
Hannay said that while your microphone is always on, your voice data is only sent out to other parties if you say specific trigger words such as “Hey Siri” or “OK Google,” but there is a catch. Third-party apps often ask to gain access to voice data in their user agreements to “enhance the experience” of their products.
“From time to time, snippets of audio do go back to [other apps like Facebook’s] servers but there’s no official understanding what the triggers for that are. Whether it’s timing or location-based or usage of certain functions, [apps] are certainly pulling those microphone permissions and using those periodically. All the internals of the applications send this data in encrypted form, so it’s very difficult to define the exact trigger,” Hannay said.
While this process is becoming more obvious by the day, many tech companies continue to deny that they are engaged with this practice, and since all of the outgoing information is encrypted there is no way of telling exactly which information they are getting and how they are using it.
“Seeing Google are open about it, I would personally assume the other companies are doing the same. Really, there’s no reason they wouldn’t be. It makes good sense from a marketing standpoint, and their end-user agreements and the law both allow it, so I would assume they’re doing it, but there’s no way to be sure.” Hannay said.
Vice reporters then conducted their own experiment, saying random phrases into their phones and then seeing advertisements affiliated with those terms pop up in their news feeds. You can try this experiment at home yourself, and it is highly likely that you have experienced results like this by accident.
In April, I experienced something like this when a friend visited my house from the west coast. I picked him up from the Baltimore-Washington airport and during a conversation about his flight, he told me that he had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina, and mentioned that they had a nice airport.
The following morning I woke up with these messages on my phone:
Oddly enough, I have never been to Charlotte, North Carolina, never really thought about the place, and have never typed anything about that place into Google or Facebook. But sure enough, after having a conversation about the airport in Charlotte, my phone thought I was interested.
As of right now, there is no way to avoid this spying, aside from being extremely careful about the apps that you sign up for, and actually reading their user agreements—or getting rid of your cell phone altogether, which could be counterproductive if you use it for business.
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[Publication] Sexual F(r)ictions: Pornography in Neo-Victorian Women’s Fiction
Muller, Nadine, ‘Sexual F(r)ictions: Pornography in Neo-Victorian Women’s Fiction’, The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 115-133
To see the full table of contents for the essay collection and/or to order a copy, please click here. If you would like a pdf copy of my chapter, please email me.
Since the first decades of the twentieth century and the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), through to the 1960s and Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Victorian England (1964), the nineteenth century has been (re)defined according to its sexual politics, not least in order to contrast perceived Victorian conservativeness with later generations’ sense of their own modernity. At the turn of the new millennium, neo-Victorian fiction, through its compulsive return to matters of sex and gender, continues this sexualization of the past, a phenomenon which Marie-Luise Kohlke has termed the ‘neo-Victorian sexsation,’ and which, as in previous decades, still frequently serves to ‘conveniently reassert our own supposedly enlightened stance towards sexuality and social progress’ by sexually ‘liberating’ the past and its fictional heroines.[i]
B elinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006) and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) not only vividly re-imagine the pornography trade during the second half of the nineteenth century but, adding to their sexsationalism, they also centre around their heroines’ encounters with and creation of pornographic works, thus exploring women’s roles in the male-dominated marketplace in which these publications were and have since been created and circulated. This chapter seeks to contextualize Starling’s and Waters’s representations of the relationships between women and pornography within contemporary debates surrounding ‘a pornographic marketplace [which] is now almost as eager to address women as desiring consumers as it once was to package them merely as objects of consumption’.[ii] Within this marketplace, women’s positions explode and blur the supposedly mutually exclusive roles of victim, accomplice and emancipated sexual agent which various feminist factions have established for them; roles which – with few exceptions – have been founded upon specific assumptions regarding the relationship between reality and cultural production. In other words, such roles rely upon the notion that pornography – as a cultural product, textual, artistic, photographic or filmic – either creates or represents society and its gender relations, most notably violence toward and the oppression of women.
