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1385 Incredible Burt Wonderstone Premiere
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Writers John Francis Daley (L) and Jonathan M. Goldstein attend the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Luke Vanek attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Director Don Scardino (R) and wife Dana L. Williams attend the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Joshua Erenberg attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Keya Morgan attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Jessica McClain attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Samm Levine attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Alan Arkin attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Alan Arkin (L) and wife Suzanne Arkin attend the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Nancy Carell (L) and actor Steve Carell attend the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Russell Simmons and guest attend the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Mason Cook attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Max Martini attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Michael Herbig attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Sterling Beaumon attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Zachary Gordon attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor John Ratzenberger attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
HOLLYWOOD, CA - MARCH 11: Actor Cary Elwes attends the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' at TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, March 11, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Tom Sorensen/Moovieboy Pictures)
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Forrest G. Read IV
Litigation / Trial Practice
All Federal
DACA Program Continues as U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Expedite Consideration of Cases
The “Dreamers” have received another reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court.
DACA litigation has been in the news since September 2017, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the DACA program would be terminated. In response to that announcement, multiple lawsuits were filed in federal courts in California, New York, Maryland, Texas, and the District of Columbia, resulting in multiple nationwide injunctions blocking the termination of the program. Indeed, the injunctions have forced USCIS to continue granting DACA renewals.
According to Vice President Mike Pence, the Trump Administration is looking for a way to prevent U.S. District Courts from imposing nationwide injunctions. In a speech in May, he said these injunctions are “judicial obstruction.” Absent relief from these injunctions, the Administration is attempting to expedite review of pending cases that are blocking its policies.
For instance, the Administration attempted to force the Supreme Court’s early consideration of the DACA cases in early-2018, which the Court rejected. At the end of May 2019, the government again sought to expedite the case by filing a brief urging the Court to decide whether to grant review by the end of this term, i.e., by June 24, 2019. The Administration argued, “The very existence of this pending litigation (and lingering uncertainty) continues to impede efforts to enact legislation addressing the legitimate policy concerns underlying the DACA policy.” But that argument did not prevail. On June 3, 2019, the Court rejected the Administration’s request.
The Court probably will not even consider reviewing the DACA cases until the fall and, if it grants review, a decision might not come down until sometime in 2020.
For now, the “Dreamers” can continue to renew their status, but they also will have to continue to live with the uncertainty. There is always the possibility that Congress will pass legislation that might provide a permanent solution for the “Dreamers,” but the legislative route has been bumpy. While numerous deals have been proposed regarding a DACA solution, stumbling blocks continue to appear in the form of unacceptable “quid pro quos.” Indeed, DACA was even a pawn in the most recent government shutdown.
Jackson Lewis P.C. © 2019
What Supreme Court on Deference to Agency Interpretations May Mean
Update: DACA Litigation
Medical Report Supports Urgent Need for Humane Immigration Policies
Forrest Read is a Principal in the Washington, D.C. Region office of Jackson Lewis P.C. He has extensive experience in both business immigration law and employment law and has special expertise in legal issues in graduate medical education (GME).
Mr. Read's immigration practice focuses on assisting employers in obtaining employment-based nonimmigrant visas (e.g., H-1B, L, O, TN) for foreign national employees and work-related immigrant (green card) visas, including PERM Labor Certifications, and advising employers on compliance with U.S. immigration laws and...
Forrest.Read@jacksonlewis.com
www.jacksonlewis.com
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AboutCurrently selected
Welcome to the Press Center. NATP can provide the information you need on tax or tax-related issues. We look forward to hearing from you.
The National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP) is the largest nonprofit organization that serves individuals specializing in tax preparation by providing tax education, federal tax research, tax updates and tax office supplies. NATP members work at offices that assist over 8 million people worldwide with U.S. tax preparation and planning. The average NATP member has been in the tax business for over 20 years and holds a tax/financial designation and/or a college degree. Formed in 1979, NATP's member base includes enrolled agents, certified public accountants, attorneys and financial planners. The national headquarters, located in Appleton, WI, employs over 50 professionals.
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Phone: 800.558.3402, ext. 1172
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Members have access to professionally written press releases. All you need to do is add your contact information and send them out to local media contacts. It's that easy and it's available to you as a member benefit. You can find these press releases under Business Central.
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Andy Katz | NCAA.com Correspondent | August 22, 2018
Mike Davis admits he wasn’t ready at Indiana. But he’s ready to prove himself at Detroit Mercy
Top Ten Plays of the Tournament
No coach was put in a tougher situation.
I’ve covered the sport since the mid-1980s and I can’t think of any other that rivals what Mike Davis had to do in September, 2000.
He took over for the fired Bob Knight at Indiana. Knight didn’t want him to take the job. Davis wasn’t part of the Indiana family. He had come on board three seasons earlier to be an assistant. He was from Alabama. He played at Alabama and had no reason to turn down the opportunity to be a head coach.
Davis had incredible headwind. There were the Knight loyalists on one side. On the other side, Indiana fans who just wanted to cheer on the Hoosiers, but also had every reason to question if Davis was ready for the job.
He admits now that he wasn’t.
And yet he found a way to lead the Hoosiers to the 2002 national title game. During his tenure, Davis was constantly under stress and it showed. He had one significant meltdown, sprinting around the court with 2.6 seconds left in a six-point loss to Kentucky at Freedom Hall in Louisville. He was ejected from the game and after was apologetic saying “I shouldn’t have acted like that. I can’t explain it. I’ve done something to embarrass my team.’’
RELATED: 7 of the most dazzling athletes in college basketball
Now, 16 years later, Davis is the new head coach at Detroit Mercy hired in mid-June, after a non-traditional route of going from Indiana to UAB to Texas Southern to Detroit.
What does Davis, now 57, say about the Mike Davis who was out of control running around the court that day in Louisville?
“I knew that guy,’’ Davis told NCAA.com. “That guy was unprepared for the position if he was in to be honest with you. I’m glad I went through all of that. Now I know how to behave. By me going through those situations I understand a lot of things. I’m able to share my past with my team. I have experienced it.
New @UDMDetroit head coach Mike Davis led Indiana to the national championship in 2002. He believes starting his career 'at the end' will help him at Calihan Hall.
"Anything that can be done in college basketball can be done from right here," Davis said. pic.twitter.com/cdGhSgZdmE
— Brad Galli (@BradGalli) June 14, 2018
“I understand, I truly understand,’’ said Davis of what his players will go through when their emotions get the best of them.
Davis said he has never heard from Knight. But Indiana did welcome him back with open arms, giving him a standing ovation when he took his Texas Southern team to Bloomington in 2014.
“I love Indiana,’’ said Davis.
“Coach Davis was thrown into a very volatile situation that history has shown to support this,’’ said Dane Fife, one of the stars of the 2002 national runner-up Indiana team and now an assistant at Michigan State.
“Indiana was and is considered one of the top programs in the country,’’ said Fife. “Given the circumstances (of succeeding a Hall of Fame coach in Knight), coach Davis did an excellent job of maintaining the level of high caliber play that coach Knight instilled in all of us, while working in his own ideas to help us win. Yes, his inexperience showed it’s warts, and mistakes were made, but we all had one goal in mind and coach Davis and staff held us accountable each day to achieve that goal.’’
Davis was the head coach at Indiana from 2000-06, finishing with a 115-79 record, 55-41 in the Big Ten, reaching the postseason five times with a 7-4 NCAA tournament record, including that 2002 title loss to Maryland.
“It was a great run and a great experience,’’ said Davis of the 2002 runner-up team. “We came together as a team. We had a team that could really shoot the basketball with Dane Fife, Tom Coverdale and Jared Jeffries.’’
Davis quickly went to UAB after Indiana, going 122-72 in six seasons, including an NCAA tournament at-large berth in 2011.
He then went to Texas Southern for six seasons. The record at Texas Southern is irrelevant since teams in the SWAC have to play on the road nearly the entire non-conference. The mark that was left is four NCAA tournament appearances, a team GPA of 3.0 and four straight semesters of a perfect APR score — something significant since Texas Southern had a postseason ban in Davis’ first season in 2013 for previous violations that pre-dated him.
“Indiana is supposed to be your last job and Texas Southern your first job,’’ said Davis. “UAB is supposed to be your second job after Texas Southern. I went totally opposite.
“I got a chance to see what big-time basketball was about at Indiana,’’ said Davis. “My goal has been to take everyone of my teams to that level. I was fortunate and blessed to be at Indiana first but I wouldn’t have known that until now.’’
RELATED: 12 college basketball coaching hires you may have missed
Davis was the easy choice for the Indiana administration. He was an outsider who didn’t have strong ties to the Knight family tree. If there was going to be a break, but with the intent to still keep the team intact in September of 2000 then Davis made sense.
“I wasn’t prepared for that situation,’’ said Davis. “Who would have been? I was an assistant coach in the CBA. I had been an assistant at Alabama (before Knight hired him at Indiana). And then all of a sudden I’m the head coach at Indiana?’’
Davis has grown tremendously — as a person and as a coach. He said he knew basketball, but wasn’t as skilled on the nuances.
He says he is now.
“I’m 20 times better now as a coach then I was then,’’ said Davis of his time at Indiana. “Now I’m much more prepared. I want to get back to a national championship game and be in the NCAA tournament every year.’’
MORE: Vote for the all-time best starting five
Texas Southern is always at a decided disadvantage, usually destined for a 16 or maybe a 15 seed out of the SWAC.
Detroit Mercy is a step up in the Horizon. The challenge with this program now is titanic, but only in the short term. Detroit fired Bacari Alexander after two consecutive eight-win seasons. Alexander had to sit seven games this past season due to a reported verbal incident with a player during a practice.
“I was really happy at Texas Southern and I had my best team coming back and I really enjoyed my time in Houston,’’ said Davis. “I didn’t pay much attention the first time (Detroit) called but the second time I thought about it. And I just thought that it could be another opportunity to challenge myself. It’s different than Indiana, UAB or Texas Southern. I got the job late but I want the challenge and there’s no better place I want to be then at Detroit Mercy.’’
A look at Coach Davis' previous stops, where he went 352-241 overall (.594 win%) and 205-95 in conference play (.683 win%). #DetroitsCollegeTeam #GoTitans pic.twitter.com/1g7bfCAg3g
— Detroit Mercy MBB (@DetroitMBB) June 15, 2018
Davis, who doesn’t look like he’s aged much at all, said he does 1,000 pushups a day. He said he was doing 500, but doubled it.
He follows that routine with a cold shower.
“It’s me challenging myself so I can challenge my players,’’ he said.
He said he also tries to spend an hour reading and/or listening to motivational speakers.
Davis said he wants to be a role model for African-American coaches.
“I can talk to them about my journey and share information,’’ said Davis.
Seven total players are on the roster, only four — seniors Josh McFolley and Gerald Blackshear and juniors Cole Long and Malik Eichler — are on scholarship. Davis’ son Antoine is going to play for Detroit.
“I have never felt this excited going to work every day,’’ said Davis, who said he has a seven-year contract at Detroit. “My goal is to get to the NCAA tournament as quick as possible. I love the challenge. When we win here, the whole community will be excited about it.’’
Andy Katz is an NCAA.com correspondent. Katz worked at ESPN for 18 years as a college basketball reporter, host and anchor. Katz has covered every Final Four since 1992, and the sport since 1986 as a freshman at Wisconsin. He is a former president of the United States Basketball Writers Association. Follow him on Twitter at @theandykatz. Follow his March Madness 365 weekly podcast here.
Here is everything you need to know about the 2020 Final Four, including dates, location, history, and how to get tickets.
College basketball: Longest active home winning streaks
Here are the current longest active home winning streaks in DI men's college basketball.
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Jesuits launch jubilee year to mark 400 years in Vietnam
by Joachim Pham
Dac Lo Monastery was the first Jesuit monastery established in Vietnam when they returned to the nation in 1957 after dissolution in 1773. The first Jesuits arrived 399 years ago, in 1615. (Teresa Hoang Yen)
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam — Vietnamese Jesuits are urged to continue bringing the Gospel's values to people as they celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jesuits to Vietnam.
Archbishop Paul Bui Van Doc, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Vietnam, asked local Jesuits to "be hymns of praise and bring people back to God through their life, witness and pastoral activities."
Doc presided at the special Mass marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first three foreign Jesuit missionaries to Vietnam, held Jan. 18 at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Ho Chi Minh City.
The archbishop also urged Jesuits to have constructive dialogue with other people and to build bridges between them, especially to the disadvantaged in remote areas. The Vietnamese Jesuits have extensive ministries in the Central Highlands, an area where ethnic minority people live. They speak different languages, are often materially poor and do not have access to the usual benefits offered to Vietnamese citizens.
About 1,500 people attended the celebration concelebrated by nine bishops and 100 priests.
In his homily, Jesuit Bishop Cosme Hoang Van Dat of the northern Bac Ninh Diocese, said Italian Fr. Francois Buzomi and two Portuguese -- Fr. Diogo Carvalho and Br. Antonio Dias -- had landed at the port of Cua Han (now Da Nang City) in central Vietnam on Jan. 18, 1615. This marks "an important milestone in the history of the Catholic church in Vietnam," he added.
Other Jesuit missionaries were also sent from Macau to the nation years later. Among them was Fr. Alexandre de Rhodes, who later became an expert in Vietnamese language and customs. His catechism book published in 1651 in Rome was considered the first book in Quoc Ngu (Romanized Vietnamese script). He also set up and trained indigenous catechists, who worked with foreign missionaries in evangelization.
De Rhodes' activities "really made Catholicism incarnated in Vietnamese society," said Dat, who is the first Jesuit prelate in Vietnam.
The bishop said before the Holy See established the first two Apostolic Vicariates of Dang Ngoai (Tonkin) and Dang Trong (Cochinchine) in 1659, Jesuit missionaries had baptized over 150,000 people, though facing severe religious persecution by local authorities.
Well known among those who were killed for their Catholic faith was Blessed Andrew Phu Yen, an indigenous catechist who worked with the early Jesuits, including de Rhodes, and was killed in 1644. He is the proto-martyr of Vietnam. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 2000.
Sixteen foreign and Vietnamese Jesuits were killed for their faith in religious persecutions from the 17th to 19th centuries.
After the Society of Jesuits was dissolved in 1773, Jesuit missionaries left Vietnam until 1957, when they returned to found their first community in Saigon and run the Pius X Pontifical College in Da Lat. The college provided priestly formation to students throughout South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; it was closed in 1976 by the communist government.
Dat urged Jesuits today to "bravely follow their confreres."
The Province of Vietnam early this month rolled out a website for the jubilee year that concludes in January.
In a statement announcing the commemorations, Fr. Joseph Pham Thanh Liem, Jesuit Provincial of Vietnam, said they will "organize seminars on missionary work and the Quoc Ngu and hold pilgrimages to the home town of Blessed Andrew Phu Yen and to the place of his execution."
The aim of this year's celebration, says the website, is the spiritual renewal of local Jesuits and all those who have adopted the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola.
Liem said part of the yearlong observation will include seminars and forums aimed at "learning (about) and promoting ways to evangelize properly in the world today through looking back over the history of evangelization in Vietnam. What can we discover that will suggest better ways for us to engage with the people of Vietnam today?"
The desired effect of this renewal is the strengthening of the missionary spirit of the local church and to help local Catholics to know something of the history of the Christian mission in their country.
In 2013, the Jesuit Province of Vietnam had 197 members providing spiritual exercises for local Catholics, doing evangelization work, and working with the poor, college students and internal migrants. Many of them are working in areas that lack local priests while others are providing needed spiritual and pastoral training to seminarians in diocesan seminaries across the county.
[Joachim Pham is an NCR correspondent based in Vietnam.]
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Only the way of Jesus will make things better
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Reality check: obsolescence
More washing machines, laundry dryers and refrigerators faulty within 5 years – consumers replace functioning flatscreens sooner
Today’s consumers are using new products for shorter timescales than in the past, according to the initial findings of a study by the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA). It finds evidence of decreased “first-use duration”, especially for TVs and, to some extent, for white goods such as washing machines, dryers and fridges. For electronic notebooks, however, the average duration of first use has remained virtually unchanged.
UBA President Maria Krautzberger explains: “When we looked at the use of electrical and electronic devices, we found a highly differentiated picture. The shortening of appliance first-use duration has varied reasons. In the second half of our study, we are now clarifying whether built-in obsolescence can be held responsible.”
Strategies to tackle obsolescence need to be equally diverse, involving measures that target both manufacturers and consumers. Rainer Griesshammer, a member of the Oeko-Institut’s Executive Board, notes: “Today, more electrical and electronic devices are being replaced even if they are still functioning. Technological advances are often the trigger: we see this happening a lot with televisions. On the other hand, we are also seeing an increase in the share of white goods being replaced within five years because of a technical defect.”
How long do today’s consumers use their electrical and electronic goods? How long does it take for the average product to develop a fault? And what motivates a consumer to buy a replacement? These are just some of the questions being explored by the German Federal Environment Agency in a joint study with the Oeko-Institut and the University of Bonn.
Do manufacturers deliberately shorten the lifespan of their products? This has been a hotly debated issue for some years. Although the concept has a name – “built-in obsolescence” – there is a lack of evidence of its existence. To close the gap, the German Federal Environment Agency commissioned a study to obtain reliable data on the lifespans and duration of use of selected electrical and electronic appliances. The researchers collected and analysed statistics on various types of household goods, large and small, as well as consumer electronics and IT products, for the period 2004-2012.
Half-way through the study, no evidence of built-in product weaknesses can be found yet. A systematic analysis of the causes of product faults and failure will be conducted in the second part of the study.
Flat screen TVs
The initial findings show that technical innovations are prompting today’s consumers to upgrade their flat screen TVs more quickly than before, even if the devices are functioning. More than 60 per cent of functioning flat screens were replaced for an upgrade in 2012, whereas only 25 per cent of purchases were made to replace a faulty product. In 2012, the average TV being replaced was only 5.6 years old. By contrast, the average duration of first use for cathode ray tube TVs from 2005 to 2012 was between 10 and 12 years.
The study also found that during the period reviewed, average first-use duration of white goods such as washing machines, dryers and fridges was 13 years – a decrease of around one year. One third of purchases were made to replace an appliance that was still functioning, i.e. the decision to buy a new product was motivated solely by the consumer’s desire for an upgrade. Just over every second replacement purchase was made because the existing product was faulty (2005: 57.6 per cent; 2012/2013: 55.6 per cent). The percentage of appliances being replaced within just five years due to technical defects has increased noticeably: from 3.5 per cent in 2004 to 8.3 per cent in 2012.
With notebooks, first-use duration has remained fairly constant, averaging five or six years, but the reasons for replacing a notebook have changed. In 2004, 70 per cent of functioning notebooks were replaced as a result of technological innovations and consumers’ desire for an upgrade, but in 2012/2013, this had fallen to around 25 per cent. In a further 25 per cent of cases in 2012, the new product was purchased because the old one had developed a technical defect.
Once the study ends in late 2015, the Federal Environment Agency plans to publish recommendations for manufacturers, consumers and legislators. “With the Ecodesign Directive and eco-labelling schemes such as Blue Angel, we already have instruments that can be used to guarantee minimum product longevity and improve the information available for consumers. Our study will now be investigating how these requirements can be broadened and assessed,” says Maria Krautzberger.
The interim report is available for download (in german language)
The Blue Angel scheme certifies long-lasting, easy-to-repair products: www.blauer-engel.de/de/artikel/presse-echo/2013/der-blaue-engel-zeichnet-langlebige-und-reparaturfreundliche-produkte-aus
Contact person at Oeko Institut:
Siddharth Prakash
Senior Researcher in the Sustainable Products & Material Flows Division
Oeko Institut, Freiburg head office
Phone: +49 761-45 295 244
Email: s.prakash--at--oeko.de
s.prakash--at--oeko.de
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Danila A. Bochkarev
EastWest Institute, Global Security Program
Danila Bochkarev holds an MA degree in Politics/Political Economy (University College London) and a DEA (MA) degree in History from University of Paris 1 (Sorbonne), a Candidate of Science degree in politics and a BA in International Relations (University of Nizhniy Novgorod in Russia).
Prior to joining EastWest Institute Global Security Program, Danila spent some time with European Parliament in Brussels and worked as a visting research fellow at the Institute for European Studies, Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). In 2001, he spent several months as trainee at the Foundation for Strategic Studies (FRS) in Paris.
Danila Bochkarev provides consultancy and research services in the area of the Russian politics, Russian foreign and energy policy, European and international security issues. He is particularly interested in energy security and foreign policy/security issues. He is a native Russian speaker and fluent both in English and French.