However, more recently scholars of media, gender, feminist and popular culture studies have suggested that an effective analysis of pornography, its status in the marketplace and its influence on society, requires such dichotomies to be cast aside, not least because, as Simon Hardy observes, postmodern theories have long begun to illustrate the fragile nature of the category of the ‘real’ which lies at the heart of the creation/representation debate.[iii] Consequently, in order to acknowledge and discuss the complexities of the ‘mainstreaming [of] sex’ – and, within that context, pornography – we must develop new approaches to ‘forms of sexualization which may be profoundly contradictory in the way they blend oppressive and emancipatory views of sex and gender’, including the development of ‘a critical language for the analysis of sexualization without reverting to “pro” and “anti” positions on pornography’.[iv] Contrary to Christian
Gutleben’s argument that much neo-Victorian fiction is ‘bereft of any narrational or diegetic consideration about the present situation’ and ‘[feels] exempt from any other political responsibility’ than the superficial rectification of historical wrongs and absences,[v] this chapter argues that, by placing their heroines in the period in which the production and distribution of pornographic works first became an industry, Fingersmith and The Journal of Dora Damage investigate pornography as a contemporary feminist issue, and explore women’s increasingly complex relationships to and roles within it. However, in doing so, Starling’s and Waters’s representations of their heroines’ sexual experiences and of their encounters with sexually explicit material also raise questions concerning the authors’ own novels’ sexsationalism, and the extent to which their narratives function as contributions and/or challenges to the neo-Victorian sexsation and our readerly consumption of it.
[i] Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘The Neo-Victorian Sexsation: Literary Excursions into the Nineteenth Century Erotic’, in Probing the Problematics: Sex and Sexuality, ed. by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2008), pp. 345-56 (p. 345).
[ii] Lynne Segal, ‘Only the Literal: The Contradictions Anti-Pornography Feminism’, in More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, ed. by Pamela Church Gibson (London: BFI Publishing, 2004), pp. 59-70 (p. 60).
[iii] Simon Hardy, ‘The New Pornographies: Representation or Reality’, in Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. by Feona Attwood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 3-18 (p. 3).
[iv] Feona Attwood, ‘Introduction: The Sexualization of Culture’, in Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. by Feona Attwood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. xiii-xxiv (p. xiii and xviii).
[v] Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2001), p. 169.
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Château de Versailles buys back €4m royal commode that left France after Louvre missed its royal mark
The piece of furniture by Bernard II van Risenburgh, which left for the US almost four decades ago, was commissioned by Louis XV for his stepdaughter
Vincent Noce
4th July 2019 11:17 GMT
The black-lacquered commode by Bernard II van Risenburgh was commissioned in 1744 for Louis XV's stepdaughter © EPV / Christophe Fouin
The Château de Versailles has finally recovered a major royal commode that left France unnoticed in 1981, sparking a wave of consternation when its true identity was revealed later at a sale in New York.
The black-lacquered piece with Japanese decor was commissioned in 1744 for Louis XV's stepdaughter from Bernard II van Risenburgh (better known as BVRB), considered the most brilliant cabinet-maker of the time. The news is due to be officially released by Versailles next week, when the commode will return to the royal bedroom. According to our information, it was bought for €4m from a US collector, who asked not to be named.
This BVRB masterwork first arrived in the US after being purchased by the New York dealer Martin Zimet from his Parisian counterpart Jacques Perrin. When he retired in 1998, Zimet asked Christie’s to auction his collection. The 60 pieces were estimated at $25m. The commode was considered the jewel in the crown with price tag of $4m-$6m, almost twice the record price for a piece of royal furniture at auction. However, the estimates and the guarantee were so high that the sale was a failure and the commode did not sell.
The extraordinary evaluation came about because the Christie’s expert, Patrick Leperlier, had discovered its true pedigree. He had spotted the number I 343 on the back of the work and traced it to the royal inventory where it exactly matched a description of a commode delivered on 23 January 1745 to the “Chambre de la Dauphine”.
As soon as its identity came to light a row erupted in France, with the media pointing a damning finger at the Musée du Louvre, which at the time monitored all works of art leaving the country: its curator had not spotted the mark and therefore missed a unique opportunity to recover the piece at a very reasonable price. Some journalists even suggested an elaborate fraud, which did not help the sale.
However, experts agreed that, in the 1980s, royal marks and other inventories’ markings were not taken seriously by the art market. Until 1959, hardly anyone knew who BVRB was. And when the monumental piece of furniture was presented at Zimet’s residence, against a wall, the number could not be seen.
The price tag is still significant for Versailles, but a donation from Jeanne Heymann who died in Monaco three years ago, covered the acquisition. She left €20m to Versailles under the condition that it be used to finance the acquisition of the palace’s furniture that was dispersed during the auction sales following the French Revolution.
More NewsTopicsDecorative artsParis Musée du LouvreVersailles
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Coronavirus Response: EU Commission adopts banking package to facilitate lending to households and businesses in the EU
28/04/2020 MaP COVID-19 0
The Commission has today adopted a banking package to help facilitate bank lending to households and businesses throughout the European Union.
The aim of this package is to ensure that banks can continue to lend money to support the economy and help mitigate the significant economic impact of the Coronavirus. It includes an Interpretative Communication on the EU’s accounting and prudential frameworks, as well as targeted “quick fix” amendments to EU banking rules.
The rules put in place following the financial crisis have ensured that banks in the EU are now more resilient and better prepared to deal with shocks to the economy. Today’s Communication recalls that EU rules allow banks and their supervisors to act in a flexible, but responsible, manner during economic crises to support citizens and firms, particularly small and medium-sized companies.
Today’s Regulation also implements some targeted changes to maximise the capacity of credit institutions to lend and to absorb losses related to the Coronavirus pandemic, while still ensuring their continued resilience.
Valdis Dombrovskis, Executive Vice-President for an Economy that Works for People said: “We are supporting households and businesses as much as we can to deal with the economic fallout of the Coronavirus. The banking sector can do a lot to help here.
We are using the full flexibility of the EU’s banking rules and proposing targeted legislative changes to enable banks to keep the liquidity taps turned on, so that households and companies can get the financing they need. I will soon also be launching roundtable discussions bringing together consumer and business groups with the financial sector so that we can address the most urgent needs of our citizens and companies.”
The Commission will engage with the European financial sector to explore how it can develop best practices that could further support citizens and businesses. The EU’s response to this crisis must be coordinated in order to avoid national fragmentation and to ensure a level playing field.
Targeted amendments to banking rules
The Commission proposed today a few targeted “quick fix” amendments to the EU’s banking prudential rules (the Capital Requirements Regulation) in order to maximise the ability of banks to lend and absorb losses related to Coronavirus.
The Commission proposes exceptional temporary measures to alleviate the immediate impact of Coronavirus-related developments, by adapting the timeline of the application of international accounting standards on banks’ capital, by treating more favourably public guarantees granted during this crisis, by postponing the date of application of the leverage ratio buffer and by modifying the way of excluding certain exposures from the calculation of the leverage ratio.
The Commission also proposes to advance the date of application of several agreed measures that incentivise banks to finance employees, SMEs and infrastructure projects.
Interpretative Communication
Today’s Communication confirms the recent statements on using flexibility within accounting and prudential rules, such as those made by the Basel Committee of Banking Supervision, the European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Central Bank, amongst others. The Commission encourages banks and supervisory authorities to make use of the flexibility in the EU’s accounting and prudential frameworks.
For example, the Communication confirms – and welcomes – the flexibility available in EU rules when it comes to public and private moratoria on loan repayments (EBA guidelines of 2 April). The Communication also highlights areas where banks are invited to act responsibly, for example by refraining from making dividend distributions to shareholders or adopting a conservative approach to the payment of variable remuneration. Today’s Communication also recalls how banks can help businesses and citizens through digital services, including contactless and digital payments.