The 'Beijing' vs. 'Washington' Consensus and Resource Management: The Case of Russia
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Alternative Gas Supplies to Europe: Pro & Contra of the diversification towards Central Asia
National and International Issues in Natural Gas Development
Gazprom buys Roman Abramovich's Sibneft: the new Russian Energy Paradigm comes true?
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A CARER who let his morbidly obese fiancee rot to death in Nundle has pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Neil Douglas Morris, 60, left the victim in a recliner without food or water for 72 hours and has received a carer’s payment since 2012. The graphic details of the case can now be revealed after Morris pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Tamworth District Court on Monday. The man’s charge was upgraded to manslaughter in August and he was set to go to trial for at least three weeks in July, before he changed his plea. The decision now is how much of a discount Morris should receive given he has saved the court from what would have been a lengthy trial, Judge Jeffery McLennan said. “The debate will be on the range of 15 to 20 per cent for the discount,” he said. “The cause of death would have been agitated with serious issues related to expert evidence.” Read also: Police facts show a nurse visited the couple’s home on July 13, 2017, and found the 75-year-old slumped in a chair unable to speak with sunken eyes and her legs weeping fluid onto the floor. The victim suffered from urine and fecal incontinence and had spent three days without food or drink. She sat in her own bodily fluids, with ‘small, midge-like insects’ crawling over her body, facts detailed. Morris told paramedics his partner of 15 years lost the strength to live three weeks earlier after finalising her will. When the ambulance took her to hospital the victim believed it was 1974. At Tamworth hospital doctors decided her wounds were too severe to survive – her spinal bones were visible and she was placed in palliative care where she died on July 16, 2017. Police evidence tendered in court claims Morris did not understand the seriousness of the injury and was annoyed the soiled sling used to lift the victim out of the chair would not be returned to him because it would “cost him money”. He made mention that he wasn’t a doctor or vet and “did his best” but had noticed the bugs and fluids near her wounds. Morris told police he should not have let her sit in the chair without food or drink for three days, but had planned to call for help the following day if she didn’t improve. The coroner’s report showed the rotted lesion that caused her death was likely present for months. Morris’ case was set for a three-week trial in July but he will now be sentenced in Tamworth District Court in May. He remains on bail. Want more Tamworth court news? Subscribe to The Leader to read the latest first
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GRAPHIC CONTENT: Nundle's Neil Douglas Morris pleads guilty to manslaughter after victim left in chair dies
GUILTY PLEA: Neil Douglas Morris pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Tamworth District Court on Monday. Photo: Peter Hardin 150818PHA368
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
A CARER who let his morbidly obese fiancee rot to death in Nundle has pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Neil Douglas Morris, 60, left the victim in a recliner without food or water for 72 hours and has received a carer’s payment since 2012.
The graphic details of the case can now be revealed after Morris pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Tamworth District Court on Monday.
The man’s charge was upgraded to manslaughter in August and he was set to go to trial for at least three weeks in July, before he changed his plea.
The decision now is how much of a discount Morris should receive given he has saved the court from what would have been a lengthy trial, Judge Jeffery McLennan said.
“The debate will be on the range of 15 to 20 per cent for the discount,” he said. “The cause of death would have been agitated with serious issues related to expert evidence.”
Manslaughter detectives upgrade charge after death of woman
Autopsy evidence missing in necessities of life case: court told
Man in court accused of failing to provide necessities of life
Police facts show a nurse visited the couple’s home on July 13, 2017, and found the 75-year-old slumped in a chair unable to speak with sunken eyes and her legs weeping fluid onto the floor.
The victim suffered from urine and fecal incontinence and had spent three days without food or drink.
She sat in her own bodily fluids, with ‘small, midge-like insects’ crawling over her body, facts detailed.
Morris told paramedics his partner of 15 years lost the strength to live three weeks earlier after finalising her will. When the ambulance took her to hospital the victim believed it was 1974.
At Tamworth hospital doctors decided her wounds were too severe to survive – her spinal bones were visible and she was placed in palliative care where she died on July 16, 2017.
Police evidence tendered in court claims Morris did not understand the seriousness of the injury and was annoyed the soiled sling used to lift the victim out of the chair would not be returned to him because it would “cost him money”.
He made mention that he wasn’t a doctor or vet and “did his best” but had noticed the bugs and fluids near her wounds.
Morris told police he should not have let her sit in the chair without food or drink for three days, but had planned to call for help the following day if she didn’t improve.
The coroner’s report showed the rotted lesion that caused her death was likely present for months.
Morris’ case was set for a three-week trial in July but he will now be sentenced in Tamworth District Court in May.
He remains on bail.
Want more Tamworth court news? Subscribe to The Leader to read the latest first
Discuss "Carer who let obese fiancee rot to death pleads guilty to manslaughter"
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Plaster Foundation and Family, Bronze Bear recipients - Academic Spotlight
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Gilleard and Higgs (2000) more fully develop some of the ideas explored by Giddens (1994) in their useful and comprehensive introduction to post-structural readings of older age. Elder's (1977) life history account offers compelling insights into the intersections of class and gender through a socialist lens, and represents an early and interesting example of the life history and biographical method. Chamberlayne et al. (2000) provide comprehensive and thoughtful insights into biographical me
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An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London, Volume 2 - West London
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Startup Launches Blockchain Powered Electric Vehicles That Mine Cryptocurrency | Crypto
By onlyinfotech On Sep 20, 2018 0
A Singapore blockchain startup is launching a fleet of blockchain-enabled electric vehicles that mine crypto as users travel. The company intends to reduce carbon emissions and to reward people for doing so.
Cars and climate change
Road vehicles such as cars, trucks and motorcycles are the largest contributors of CO2 emissions in the transport sector, overshadowing that of trains, planes and boats. In the United Kingdom, the transport sector is the U.K.’s biggest contributor to CO2 emissions, and at present, there is a scramble not only in the U.K. but worldwide to put more electric vehicles on the roads.
CyClean aims to combat the issue by combining blockchain and cryptocurrency software with electric-powered vehicles as well as other products, such as solar panels and bicycles. The company will allow its users to rent these energy-efficient products and be rewarded with cryptocurrency.
Electric vehicles and products supplied to CyClean by leading producers are upgraded with a chip that connects to the CyClean server, it then tracks the traveled meters or watts of the user and rewards them accordingly.
There is a fixed amount of daily rewards for users and that total is divided by the number of users who have exceeded more than a kilometer of travel that day or produced more than one watt. With that said, the amount of CyClean coins awarded to users will be proportionate to the distance travelled or watts produced.
According to the CyClean white paper, their business model covers the electric bicycles and motorbikes, and they will be moving toward electric cars in the near future. They also have intentions to expand their motorbike sales to Southeast Asia, where usage of these vehicles is very high.
CyClean says it is an operating business that has recently completed a successful Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and is preparing to launch domestic solar panels and an e-bike, adding to their range of products that mine the platform’s native cryptocurrency, the CyClean Coin (CCL). A CCL/USDT trading pair is now listed on HitBTC, a global cryptocurrency exchange, the CyClean team announced in August. At the time of writing, CCL is the highest trading ICO token on HitBTC, following only the established cryptocurrencies and altcoins, according to CoinMarketCap.
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The Champion of Creators: Ted Murphy Interview
On today’s show, David and I interview the CEO of IZEA, Ted Murphy. He shares his entrepreneurial story of how he began designing and selling shirts in his school to now representing some of the biggest influencer marketers and content creators on the planet. Join our conversation which is packed full of wisdom and advice.
Ted Murphy is a serial entrepreneur who has founded six companies since 1994. Today he is Founder, CEO and Chairman of IZEA. Murphy has been called the father of paid blogging and is largely credited for creating the social sponsorship industry. In 2006 Murphy launched PayPerPost.com, the first online marketplace that paid bloggers to create content on behalf of brands. Ted’s vision for democratizing content and influencer compensation is now a reality in most marketing strategies, from top brands and agencies to small businesses.
Murphy has bootstrapped companies off credit cards, been VC backed and most recently brought IZEA public. His disruptive approach and leadership have enabled him to raise over $50 million in equity for his entrepreneurial endeavors in both public and private markets. Murphy’s backers have included top tier VCs Draper Fischer Jurvetson and Village Ventures as well as billionaires John Poppajohn and Dr. Phillip Frost.
Murphy has consulted for some of the world’s largest marketing organizations including FOX, Bombardier, General Motors, SeaWorld and Disney. He has also negotiated deals with celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, Diddy and Mario Lopez. Murphy is a prominent TV commentator on tech and social media marketing trends and platforms. His unique point of view from the intersection of media and technology, has led to frequent appearances on Fox Business’s Varney & Co, CNBC and Bloomberg TV.
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Home / News / Anne Hathaway To Present On Oscar® Sunday
Anne Hathaway To Present On Oscar® Sunday
Oscar winner Anne Hathaway will present at this year’s Oscars®, show producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron announced today. The Oscars, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, will air on Sunday, March 2, live on ABC.
Hathaway won last year’s Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in “Les Misérables.” She was previously nominated for her leading role in the 2008 film “Rachel Getting Married.” Hathaway, who made her feature film debut in 2001’s “The Princess Diaries,” has starred in films including “Ella Enchanted,” “The Devil Wears Prada” and “The Dark Knight Rises.”
Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2013 will be presented on Oscar Sunday, March 2, at the Dolby Theatre® at Hollywood & Highland Center® and televised live on the ABC Television Network. The Oscars, produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
Gail Silverman
Gail.Silverman@oscars.org
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Home / News / JOHN SINGLETON’S “BOYZ N THE HOOD” LEADS ACADEMY’S JUNE PROGRAMMING SLATE IN LOS ANGELES AND NEW YORK
JOHN SINGLETON’S “BOYZ N THE HOOD” LEADS ACADEMY’S JUNE PROGRAMMING SLATE IN LOS ANGELES AND NEW YORK
The Academy will also screen and discuss Oscar®-winning films “Rebecca” and “Giant”
The Academy today announced its June slate of Los Angeles and New York programs: a “Boyz N the Hood” 25th anniversary celebration, a digital restoration premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and a 60th anniversary screening of the George Stevens epic “Giant.” The events will be highlighted by onstage discussions with a wide range of special guests, including filmmakers John Singleton and Gregory Nava, novelist Walter Mosley, actress Elsa Cárdenas, and visual effects artist Rob Legato.
“BOYZ N THE HOOD” (Los Angeles)
25th Anniversary Celebration: Cast and Crew Reunion
Friday, June 10, at 7:30 p.m.
Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Beverly Hills
This 25th anniversary screening at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater includes an onstage panel discussion with members of the film’s cast and crew, including Oscar®-nominated writer-director John Singleton, producer Steve Nicolaides, editor Bruce Cannon, composer Stanley Clarke and former Columbia Pictures executive Stephanie Allain.
The Los Angeles celebration will continue the following week at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater with screenings of two of Singleton’s later films, “Baby Boy” (2001) and “Rosewood” (1997).
Tuesday, June 14, at 7:30 p.m.
Linwood Dunn Theater, Hollywood
“BOYZ N THE HOOD” (New York)
25th Anniversary Celebration: Spotlight on Screenwriting
Sunday, June 12, at 1 p.m.
SVA Theatre, 333 W. 23rd St., New York City
John Singleton in conversation with Walter Mosley
This 25th anniversary screening in New York City will be followed by an onstage conversation between Oscar-nominated writer-director John Singleton and acclaimed novelist Walter Mosley. The event is part of the Academy’s Spotlight on Screenwriting series.
Digital Restoration Premiere
Wednesday, June 1, at 7:30 p.m.
Two-time Oscar-winning visual effects artist Rob Legato will offer background notes and visual design insight at the premiere of a new 4K digital restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940). The film received Oscars® for Best Picture and Black-and-White Cinematography, as well as nine additional nominations. The print is courtesy of the Walt Disney Studios, which supervised the restoration.
60th Anniversary Screening: The George Stevens Lecture Series
Thursday, June 23, at 7:30 p.m.
As part of its George Stevens Lecture series, the Academy will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Best Picture nominee “Giant” with a screening and onstage conversation between Academy governor Gregory Nava and actress Elsa Cárdenas, who has a supporting role in the film. The first commercial motion picture to take on prejudice and racial intolerance toward Mexican Americans, “Giant” received a total of 10 Academy Award® nominations and earned George Stevens his second Directing Oscar.
For more information about Academy events, and to purchase tickets, visit www.Oscars.org/Events.
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Washington County officials reach stalemate on jail expansion
by: Clarissa Bustamante
Posted: Jun 11, 2019 / 03:57 AM CDT / Updated: Jun 11, 2019 / 03:57 AM CDT
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (KNWA)– Washington County leaders have made a proposal in the ongoing debate to solve overcrowding at the Washington County jail.
The Quorum Courts Jails Committee has approved the motion to suspend the three items on the table Monday night indefinitely.
Those motions were a half percent sales tax for jail expansion, a quarter percent sales tax to fund maintenance and operation, and an ordinance to hold a special election.
At the meeting, there were a lot of conflicting views. One of the few things the community could agree on is that the current jail facility is a problem.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office presented the most recent numbers on how many inmates are sleeping on the floor. Right now, it’s about 40 women and 40 men.
Various alternatives to expanding the jail were presented throughout the meeting, such as sending felons to treatment or rehabilitation programs.
Matthew Bender, a public defender, said creating more space would mean more inmates. Right now, the system doesn’t have the capacity to take on more people.
“There’s not enough resources to handle more cases and if you have a bigger jail you’re going to have more cases and more people who are incarcerated,“ Bender said.
Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder proposed the original plan.
He said, “Our officers, our deputies, our law enforcement partners throughout Northwest Arkansas…
Crimes can be committed, they can investigate and they can arrest. But, if they don’t have room in the jail, it really takes the teeth out of the crime fighters ability to really curb crime.“
A motion by Justice of the Peace Ann Harbison was approved Monday night.
It’s to take the issue up to the budget committee to explore options to fund a study to solve the overcrowding problem.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The top American diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran when it was overrun by Iranian protesters in 1979 has died. L. Bruce Laingen (LAYNG'-ehn) was 96.
Laingen's son Chip says his father died Monday in Bethesda, Maryland.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The founders of Oklahoma's largest virtual charter school embezzled millions of dollars in state funds through an illegal scheme that involved the use of "ghost students" to artificially inflate enrollment numbers, investigators allege.
Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent Tommy Johnson outlined the allegations in an affidavit for a search warrant of an Epic teacher's home filed late Monday in Oklahoma County. Investigators seized a laptop and mobile phone during their search.
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Archives|ATLANTA MURDER TRIAL TESTIMONY ENDS
https://nyti.ms/29K4YwK
ATLANTA MURDER TRIAL TESTIMONY ENDS
By WENDELL RAWLS JR. and SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES FEB. 26, 1982
View page in TimesMachine
February 26, 1982, Page 00014Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives
Testimony in the murder trial of Wayne B. Williams ended today with his mother saying the authorities had ruined her family, ''but they haven't produced any evidence my son is a killer.''
Judge Clarence Cooper of Fulton County Superior Court scheduled final arguments for Friday at 9 A.M., with two hours allotted for each side. Deliberations by the jury of eight blacks and four whites could begin in late afternoon.
The jurors, instead of convening in the small jury room, are to deliberate in the courtroom because of the bulky exhibits submitted as evidence. Among them are an eight-foot-long model of the James Jackson Parkway bridge over the Chattahoochee River, from which Mr. Williams is said to have thrown the bodies of Nathaniel Cater, 27 years old, and Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, the men he is charged with slaying.
There are also a car seat, dozens of maps and charts and scores of photographs of microscopic sections and cross-sections of carpet fibers and dog hairs mounted on sheets of posterboard. 'Scuffle' in a Parking Lot
The defendant's mother, Faye Williams, returned to the stand as a rebuttal witness for the defense in an abbreviated court session today. Later, a parking lot attendant, Henry I. Ingram, a rebuttal witness for the prosecution, said he saw Mr. Williams's parents drive into the lot about 5 o'clock one afternoon last May. Moments later, he said, two young men walked to the car where one of them ''snatched open'' the door on the driver's side and pulled Homer Williams out of the car. The father and the younger man ''scuffled'' in the parking lot, he said.
Mr. Ingram said he later recognized the younger man as Wayne Williams, a 23-year-old self-styled music promoter, when he saw him on television.
The attendant said that at the time of the incident, he warned the men that they were on private property and would have to take their argument elsewhere. He said that as the elder Mr. Williams was about to leave, the man returned to the car and warned him, ''Don't come home tonight.''
The attendant said that the elder Mr. Williams told him that his son had been angry at his refusal to rent a car for a friend. Anger Is an Issue at Trial
Mr. Williams's anger has been an important issue in the trial, the prosecution trying to establish the defendant's flares of fury, to show a man capable of violence and murder.
The defense, on the other hand, tried to present an ambitious, ''carefree, happy-go-lucky, all-American'' youth who harbored no rage and was incapable of such destruction.
For the outset, the defense strategy seemed to be to show that Mr. Williams had been framed by a law-enforcement community desperate for a scapegoat in Atlanta's ordeal of 28 murdered or missing young blacks in 22 months.
The defense lawyers said the prosecution witnesses were lying about everything adverse to the defendant, that the police and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ''programmed'' their accounts and that other witnesses bore grudges against Mr. Williams. Parents' Testimony Weakened
But against a prosecution case that was based on two items, a splash in the Chattahoochee River when the defendant was said to have been on the bridge and the presence on the bodies of fibers that purportedly came from carpeting in the Williams home, the defense could bring only Mr. Williams's parents to the witness stand to try to establish an alibi for him. And their credibility was cracked by conflicting evidence.
The father, for example, testified that he used the family station wagon on a photographic assignment until 11:30 P.M. on May 21, the evening when other witnesses said they recalled seeing the defendant with one of the victims. But the elder Mr. Williams could not show the assignment listed in his log book, as dozens of others were.
The mother said the fibers found on the bodies could not have come from her carpet, as alleged by the state, because she bought it in 1968 and the state's own fiber analysts said it was not manufactured until 1971. She exhibited photographs purporting to show the green carpet in her home in 1968.
Then the man who sold the carpet to the Williamses said he had not formed his company until l97l and that he and the carpet installer could identify their signatures on the loan agreement for the carpet. It was dated Dec. 7, 1971.
The defense spent much of its effort trying to refute prosecution implications that Mr. Williams was a homosexual who preyed on young blacks. The prosecution never said that Mr. Williams was a homosexual, but a teen-age witness said he saw Mr. Williams holdng hands with a victim and another said the defendant had made a sexual proposition.
A version of this article appears in print on February 26, 1982, on Page A00014 of the National edition with the headline: ATLANTA MURDER TRIAL TESTIMONY ENDS. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Middle East|Syria, Claiming Heavy Toll in Town, Hints at Retaliation
Syria, Claiming Heavy Toll in Town, Hints at Retaliation
By LIAM STACK JUNE 6, 2011
CAIRO — The Syrian government said “armed gangs” had slaughtered at least 120 police officers, security personnel and civilians in a town near its border with Turkey on Monday, an account that, if true, suggests a violent shift in the uprising against Syria’s hard-line leadership.
Many opposition figures and local residents disputed official Syrian news media reports of what was happening in the town, Jisr al-Shoughour. Some said the violence was set off by the defection of soldiers sent to besiege the town on Saturday, a number of them seeking “refuge with the citizens” of the town, according to a statement released by an opposition group, Local Coordinating Committees in Syria.
The number of dead ballooned throughout the day as state media described a “massacre” by unidentified gunmen, and said residents were “pleading” for the army to intervene. But state television provided few details of the dead and no images of the town. Instead, throughout the day an ever-higher estimate of fatalities scrolled across the bottom of Syrian television screens.
Neither the government’s nor the opposition’s version of events could be independently verified, but both would represent a troubling escalation in the popular uprising — and the bloody government crackdown — that has gripped Syria since mid-March. Although the protests in many Syrian cities have been peaceful, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has claimed that it faces an armed insurrection by extremists and terrorists, possibly to justify the widespread deployment of troops and tanks to crush dissent.
There have been sporadic armed clashes with opponents of the government during the revolt, and human rights groups did not rule out the possibility of violent reprisals against troops by people who lived in Jisr al-Shoughour, a Sunni Muslim area with a history of support for the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
Telephone and Internet service to the town was heavily disrupted on Monday night. But residents reached by phone described scenes of mass flight and street barricades hastily built by the people to defend against the return of security forces.
“The army split; the confrontation is between them,” said Saeb Jamil, a local activist who said he was helping people flee to the nearby Turkish border. “The army is confronting the army.”
It was unclear from residents’ accounts if local people took part in the conflict between defectors and elements of the security forces that remained loyal. Camille Otrakji, a Damascus-born political blogger living in Montreal, said the country was tinderbox waiting for a spark, especially as the unrest dragged on and tensions mounted.