Commission Interpretative Communication on the application of the accounting and prudential frameworks to facilitate EU bank lending (Supporting businesses and households amid COVID-19)
https://ec.europa.eu/info/publications/200428-banking-package-communication_en
Proposal to amend Regulation (EU) No 575/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 on prudential requirements for credit institutions and investment firms
Regulation (EU) No 575/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 on prudential requirements for credit institutions and investment firms and amending Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 Text with EEA relevance
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2013/575/oj
Questions and Answers: Coronavirus response: Banking Package to facilitate bank lending- Supporting households and businesses in the EU
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_20_757
Daniel FERRIE, photo © Copyright European Commission 2018
leding
Coronavirus: EU Commission issues guidance to mitigate clinical trial disruption in the EU
UNCTAD – Ten-point plan to bolster global transport, ease trade during COVID-19
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post-title Duke, The
Duke, The
Home / 2011 / Duke, The
Ideally situated in the city centre on historic Duke Street, this old watering hole, which takes its title from the street named after the second Duke of Grafton, has been providing liquid refreshments and sustenance to the people of Dublin since 1822.
By 1845, the pub was radiating beneath the affluent glow of Fishbourne & Bianconi across the street, whose principal, Charles Bianconi, had the exclusive rights on all coach travel to every town south of Carlow. Within six years, amid the coaching trade boom, this old hostelry was known as the National Hotel & Tavern. A select premises in the city that provided tavern tokens for customers who availed of Bagatelle & Billiard facilities. The winning tokens were subsequently exchanged for drink, never money.
In the 1890′s the premises underwent a spending Victorian renovation, leaving a facade that has been largely preserved to this day. Because of its cosmopolitan location beside the commercial and literary life and pulse of the city, the Duke has enjoyed a distinguished association with the literary greats of the Irish Nation.
James Stephens, James Joyce, Oliver St. John Gogarty and Arthur Griffith breezed into the Duke regularly in the early days of the century when they wanted a quiet reflective jar.
In later years, the three great literary musketeers, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Myles Na gCopoleen experienced a transitory love affair with the premises, although hardly ever at the same time as they were rarely enamoured with eachothers company for too long. As a general rule. the presence of one was dictated by the absence of the other two.
Nowadays the organisers of the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl start their historic tour of Dublin at this establishment.
Today the Duke is still renowned for providing the caller with a place of quiet respite to enjoy a peaceful drink or some heartwarming food throughout the day.
Traditional music can be enjoyed every Sunday evening at 9pm until 11pm.
johnlepo 22nd November 2011
Beer Garden/ Smoking area, Food, Function Room, James Joyce Pub Crawl, Micro Brewery/ Craft beers, Pubs, Wheelchair Toilet, wifi
About johnlepo
View all posts by johnlepo →
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About RUR
State accreditation certificate
Rights holders about RUR
For right holders
Yuri Bashmet joined the committee of St. Petersburg Cultural Forum
Violist, conductor, Honored Artist of the USSR, Vice-President of the Council of Russian Union of Rightholders Yuri Bashmet joined the organizing committee for the holding and preparation of St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum.
The committee also includes Russian Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova, Presidential Adviser for Culture Vladimir Tolstoy, Director of the Russian Seasons project Alexei Lebedev, Director of the Tretyakov Gallery Zelfira Tregulova, Deputy Minister of Culture Alla Manilova, artistic director of the Academic Ballet Theater Boris Eifman and others.
The international event is scheduled for November 2020. It is assumed that the forum will be held in a mixed format, which provides for the in-person presence of participants and online speeches of those who cannot come. The final decision will be made later, depending on the development of the pandemic situation.
The organizers of St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum are the Government of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Government of St. Petersburg. Every year, thousands of experts in the field of culture from all over the world take part in the forum’s discussions – stars of theater, opera and ballet, outstanding directors and musicians, public figures, representatives of government and business, and the academic community.
The business program includes 14 sections, each of which is dedicated to one of the areas of cultural activity, thematic tracks, and official events.
12/8 bldg 1, Arkhangelskiy Lane, Moscow, Russia, 101000
E-mail: office@rp-union.ru
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Xun zhang chinese dating speed dating newmarket
This was often difficult for the official dynastic historians, who used historical works to justify the reign of the current dynasty.He influenced the written works of many Chinese historians, including the works of Ban Gu and Ban Zhao in the 1st and 2nd centuries, and even Sima Guang's 11th-century compilation of the Zizhi Tongjian, presented to Emperor Shenzong of Song in 1084 AD.This groundbreaking text laid the foundation for Chinese historiography and the many official Chinese historical texts compiled for each dynasty thereafter.Sima Qian is often compared to the Greek Herodotus in scope and method, because he covered Chinese history from the mythical Xia Dynasty until the contemporary reign of Emperor Wu of Han while retaining an objective and non-biased standpoint.It was also the first in a tradition of Chinese military treatises, such as the Jingling Zongyao (Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques, 1044 AD) and the Woolongong (Fire Dragon Manual, 14th century AD).The Chinese kept consistent and accurate court records after the year 841 BC, with the beginning of the Gonghe Regency of the Western Zhou Dynasty.
Although court records and other independent records existed beforehand, the definitive work in early Chinese historical writing was the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian written by Han Dynasty court historian Sima Qian (145 BC-90 BC).Later authors combined Daoism with Confucianism and Legalism, such as Liu An (2nd century BC), whose Huainanzi (The Philosophers of Huai-nan) also added to the fields of geography and topography.Among the classics of military science, The Art of War by Sun Tau (6th century BC) was perhaps the first to outline guidelines for effective international diplomacy.This included the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era (978), the Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era (983), the Finest Blossoms in the Garden of Literature (986), and the Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau (1013).Although these Song Dynasty Chinese encyclopedias featured millions of written Chinese characters each, their aggregate size paled in comparison to the later Yongle Encyclopedia (1408) of the Ming Dynasty, which contained a total of 50 million Chinese characters.
These nine books therefore became the center of the educational system.
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How to Buy Fitness Equipment on TV
No fail, I get at least three queries a month on what kind of exercise machine to buy from cable TV infomercials. Here's an example: "I just wanted to know which type of exercise machine would be more effective in helping me lose weight - a "rider" or a "strider"? I plan to purchase one in the near future and don't want to get stuck with a lemon."
I'm not surprised at the growing interest in exercise machines being sold on TV. What with traffic and pollution, people now want a practical and affordable way to keep fit at home.
In addition, more consumers than ever are exposed to an amazing variety of exercise gadgets and contraptions through the home shopping channels. So -- which are the effective ones and which are the duds that will just gather dust under your bed?
Top five mistakes.
According to IDEA, the International Association of Fitness Professionals, the top five mistakes people make when buying fitness products are:
They buy equipment not designed to produce the desired result.
They don't consider which activities they enjoy or dislike.
The purchase a machine by mail or infomercial without testing it in person.
They neglect to ask about warranties, repairs, maintenance and return policies.
They buy a product that is too big or too loud for their home.
All about infomercials.
According to Liz Neporent in her book, Fitness for Dummies (an excellent resource for anyone interested in starting an exercise program), infomercials started in 1984 when the Federal Trade Commission abolished limits on the amount of commercial time a television station could air. These half-hour commercials typically masquerade as talk shows.
Ms. Neporent, who has a master's degree in exercise physiology, says they are typically filled with "exaggerated claims, shameless testimonials, outlandish stunts, and lots of scientific gobbledygook - all intended to separate you from your dollar".
She says that the enthusiastic audience members you see in the background are usually paid and the "experts" and individuals that offer testimony are always paid. One woman she interviewed who had given an emotional testimony for an exercise video had never even watched it, much less, tried it. The woman said she "just wanted to be on TV".
Neporent also recounts the time she questioned an infomercial executive at a trade show about a particular product that appeared to be a waste of money. "I wouldn't disagree with you," he said, smiling, "but we've sold 20,000 units in the first month." When she mentioned that the product appeared flimsy, he agreed and said, "Well, 80 percent of these things are never even used."