“It doesn’t take much to get people there to use arms,” Mr. Otrakji said. “You can never control everybody on the streets. If you get people angry enough, the arms are there, and they’re going to go for it.”
The town was the target of a military operation that began on Saturday night. Attacks using helicopter gunships and armored cars mounted with machine guns killed more than two dozen people and drew forces from other cities like Latakia and Homs, said activists in those towns.
TimesCast | Syria Says Officers Killed
June 6, 2011 - Syrian state television says at least 120 people - most if not all of them police and security personnel - were killed in a clash in a northern town, but reports could no be verified.
By Zena Barakat on Publish Date June 6, 2011. . Watch in Times Video »
Elements of the security forces began fighting each other around dusk on Sunday in the town’s Friki District and soon withdrew to an area about 12 miles east, Mr. Jamil said. He described the town on Monday night as “a city of ghosts.” Most of its population had fled, he said, save a few who remained behind to defend against looters and prepare for a renewed military assault.
But another resident, a 28-year-old who gave his name only as Omar, said clashes continued on Monday between “tens of soldiers” who had defected to defend the town, on one side, and members of military intelligence and plainclothes security agents on the other.
For weeks, opposition figures and rights activists have claimed to receive reports of defecting soldiers killed by others in their unit as the crackdown against a string of restive towns has ground across the country. If the residents’ accounts of events in Jisr al-Shoughour are confirmed, the clashes would represent the largest known episode of infighting within the Syrian security forces since the start of the uprising, which the government has described as a Sunni sectarian attack on the country’s fragile balance of ethnic groups and religious denominations.
Jisr al-Shoughour is at the edge of the remote and neglected agricultural province of Idlib, an impoverished hub of Sunni conservatism and well-armed smuggling activity that is centered on tribal networks spanning the nearby Turkish border. Antigovernment sentiment has swelled there , said a rights activist, Wissam Tarif. Record numbers filled the streets for antigovernment protests on Friday. “The whole area is rising up,” Mr. Tarif said.
The town’s location on the Turkish border, and its history of ties to areas beyond it, may have sounded an alarm for Damascus, analysts said. Some of the uprising’s harshest crackdowns have occurred in other border regions, like the town of Dara’a on the Jordanian border, and Baniyas, a coastal town close to Lebanon.
“One thing I’ve heard is that the regime is being particularly hard on border towns because they are petrified of another Benghazi being carved out,” said Amr al-Azm, a Syrian dissident and historian at Shawnee State University in Ohio, referring to the rebel stronghold in Libya. “It’s bandit country, right on the border with Turkey.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon; Katherine Zoepf from New York; and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.
A version of this article appears in print on June 7, 2011, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Syria Reports Rising Toll From ‘Armed Gangs’; Opposition Disputes Account. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
THE LEDE BLOG
Syrian Soldiers Record 'Trophy Videos' of Dead Protesters JUNE 6, 2011
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New York|Investigators Say Menendez Intervened on Friend’s Behalf
Investigators Say Menendez Intervened on Friend’s Behalf
By Raymond Hernandez and Robert Pear
WASHINGTON — Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey intervened with federal health officials on two occasions in the last four years in an effort to help a close friend in a billing dispute with Medicare, federal investigators said Wednesday.
The senator’s efforts were unavailing, but he persisted, the investigators said.
The senator’s friend, Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, a Florida eye surgeon, is under federal investigation. A team of agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services raided Dr. Melgen’s offices in West Palm Beach and removed 30 boxes of documents and other material last week.
The revelation about the senator’s involvement in the Medicare matter was reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday night.
Last week, The New York Times published an article detailing the senator’s efforts to help Dr. Melgen, a major benefactor of his, revive a lucrative contract to provide port security in the Dominican Republic.
Dr. Melgen has been in a dispute with Medicare officials over billing for a drug used to treat certain types of macular degeneration, which can cause loss of vision and damage to the retina. By getting several doses of the drug from a single vial, investigators said, Dr. Melgen was able to make the drug go further, and as a result, he was able to treat more patients and file more claims with Medicare.
Thus, for example, Medicare might allow doctors to bill $2,000 for a vial, but the doctor sometimes filed claims for as much as $8,000, said the investigators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry was continuing.
While Medicare was trying to recover money from the doctor, the senator contacted federal officials and suggested that the agency was being unfair and needed to clarify its policy, the investigators said.
Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey.CreditSaul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In 2009, they said, Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, called Jonathan D. Blum, a senior official at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as C.M.S. In 2012, they said, the senator expressed his concern in a meeting with Marilyn B. Tavenner, the acting administrator of the agency, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Both officials indicated to Mr. Menendez that they had no plans to change the payment policy for the drug.
The government eventually recovered some of the money from Dr. Melgen, but he is exercising his right to pursue an administrative appeal, challenging Medicare’s determination that he had overbilled the program, the investigators said.
An aide to Mr. Menendez issued a statement on Wednesday night, saying that the senator had no knowledge of any Medicare fraud investigation involving Dr. Melgen’s company. “Senator Menendez was never aware of and has not intervened in any Medicare fraud investigation on behalf of Vitreo Retinal Consultants,” one of Mr. Melgen’s companies, the aide said.
The Menendez aide confirmed that the senator has “in the past raised concerns with C.M.S. about conflicting guidelines and ambiguity in C.M.S. rules that are difficult for providers to understand.” Mr. Menendez wanted to make sure that “providers were not penalized if C.M.S. clarified or changed the rules of the game retroactively,” the aide added.
Alan Reider, a lawyer representing Dr. Melgen, issued a statement Wednesday night saying that his client was cooperating fully with the government and had not been told the focus of the investigation. Because Dr. Melgen is a Medicare provider, Mr. Reider said, his claims had been subject to audits by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and he called the audits routine. “Those audits have been resolved administratively, consistent with Medicare requirements,” Mr. Reider said.
The relationship between Mr. Menendez and Dr. Melgen has been drawing scrutiny since reports recently surfaced that Mr. Menendez had accepted two round-trip flights aboard Dr. Melgen’s jet for personal vacations in the Dominican Republic in 2010. He failed to report them as gifts or reimburse Dr. Melgen at the time, as required. Then in January, he sent the doctor a check to cover the cost of the flights, with his aides saying that he failed to reimburse the doctor earlier because of sloppy paperwork.
Mr. Menendez has been helpful to Dr. Melgen. Two years ago, Dr. Melgen bought an ownership interest in a company that had a long-dormant contract with the Dominican Republic to provide port security. Mr. Menendez, who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee that holds sway over the Dominican Republic, subsequently urged officials in the State and Commerce Departments to intervene so the contract would be enforced, at an estimated value of $500 million.
While the focus of the investigation involving the raid late last month is not clear, Mr. Menendez finds himself defending his relationship with a major benefactor as he ascends to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Investigators Say Menendez Intervened on Friend’s Behalf. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Port Deal Pushed by Menendez Could Benefit Former Aide, Not Just a Major Donor
Senator Has Long Ties to Donor Under Scrutiny
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in Posts
Jon Letendre
Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/09/2019 in Posts
Aristotle's wheel paradox
Correct. It's dogmatism: Dogmatism made this little dog taller than the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. J
In France pro boxers are joining the yellow vests jumping into the streets and fighting back globalist Macron’s police. Click little arrow on the right.
“Brazil has pulled out of a United Nations pact on dealing with rising migration, joining the United States and a growing number of countries in rejecting the agreement” https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2019-01-08/brazil-quits-un-migration-pact-will-still-take-in-venezuelan-refugees-source
That's rather trivial. If a disk rolls without slipping, by definition the distance between the contact points between disk and support before and after one revolution equals the circumference of the disk. The center has always the same position and distance relative to the contact point (perpendicular, distance R), so that has also traveled a distance of the circumference of the disk.
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Album note by Eric C. Simpson
January 2016 January 2016
Music January 2016
Album note
by Eric C. Simpson
On Gil Shaham’s J. S. Bach: Sonatas and Partitas.
Gil Shaham. via
It is a peculiarity of the violin’s history that the most cherished solo works in the repertoire came outside the rough boundaries of the instrument’s “golden period.” The years between 1775 and 1904 saw a remarkable flourishing of the violin canon, in the form of five concerti by Mozart and the five pantheonic concerti by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Beethoven, and Brahms. These latter two also contributed a total of thirteen sonatas for violin and piano that remain essential items of the chamber repertoire.
Yet somehow, even as the violin and its technique were being rapidly transformed and the repertoire vastly expanded, the expressive potential of the unaccompanied violin, established in the eighteenth century and revisited in the twentieth, went largely unexplored. The caprices and études of Niccolò Paganini and Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, which helped to drive that technical revolution, are essentially musical party tricks, requiring fantastic digital dexterity but offering little in the way of artistic depth. Not until Eugène Ysaÿe’s six sonatas of 1923 did anything in the solo violin repertoire approach the emotional power of Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas. Composed between 1703 and 1720, Bach’s set stands as the exemplar of violinistic polyphony, achieving on a single staff a level of musical complexity previously thought to be impossible. Today the six not only remain a central pillar of the violin repertoire, but have even earned a place among the greatest pieces of music for any instrumentation.
So when a major violinist releases a recording of the complete Sonatas and Partitas, one pays attention. It’s surprising, actually, given the scope of Gil Shaham’s career as a recording and performing artist, that he hasn’t gotten around to a Bach cycle before now. It was more than twenty years ago that Shaham, then the newest young star on the violin circuit, released on one album recordings of the Barber and Korngold concerti that are just about definitive. Today he is the consensus dean of American concert violinists, and most recently the author of a Bach album on the Canary Classics label that is, in a word, strange. Said the master of his latest recordings:
I grew up playing this music slower and hearing performances that were slower. But at some point I realized that if the Menuets of the French Suites or the very famous Minuets from Anna Magdalena’s Notebook fall at a certain clip, then why don’t I play the Menuets of the Third Partita in the same tempo? If you think of how fast the fugue from the Ouverture of the Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C major is performed, why was I playing the Fuga of the G-minor Sonata so slowly? I believe composers often think of violin writing as rapid and brilliant, and in my experience it is rare that a living composer requests that we play slower. So my feeling for the general tempos of this music is faster. It swings better.
Uh-oh. Interpretive experimentation is all well and good, but attempts to mimic or “rediscover” imagined period practice within a modern performing idiom are frequently misguided and occasionally disastrous. Shaham isn’t kidding about his tempi: nearly every movement in the cycle is about 25 to 50 percent faster than the current standard, and some are even more eccentric.
Completing the G-minor fugue in about four minutes to the usual five and a half, he seems to answer his own question: one doesn’t play Bach’s fugues at these tempi because it is practically impossible to do so cleanly. Consider that violinists today are, as a class, more technically proficient than they have been at any other point in history: when Paganini unveiled the last of his twenty-four caprices in 1817, at age thirty-five, a Faustian bargain seemed the only plausible explanation for his abilities. Today, a violinist with any shot at a major career is expected to have mastered all twenty-four by age sixteen. If Gil Shaham can’t play these fugues cleanly at 120 beats per minute, it’s unlikely any of Bach’s contemporaries could have, either.
Beyond even the crass consideration of whether all the notes are “there,” the fugues, when played this fast, totally miss their essential characters. The G-minor fugue, usually a crisp but thoughtful meditation, becomes a scrambling dash to the finish. Its joyous counterpart in C major feels manic, its dovetailed lines whirring by too quickly to be heard—remedied only when Shaham slows down to wrap his fingers around the treacherous clusters of chords that make up so much of this movement, raising further doubts about whether his pace is a realistic one.
Yet even in many of the slower movements, where technical dexterity is less of a concern, Shaham’s interpretations are unsatisfying. The C-major sonata opens with a gorgeous, distant pulse, its progression slowly emerging from the simplest of beginnings. There is no mystery to speak of in Shaham’s treatment—the blooming chords sound unconsidered, as though he’s merely rushing through to get to the end.
Far more effective is the treatment of the E-major Partita, successful in no small part because the tempi are comparatively sane. Shaham’s Preludio is bright and shining—it’s difficult, really, to play this movement any other way, but taking the music at a reasonable tempo, he shows off the clarity of tone and phrasing that make his playing so attractive. It’s extremely tempting to turn the second movement into a dirge, so aching and spacious is its melody. But it is a Loure, a graceful and pert court dance, and Shaham’s interpretation is one of few that I’ve ever heard to keep that fact in mind, favoring short, quick bow strokes to give the music a sprightly gait. He takes the repeats in all of the sonata movements, of course, and his ornamentation, though tasteful, is not the sort of inoffensive noodling usually heard from violinists as a nod to period practice. Deeply thoughtful, often playful, his additions actually make the second time around feel like a fresh take on the same idea. The chief example is the Gavotte en rondeau, growing cheekier and more complex with every subsequent iteration of the refrain.
The most impressive suite from the entire set, and the only one in which Shaham’s experimental tempi really work is, as it happens, the greatest and most famous, the D-minor Partita. This piece is a towering fixture in the violin repertoire in the way that Beethoven’s Fifth looms over the symphonic repertoire, or Hamlet over English drama. To render an interpretation that stands out among the hundreds that can already be heard is itself an achievement; to shed new light on the piece, to craft a reading that is truly unique, takes an uncommon strain of interpretive genius.
The opening Allemande, taken at this speed, has more a narrative than a proclamatory force. The Sarabande, less morose than usual, is actually danceable, while still retaining its intrinsic melancholy. The Gigue is impressively nimble, rippling by in an instant.
The last movement, the Chaconne, is the jewel of this partita, a dark and massive structure composed of extensive variations on a simple descending bass line. Most performances take between thirteen and fifteen minutes; by that standard, Shaham’s eleven is certainly on the extreme end, but not completely beyond the pale. His basic tempo, in fact, though certainly brisk, feels very much within standard boundaries—but crucially and unusually, he sticks to that initial tempo, maintaining a consistent pace through the kaleidoscopic progression of variations. At times, the music feels a little rushed as a result, notably in the central D-major section. In sum, though, the relentless forward push lends the music a certain subtle intensity, particularly in the thrilling bariolage sections, even while Shaham’s coloring is relatively light. His voicing is spectacular, bringing out lines in the writing that I’ve never heard so clearly before.
That, of course, is the payoff of charting a course so far afield from standard performance practice—there might be many misses, but the hits will offer fresh perspectives on even the most familiar works. It would have been nice if Shaham, like Nathan Milstein, had completed another, more tame recording in his youth, as a point of comparison, but as it is, this quirky set from a quirky master player has merit enough on its own.
Eric C. Simpson is a music critic and violinist. He is Chief Development Officer at the Paideia Institute.
newcriterion.com/issues/2016/1/album-note-8326
Topics:Music
Pride of Pittsburgh
The conservative activist
E-mail Album note by Eric C. Simpson
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https://www.newmilfordspectrum.com/news/education/article/Hot-Springs-elementary-school-s-summer-reading-14093470.php
Hot Springs elementary school's summer reading camp wraps up
The Sentinel-Record
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. (AP) — A summer camp that is designed to help students who may struggle with reading get ready for the coming school year recently wrapped up.
The inaugural Cutter Morning Star Summer Reading Camp for kindergarten, first- and second-grade students, in partnership with Arkansas Learning Through The Arts, was designed to assist students who have been identified through targeted testing as struggling with reading to enhance their skills for the coming school year.
"We have a diverse population as far as reading levels go here. So as we were working with those children, we realized we needed something to extend the school year so kids would not lose what we had worked so hard to gain in the school year," Cutter Morning Star Elementary School Principal Terry Lawler told The Sentinel-Record.
"If you can have a child on grade level by third grade, statistics say that they will be successful in school. However, the opposite is also true. Every child can learn to read. There's not a doubt in my mind. But it's all about exposure and time with quality instruction, with trained staff, with the right resources. And that's what we're trying to do."
Each Monday through Thursday in June, from 8-11 a.m., 41 students regularly attended the camp. To make attendance feasible, the school arranged for two different bus routes to pick up and drop off children and made breakfast and lunch available at school.
For staffing needs, the camp required three classroom teachers, two reading therapists and four local artists.
The teaching artists that spoke to students each week were one of two "key components" of the camp, Lawler said.
"Craig (Welle) and his staff met with us early. We had done their workshops that they offer all schools, but I asked them to do something different," Lawler said.
She said school officials spoke with ALTTA representatives, submitted lessons plans, and suggested artists and workshops created by ALTTA for the camp.
During the program's first week, Lanie Carlson instructed students in theater; the second, Jerri Hillis exposed them to visual arts; the third, Chana Caylor taught music and songwriting; and the fourth and final teaching artist was Kai Coggin, who covered literature, poetry and creative writing.
"We've been reviewing what they've learned over the past four weeks with all the different artists. We were talking about feelings, and poetry is about expressing their feelings. With the theater teacher in the beginning, they learned how to act out their emotions. An artist came in as a painter, and they connected feelings to colors. We're learning how to express these feelings and use our words instead of holding it all in today," Coggin said.
Students presented original acrostic poems and illustrations about a chosen emotion to the class.
Executive Director Craig Welle said this sort of activity is exactly what ALTTA aims to do in schools.
"What our focus on is really engagement. Fun is a part of being engaged. Because if they're not engaged, they're not learning," Welle said.
The second "key component" of the camp was the reading therapy class, Lawler said.
"We screen every single one of our kindergarten through second-graders for markers of dyslexia, hoping to catch it early. If we don't catch them up on their reading skills quickly, with a very specific phonics based, multisensory program, they will fall further and further behind in reading," she said.
One activity used to assist students in this category was reading bingo. This game involved repetition of words, exaggerated pronunciation, seeing words and letters visually, and learning how to correctly form words orally.
"It inputs it into their brain in different ways," reading therapist Susanna Crow said.
The camp's $20,000 price tag was largely covered by grant funds from the Arkansas Community Foundation and the Hot Springs Community Foundation. Title I funds and "some district moneys" were also used to pay for the camp, Lawler said.
"I so much appreciate the Hot Springs Community Foundation and the Arkansas Community Foundation. Without their support, we would not have had two of the most important parts of our formula, those are the artists and the reading therapists. That is what has made this such a special, successful program," Lawler said.
Lawler also said she hopes to bring the program back next summer, and add an attendance incentive, such as a field trip to Mid-America Science Museum.
"This is our first year to do this, so we just tried to keep it simple. But we have so many ideas for next year. We know we have a plan. We have the formula, the components: that strong literacy unit taught by a strong classroom teacher, with support and the best resources," she said.
Information from: The Sentinel-Record, http://www.hotsr.com
An AP Member Exchange shared by The Sentinel-Record.
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Newport County AFC Remembers
November 11th, 2018, marks the centenary of the end of the First World War.
Across the country, the anniversary will be marked with parades, remembrance services, and the wearing of the poppy symbol as the nation remembers the sacrifice of those who died at war.
Newport County AFC will be involved in marking the centenary in a number of ways.
We are already selling bespoke centenary poppy pin badges in the Club Shop in the Kingsway Centre for £3 (click here to buy online) and will soon be stocking a limited number of home and away poppy shirts.
These limited edition Newport County AFC poppy shirts are expected to be in stock the week commencing November 5th but can be pre-ordered online or in the Kingsway Club Shop from tomorrow.
Newport County AFC players will be wearing the poppy shirts for three matches: Carlisle Away (November 3rd), Met Police FC Away in the Emirates FA Cup (November 10th), and Colchester Home (November 17th). The players' shirts will then be auctioned with all proceeds going to the Royal British Legion.
The Club has nominated its home match against Colchester as its remembrance match. We will be holding a bucket collection at the ground and will be welcoming the Royal British Legion as our special guests.
On November 11th, Newport County AFC representatives will join people from across the city to take part in a Remembrance Day parade. The parade will begin at Corn Exchange on High Street and will end at the Cenotaph. As part of the parade, Newport County AFC will lay a wreath and plant a single tree.
This tree, along with a commemorative plaque, has been donated by the EFL as part of their For Club and Country project which will see all EFL and Premier League Teams offered a chance to create this living legacy to remember the football players who lost their lives fighting in the First World War. Find out more about this project at www.forclubandcountry.org.uk.
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Popular FaceApp turns heads & raises privacy concerns
Residents want northern St. Johns County development halted
Fans anxiously await Rolling Stones arrival in Jacksonville
SE Jacksonville neighbors concerned about 5,000 acre development
2 people died when a small plane crashed in New York
The victims' dog survived the crash
By Amir Vera, and Tatyana Bellamy-Walker, CNN
News 12 Long Island via CNN
Two people were killed when a plane went down Saturday morning near Harbes Family Farm in Mattituck, New York.
(CNN) - A small plane crashed and erupted into flames in New York, killing two people. A dog that was also on board survived, police said.
The plane went down Saturday morning near Harbes Family Farm in Mattituck after taking off from Long Island MacArthur Airport.
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There were only two people on the plane along with the dog, the Southold Town Police Department said in a statement.
When first responders arrived at the scene, the plane was in flames, and a local farmer found the dog after it escaped the wreckage, police said.
The victims' bodies were removed from the scene and transported to the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office. Their names will be withheld until family members are notified.
Harbes Family Farm is a sort of amusement park where families can enjoy music, pick their own fruits and veggies, and go in a corn maze. In a statement after the crash, the farm said the plane flew low over their property before the crash.
"This is a sad tragedy, and our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the passengers of the aircraft," it said.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it's investigating the crash and the National Transportation Safety Board will determine the probable cause of the accident.
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STUDY: Nets Covered Donald Jr’s Russia Meeting 20x More Than Clinton Uranium Deal
By Geoffrey Dickens | July 13, 2017 1:52 PM EDT
The Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) evening news shows, in the last four nights, have been dominated by Donald J. Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower – a meeting in which apparently no favors, money or meaningful information was exchanged – but those same shows all but ignored Hillary Clinton’s Russia-Uranium scandal back in 2015.
Author Peter Schweizer, in his 2015 book Clinton Cash, broke the story that a Canadian uranium company, seeking approval of a sale to the Russian government from then Secretary of State Clinton’s State Department, had donated millions to the Clinton Foundation.
At the time, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was considered the favorite to win the Democratic nomination but the networks couldn’t care less. Total amount of Big Three evening news network coverage of that story in over two years? Just 3 minutes and 1 second.
However, in just four nights the Big Three networks have swamped their evening news shows with 62 minutes and 18 seconds of Donald Trump Jr. coverage, or 20 times more than what they devoted to the Clinton Foundation uranium deal scandal.
So far CBS Evening News has devoted the most amount of time to Trump Jr.’s meeting (25 minutes, 20 seconds), followed by ABC’s World News Tonight (22 minutes, 24 seconds) and then NBC Nightly News at 14 minutes, 34 seconds.
In contrast, since April 23, 2015 the NBC Nightly News has spent a grand total of 92 seconds on the Uranium-Russia deal. The CBS Evening News devoted a total of 61 seconds on the Schweizer revelations, followed by ABC World News Tonight at just a mere 28 seconds of coverage.
On the April 23, 2015 NBC Nightly News, correspondent Andrea Mitchell reported: “When she took office, Hillary Clinton, pressed by the White House, agreed to a memo voluntarily disclosing foreign contributions. But the upcoming book Clinton Cash, obtained by NBC News, claims she did not live up to that promise. For example, while Secretary Clinton was trying to reset relations with Russia, the book describes how Russia`s nuclear agency Rosatom gained control of a U.S. uranium company. The author, former George W. Bush aide Peter Schweizer writes, shortly after the Rosatom deal was announced, Bill Clinton was in Moscow for a particularly well-compensated speech. He was paid five hundred thousand dollars, from another Russian entity.”
Mitchell continued: “And the book claims, however hawkish Hillary might have been on other deals, this one sailed through. The Russian purchase of Uranium One was approved. The author asks, why the apparent reversal? Could it be because shareholders involved in the transactions had transferred approximately one hundred forty-five million dollars to the Clinton Foundation or its initiatives? Republicans are pouncing.”
Mitchell laid out a damning set of facts, but the NBC Nightly News has never again mentioned the scandal.
Over on the April 23, 2015 ABC World News Tonight, correspondent Cecilia Vega briefly relayed The New York Times version of the uranium story: “Report after report questioning foreign donations it [The Clinton Foundation] scandal accepted while Clinton was Secretary of State. The New York Times reporting that, as Clinton State Department was signing off on the sale of one of America’s largest uranium mines to Russia, the mine’s chairman used his family’s charity to donate more than $2 million to the Clinton Foundation. And despite promises of transparency, those donations never disclosed.”
That brief mention, more than two years ago, is all the coverage this story has received on ABC World News Tonight.
CBS Evening News didn’t arrive on the uranium story until March 29, 2017 and then it was only to knock down President Donald Trump’s claims, as anchor Scott Pelley reported the following: “Well, today, President Trump sowed confusion on the Russia investigation. He asked why the media are not covering, quote, ‘Money from Russia to Clinton for the sale of uranium?’ Well, here’s why, no credible source alleges that Hillary Clinton was paid by Russia for American uranium. But like most conspiracy theories, there is an atom of truth in this. By 2013, a Russian company purchased twenty percent of American uranium deposits. That was approved by a committee, including Clinton’s State Department, but also including the Departments of Treasury, Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce, and Energy, plus the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Office of Science and Technology. Separately, the deal was okayed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Secretary Clinton could not have stopped the deal.”
Schweizer countered that argument and more when he broke down the connections in a March 3, 2017 FoxNews.com article:
Then there is the glaring fact that the Clinton Foundation also scored $145 million in donations from nine shareholders in a Canadian uranium company called Uranium One that was sold to the Russian government in 2010. The deal required the approval of several federal government agencies, including Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The deal allowed Rosatom, the Russian State Nuclear Agency, to buy assets that amounted to 20 percent of American uranium. Rosatom, by the way controls the Russian nuclear arsenal.
Equally troubling: some of those donations were hidden and not disclosed by the Clintons. President Obama required the Clinton Foundation to disclose all contributions as a condition of Hillary Clinton becoming Secretary of State. But that did not happen. The only reason the hidden donations ever came to light is because we uncovered them by combing through Canadian tax records.
Everyone got what they wanted in this deal: the uranium investors made a nice profit; the Russians acquired a strategic asset; and the Clinton Foundation bagged a lot of money.
Hillary Clinton says she was not involved in the decision to approve the sale of Uranium One. As proof, the Clinton campaign in 2015 trotted out her former aide, Assistant Secretary of State Fernandez, to say publicly that we should take his word for it that she was not involved in approving that deal. But as we now know from the leaked Podesta emails, Fernandez was all too eager to help Podesta kill the story, while getting other favors from Podesta. That raises questions about the veracity of his comments.
H/T Deroy Murdock
<<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>>
Research NBDaily Bias by the Minute Russian uranium deal ABC World News Tonight CBS CBS Evening News NBC NBC Nightly News Andrea Mitchell Donald Trump Jr. Hillary Clinton
Geoffrey Dickens
Geoffrey Dickens is the Deputy Research Director at the Media Research Center.
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Home Tech Facebook Announces New Tool to Check “liked” Pages
Facebook Announces New Tool to Check “liked” Pages
Social networking platform Facebook announced plans to allow people access to information which would inform them if they had “liked” pages which had ties to “foreign actors”.
Facebook announced that users would soon be able to scan their “likes” to check if they had chanced upon any pages linked to the foreign operatives that spread propaganda during the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
The website has recently faced a Senate meeting to explain how the “foreign actors” attempts to spread propaganda via their platforms went unnoticed. A similar concern was raised over other sites like Google and Twitter with Senate members shocked that none had taken the time to screen its users.
At the Senate hearing, Facebook admitted that almost 126 million Americans could have viewed the content uploaded by the Kremlin linked account.
While the pages have since been deleted, Facebook has taken the infiltration personally. The company has now decided to build a tool which will allow users to find out if they were following the pages created by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency.
The Internet Research Agency, was the mastermind behind over a thousand fake accounts spread out over popular social media interphases such as Instagram, Twitter, and of course, Facebook.
The accounts were active during the U.S. Presidential campaign and published a number of politically charged messages. Sources now believe that these accounts were created with the sole intention of influencing the election.
Many of the pages were designed to make users believe they were created by U.S. citizens.
When asked about the alleged foreign influence in November 2016, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stated it was a “crazy idea”. However, since then the company has admitted to the presence of thousands of posts and paid advertisements created by Russian operatives.
The company has come under a great deal of fire for being lax enough to allow the spread of propaganda and fake news on its so called “secure” network.
Facebook’s new tool will be available to the public from December.
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William Armstrong has a Ph.D. in International Relations, and an experienced journalist with 10 years of track record covering major global events. He has also assisted budding entrepreneurs to establish their startups for the better part of the last decade. He now covers technology stories with a business slant.
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Gibson's Bakery v. Oberlin College Trial: School Accused of Defaming Business With Racist Accusations
By Jenni Fink On 5/15/19 at 12:57 PM EDT
U.S. Campus Culture
The arrest of three Oberlin College students prompted allegations of racism against a local business, protests and calls for a boycott. Almost three years later, a jury is now tasked with deciding if the school and its dean of students had a hand in defaming the business.
In November 2016, three black students—Jonathan Aladin, Cecelia Whettston and Endia Lawrence—were arrested after Aladin tried to purchase alcohol at Gibson's Bakery and Market with fake identification. Mass protests ensued, causing harm to the business's finances and reputation.
A year later, Gibson's filed a lawsuit against the private Ohio liberal arts college and Dea of Students Meredith Raimondo. The two parties failed to reach a settlement.
In a trial that began last Thursday and is expected to continue for a few weeks, the owners of Gibson's alleged that Oberlin College officials harmed its reputation and encouraged an economic boycott. The college denied the claims made against it and said the law was "clear" that it, as an employer, could not be held responsible for the actions of others.
"Neither Oberlin College nor Dr. Raimondo defamed a local business or its owners," Oberlin College said in a statement. "Colleges cannot be held liable for the independent actions of students. Employers are not legally responsible for employees who express personal views on personal time."
In the days following the opening statements, a number of witnesses, including Raimondo, Rick McDaniel, former director of safety and security at Oberlin, and Victor Ortiz, a former Oberlin police sergeant, were called to the stand to testify.
If the business can show the school took a position and fostered and promoted that position, Adam Citron, senior counsel at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, told Newsweek it had a strong claim.
"The bakery must show that because of the school's actions in promoting a boycott and lack of good will they were damaged monetarily," Citron said. "It appears that this is the case and as such, the plaintiff appears to have an actionable cause of action against the school."
During her testimony, which lasted for several days, Raimondo repeatedly denied she had control over the students' actions, according to The Chronicle-Telegram.
Oberlin College and Gibson's Bakery and Food Mart face off in court over claims made by Gibson's that Oberlin defamed the business. Google Maps
The Incident
On November 9, 2016, David Gibson and his son Allyn Gibson were working at the store, according to the lawsuit. Aladin, Whettson and Lawrence entered the premises, allegedly with the intention of stealing wine or using Aladin's fake identification to procure it.
After they were arrested, Aladin, Whettson and Lawrence pleaded guilty to attempted theft and aggravated trespass. During their sentencing hearing, according to the lawsuit, Aladin admitted to a physical altercation with the clerk to recover his fake ID when the clerk realized it wasn't valid.
"This unfortunate incident was triggered by an attempt to purchase alcohol. I believe the employees of Gibson's actions were not racially motivated," the three said. "They were merely trying to prevent an underage sale."
The Fallout
Mass protests and demonstrations followed the arrest of Aladin, Whettston and Lawrence. The lawsuit claimed Raimondo had handed out flyers that stated Gibson's Bakery was racist and had a "long account of racial profiling and discrimination." The flyer also encouraged people to patronize a list of alternative businesses.
"This piece of the puzzle is crucial," Citron said. "If the Dean was involved, it is a strong argument for the school's involvement."
As a representative of the school, Citron said this could show Raimondo was "actively taking a position against the bakery" and not acting in a neutral manner.
The flyer, the lawsuit claimed, was reproduced on Oberlin College copier machines and students were encouraged by the college to attend protests and demonstrations.
A Student Senate resolution reiterated the comments from the flyer, stating that Gibson's had a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment. This, the lawsuit argued, was problematic because it violated the Student Code of Conduct prohibiting defamation, libel and slander.
The Oberlin Police Department conducted an investigation into accusations of racism against Gibson's and found a "complete lack of any evidence," according to the lawsuit. Over the past five years, the Oberlin Police Department identified 40 adults who had been arrested for shoplifting, six of whom were black.
Along with allegedly making libelous statements, the lawsuit accused Oberlin of instituting an economic boycott by allegedly forcing the termination of a contract between Gibson's Bakery and Bon Appetit Management company, a food services contractor for the school. The contact, which allowed Gibson's to provide baked goods to the school, was reinstated in February 2017.
Oberlin said in a statement the claims of the case conflicted with higher education's obligations to protect freedom of speech on campus. The college added that it respects everyone's right to express their opinions and exercise their First Amendment rights.
If the lawsuit succeeds, Citron told Newsweek it could require schools to take more care in walking the line between promoting free speech and taking sides.
"I believe schools will need to be very careful with respect to keeping a neutral position and have measures in place to ensure they and their representatives act in such a neutral manner," Citron said. "They cannot advocate positions. They simply must promote free speech from all sides."
Gibson's Bakery v. Oberlin College Trial: School Accused of Defaming Business With Racist Accusations | U.S.
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Champion Race Car Driver to Receive AARDA Champion Award
Kyle Marcelli to be Honored for Driving Autoimmune Awareness
18-Apr-2019 1:05 PM EDT
American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA)
Kyle Marcelli (left)
Autoimmune Diseases, Diabetes
Autoimmune Disorders, Autoimmune Advocacy, Autoimmune Disease, Lupus, RP, Relapsing Polychondritis, Type 1 Diabetes, Kyle Marcelli, Virginia Ladd, Race Car, Award Announcement, Fundraisers
Newswise — DETROIT, MI, April 18 -- The American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA) has selected champion race car driver Kyle Marcelli to receive its 2019 AARDA Champion Award at the organization’s 19th annual spring fundraiser, “Bound by a Common Thread,” on May 11 at the Detroit Athletic Club.
The award is presented to individuals or organizations that have championed the mission of AARDA to eradicate autoimmune disease (AD), and alleviate the suffering and the socioeconomic impact of autoimmunity through fostering and facilitating collaboration in the areas of education, public awareness, research, and patient services in an effective, ethical, and efficient manner.
Marcelli is being honored for driving autoimmune awareness down new roads, reaching new audiences. Since 2016, he has lent his name and celebrity to bring greater attention to the trailblazing work of autoimmune organizations, including AARDA, Race for RP, and the Allegheny Health Network Autoimmunity Institute. He has participated in numerous awareness-raising and fund-raising events and projects, and raced with the logos of autoimmune organizations emblazoned on his race helmet, race suit and winning vehicles.
“I have an aunt that suffered with [type 1] diabetes,” says Marcelli, “a close friend with relapsing polychondritis, and another close friend with lupus. And these are some of the most positive people in my life. … Being a race car driver is my dream, my passion. Now, it’s given me the opportunity to promote something close to my heart.”
“There are more than 100 autoimmune diseases affecting one in every five Americans and currently zero cures,” says AARDA President and Executive Director Virginia T. Ladd. “Awareness continues to be a priority for earlier diagnosis and treatment. We are thankful for all that Kyle has done over the years to make an impact.”
Bound by a Common Thread also will feature a VIP Reception with Marcelli, a silent auction, and a fashion show in partnership with the Wayne State University Fashion Design and Merchandising program. Tickets are available at aardabbct2.eventbrite.com or by calling (586) 776-3900.
To learn more about Kyle Marcelli, please visit kylemarcelli.com.
Founded in 1991, AARDA is a national nonprofit dedicated to bringing a national focus to autoimmunity as a category of disease and a major women’s health issue – approximately 75 percent of autoimmune disease sufferers are women. Visit aarda.org to learn more.
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Annals of Technology
The Tweaker
The real genius of Steve Jobs.
By Malcolm Gladwell
Jobs’s sensibility was more editorial than inventive. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he said.
Illustration by André Carrilho
Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ”
It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”
Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase. . . . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”
Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:
Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.
One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.
In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”
Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.” Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because, Isaacson writes, “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.” The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:
This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”
Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for others’ ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, ‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one.’ And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea.”
Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, “Your commercials suck.”
“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.”
“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.”
Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.
When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”
The famous Apple “Think Different” campaign came from Jobs’s advertising team at TBWAChiatDay. But it was Jobs who agonized over the slogan until it was right:
They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”
The point of Meisenzahl and Mokyr’s argument is that this sort of tweaking is essential to progress. James Watt invented the modern steam engine, doubling the efficiency of the engines that had come before. But when the tweakers took over the efficiency of the steam engine swiftly quadrupled. Samuel Crompton was responsible for what Meisenzahl and Mokyr call “arguably the most productive invention” of the industrial revolution. But the key moment, in the history of the mule, came a few years later, when there was a strike of cotton workers. The mill owners were looking for a way to replace the workers with unskilled labor, and needed an automatic mule, which did not need to be controlled by the spinner. Who solved the problem? Not Crompton, an unambitious man who regretted only that public interest would not leave him to his seclusion, so that he might “earn undisturbed the fruits of his ingenuity and perseverance.” It was the tweaker’s tweaker, Richard Roberts, who saved the day, producing a prototype, in 1825, and then an even better solution in 1830. Before long, the number of spindles on a typical mule jumped from four hundred to a thousand. The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.
Jobs’s friend Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, had a private jet, and he designed its interior with a great deal of care. One day, Jobs decided that he wanted a private jet, too. He studied what Ellison had done. Then he set about to reproduce his friend’s design in its entirety—the same jet, the same reconfiguration, the same doors between the cabins. Actually, not in its entirety. Ellison’s jet “had a door between cabins with an open button and a close button,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs insisted that his have a single button that toggled. He didn’t like the polished stainless steel of the buttons, so he had them replaced with brushed metal ones.” Having hired Ellison’s designer, “pretty soon he was driving her crazy.” Of course he was. The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection. “I look at his airplane and mine,” Ellison says, “and everything he changed was better.”
The angriest Isaacson ever saw Steve Jobs was when the wave of Android phones appeared, running the operating system developed by Google. Jobs saw the Android handsets, with their touchscreens and their icons, as a copy of the iPhone. He decided to sue. As he tells Isaacson:
Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.
In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”
Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Jobs was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them. But he did not like it when the same thing was done to him. In his mind, what he did was special. Jobs persuaded the head of Pepsi-Cola, John Sculley, to join Apple as C.E.O., in 1983, by asking him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” When Jobs approached Isaacson to write his biography, Isaacson first thought (“half jokingly”) that Jobs had noticed that his two previous books were on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, and that he “saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.” The architecture of Apple software was always closed. Jobs did not want the iPhone and the iPod and the iPad to be opened up and fiddled with, because in his eyes they were perfect. The greatest tweaker of his generation did not care to be tweaked.
Perhaps this is why Bill Gates—of all Jobs’s contemporaries—gave him fits. Gates resisted the romance of perfectionism. Time and again, Isaacson repeatedly asks Jobs about Gates and Jobs cannot resist the gratuitous dig. “Bill is basically unimaginative,” Jobs tells Isaacson, “and has never invented anything, which I think is why he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”
After close to six hundred pages, the reader will recognize this as vintage Jobs: equal parts insightful, vicious, and delusional. It’s true that Gates is now more interested in trying to eradicate malaria than in overseeing the next iteration of Word. But this is not evidence of a lack of imagination. Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.
As his life wound down, and cancer claimed his body, his great passion was designing Apple’s new, three-million-square-foot headquarters, in Cupertino. Jobs threw himself into the details. “Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives,” Isaacson writes. He was obsessed with glass, expanding on what he learned from the big panes in the Apple retail stores. “There would not be a straight piece of glass in the building,” Isaacson writes. “All would be curved and seamlessly joined. . . . The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome.” The architects wanted the windows to open. Jobs said no. He “had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. ‘That would just allow people to screw things up.’ ” ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the November 14, 2011, issue.
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for the The New Yorker since 1996.
Xerox PARC
Does Technology Shape History?
We often think that world events are driven by technology. Are they really?
By Jill Lepore
Bell Labs: The Invention Factory
A visit to Bell Labs in 1931.
By Malcolm Ross
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In Florida prisons, mentally ill inmates have been tortured, driven to suicide, and killed by guards.
By Eyal Press
Harriet Krzykowski, a former counsellor at the Dade Correctional Institution, faced retaliation after questioning inmate abuse.
Photograph by Elinor Carucci for The New Yorker
Shortly after Harriet Krzykowski began working at the Dade Correctional Institution, in Florida, an inmate whispered to her, “You know they starve us, right?” It was the fall of 2010, and Krzykowski, a psychiatric technician, had been hired by Dade, which is forty miles south of Miami, to help prisoners with clinical behavioral problems follow their treatment plans. The inmate was housed in Dade’s mental-health ward, the Transitional Care Unit, a cluster of buildings connected by breezeways and equipped with one-way mirrors and surveillance cameras. “I thought, Oh, this guy must be paranoid or schizophrenic,” she said recently. Moreover, she’d been warned during her training that prisoners routinely made false accusations against guards. Then she heard an inmate in another wing of the T.C.U. complain that meal trays often arrived at his cell without food. After noticing that several prisoners were alarmingly thin, she decided to discuss the matter with Dr. Cristina Perez, who oversaw the inpatient unit.