Federal Trade Commission cracks down.
The Federal Trade Commission has made an effort to crack down on the infomercials that cross the line from exaggeration to outright lies, according to Neporent. She reports that the producer of a European diet patch that was supposed to suppress appetite was slapped with a $1.5 million fine because the product didn't work.
According to the June 18, 1997 issue of the San Diego Tribune, the latest infomercial product to be penalized by the FTC is the Abflex abdominal machine. Attorneys for the FTC found that the makers of the Abflex exerciser couldn't substantiate their advertising campaign's claim that the Abflex could produce a "flat, sexy stomach in just three minutes a day."
The FTC said there was no proof that the abdominal machine could by itself cause weight loss or spot reduction. The manufacturer of the exerciser has agreed to stop making the claims. Expect more infomercial health products to be penalized. It's about time, too. There are some effective products that are available over those home shopping channels but there are also many that are ineffective, unsafe, and shoddily made.
The Ten Commandments of buying TV fitness gadgets.
According to Liz Neporent who was written extensively on the subject of exercise machines sold on TV for fitness magazines, keep the following tips in mind:
If the advertisement claims that you can tone up while lying in bed watching the tube save your money for the Miracle Mop. There's no such thing as "the no sweat workout that works." If there were, don't you think you'd have done this workout by now?
Beware of the phrase guaranteed or your money back. Read the fine print. The manufacturers may promise that you'll lose four inches in one month - if you stick to a low-fat diet and a far more extensive exercise program.
Don't be impressed by the "expert" endorsements. Don't think for a minute that some three-time Mr. Universe built his biceps with some plastic contraption that looks like a model of the Star Ship Enterprise. And never buy anything hawked by an actress who hasn't had a decent gig in more than five years.
Don't whip out your credit card just because a product is not sold in stores. Truth is, most of these gizmos are sold in stores - or they will be in a month or two. Sometimes the product is actually cheaper at the store; plus, you can test out the product.
Beware of phrases like three easy payments. One gadget claims to cost "Not $60! Not $50! but "just two easy payments of $19.95". Add in shipping and handling, and it costs $46.85.
Don't be impressed that a product was "awarded a U.S. patent." You could patent a nose-hair clipper for mice if you wanted to. To get a patent, you need to have an original idea, not necessarily a good one.
Don't believe that a gadget will enable you to build strength and lose fat simultaneously. Some products make this claim blatantly; others use a more subtle approach. Consider the ThighMaster commercials: A svelte model zips up her pants, and says, "Thank you, ThighMaster. I never thought I'd fit into these jeans again." The ThighMaster may help you tone your inner thigh muscles, but it's not going to slim down.
Don't be swayed by scientific terminology. Product manufacturers love to throw around big words. Some of these terms, such as omnikinetics, have no accepted meaning in the scientific community.
Don't believe some new contraption is better than free weights or real weight machines. One product manufacturer claims that "with free weights or machines, getting the right form is impossible, " but with its gizmo, "there's no way to use the gadget improperly."
Hide your credit card between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. At that late hour, everything kinda looks good. Go to bed.
Neporent says the bottom line is to exercise extreme caution when buying fitness equipment from TV infomercials. According to her, you have no way of judging the quality of a machine or gadget - everything looks better on TV!
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Egypt starts dig on Gaza border to stop smuggling tunnels
ByFARES AKRAM
RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Egyptian military bulldozers are digging through the sand along Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip in recent days, pressing ahead with what appears to be a renewed campaign to pressure Gaza's Hamas rulers and stamp out militant activity along the border.
The project, billed as an Egyptian military-operated fish farm, effectively would fill the border area with water and is designed to put an end to the last remaining cross-border underground smuggling tunnels, Egyptian military officials said. Hamas accuses Egypt of further isolating the beleaguered Palestinian territory.
The new excavations seem to be "a tightening of the grip of siege on Gaza," Hamas official Mushir al-Masri said. Egypt "should not slide into this cliff that agrees with the Israeli policies of siege."