Krzykowski, an unassuming woman with pale skin and blue eyes, was thirty at the time. The field of correctional psychology can attract idealists who tend to see all prisoners as society’s victims and who distrust anyone wearing a security badge—corrections officers call such people “hug-a-thugs.” But Krzykowski, who had not worked at a prison before, believed that corrections officers performed a difficult job that merited respect. And she assumed that the prison management did not tolerate any form of abusive behavior.
Perez was a slender, attractive woman in her forties, with an aloof manner. When Krzykowski told her that she’d heard “guys aren’t getting fed,” Perez did not seem especially concerned. “You can’t trust what inmates say,” she responded. Krzykowski noted that complaints were coming from disparate wings of the T.C.U. This was not unusual, Perez said, since inmates often devised innovative methods to “kite” messages across the facility.
Krzykowski mentioned that she had overheard security guards heckling prisoners. One officer had told an inmate, “Go ahead and kill yourself—no one will miss you.” Again, Perez seemed unfazed. “It’s just words,” she said. Then, as Krzykowski recalls it, Perez leaned forward and gave her some advice: “You have to remember that we have to have a good working relationship with security.”
Not long after this conversation, Krzykowski was working a Sunday shift, and a guard told her that, because of a staff shortage, T.C.U. inmates would not be allowed in the prison’s recreation yard. The yard, a cement quadrangle with weeds sprouting through the cracks, had few amenities, but for many people in the T.C.U. it was the only place to get fresh air and exercise. Overseeing this activity was among Krzykowski’s weekend responsibilities.
The following Sunday, access was denied again. The closures continued for weeks, and the explanations increasingly sounded like pretexts. When Krzykowski pressed a corrections officer about the matter, he told her, “It’s God’s day, and we’re resting.” In an e-mail to Perez, Krzykowski expressed her concern.
A few days later, Krzykowski was running a “psycho-educational group”—an hour-long session in which inmates gathered to talk while she observed their mood and affect. After a dozen inmates had filed into the room, she noticed that the guard who had been standing by the door had walked away. She was on her own. Krzykowski completed the session without incident, and decided that the guard must have been summoned to deal with an emergency. But later, when she was in the rec yard, the guard there disappeared, too, once more leaving her unprotected amid a group of inmates.
Around the same time, the metal doors that security officers controlled to regulate the traffic flow between prison units started opening more slowly for Krzykowski. Not infrequently, several minutes passed before a security officer buzzed her through, even when she was the only staff member in a hallway full of prisoners. Krzykowski tried not to appear flustered when this happened, but, she recalls, “it scared the hell out of me.”
In theory, the T.C.U. was designed to provide mentally ill inmates with a safe environment in which they would receive treatment that might allow them to return to the main compound. Krzykowski discovered, however, that many inmates were locked up in single-person cells. Solitary confinement was supposed to be reserved for prisoners who had committed serious disciplinary infractions. In forced isolation, inmates often deteriorated rapidly. As Krzykowski put it, “So many guys would be mobile and interactive when they first came to the T.C.U., and then a few months later they would be sleeping in their cells in their own waste.”
Not only did Krzykowski suspect that few inmates in the T.C.U. were getting better; she was certain that the guards were punishing her for the e-mail she had sent to Perez. But she was afraid to complain about her situation. She didn’t even tell her husband, Steven, fearing he would insist that she give notice. He was an unemployed computer-systems engineer, and they could not afford to forgo her modest paycheck.
“Thanks for walking a mile in my shoe but it’s beginning to hurt now.”
Krzykowski and her husband lived at her mother’s house, in Miami, with their two young children. Her hourly wage was only twelve dollars, so she supplemented her income with food stamps and, occasionally, with loans from her mother and her sister. Krzykowski was accustomed to hardship. Born in a small town in northwestern Missouri, she was seven years old when her mother drove her and her older sister to a battered women’s shelter to escape their father after he had hurled the family’s pet cat against a wall. (He denies that this happened.) They moved to an even smaller town, in Illinois, where her mother took a job at a gas station. They required public assistance, and at home there was often little to eat.
After Krzykowski graduated from high school, in 1998, she and her mother moved to Miami. Her mother became a nurse, and Krzykowski enrolled at Florida International University, majoring in psychology. She got in touch with Steven, a childhood friend, and invited him to visit her. He showed up a few weeks later, and stayed; they married in 2007.
By then, Krzykowski had received a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and had enrolled in a master’s program in mental-health counselling. But Florida was in a deep recession, and Krzykowski had no luck finding work until she saw a listing posted by Correctional Medical Services, the private contractor in charge of providing mental-health services at Dade.
Even at the height of the economic crisis, jobs in corrections were plentiful in Florida—the state has the third-largest prison population in the country, behind Texas and California. Insuring that inmates with mental illnesses receive psychiatric care is a constitutional obligation, according to Estelle v. Gamble, a 1976 case in which the Supreme Court held that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners” amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
Around the same time, the Court ruled, in O’Connor v. Donaldson, that a Florida man named Kenneth Donaldson had been kept against his will in a state psychiatric hospital for nearly fifteen years. The ruling added momentum to a nationwide campaign to “deinstitutionalize” the mentally ill. Activists decried the existence of mental hospitals that were filled, as one account put it, with “naked humans herded like cattle.” During the next two decades, states across the country shut down such facilities, both to save money and to appease advocates pushing for reform. But instead of funding more humane modes of treatment—such as community mental-health centers that could help patients live independently—many states left the mentally ill to their own devices. Often, highly unstable people ended up on the streets, abusing drugs and committing crimes, which led them into the prison system.
By the nineties, prisons had become America’s dominant mental-health institutions. The situation is particularly extreme in Florida, which spends less money per capita on mental health than any state except Idaho. Meanwhile, between 1996 and 2014, the number of Florida prisoners with mental disabilities grew by a hundred and fifty-three per cent.
The Supreme Court failed to clarify how psychiatric care could be provided in an environment where the paramount concern is security. According to medical ethicists, prison counsellors and psychologists often feel a “dual loyalty”—a tension between the impulse to defer to corrections officers and the duty to care for inmates. Because guards provide crucial protection to staff, it can be risky to disagree with them. But, if mental-health professionals coöperate too closely with security officials, they can become complicit in practices that harm patients.
After Krzykowski met with Perez, she told herself, “Maybe I’m being too sensitive—boys will be boys.” Aware that she was a newcomer to the world of prisons, she decided that the corrections officers at Dade were far more qualified than she was to determine how to maintain order.
At a morning staff meeting in June, 2011, a psychotherapist at Dade named George Mallinckrodt aired a different view. The previous day, Mallinckrodt announced, an inmate had shown him a series of bruises on his chest and back. The injuries had been sustained, the inmate claimed, when a group of guards had dragged him, handcuffed, into a hallway and stomped on him. Several other inmates confirmed the account, Mallinckrodt told his colleagues. He accused Dade security officials of “sabotaging our caseload,” and said that action needed to be taken.
In the days after the meeting, Krzykowski recalls thinking that “sabotaging” was “a pretty strong word—a loaded word.” Mallinckrodt was known to be on friendly terms with some of the patients in the T.C.U., and Krzykowski felt that he had become too aligned with the inmates—“too much on their side.” She told me, “I thought he’d become an advocate—you know, a hug-a-thug.”
Krzykowski tried to focus on providing good care, but she discovered that she had limited power to make decisions. State law mandated that prisons offer inmates twenty hours of activities a week, and when she was hired she was told that she would be responsible for insuring that this happened in the T.C.U. But every time she proposed an activity—yoga, music therapy—her superiors rejected it. Invariably, the reason cited was that it posed a “security risk,” even though the activities were meant to alleviate aggression.
One day, Krzykowski brought in a box of chalk, in the hope that inmates could draw on the pavement in the rec yard. On another occasion, she gave a rubber ball to an inmate who had schizophrenia; she thought that he would benefit from tactile play. An officer returned both items to her, ostensibly because they posed safety hazards. Krzykowski felt that she was being taught a lesson about knowing her place. “I kept getting the message that whatever security says goes,” she said.
Krzykowski had heard enough stories about inmates assaulting prison staff to know how dangerous it was to work without protection. One day in the rec yard, after a guard left her alone, an inmate sidled up to her and put his hands on her backside. The inmate was tall and imposing, and had been diagnosed as psychotic. Krzykowski thought of screaming for help, but she sensed that the guard who had vanished would not come rushing back if she did. Instead, she froze. After a moment, she hurried away without looking back. The inmate didn’t follow her. For days afterward, she was shaken. “He definitely could have overpowered me,” she said. “I could have been assaulted, raped—anything.”
The Dade Correctional Institution’s Transitional Care Unit, in 2008.
Photograph by Nuri Vallbona / The Miami Herald
Krzykowski’s concerns kept mounting. In her view, the T.C.U. was unacceptably run-down: the walls were mildewed, the hallways were caked in grime, and the sewage system was often backed up. In the staff break room, cockroaches had overrun the kitchen area, infesting even the microwave. Oddly, the water from the kitchen faucet was scalding, so Krzykowski began using it to make ramen noodles for lunch.
One Saturday in June, 2012, Krzykowski was finishing a shift when she heard that an inmate in the T.C.U. named Darren Rainey had defecated in his cell and was refusing to clean it up. He was fifty years old, and, as Krzykowski recalls it, he gave people unnerving looks, “like he was trying to see inside you.” He had been convicted of possession of cocaine, and suffered from severe schizophrenia.
“What’s going on with Rainey?” Krzykowski asked a guard.
“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll put him in the shower,” he told her.
Krzykowski remembers hearing this and feeling reassured. “I was thinking, O.K., lots of times people feel good after a shower, so maybe he will calm down. A nice, gentle shower with warm water.”
The next day, Krzykowski learned from some nurses that a couple of guards had indeed escorted Rainey to the shower at about eight the previous night. But he hadn’t made it back to his cell. He had collapsed while the water was running. At 10:07 P.M., he was pronounced dead.
Krzykowski assumed that he must have had a heart attack or somehow committed suicide. But the nurses said that Rainey had been locked in a stall whose water supply was delivered through a hose controlled by the guards. The water was a hundred and eighty degrees, hot enough to brew a cup of tea—or, as it soon occurred to Krzykowski, to cook a bowl of ramen noodles. (Someone had apparently tampered with the T.C.U.’s water heater.) It was later revealed that Rainey had burns on more than ninety per cent of his body, and that his skin fell off at the touch.
Krzykowski said to the nurses that, surely, there would be a criminal investigation.
“No,” one of them told her. “They’re gonna cover this up.”
In the days after Rainey’s death, Krzykowski learned from several inmates in the T.C.U. that Rainey was not the first person who had been locked in that shower; he was only the first to die there. Before this, she would have rolled her eyes had someone told her that the guards tortured inmates. She now asked herself how she could have been so blind. Nevertheless, Krzykowski did not file a report calling for the guards who killed Rainey to be held accountable—and no one else on the mental-health staff did, either. She told me, “I thought, Somebody has to report it, and it has got to come from the inside, but it’s not going to be me.” She was convinced that any employee who spoke out would be fired.
This was not an unreasonable concern. A year earlier, after George Mallinckrodt had heard about the guards stomping on the inmate, he had consulted the Web site of the Florida Department of Corrections. It stated that any employee who suspected the abuse of a prisoner was obligated to report it. He had subsequently heard from another counsellor that the attack had taken place in a hallway without cameras, and that she had witnessed it from a window that looked onto the corridor. The guards, she said, had stopped the attack when she started yelling. (These details matched accounts that Mallinckrodt later compiled from inmates.)
The counsellor had attended the staff meeting where Mallinckrodt spoke out, but she had remained silent. As incensed as she was, she later told Mallinckrodt, she did not intend to report anything, out of fear that the guards would turn on her next. Mallinckrodt’s other colleagues also did not respond to his call for action.
In July, 2011, Mallinckrodt filed an incident report with both the Florida Department of Corrections and the Florida Inspector General’s office. Around this time, a new warden, Jerry Cummings, arrived at Dade. Mallinckrodt told him about the alleged beating and other abuse that inmates had described, including instances of security officers taunting mentally ill prisoners until they screamed, banged their heads against the wall, or defecated in their cells, triggering yet more punishment from the guards. According to Mallinckrodt, Cummings responded with concern, leaving him optimistic that some changes might occur. (Cummings declined to be interviewed for this story.)
On August 31, 2011, an officer stopped Mallinckrodt at the entrance gate as he was returning from a lunch break. He’d just been fired, on the ground that he frequently took extraordinarily long lunches. Mallinckrodt does not deny this, but says that plenty of staff members did the same. (Several people confirmed to me that this was true.) Mallinckrodt was the only one who had voiced concerns about abuse.
In 2013, Krzykowski was promoted to staff counsellor, and began providing individual therapy for inmates. The work was more rewarding, but the conditions in the T.C.U. remained so stressful that her hair began to fall out in clumps. Embarrassed that her scalp was showing in spots, she took to wrapping scarves around her head.
Krzykowski recalled that, as a child, her sister had occasionally stood up to their father, whereas she had always tried to win his affection by impressing him; when this failed, as it invariably did, she retreated into herself. Now, once again, she was trapped in an environment where she felt afraid to speak out. Even observing misconduct in the T.C.U. was risky, since the guards were on alert for the presence of anyone who might potentially expose them. If abuse was happening, “the politically safest thing was to excuse yourself and go to the bathroom,” Krzykowski said. “Don’t be a witness.”
In January, 2013, one of Krzykowski’s new patients, a convicted burglar named Harold Hempstead, told her that he had information about Darren Rainey’s murder. Hempstead, a wiry man with hazel eyes, occupied a cell that was directly below the shower where Rainey was tortured. That night, he heard Rainey screaming repeatedly, “Please take me out! I can’t take it anymore!” He also heard him kick at the stall door. Eventually, there was a heavy thud, followed by the voices of guards calling for medical help. A short while later, Hempstead watched as a gurney with Rainey’s naked body on it was wheeled past his cell.
Hempstead kept a diary, and in it he had recorded the names of four other inmates who had been subjected to what he called the “shower treatment.” He had even noted the dimensions of the stall, surmising that an inmate locked inside it would likely have just enough room to avoid getting sprayed directly by the scalding water but not enough to prevent it from lapping at his feet. The stall had little ventilation, so steam built up. After nearly two hours in the shower, the steam caused Rainey to lose consciousness.
In the weeks after Rainey’s death, Hempstead told several mental-health counsellors in the T.C.U. that he felt haunted by what he had heard and seen. They warned him that if he told them too much they would have to write an incident report, which would be forwarded to security officials, exposing him—and, by implication, them—to retaliation. Around this time, two of the guards who took Rainey to the shower, including a former football player named Roland Clarke, were promoted. (Both later resigned; their files included no indication of wrongdoing.) But Hempstead, who had been given a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, wouldn’t let the matter drop. He told Krzykowski that he had begun filing grievances about Rainey’s murder.
Krzykowski wasn’t sure if Hempstead, who professed to be a devout Christian, was motivated by compassion for Rainey or by a less high-minded impulse—a desire to embarrass Dade or to leverage a transfer out of the T.C.U. In the end, however, she encouraged him. “I thought that, therapeutically, writing it all down would be good for him,” she said. This advice was consistent with her general approach, which was to try to make small differences in the lives of the people under her care while ignoring problems that she lacked the power to solve. Krzykowski was the only mental-health professional at Dade who did not pressure Hempstead to remain silent about Rainey’s death, and he was grateful to her. He asked Krzykowski whether she would back him up if he succeeded in drawing attention to the abuses at Dade. “I said, ‘Well, yeah,’ ” she told me. “But I didn’t honestly know if I would honor that.”
On May 17, 2014, Julie Brown, of the Miami Herald, published an article in the paper about the abuse of mentally ill inmates in the T.C.U. at Dade. Below the headline was a photograph of Darren Rainey, dressed in prison blues. Brown’s main source was Hempstead, who had turned over copies of the complaints that Krzykowski had encouraged him to write. The article indicated that Hempstead, after being interviewed, had been threatened with solitary confinement and other forms of punishment by three corrections officers.
After the Herald article appeared, Jerry Cummings, the warden, was placed on administrative leave, and many people questioned whether the Department of Corrections had tried to cover up a case of lethal abuse. Far less attention was paid to why an inmate had exposed it, rather than one of the prison’s mental-health or medical professionals. The duty to protect patients from harm is a core principle of medical ethics. According to the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, an offshoot of the American Medical Association which issues standards of care for prisons, any mental-health professional who is aware of abuse is obligated “to report this activity to the appropriate authorities.”
In a recent survey by the Bureau of Correctional Health Services, in New York City, more than a third of mental-health personnel working in prisons admitted to feeling “that their ethics were regularly compromised in their work setting.” There was a pervasive fear that “security staff might retaliate if health staff reported patient abuse.” Violence toward inmates flourished at the city’s main prison, Rikers Island, and it was often ignored by the dozens of counsellors and psychologists on staff. One counsellor who did not ignore it was Randi Cawley. In December, 2012, she reported having seen guards beat an adolescent inmate who was handcuffed to a gurney. But other witnesses refused to confirm her account, and Cawley began receiving threats: dead flowers placed on her computer, ominous phone calls. She felt so unsafe inside Rikers that she quit.
In May, 2015, Jamie Fellner, a senior adviser at Human Rights Watch, released a report documenting the use of force in U.S. prisons against inmates with mental disabilities. The report, titled “Callous and Cruel,” offers a grim account of tools that are routinely used to incapacitate and punish the estimated three hundred and sixty thousand prisoners with serious mental illnesses: full-body restraints, chemical sprays, stun guns, extended solitary confinement. “Mental-health staff in prisons all too often acquiesce,” Fellner told me. “There is this culture of ‘It’s none of our business’ . . . which means that nobody ends up advocating for the patient.”
Kenneth Appelbaum, a psychiatrist who spent nearly a decade as the mental-health director of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, agrees that deference to guards is common. He also faults professional organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association for paying little attention to the ethical challenges facing their members who work in prisons. At the A.P.A.’s annual meetings, Appelbaum says, “barely one per cent of the sessions have anything to do with care and treatment in a correctional setting.” He adds, “Prisons are where so many of the sickest people with the most serious psychiatric disorders in our society end up, and as a profession we constantly lament this. Yet our professional organizations are not very engaged in asking how we should care for patients in those settings.” The lack of engagement, he says, likely reflects the fact that the vast majority of élite psychologists have no experience in prisons, and consider such work beneath them.
“Group Five may now board.”
By the time the Herald article on Darren Rainey’s death appeared, Krzykowski was no longer working at Dade. She had quit in 2013, and she and Steven had moved back to Missouri to be closer to his mother, who had health problems. When I met Krzykowski, in March, 2015, she told me that she had tried to forget about her experiences at the prison. But after learning about the Herald story Krzykowski became depressed. She couldn’t eat, and she lost so much hair that she shaved the rest off.
At our meeting, she was wearing jeans, a simple blouse, and a black wig. She recalled, “There was one particular night I couldn’t sleep because I was crying too hard, thinking, Oh, my God, all this time has gone by and I didn’t say anything, even when I was out of the situation. I let it continue. These guys are still suffering. They’re still there. Why didn’t I do more?”
In April, 2015, I had lunch in Miami with another former employee in the Dade T.C.U., a behavioral-health technician named Lovita Richardson. She told me that, when she started the job, she “couldn’t wait to get to work.” But one morning, at around ten-thirty, she walked out of the nurse’s station and saw, through a glass wall, a group of guards pummelling an inmate who was handcuffed. They took turns administering the blows while one of them stood watch. The inmate was a tiny man, “maybe a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet,” Richardson said. She stood there, in stunned silence, until the lookout guard spotted her.
She wanted to report what she’d seen, but a co-worker warned her that she would be imperilling herself. In the days that followed, the guards involved in the beating dropped by Richardson’s office to tell her that they had “taken care” of everything. Their tone was polite, but the message was clear, she said: “We’re running this place, this is our house—you’re just visiting.” Richardson started having nightmares, and questioned what kind of person she was. “It makes you feel like you’re letting them down,” she told me, tears filling her eyes. “They are at risk for their very life, and you know it, but you’re not helping them out.” (Disturbed by her experience at Dade, Richardson quit after less than a year on the job.)
The co-worker who advised Richardson also spoke to me, though she did not want her name to be published. She understood Richardson’s feelings of guilt, because she was the mental-health counsellor who had witnessed the stomping incident. After seeing that, she recalls, “I wanted to cry—I wanted to scream.” Yet, when she was instructed to fill out a report, she wrote that she hadn’t seen anything.
In September, 2013, a forty-year-old inmate in the T.C.U. named Richard Mair hanged himself. A note was found tucked into the waistband of his boxer shorts. It was written in a fury—Mair called it his “fuck the world” note—and it contained racist comments about black prisoners. But it was dominated by accusations of mistreatment in the T.C.U., which, he said, was “supposed to be therapeutic.” Mair wrote that guards punished inmates by putting them on a “starvation diet,” and that a crew on the night shift pulled inmates out of their cells, arranged for them to fight, and placed “bets on winners.” One guard, whom Mair named, had ordered him to “strip out” and then, promising cigarettes in return, commanded, “Stick a finger in your hole.” Mair refused. “He knew I’d gotten raped,” he wrote, and went on, “I’m supposed to be getting help for my depression, suicidal tendencies, and I was sexually assaulted.” Mair said that he filed “grievance #AW13-08-126,” but a security lieutenant intercepted it. The lieutenant, Mair wrote, “slammed me against the wall, kicked me in the groin . . . and told me to keep my mouth shut or else.”
The co-worker who advised Richardson found out about Mair’s suicide note, and felt that his charges should be investigated. But she feared that her life would be in danger if she pursued the matter, and she was sure that she would receive no support from her supervisor, Cristina Perez.
Reached by phone, Perez declined to comment, telling me that I could direct any questions to Wexford Health Sources, the private contractor that now provides mental-health services at Dade. In 2013, Florida privatized all the health services in its prisons. According to a series of investigative articles by Pat Beall, of the Palm Beach Post, this policy change has resulted in grossly substandard care. One difficulty with entrusting mental-health services to a for-profit company is that there is a disincentive to acknowledge abuse, because doing so could jeopardize the contract. Wexford’s Web site describes “integrity and ethics” as the “foundation” of the company’s culture. Wexford, too, declined to comment.
“If they say ‘Rubensesque’ in their profile, they mean they’re a Botero.”
Not long ago, I met with Mallinckrodt. He is six feet three, with a lanky, athletic build. Though he didn’t fear for his physical safety during the three years he worked at Dade, he nearly had a nervous breakdown. When he was fired, he almost found it a relief. He, too, was plagued by awful memories, among them an exchange that he had with an inmate who kept flinging his food tray at the window of his cell, as though it were a Frisbee. After failing to persuade him to stop, Mallinckrodt concluded that the inmate was in the throes of a psychotic episode. He also noted, with surprise, that there were no food stains on the window. Only later, when he heard about inmates receiving empty meal trays as a form of punishment, did he realize that the prisoner was outraged because the guards were starving him. “I was seeing inmate abuse, but I was labelling it as ‘Oh, he’s psychologically compromised,’ ” Mallinckrodt told me. In 2015, Mallinckrodt self-published a memoir, “Getting Away with Murder.” In one passage, a prisoner tells Mallinckrodt about an inmate who, after receiving an empty food tray, stuck his arm through the flap on his cell door, demanding something to eat. A guard grabbed the inmate’s arm; then another officer came over and kicked the door flap, smashing the arm again and again. Mallinckrodt talks to the victim, who shows him his bruises, and reports the incident. Nothing is done.
Harriet Krzykowski also had the impulse to document her worst experiences at Dade. Halfway through our first conversation, she handed me a manuscript of fifty-two single-spaced pages. She wrote it in feverish outbursts, she said, sometimes jotting down details on her arm when she didn’t have paper or a laptop nearby. She called the manuscript, which wasn’t finished, a “trauma narrative.” (She’d been seeing a therapist.) In it, she recalls seeing a guard repeatedly taunting an inmate by calling him Tampon, until the inmate flew into a rage. When Krzykowski asked the guard about the insult, he said, “He got his ass raped, and now he needs a tampon to stop the bleeding.” Krzykowski later spoke with a nurse, who confirmed that the inmate had been sexually assaulted.
At our second meeting, Krzykowski showed me excerpts from a diary that a T.C.U. inmate had shared with her—scraps of paper that were covered in a looping, childlike script. The inmate was a convicted drug dealer with a range of physical and mental disabilities. At one point, he had been hospitalized after he had tried to swallow pieces of his wheelchair. He was a victim of childhood abuse, and his wife and two daughters had died in a car accident. This won him no sympathy from one of the guards, who called him a “loser” and once tipped him out of his wheelchair. Krzykowski said of the inmate, “This is a real person, with a real life.”
Sometime later, I met Harold Hempstead, Krzykowski’s former patient, at the Columbia Correctional Institution, in Lake City, Florida. He had been transferred there in 2014, after his sister, Windy, convinced officials at Dade that his life would be in danger if he remained there. We spoke for an hour in a featureless gray room while a sergeant stood watch. Hempstead said that after Rainey’s murder several mental-health counsellors urged him to stop “obsessing” over the crime. One told him that he was being “delusional”; another cautioned him to keep any accusations “vague.” Hempstead acknowledged the pressure that mental-health counsellors in the T.C.U. were under. “Their hands were tied,” he said. But too many of them had internalized the view that the inmates in the unit deserved rough treatment. If more counsellors had been willing to stand up for the prisoners, he said, “the majority of that stuff wouldn’t have happened.”
Hempstead told me that he had a confession to make. A few weeks before Rainey died, he had informed a guard that there appeared to be dried excrement on a Koran that Rainey owned. The guard seized the Koran and, over Rainey’s protests, threw it away. Rainey later confronted Hempstead and called him an “effing cracker.” Hempstead said that he regretted talking to the guard, because losing the Koran had caused Rainey to have a breakdown that made him a target of prison staff.
The only therapist who had helped him with such feelings was Krzykowski, whom he affectionately called Ms. K. “She would actually listen,” he said. “She attempted to enroll me in some classes dealing with trauma.” He paused. “I really didn’t like to see her go.”
Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade medical examiner delivered a copy of Rainey’s autopsy report to state prosecutors. The report has not been made public, but its contents were leaked to the media. It concluded that the guards at Dade had “no intent” to harm Rainey, and that his death was “accidental.” This was technically correct—the aim of the “shower treatment” was to punish and torture Rainey, not to murder him. But the report implicitly absolved the guards, at least legally. No criminal investigation was recommended. Howard Simon, the executive director of the Florida A.C.L.U., criticized the report, telling the Herald that it underscored the need for a federal investigation.
At least eight other inmates in the T.C.U. endured abuse in a scalding shower. Among them was Daniel Geiger, who is now at the Lake Correctional Institute, near Clermont, Florida. When I spoke with his mother, Debra, who lives in North Carolina, she told me that she had not seen her son in several years, because prison officials had denied him visitation rights, claiming that he was dangerously unstable. She said that she had last talked to him in 2012, on the phone, shortly after he was transferred out of Dade. It was a brief conversation, and he appeared to have been overmedicated: he spoke with a slur and could not pronounce simple words. He told her that his weight had dropped from a hundred and seventy-eight pounds to a hundred and five. Although she was alarmed by this news, she did not suspect that he had been abused, only that “something was being hidden” from her. (The Department of Corrections says that she initially “asked about visitation,” but hadn’t actually attempted to schedule a visit. When she did make a request, according to department records, she was informed that her son was “not approved for visits at that time.”)
“I would die, but I have a rent-controlled apartment.”
I told Debra Geiger that, according to several sources, her son had been forced multiple times into the same shower where Rainey had died. He was also among the inmates who had been denied meals. “I’m heartbroken,” she said, her voice cracking. When we spoke again, a few days later, she told me that she had called the Lake Correctional Institute and learned that her son was being given two psychiatric medications, to which he was allergic. Later, she sent the facility a note from her son’s former psychiatrist, Dr. James Larson, confirming the allergies. She received a two-line response, saying that the information would be forwarded to the medical staff. She has no idea if the treatment has been discontinued. “It’s hard for me to digest all of this,” she told me. She compares the treatment of mentally ill inmates to the detention of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo.
In late February, Geiger was finally permitted to visit her son. She described him to me as being “at death’s door,” a gaunt figure with sunken eyes who mistook her for his wife and growled at the guards when they called his name. His arms were skeletal—“no wider than my wrists,” she said—and there were deep-red marks on his neck. When she asked him what had happened at Dade, he peered up at the ceiling, pressed his face against the glass partition separating them, and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” She said that when her son was taking the right combination of medications he was relatively stable—a point that she impressed on the warden before leaving. “I told him that I kept him more or less normal for thirty-three years, and you all have destroyed him in seven,” she said.
In September, 2014, Disability Rights Florida, an advocacy organization, filed a lawsuit charging the Florida Department of Corrections with subjecting mentally ill inmates at Dade to “abuse and discrimination on a systematic and regular basis.” According to the terms of a settlement reached last year, the Department of Corrections agreed to make several changes, including the installation of a new camera system at Dade, better training of guards, and the hiring of an assistant warden of mental health.
One morning this past September, I drove to Dade to meet the new assistant warden, Glenn Morris. The prison is on the outskirts of the Everglades, on a two-lane road flanked by fields and by signs advertising alligator farms and airboat rides. Morris met me at the prison’s public entrance. We passed through a metal detector and beyond a heavy steel door that opened onto a cement path. After walking a quarter of a mile across the prison campus, we arrived at a cream-colored building with a sign saying “transitional Care Unit.” The path wasn’t shaded and, although it was early, the heat was stifling. Much to my relief, the air-conditioning inside the T.C.U. was functioning well. (Krzykowski told me that when she worked there it was often broken.) The walls were a dull gray, but the place looked clean: an orderly in faded scrubs was sweeping the cement floor. We walked down a nurses’ hall and stopped at the entrance to the west wing, a cavernous chamber lined with single-person cells, each of which had a small rectangular window.
Morris told me that the inmates were out in the rec yard. He pointed to several TV sets that had been installed recently. On one wall, an inmate had painted a mural—a cheerful ocean scene.
“When I first got here, the mentality was ‘This is confinement,’ ” Morris told me. “I had to change that.” The Department of Corrections now has an “open cell” policy at Dade, which is supposed to allow lower-risk inmates to move around more freely.
Earlier, Morris had introduced me to the unit’s major, a large man with a broad smile, and to several corrections officers. All of them were recent hires. When we crossed to the east side of the T.C.U., which houses inmates who are deemed more stable, a staff meeting was ending, and Morris introduced me to Cristina Perez. “She does a very good job,” he said. Dressed casually in sneakers and sweatpants, Perez extended her hand. “Nice to meet you. Oh . . . ,” she stammered, evidently recalling that we had spoken on the phone. She smiled uneasily and walked away.
Afterward, in an office, I asked Morris if the desire to appease security might affect how well mental-health counsellors did their jobs. “Dr. Perez, I’m sure, tells her staff to report things to her,” he said. “And I’m very confident that if she found out something she would report it to us.” I said that I had heard otherwise. Morris rolled his eyes, telling me that he assumed my understanding came from a “disgruntled” ex-employee—meaning George Mallinckrodt. I said that other former employees had the same misgivings. “Obviously, that was way before my time,” he said.
Morris came across as well-intentioned, but his assurance that inmates were getting their “basic needs” met was disputed by a source who spoke to me confidentially. Prisoners, I was told, still came to the inpatient unit of the T.C.U. and languished after being placed in what amounted to solitary confinement. Many prisoners received no treatment at all. In one case that was described to me, a young inmate afflicted with paranoia had been degenerating for more than a year. Though he was not disruptive, he had spent prolonged periods in lockdown, because he had stopped taking his medication. Nobody had encouraged him to try different medication; nobody had tried to engage him in activities that might have lessened his feelings of distrust. As a result, the source said, the patient was “undergoing a quiet decompensation where he just gets sicker and sicker.”
The mental-health staff continued to defer to security, acquiescing when inmates were disciplined for misconduct that was clearly related to their illnesses. An inmate with diagnosed impulse-control problems had his privileges taken away after an outburst. Mental-health officials checked a box indicating that the inmate’s issues had played no role.
Bob Greifinger, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies mental-health conditions in prisons, told me that routine neglect is no less pernicious than flagrant abuse. “Most of the coercion that happens goes relatively unrecognized,” he said. “There are very few people who can step back and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute—the guards are trying to interfere with my taking care of my patients.’ ” One observer who sat in on a recent staff meeting at Dade said that the counsellors and the psychiatrists seemed “oblivious” of the mental-health needs of the inmates.
The civil-rights division of the Justice Department has launched an investigation to determine whether the death of Darren Rainey is part of a broader pattern of abuse. It is not the first time that the Florida prison system has been the subject of federal scrutiny. In 2006, the secretary of Florida’s Department of Corrections, James V. Crosby, was sentenced to eight years behind bars for accepting kickbacks from prison venders. Ron McAndrew, a former warden, told me that while Crosby was in office guards regularly beat up inmates for sport. (Crosby himself was the warden of a prison where, in 1999, an inmate named Frank Valdes was brutally beaten to death.) Crosby’s successor at the D.O.C., James McDonough, dismissed dozens of prison officials who were suspected of corruption. Yet tougher sentencing laws filled Florida’s prisons beyond capacity, and the system was weakened by severe budget cuts. In 2011, the Correctional Medical Authority, an independent agency that monitors the medical and mental-health care of inmates, was gutted. Additional savings have come from extensive layoffs, which result in guards at many prisons having to work twelve-hour shifts. Placing the staff under such stress only increases the likelihood of abuse.
Julie Jones, the current D.O.C. secretary, has promised to change the culture of Florida’s prisons. A few months after taking office, she issued a “statement on retaliation,” in which she vowed that no employee “who comes forward with an issue of concern would face retaliation.” On the wall of the main administrative building at Dade, I spotted a framed copy of the statement. A few months earlier, however, Jones had circulated a memo requiring all D.O.C. inspectors to sign confidentiality agreements about any investigations they conducted. Some employees viewed this as the equivalent of a gag order.
In 2013, four senior inspectors employed by the D.O.C. alleged that Randall Jordan-Aparo, an inmate at a prison south of Tallahassee, had needlessly suffocated to death. Corrections officers had sprayed Jordan-Aparo with chemicals, even though he suffered from a disorder that compromised his lungs. The inspectors also alleged that Jordan-Aparo had committed no disciplinary infractions; he had angered corrections officers by demanding medical attention. Two years ago, the inspectors sued the D.O.C. and Jeffrey Beasley, its inspector general, claiming that their inquiry had led to retaliation. (According to the Department of Corrections, the inspectors’ cases were dismissed.)
Krzykowski, who now works as a counsellor at an agency for at-risk youth, was clearly appalled by the behavior of some security guards at Dade, but she didn’t seem to blame them. Many of the guards she met were decent people who treated the inmates with respect, she told me. And the ones who were abusive, she suggested, acted in ways that are to be expected in a society that has resumed warehousing mentally ill people like Darren Rainey, as if they were beyond hope.
Before I left Missouri, Krzykowski told me that she wanted to take me to a place called the Glore Psychiatric Museum, in St. Joseph. The museum, which occupies a drab brick building, offers an unsettling commentary on how people with mental disabilities have been treated in the past. We walked through a series of rooms filled with arcane devices—a fever cabinet, a lobotomy table. At one point, we stood before a full-scale replica of a nineteenth-century cell at the hospital of Salpêtrière, in Paris. Michel Foucault wrote about the hospital in his 1961 book, “Madness and Civilization,” and he called the era it represented “the Great Confinement.” Krzykowski peered into the cell, a dingy chamber littered with straw, and read the label on the wall:
At the hospital of Salpêtrière the insane were kept in narrow filthy cells. . . . When frostbite resulted, as it often did, no medical help was available. Food was a ration of bread once a day, sometimes supplemented by thin gruel. The greatest indignity was the chains.
Afterward, we sat in a gazebo outside. “We don’t learn very fast,” she said.
As I subsequently found out, the Glore Psychiatric Museum is situated in the medical wing of a former state psychiatric hospital. Curious to see the main compound, which closed in 1997, I went back a few days later. Following a narrow walkway shaded by pines, I arrived at a more secluded area, where the hospital’s residential quarters once stood. The path ended at a security barrier. A chain-link fence topped with razor wire now encircles what the hospital once known as State Lunatic Asylum No. 2 has become: a prison. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the May 2, 2016, issue.
Our Local Correspondents
Kalief Browder was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.
By Jennifer Gonnerman
Annals of Human Rights
Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?
Through its prison system, America may subject more of its own citizens to the cruelty of prolonged isolation than any other country in history.
By Atul Gawande
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The Higgs Boson May Already Be Devouring the Universe, as Stephen Hawking Predicted
Chris Mahon
Tuesday, 20 March 2018 - 1:16PM
Altogether, CERN spent about $13.25 billion on finding the elusive particle known as the Higgs-Boson, which is hypothesized to be reason that matter has mass.
There were a lot of worries that the search for the Higgs-Boson would create a black hole that would engulf the world, but like most doomsday prophecies it didn't turn out to be true—scientists managed to safely find the Higgs-Boson and study it (and win a bet with Stephen Hawking to boot).
Everything seemed to have a happy ending until researchers realized that the Higgs-Boson has the potential to become unstable and wipe out the universe in a bubble-shaped vacuum that travels at the speed of light. In fact, that universe-destroying void bubble may already be on its way.
But let's back up for a second here.
The Higgs-Boson particle is an extremely small particle, and like other particles, it can become unstable..or rather, its field can become unstable. It would take an incredible amount of energy to pull this off, but the result would be devastating due to how to Higgs-Boson interacts with other matter: the Higgs field.
The Higgs field has (according to our best estimates) been around since the beginning of the universe and is one of the major forces keeping it stable. If a portion of the Higgs field experienced a phenomenon called "quantum tunneling," which is most likely to occur out in the empty space between galaxies, then it could set off a chain reaction that has the potential to destroy the universe.
According to Stephen Hawking:
"The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 [billion] gigaelectronvolts (GeV)…This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming."
What makes this scenario especially terrifying is that the Higgs Boson is teetering right on the edge of stability.
According to physicist Joseph Lykken, "It turns out we're right on the edge between a stable universe and an unstable universe. We're sort of right on the edge where the universe can last for a long time, but eventually, it should go 'boom.' "
That 'boom' may already have begun, however.
Fortunately, new research from Harvard University has run the numbers.
We now have an estimate of how long we have before the Higgs Boson conceivably consumes the universe itself: between 10^58 and 10^139 years. Respectively, that's 10 with 58 zeroes behind it, and 10 with 139 zeroes. So we've got a long time before that Higgs Boson bubble comes for us.
MIT and NASA Engineers Reveal Aircraft Wing That Changes Shape During Flight
Falling Into a Black Hole Might Actually Be Totally Survivable, Says Physicist
Scientists Claim That Newborn Stars Can Heat Dark Matter And Move It Around Their Host Galaxies
New Theory Says Black Holes Will Spit Out Their "Singularities" in Time
The Earth's Magnetic Field May Be Headed for a Cataclysm
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Dennis Heaney 40th Anniversary - statement from family
10th June 1978- 2018 | 06 June 2018
The family of Dennis Heaney (21), shot dead on the streets of his home town Derry by under-cover soldiers of the British Army’s 14th Intelligence Company (a cover name for the SAS) on 10th June 1978. A series of events to remember Dennis on the 40th anniversary have been arranged by the Heaney famil...
Event to Mark International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
26th June marks the International Day in Support of the Victims of Torture. The PFC, along with our colleagues in CAJ, Amnesty International and Matrix Chambers marked the day by outlining evidence of torture carried out by the RUC and British Army during the 1970's in the north of Ireland at an eve...
Witness Appeal: Kathleen Thompson, Derry 1971
Coroner Service | 30 June 2017
CORONER SEEKS WITNESSES IN RELATION TO KILLING OF KATHLEEN THOMPSON IN DERRY IN 1971 Contact PFC for details
"I AM JOHN PAT CUNNINGHAM"
London, 16th Sept, 11am | 14 September 2017
This weekend Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans are organising a protest in London entitled "I AM DENNIS HUTCHINGS". (11am at Horse Guard Parade London). Hutchings is currently being prosecuted for the attempted murder of John Pat Cunningham, a vulnerable adult, in Benburb in 1974.(Full case deta...
KATHLEEN THOMPSON INQUEST POSTPONED
26 OCTOBER 2017 | 26 October 2017
KATHLEEN THOMPSON INQUEST POSTPONED UNTIL NEW YEAR The inquest into the death of Kathleen Thompson, due to start tomorrow in Derry, has been postponed until the New Year.
Pat Finucane Centre | 26 October 2017
In November 2016 the families of Christopher Quinn and Kevin Heatley along with the Pat Finucane Centre utilised Advans in London to highlight the murders of their relatives and the appalling treatment they endured after the killings, in response to Theresa May's comments on those pushing for human...