Israel and Egypt have maintained a blockade of the territory since the Islamic militant group Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. For several years, Egypt tolerated a smuggling industry, allowing hundreds of tunnels to bring in goods like cigarettes and spare motorbike parts, as well as weapons. These tunnels were a lifeline for Hamas, which collected millions of dollars in taxes and revenues from the smuggled goods. They continued to thrive after longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 and the Islamist Mohammed Morsi won the country's first free presidential election.
But things changed after the Egyptian army ousted Morsi, a key ally of Hamas, in 2013. The military-backed government accused Islamic militants of using smuggling tunnels to move between Gaza and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Hamas denies militants move in and out of its territory.
Last November, after militants killed 31 Egyptian troops in an assault on a checkpoint 20 miles (30 kilometers) from Rafah, Egypt demolished hundreds of homes and evicted thousands of residents as it carved out a buffer zone and destroyed more tunnels. Today, Palestinian smugglers operate an estimated 20 tunnels.
In this Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015 photo, Palestinians sit and watch bulldozers and diggers work at the E …
But the violence has continued. Last month, Islamic State-linked militants struck Egyptian army outposts in a coordinated wave of suicide bombings and battles. It was some of Sinai's deadliest fighting in decades and underlined the government's failure to stem the insurgency. Last week, three gunmen in a speeding car killed two policemen in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.
Now Egypt is trying to finish off the tunnels for good.
Egypt's army began digging last week what officials said will be 18 fisheries along the 9-mile (14-kilometer) border with Gaza to grow mullet fish and shrimps, and to make digging underground tunnels impossible. The military officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
On Sunday, diggers and bulldozers operated in several locations along the border. Pairs of 15-inch black steel pipes were scattered in the construction area. Previous plans to dig a small canal were abandoned after studies showed that the water would eventually flood the border completely, the officials said.
The new construction work has had an immediate effect on Gaza's tunnel smuggling trade. One smuggler, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want trouble with the Egyptians, said he bought a shipment of motorbike parts for $6,000, but paid $10,000 to get it smuggled into Gaza because the operation has become very risky.
In this Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015 photo, a Palestinian man looks from a window at bulldozers and diggers …
Before the excavation began two weeks ago, 10 packs of cigarettes smuggled through the tunnels from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula sold in Gaza for around 110 shekels, or about $28. Now the price has jumped to 125 shekels, or nearly $32.
Several smugglers told The Associated Press they are installing water pumps with 200-meter-long (220-yard) hoses to suck the water out of the tunnels in case they flood.
Hamas-appointed Rafah mayor Subhi Radwan said if the Egyptians filled the wells with sea water, it would damage the aquifer feeding Gaza, a charge Egyptian military officials dismissed. Radwan also said the fisheries would threaten to collapse homes on the Gaza side of the border.
"We appeal to our brothers in Egypt to stop the work that endangers the people of Gaza," Radwan said. "Gaza has enough problems: wars, siege and a difficult economic situation."
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Home Lifestyle Already a star, singer King Princess releases debut album
Already a star, singer King Princess releases debut album
on: October 24, 2019 In: Lifestyle
LONDON (Reuters) – Twenty-year-old singer-songwriter King Princess releases one of pop music’s most hotly anticipated debut albums on Friday, “Cheap Queen”, more than a year after she shot to stardom with a single name-checked by Harry Styles and Kourtney Kardashian.
The buzz around the Brooklyn-born singer, whose full name is Mikaela Straus, has built since her single “1950”, inspired by “The Price of Salt”, the Patricia Highsmith novel about a forbidden lesbian affair. The soulful ballad has more than 10 million YouTube views since it appeared in February last year.
Speaking at the Glastonbury Festival in June, Straus said she was “really, really excited” about the album. “It’s going to be fierce,” she said, adding that the songs had been inspired by “the usual girl heartbreak”.
“Honey, heartbreak, hard times, friendships, you know, that shit, all the good shit,” she said.
As her stage name suggests, she plays with gender roles, appearing in the…
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