Interrogations of hooded men were ‘taped’
Gerry Moriarty, Irish Times | 20 February 2015
New documents have been uncovered that confirm interrogations of detainees who became known as the “hooded men” were taped, according to the Pat Finucane Centre (PFC) in Derry.
Ireland v. UK: Revisiting the Treatment of the 'Hooded Men'
Philip Leach, Jurist | 06 December 2014
The Irish government announced this week that it is applying to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to re-open the case it instigated in the early 1970s against the UK government concerning the treatment in detention of fourteen IRA suspects, following their arrest by the British army under in...
The Hooded Men
CAJ and PFC Press release | 24 November 2014
The Committee on the Administration (CAJ) and the Pat Finucane Centre (PFC) welcome Amnesty International’s call to the Irish Government that it seeks to re-open the case it took against the UK in relation to the use of the "five interrogation techniques" inflicted on 14 men when internment was intr...
Press release KRW LAW LLP | 24 November 2011
KRW LAW LLP is instructed by a number of The Hooded Men, those interned by the British government in August 1971. These 12 men became the guinea pigs in the British army’s deployment of ‘deep interrogation’ or what has become known as The Five Techniques. These techniques had been developed in the p...
The "Hooded Men"- Irish State case
In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that the British government had violated Article 3 of the European Commission on Human Rights in their treatment of 14 men in 1971. These "Hooded Men" had been selected for 5 techniques of "Deep Interrogation" - white noise, wall standing/ stress positions, sleep deprivation, bread and water diet, and hooding....
(-) State Violence (12)
RUC (3)
Pat Finucane (1)
(-) British Army (6)
(-) Dennis Heaney (1)
(-) Prosecutions (1)
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The US Army is starting its own esports team
It wants to be more relatable to cool youths.
The US Army is hoping that esports, of all things, will encourage more young Americans to consider a career in the armed forces. It’s putting together its own esports team as part of the marketing initiative, sending them to tournaments where they can drum up awareness and make the Army seem more relatable.
During a Reddit AMA last week, the Army invited veterans, reservists and active members to sign up to be involved, though it clarifies that members of the actual esports team would need to have time left in the Army. “It is an All-Army team essentially,” explains SSG Meaux.
There will be other opportunities for veterans, and there’s also a form for people not in the Army linked in the AMA. Beta testing Army apps and training and simulation software is also mentioned as part of the team’s responsibilities. An Army esports Twitter was also set up, but it seems to have been suspended.
While the team won’t be Army recruiters, the US Army is also sending recruiters to esports tournaments. This recruitment drive was announced earlier in the year, when the Army was 6,500 soldiers short of its target for the year ending in September.
Both the Army and Air Force have delved into esports before. Across July and August, the Army hosted and livesteamed an esports qualifier for Street Fighter 5, while the Air Force worked with an esports team during the summer. Neither of them featured an all-military esports team, however, and this one will be the first.
The US military also works with game developers and publishers. Prolific strategy publisher Slitherine made a version of Command Modern Air/Naval Operations to be used as a training simulation. The Army even has its own official game series: America’s Army.
I’m not really sure how this will actually encourage new recruits. Would you be more interested in joining the Army just because some of your fellow soldiers also enjoy League of Legends? I don’t think we’re going to see a surge of gamers suddenly deciding to enlist.
Cheers, Stars and Stripes.
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Norwegian Cruise Line’s New Ship Class Named Project Leonardo
Posted on March 31, 2017 by writer
Norwegian Cruise Line has named its new class of ships the Leonardo Project.
Although the cruise operator first announced its next generation project in February 2016, the company announced the name and showed first images at Seatrade Cruise Global 2017 in Fort Lauderdale only a few days ago. The Leonardo Project will consist of four ships, which will be built by Fincantieri shipyard in Italy.
The first of the as-yet-to-be-named ships will be delivered in June 2022. And the other three are coming in June 2023, June 2024 and June 2025 with an option for two additional ships to be scheduled for 2026 and 2027.
The new additions to the Norwegian fleet will be roughly 140,000-ton ships that can carry 3,300 passengers at double capacity and will feature a lot of open deck space on the lower levels. The ships are not as large as the Norwegian vessels that have rolled out the last few years. They are the two Breakaway Class cruise ships, Norwegian Breakaway that arrived in 2013 and Norwegian Getaway that debuted in 2014.The Breakaway Plus Class ships are 165,300-ton like Norwegian Escape that sails out of Miami and its sister ship Norwegian Joy scheduled to debut later this year and Norwegian Bliss coming in 2018.
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Chairman and CEO Frank Del Rio noted that in the cruise industry the next series of vessels is usually larger than the one before, however, the cruise operator is famous for “breaking molds and going against the grain.” He added that not all destinations can handle 5,000-passenger ships effectively.
Further details on the new ships including names and home ports were not revealed. However, Del Rio promised that they will feature “cutting-edge technology” with optimized fuel consumption and reduced environmental impact.
This entry was posted in Travel, Vessels and tagged cruise ship, Norwegian Cruise Line, travel, vacation by writer. Bookmark the permalink.
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Neenah invests in 'classy' identification sign along I-41
The city has money left over for a sign at the entrance to the Southpark Industrial Center.
Neenah invests in 'classy' identification sign along I-41 The city has money left over for a sign at the entrance to the Southpark Industrial Center. Check out this story on postcrescent.com: https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/local/2018/12/28/neenah-spends-25-000-welcome-sign-along-41/2314041002/
Duke Behnke, Appleton Post-Crescent Published 7:47 a.m. CT Dec. 28, 2018
A new sign mounted on a Bell Street retaining wall promotes the city of Neenah. It is visible to motorists on northbound Interstate 41.(Photo: Duke Behnke/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)Buy Photo
Question: How much did Neenah spend on its new sign along I-41?
Answer: The final bill for electrical work hasn't been received, but the cost of the sign will be about $22,250.
The total consists of $900 for design, $15,350 for the sign and installation, and about $6,000 for the electrical work.
The lighted sign contains an image of the Neenah council tree and the word "Neenah" in green lettering. It is located on the south facade of a retaining wall on Bell Street and is visible to motorists on northbound Interstate 41 as they approach the Breezewood-Bell interchange.
RELATED: Neenah adds $23 transportation fee to replace special assessments
"Our goal was to have something that was classy, could stand the test of time and wasn't too commercialized," said Chris Haese, Neenah's director of community development and assessment. "My impression is that it's been well-accepted by the community."
Neenah budgeted $100,000 in 2017 to purchase and install a new sign to promote the city's identity and location along I-41. At the time, officials envisioned a monument sign along the highway, similar to the one erected by De Pere.
"If we would have had a free-standing sign, the costs would have been significantly higher," Haese said. "By using that existing retaining wall, that saved us quite a bit."
A retaining wall on the south side of Bell Street near a widening of the Neenah Slough serves as the backdrop for the city's new sign. (Photo: Duke Behnke/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)
The city let $25,000 of the $100,000 lapse but carried forward $50,000 to pay for the installation of a monument sign at the north entrance of the Southpark Industrial Center.
The industrial park entrance was marked with a sign until it was taken out by a driver who lost control of a vehicle several years ago.
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Read or Share this story: https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/local/2018/12/28/neenah-spends-25-000-welcome-sign-along-41/2314041002/
Police report says missing Dale women left home because they didn't feel safe
SECURA sells Appleton building to Fleet Farm
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Video: Take A Tour Of How Ford 3-D Prints Shelby GT500 Parts
By Kelly Getzelman January 09, 2019
We are less than a week away from The North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), and many Blue Oval enthusiasts are anxiously awaiting the official debut of the 2020 Shelby GT500.
While Ford has been relatively tight-lipped on the official performance numbers on its flagship pony, throughout the year, we have been able to learn a bit more about some of the advanced components that will make this vehicle so unique.
AmericanMuscle’s Justin Dugan recently had the opportunity to visit Ford’s Advanced Vehicle Manufacturing Plant where future Ford vehicles will be developed and built. This 45 million dollar facility will also play an essential role in manufacturing 3-D printed parts for the new GT500.
“The ability to turn a 3-D printed part into a production-ready piece is a sign that the future is now, regarding automotive manufacturing,” said Justin.
Justin was also able to witness how the design and engineering team at the facility use emerging technologies to make vehicles safer and more efficient for its customers. By implementing the use of augmented and virtual reality, the team can create a 3-D workstation environment that allows vehicle designers to collaborate with engineers both across the country and abroad.
The 22-minute video may not give us any new insight on the upcoming GT500, but it does give viewers the chance to see how some of this advanced technology helps Ford engineers develop safer and more efficient vehicles for years to come. And when the new GT500 is officially unveiled at NAIAS on January 14th, we have a strong feeling that what Justin witnessed in the video is just a fraction of the groundbreaking advancements in technology that this Vehicle Manufacturing Plant is ready to debut to the world in 2019 and beyond.
AmericanMuscle
Kelly Getzelman
Kelly is a SoCal car enthusiast and skilled driver. His “get out and drive” obsession began after attending his first high-performance racing school while serving on active duty. Since then, he has attended numerous military and civilian driving schools across the country to help fuel that passion.
Top 10 Highlights From 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed
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Working for the public good
by Natalia Vander Laan
Hello! My name is Natalia Vander Laan and I am an attorney in the Carson Valley practicing estate planning, family law, and workers’ compensation. It is my pleasure to share with our community my knowledge and experience about legal issues that may affect you or someone you know.
Before I delve into the subject of my first article, pro bono legal assistance, a topic that I hold a deep respect for, please allow me to quickly introduce myself.
Czesc! Or, again, hello! I was born and raised in Poland. I hold a law degree from Poland (2004), a Juris Doctor from the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento (2011), and I am licensed to practice law in California and Nevada. I am the managing member of Vander Laan Law Firm, LLC in Minden and a soon-to-open Carson City office.
One thing I strongly believe in is “giving back” or, as I call it, “lawyer it forward,” by volunteering my time to improve the well-being of the community and to provide free legal assistance to those experiencing financial hardships. The prior I do by serving as a director on the Boards of the Suicide Prevention Network and the Foundation for Douglas County Recreation and Senior Center, and as a member of the advisory council of the Boys and Girls Club. The latter I do through pro bono legal work I perform for Volunteer Attorneys for Rural Nevadans, Nevada Legal Services, and the Nevada Supreme Court Access to Justice Commission.
While many people are familiar with the term pro bono, some may not understand its true meaning. Pro bono publico is a latin phrase meaning “for the public good” and denotes professional services rendered voluntarily and without compensation to people that are in need of such services but do not have the financial resources to afford them. Just as Doctors without Borders organizes medical professionals to help people receive necessary medical care for free, VARN and NLS organize legal professionals to help qualified Nevadans get the legal advice and assistance needed that they otherwise would not be able to afford.
VARN provides pro bono civil legal (non-criminal) services for eligible low-income individuals and families in one of two programs. The first program is the Pro Bono Project in which qualifying individuals are matched with an attorney donating legal services. This program offers assistance with civil legal matters including but not limited to domestic violence issues, family law matters (adoption, divorce, guardianship, and custody), real estate/real property matters (homesteads, foreclosure, breach of contract, and landlord/tenant issues) and other civil legal matters (debt collection, bankruptcy, and wills and probate). The second program is Lawyer in the Lobby where an appointment for a 20-minute consultation is scheduled with a volunteer attorney during different sessions throughout the month focusing on family law, general law, and sessions which are exclusively for Spanish speakers. More information on VARN’s Pro Bono Project and Lawyer in the Lobby services and how to determine eligibility is available online at varn.org or by calling 775-883-8278.
NLS also provides pro bono legal services where eligibility again is usually dependent on the applicant’s income level. If eligible, NLS can assist applicants only with civil law cases (non-criminal) including but not limited to government benefit denials, IRS tax disputes, subsidized housing and mobile home parks, consumer issues, Ryan White Part B, legal issues affecting Native American legal issues, tenants’ rights, elder law, family law, community development, and Veterans and rural services. You can learn more about what NLS provides and whether or not you are eligible for its services by contacting NLS online at nlslaw.net or by calling 775-883-0404.
In my next column, I will discuss how to prepare for a consultation with a pro bono attorney.
Natalia Vander Laan is a Carson Valley attorney.
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Pediatricians: Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play sleeper is 'deadly,' should be recalled
Gary Dinges @gdinges
Pediatricians across the nation are calling on Fisher-Price to immediately recall its Rock 'n Play sleeper, calling it "deadly."
The American Academy of Pediatrics claims 32 sleep-related infant deaths are linked to the popular sleeper, while Fisher-Price put the number of deaths at 10. The deaths reportedly occured when unrestrained infants rolled over.
Friday, Fisher-Price and the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning for owners of the Rock 'n Play, but doctors say that's not good enough, CBS News reports.
"This product is deadly and should be recalled immediately," Kyle Yasuda, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a written statement obtained by People magazine. “There is convincing evidence that the Rock 'n Play inclined sleeper puts infants’ lives at risk, and CPSC must step up and take immediate action to remove it from stores and prevent further tragedies.”
The Friday warning urged parents to stop using the sleeper when infants turn 3 months old. That's typically when infants are able to roll over on their own.
But a Consumer Reports investigation cited by CBS News found that some of the infants who died were younger than 3 months old.
"Based on the deaths and injuries associated with the Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play, the product clearly puts infants' safety at risk and should be recalled immediately," William Wallace, senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports, said. "All other inclined sleepers should be investigated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. These products conflict with American Academy of Pediatrics' safe sleep recommendations, and manufacturers should pull them off the market."
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Serco Awarded New Contract To Manage the Texas Department of Transportation Traffic Management Center
Aug 24, 2017, 11:37 ET
RESTON, Va., Aug. 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Serco Inc., a provider of professional, technology, and management services, announced today that the Company has been awarded a new contract to manage the traffic management center for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Austin District. The contract has a one-year base period and three one-year option periods, and is valued at $7 million, if all options are exercised.
Serco will be responsible for managing the TxDOT freeway operations in Austin's Combined Transportation, Emergency & Communications Center (CTECC) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Company's work at the CTECC will help identify incidents faster, reduce roadway congestion, and enhance emergency response coordination, thereby promoting a more reliable trip for the motorists.
"Serco provides transportation services around the world and we are proud to have earned this contract with the Texas Department of Transportation," said Dave Dacquino, Chairman and CEO of Serco Inc. "We have a team in place who recognizes the importance of safety to the district's travelers and are standing by ready to serve."
Serco has a long history of managing traffic management center for the state Departments of Transportation and agencies around the world, including active traffic management and intelligent transportation systems in the United Kingdom, and traffic/tunnel controls in Hong Kong.
Serco's transportation division delivers Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) services, Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations, rail operations & maintenance, fleet management and parking enforcement services throughout the country.
About Serco Inc.
Serco Inc. is a leading provider of professional, technology, and management services. We advise, design, integrate, and deliver solutions that transform how clients achieve their missions. Our customer-first approach, robust portfolio of services, and global experience enable us to respond with solutions that achieve outcomes with value. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Serco Inc. has approximately 8,000 employees and annual revenue of $1 billion. Serco Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Serco Group plc, a $5 billion international business that helps transform government and public services around the world. More information about Serco Inc. can be found at www.serco-na.com.
SOURCE Serco Inc.
http://www.serco-na.com
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Search by Category > Food and Tobacco Manufactures > Food and Kindred Products > Wines, Brandy and Brandy Spirits
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Nfld Liquor Corporation
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Back to main gallery
Photo Profile: Red Grange
In the early 1920s, George Halas was desperately seeking a special gate attraction to help draw fans for his Chicago Bears and the National Football League. University of Illinois running back Harold "Red" Grange was the answer.
Grange delivered huge blocks of ice during his college days earning him the nickname "The Wheaton Iceman."
On Thanksgiving Day, 1925, just 10 days after Grange's last college game, 36,600 filled Wrigley Field to see Red's pro debut against the Chicago Cardinals.
Grange embarked on an expansive “barnstorming tour” following the 1925 NFL season, playing all over the country and winning tens of thousands of new fans for pro football.
Grange and the Bears ownership couldn’t agree on terms for the 1926 season, so he migrated to the rival American Football League and played for a team in New York called the Yankees.
Halas invited Grange back to the Bears in 1929 and he remained with them through the 1934 season.
Grange carries the ball in a game for the New York Yankees in 1926.
Grange was a member of the charter class of enshrinees inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963.
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Orlando City falls to Montreal Impact, extends seven-game MLS losing streak
Jordan Culver, Pro Soccer USA
Orlando City is still searching for answers.
During the Lions’ first home match in nearly a month, the story remained the same for the club. Orlando City conceded first and never recovered.
The club fired coach Jason Kreis after loss No. 6 during the current losing streak, but on a stormy Saturday in front of an announced crowd of 23,498, not much changed with interim coach Bobby Murphy at the helm.
The Lions (6-9-1, 19 points) lost 2-0 to the Montreal Impact, dropping their seventh consecutive match in league play and extending a club-record losing streak. It was Orlando City’s second match this week after playing D.C. United on Wednesday in a U.S. Open Cup game that went into extra time and was decided in the Lions’ favor on penalty kicks.
Orlando City came out flat after playing 120 minutes in the middle of the week.
“I want to apologize to the fans who came out tonight,” Murphy said. “The team selection falls on me and I chose a group that went out there and we weren’t good enough tonight.
“The energy was not there in the first half. For the first 45 minutes, the energy wasn’t there. It was the same group of players that came out to start the second half who were much livelier. You can call it whatever you want to, energy, effort. Bottom line, whatever it was, it wasn’t good enough.”
Since Philadelphia got a 4-0 win over the Vancouver Whitecaps on Saturday, the Lions are now out of the playoff picture and sit in seventh place in the MLS Eastern Conference table.
Centerback Lamine Sané put Orlando City behind early when he headed a cross from Montreal forward Matteo Mancosu into his own net in the 13th minute. The ball skipped by the outstretched arms of goalkeeper Joe Bendik and for the 14th time this season, the Lions were down 1-0 early.
“It’s a fluke and a really bad way to start the game,” Lions team captain Jonathan Spector said. “Too many times we’ve given up early goals in games because of poor defending or whatever it might be and then tonight it was just a bit of a fluke and I guess when it rains, it pours.”
After the first goal, the Impact were content to stay compact and force Orlando City to try to break them down. The Lions never could and finished the match with just one shot on target (eight shots total), despite 54.2 percent of the possession.
Montreal’s Ignacio Piatti put another goal on the scoresheet for the Impact in the 84th minute. The goal was waved off at first, but then was upheld after video review.
“They’re down, for sure,” Murphy said of the team. “They’re disappointed. The challenge is, you know, all the feel-good stuff we talked about in the last three days, coming off the victory and stuff, now you can’t abandon that stuff. Now my having to hold them accountable is even more important.
“There’s nowhere to hide in this. It’s not good right now, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. That’s a choice. We’ve just got to keep going and go back to work. For as long as they’ll employ me, I’ll keep pushing them and holding them accountable and try to get the best out of them.”
After a mostly-uninspired first half, Orlando City played with a sense of urgency after rookie attacker Chris Mueller was subbed on in the 64th minute. Centerback Amro Tarek came off and Orlando City abandoned its new three-man back line in favor of the 4-2-3-1 it had gone with for weeks.
The change in shape meant central attacking midfielder Sacha Kljestan dropped next to holding midfielder Uri Rosell.
It wasn’t enough for Orlando City to overcome a dismal first half that included no shots on goal despite controlling 55.6 percent of the possession.
Orlando City returns to action next Saturday with a match against rival Atlanta United at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Related TopicsBobby MurphyfeaturedJason KreisMLSMontreal ImpactOrlando City
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Orlando City’s fatigue obvious in loss to Montreal Impact
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Facebook Says It’s Open To New Regulation
Posted on February 18, 2019 February 18, 2019 7:18 am
Facebook, which has been under fire for months over data scandals, expressed openness to new regulation.
According to a report in Reuters citing Facebook’s public policy manager Karim Palant, the executive said the social media giant is “open to meaningful regulation.” His comments came following calls by lawmakers in the U.K. for large tech companies to have to meet a code of ethics to prevent fake news from spreading and for preventing users from abusing the platforms. “We are open to meaningful regulation and support the committee’s recommendation for electoral law reform,” Reuters quoted Palant as saying. Facebook is “not the same company” even a year ago, with the social media giant already instituting a lot of changes, the executive noted.
The comments from Palant come on the heels of reporting by The Wall Street Journal that the company could pay a multi-billion dollar fine to the Federal Trade Commission to settle an inquiry by the regulator into its privacy practices. An exact amount hadn’t been agreed upon as of last week, but the fine is expected to be the largest to ever be imposed by the FTC on a technology company. Google in 2012 paid $22.5 million to the FTC to settle an inquiry into how it handles data.
In addition to the inquiry by the FTC, Facebook is facing increased scrutiny by regulators around the globe and calls for more regulation of it and other large tech companies. It has also prompted a backlash among some customers who have vowed to never use Facebook again. But despite the backlash, Facebook was still able to report a strong showing for the fourth quarter, the last three months of 2018. Its daily active user based increased 9 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2018 and reached 1.52 billion on average in December. Monthly active users also increased 9 percent during Q4, hitting 2.32 billion. All told, Facebook said about 2.7 billion people now use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger each month, and more than 2 billion people use at least one of its services every day, on average.
Related Items:data, data privacy, Facebook, fake news, fine, News, privacy, regulation, security and fraud, tech companies, What's Hot
Scribd Turns The Page On Subscription Limits
UK’s Newest Challenger Bank Diaspora Eyes Trade Finance
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Democrats refocus fight against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on healthcare
Democrats on Wednesday were reorienting their uphill push to block U.S. Senate confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, moving healthcare to the center of their strategy and putting less emphasis on abortion rights.
While the two issues are closely linked, the change aligns with polling that shows healthcare is a major concern for swing-state voters ahead of November’s congressional elections, with abortion rights more divisive.
No matter the top issue, Democrats will have a hard time derailing the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump’s Republicans have a 51-49 Senate majority, enough to confirm Kavanaugh if they stick together. But they have little margin for error and Democrats see healthcare as a potential wedge issue.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday rattled off topics Kavanaugh might have to rule on as a Supreme Court justice. “But at the top of the list is healthcare,” he said.
Democratic strategist Jim Manley noted, “This is one argument that unites the (Democratic) caucus.”
Congressional Republicans suffered a crushing defeat in 2017 when they tried and failed to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, former President Barack Obama’s healthcare law. Democrats hope public support for healthcare will help them repeat that victory by building opposition to Kavanaugh, a conservative federal appeals court judge and Trump’s second nominee to the high court.
If confirmed, Kavanaugh and the court might have to consider a lawsuit by Texas and other states challenging Obamacare’s health insurance protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, such as cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s.
The case has slim chance of success even if it does reach the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, said legal scholars, including some involved in previous Obamacare challenges.
Still, Democrats are pointing to that case as a red flag as Congress considers elevating Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Kavanaugh dissented in 2011 from the appeals court’s conclusion that Obamacare did not violate the U.S. Constitution. The dissent was narrowly focused.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on Wednesday that Trump, in choosing Kavanaugh, is “trying to rig a Supreme Court such that it will strike down protections for pre-existing conditions and he has a case ready to move to the Supreme Court to do just that.”
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, battling for reelection in a state Trump won in 2016, in a statement on Kavanaugh’s nomination, said the “Supreme Court will ultimately decide if nearly 800,000 West Virginians with pre-existing conditions will lose their healthcare.”
Compared to their initial attacks on Kavanaugh, Democrats are putting less stress in recent days on the possibility that he could threaten Roe v Wade, a landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision supporting abortion rights.
Republican Senator Susan Collins, a moderate and a key swing vote in the Senate, has signaled concern about Kavanaugh and abortion, but also about healthcare. Speaking to reporters, she said, “The healthcare issues are very important to me.”
Additional reporting by Amanda Becker; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and David Gregorio
In a story about how great he is, President Donald Trump told his North Carolina rally audience on Wednesday that a "business person" he knows always hated him. But he's doing well now anyway because of the president's policies.
"He came up to me and I said, 'How are you doing?' Very warm, you know. 'Hey, how are you doing. Let’s get out of here,'" Trump recalled.
"And he said, 'I’m doing good, you are doing good.' I said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'You know, you don’t like me and I don’t like you, I never have liked you, and you have never liked me. But you are going to support me because you are a rich guy, and if you don’t support me, you are going to be so Goddamn poor, you are not going to believe it.'"
The ignoble highlight of President Donald Trump's rally in Greenville, North Carolina on Wednesday was when his fans doubled down on his racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color and targeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), chanting "Send her back! Send her back!"
Political commentators of all stripes were gobsmacked by the crowd's naked racism — and buried them in condemnation:
The crowd at Trump’s rally chanting “send her back” after the President viciously and dishonestly attacked Ilhan Omar is one of the most chilling and horrifying things I’ve ever seen in politics.
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Youth Cup Preview
Brentford under-18s v Royals under-18s
The Royals Academy take on Brentford in the Third Round of the FA Youth Cup tonight – kick off 7pm at Griffin Park.
The Bees reached this stage with a 5-1 victory over Barnet in the First Round, followed by a 3-2 victory over Brentwood in the next stage.
This is the Royals' first fixture in the cup this season – but they have been in outstanding form in the league, topping their National Group One table and scoring 40 goals in 14 games.
Brentford’s Youth Team play in the Under-18 Professional Development League Two South and compete against other clubs operating Category Two Football Academies in the south of the country.
First team debutant Dominic Samuel featured in this competition in the past couple of years, as did Gylfi Sigurdsson in 2007/08 - so it's well worth keeping tabs on!
Full team news will be confirmed prior to kick off - whilst live updates will be available via our Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Ticket Prices - Available on the night at Griffin Park
Adults: £3
Concessions: £1
Leave the M4 at junction 2 and take the A4, going around the Chiswick Roundabout so that you end up coming back on yourself. Continue along the A4 and at the first roundabout take a left onto the B455 (Ealing Road). The ground is located about half a mile down this road on your right. There is no parking at the ground for supporters. So apart from a small pay and display car park in Layton Road (first right off Ealing Road) which costs £5 for free hours (but is free after 6.30pm), it is street parking.
The nearest railway station is Brentford. This is around a five minute walk away from the ground. This station is on the London Waterloo to Reading line - to get from the station to the ground, exit onto Station Road. Take the first right into Orchard Road, right again into Windmill Road and then first left into Hamilton Road which leads into New Road and the ground.
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RIF’s Favorite Reads of May 2019
Helping you sort out the best from the rest published this month.
By RIF Editorial Team • 2 months ago
Happy May, everyone, and may you read a whole bunch of books this month! (See what we did there?) As always, we want to make your bookish pursuits easy, so we’ve rounded up our favorite selections of May’s new book releases. From brilliant short story collections (new Karen Russell! new Ted Chiang!), gripping nonfiction, and novels of all stripes, we’ve got your reading enjoyment on stack. Take your picks, and see you next month!
Imagine if the women forced into pregnancy in The Handmaid’s Tale were instead paid exorbitant amounts of money to play Host to wealthy women’s embryos and live on a lavish estate until they give birth. Seems aboveboard, right? Not so much. Jane, a Filipina immigrant in dire financial straits, leaves her 6-month-old daughter and community behind in order to get the Host payout. Isolated and missing her daughter, she’s desperate to communicate with the outside world, which is strictly forbidden. With the help of new friends, she just might manage—but what will they suffer as a result?
Domenica Ruta
On Domenica Ruta’s version of our own dying planet, humanity gathers every May 28 to celebrate the end of the world. Each year is a new chance to atone for one’s mistakes and make amends, because every Last Day is treated as if that’s exactly what it is. This time around, teenager Sarah searches for the middle-aged tattooist she fell for last May 28, Karen finally listens to the voices pointing her toward the vestiges of her family, and three astronauts share their complicated feelings about the International Space Station.
Exhalation
Ted Chiang
If you, like us, cried buckets when you saw Arrival—or if you, like us, are going through the occasional existential crisis about the state of the world—this is a book you need. Ted Chiang’s marvelously imagined, deeply researched, and gloriously profound tales—of time travel in ancient Baghdad, machines raising human children, humans trying to keep sentient machines alive, other intelligent species reaching out to us—will help remind you of the wonder found in the mere fact of existence. Affirming, thought-provoking, and so welcome, Chiang’s new collection has been well worth the wait.
Abi Maxwell
In a New England town around the turn of millennium, an old house in the woods has become the setting for scary stories that Jane and Henrietta’s father has been telling them for years. Over a century earlier, the house was home to Elspeth, whose out-of-wedlock pregnancy caused her parents to ship her off to the U.S., away from her beloved sister Claire. In one timeline, Henrietta disappears; in the other, Elspeth stops sending letters to Claire. What’s happened to them? How do their sisters contain the loss? And where do mythmaking and reality collide?
Helen Hoang
Khai is an accountant—a good one, too—and he’s pretty content with the life he’s living. His mother has other ideas though, and once she realizes that Khai is never going to date on his own, let alone get married, she goes to her home country, Vietnam, to find a good match. Esme is a maid supporting her 5-year-old daughter and extended family, and when given the chance to fly to the U.S. and win over Khai, she jumps at it. But Khai has autism and is convinced that he simply can’t love. Will Esme prove him wrong?
No Walls and the Recurring Dream
Bisexual feminist icon Ani DiFranco is just like us—she’s lived, loved, been heartbroken, and struggled to understand where she belongs. In her new memoir, DiFranco shares her journey, from her discovery of the magic that music could bring out in her to her emancipation as a teenager to the hardscrabble years of the underground music scene and beyond. As if that weren’t enough, DiFranco also explores her induction into political activism and dedication to social justice. A gift from a now mainstream artist who still feels like an indie darling, this memoir is full of heart and fun.
The Paris Diversion
Chris Pavone
When a man unzips his windbreaker outside the Louvre to reveal a bomb strapped to his chest, everyone’s pretty sure what’s happening. But is the man really affiliated with terrorists? Is he even there by choice? And what about the CEO who’s just been disappeared across the river? Kate Moore, a deep-cover CIA operative living in Paris with her clueless husband, is going to find out. She’s been ostensibly living the housewife life, but it’s been boring her to tears, and running her network of undercover operatives is far more satisfying in this Parisian, fast-paced thriller.
Xuan Juliana Wang
In this broadly imagined short story collection, characters of all social strata—from the nouveau riche to the first Americans in a working-class immigrant Chinese family—struggle with the desire to both belong and individuate, to remember the past and also leave it behind. Featuring young Chinese divers preparing for the Beijing Olympics, an old woman taking a vacation in space and looking back on her life, and other captivating characters, these are stirring stories of love unattainable or long gone. The uncanny and surreal make an appearance, too—like through a set of clothing that seems to curse its wearers into self-destruction.
The Flight Portfolio
Varian Fry was an American journalist who traveled to France during World War II with a list of names. Intending to help the artists and writers on his list escape within a month of his arrival, Fry found himself struggling to convince them of the encroaching danger even as it grew closer by the day. In this historical novel based around Fry’s work, Julie Orringer vividly paints Fry, the European intellectual set, and the struggle to escape an increasingly violent war. With enough espionage for spy fans and enough pathos for literary readers, this is a page-turner to sink into.
Once More We Saw Stars
Jayson Greene
When Jayson and Stella’s daughter, Greta, was two years old, she was sitting on a bench with her grandmother when a freak accident occurred: a brick dislodged from the building above and struck her. In trying to cope with her death, Jayson and Stella attempted to find signs of her everywhere while also starting a new life. Embracing the full, gut-wrenching awfulness of grief and recognizing the deeply human beauty of it, the pair attended workshops, moved to a new apartment, and tried to prepare for the future without ever forgetting their beloved Greta.
Orange World and Other Stories
Karen Russell is back with a new collection, and boy, are we ready for it. In these eight stories, Russell uses her keen eye for the absurdity of life and filters it through her signature fabulist tint, introducing readers to a mother who begins breastfeeding the devil, wealthy-husband seekers who find themselves haunted by a group of men long-buried under an avalanche, a love affair between a man and a 2,000-year-old girl mummified in a bog, and other wild and wondrous characters. Moving and funny and utterly her own, these stories beg for rereading.
Oscar Cásares
Brownsville, Texas, is a border town, and Orly has no interest in living there for the summer. But his mom has died, his brother is at camp, and his dad wants to spend time with his new girlfriend—so here Orly is, living with his aunt Nina. Nina isn’t thrilled about the situation either, nor about the fact that the pink casita in her backyard is being used by coyotes smuggling people into the country. When a 12-year-old boy gets stuck there, Nina decides to keep him safe, and he and Orly become fast friends. But what’s next in a town full of ICE agents?
Liv and Fiona are roommates at Buchanan, a liberal arts school, and the arrival of a formerly successful and still charming professor becomes a catalyst for both young women. Fiona, still mourning the death of her younger sister, has been making bad decisions all year, so what’s one more? And Liv, well, she’s not the kind to be rash, and she loves her boyfriend, so it makes no sense that she’d act on her silly crush, right? But growing up is difficult, and charm is an alluring thing—even amidst friendship and a desire to have it all figured out.
Keep You Close
A common mistake secret-keepers make is forgetting that those closest to them may have secrets of their own. Stephanie Maddox, working for the FBI’s internal affairs, is reminded of this the hard way when she finds a loaded gun that belongs to her 17-year-old son, Zachary. Things become worse when a colleague tells her there’s serious concern over Zachary’s involvement in an anarchist group. While Stephanie knows she hasn’t been spending much time at home, she’s sure her son is being set up. But who’s behind the plot, and can she expose them in time?
Becoming Dr. Seuss
Brian Jay Jones
Still widely beloved, Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, lived a more complicated life than expected, as thoroughly explored in this new biography. Geisel didn’t always plan to be a children’s book author, and his career move surprised many who never thought he had a special affinity for children. But what he did have was a sense of what might get children reading, and he planted many of his own political beliefs in his texts, hoping to pass on messages of environmentalism and anti-Cold War sentiment. A digestible, fascinating read for fans both avid and casual.
Furious Hours
Casey Cep
When Casey Cep traveled to Alabama to report on the controversial announcement about a posthumous new book by Harper Lee, she was eager to learn more about the beloved, fiercely private author. But what Cep wasn’t ready for was the discovery she made: Nelle Harper Lee had another book she’d started and abandoned, one that would fit right into our contemporary love of true crime. Here, Cep traces the crime that Lee found herself enthralled with—a serial killer reverend and the vigilante who shot him when the police wouldn’t—and what happened to the author’s project.
The Scholar
Dervla McTiernan
Detective Cormac Reilly’s new case is a doozy. Called to the scene of a hit-and-run, Reilly discovers that the victim is the heiress to Ireland’s largest pharmaceutical company. The victim’s notoriety and the strings that Darcy Therapeutics can pull make the case far more complicated. The company has been funding research and political parties, and while it gives generously to charity to keep its good name, there are plenty of people who dislike the giant corporation. Conflicts of interest, suspicion, and the mess only power and money can sow make for a twisted case.
Minnie Darke
Say you don’t believe in astrology but are head-over-heels in love with someone who takes it very, very seriously. That’s where Justine (Sagittarius) finds herself. She’s known Nick (Aquarius) for years, but she’s terrible at flirting and isn’t sure he likes her. But he does like the horoscopes in the magazine she writes for, and when Justine’s promoted and gets access to them, she starts to fudge the Aquarius section in the hopes of making Nick wake up and smell the love. Instead, Nick seems to be misunderstanding, while other Aquariuses are acting on her advice. Are Justine and Nick just star-crossed?
Nick de Semlyen
The 1980s were the golden age for a particular kind of comedian, many of whom are still working today. Film journalist Nick de Semlyen takes us behind movie sets starring Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, John Candy, and Rick Moranis, as well as behind the scenes of their friendships, off-screen feuds, and good-natured played-for-laughs fights. This book is a delicious look at the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll lifestyle of many of the most well-known ’80s comedians and movies, including Animal House, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, and more.
Rachel Hawkins
Millie may be into rocks, but her best friend and sort-of-girlfriend kissing someone else doesn’t rock her world. She sets about getting some distance—like, across-the-pond type distance. When a prestigious Scottish boarding school accepts her, Texan Millie is eager to graduate without any more drama. Except that her roommate Fiona is a spoiled princess—literally—who keeps trying to get kicked out of school. When the two get stuck in the woods one day, Millie discovers that Fiona’s gay, and they embark on a sort-of relationship. Will Millie just get her heart broken again, or a happily ever after?
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Ready4Retirement have been shortlisted for Ayrshire’s Best Business Awards 2018
‘The shortlist for the Ayrshire Business Awards 2018 has been unveiled, with 42 companies making the cut across 12 categories. The nominees showcase the best of business in Ayrshire, reflecting the breadth and depth of business successes in the region.’
Ready4Retirement have been shortlisted for the final 3 of Best Business Awards 2018.
We are continuing with our record year, and are now shortlisted for Best Business Awards 2018. This award recognises businesses that have successfully grown their organisation, and now operate with more than 51 employees.
I’m very proud that Ready4Retirement is being recognised for the excellent work that we are doing. It’s been a terrific journey for us so far and being nominated for an award like this just shows how far we’ve come in the 2 short years we have been operating.
David Nix, Managing Director
We are up against some of Ayrshire’s biggest hitters in the form of Buzzworks Holdings and Ampcontrol UK.
The winner will be announced at the Business Awards Dinner which is taking place at Ayr Racecourse on Friday 12th October.
We have ambitious growth plans for the forthcoming year and will be recruiting a further 100 team members in the next few months.
By kieran|2018-08-15T19:01:36+00:00August 15th, 2018|Uncategorised|
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Europe Needs New RFID Regulations
Proposed changes to ETSI regulations surrounding the use of RFID systems won't enable European companies to use UHF systems for supply chain management.
By Hendrik van Eeden
Jun 07, 2004—Global companies are moving rapidly to adopt RFID systems that operate in the UHF spectrum. But the dream of a single worldwide standard can be realized only if countries around the world allocate a suitable part of the radio spectrum for UHF systems. The problem is Europe hasn't done this, and while changes proposed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) will improve the situation, they won't enable European companies to use UHF systems for supply chain management.
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allows U.S. companies to deploy RFID readers that emit 4 watts effective isotropic radiated power in the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band from 902 to 928 MHz. This is ample, both in terms of power and bandwidth.
In Europe, ETSI allows only half a watt of effective radiated power (ERP) in a narrow 250 kHz band from 869.4 MHz to 869.65 MHz. This allocation is for nonspecific short-range devices, which can be on only 10 percent of the time (this is called their duty cycle).
Companies and organizations, such as UCC-EAN, lobbied ETSI to change the rules because the restrictions do not provide for the same read range that is achievable under U.S. regulations. ETSI responded with a proposed set of new regulations, which say:
1. Companies can use readers that emit 2 watts of ERP between 865.6 MHz and 867.6 MHz. The band is divided into 10 channels of 200 kHz. Readers would have to listen for other transmitters using the same channel before trying to communicate with tags. (This is called listen before talk, or LBT.) The regulations set the LBT sensitivity at -96 decibels. If another transmitter is detected, the reader has to try another channel until it finds a free channel. This is called Adaptive Frequency Agility (AFA).
2. Companies can use readers that emit half a watt of ERP between 867.6 MHz and 868 MHz. The band is divided into two channels of 200 kHz. The LBT sensitivity would be -90 decibels.
3. Companies can use readers that emit a tenth of a watt of ERP between 865.0 MHz and 865.6 MHz. The band is divided into 3 channels of 200 kHz channels. The LBT sensitivity would be -83 decibels.
In order to ensure equitable access to the spectrum, AFA with LBT would be mandatory. Readers with LBT would be allowed to emit energy for a maximum period of 4 seconds at a time and would be required to be off for at least 0.1 second. Readers without LBT are limited to a 0.1 percent duty cycle. The new proposed regulations leave the current allocation at 869.4 MHz to 869.65 MHz intact for nonspecified short-range devices, but it's not clear whether existing and/or future RFID applications will still be allowed to use this band.
The new proposal is based on the findings of Electronic Communication Commission (ECC) Report 37, which is based on a study of the whole short-range device band from 863 MHz to 870 MHz. The study analyzes the compatibility between existing and proposed new systems and calculates interference probabilities between the different systems that make use of this band. What's critical are the assumptions made about interference probabilities between UHF RFID systems themselves and the probability of UHF RFID systems interfering with the other users of this spectrum.
The report is very thorough and comprehensive, but the assumptions made for UHF RFID are outdated and extremely conservative. One assumption is that UHF RFID readers will interfere with each other and that only one RFID reader can be operated in one channel at a time. This is true of some UHF RFID systems in use today, but newer systems, some of which are currently being deployed widely, can have several readers operating simultaneously at the same frequency.
Other assumptions are that tag prices will reach €1.00 by 2010, reader prices will reach €1,000.00 by 2010, and that Europe will account for a quarter of the estimated €3,400 million global RFID market. Factoring in the total area and estimated urban area of Europe, as well as reader/tag ratios, these numbers result in an overall reader density figure of 0.9 readers per square kilometer and an average hot-spot reader density estimate of 25 readers per square kilometer. But reader and tag prices are already below the figures used, and the prices are likely to be significantly less than 10 percent of the estimates for 2010 by that time.
A duty cycle of 0.1 percent and 70 channels were used when calculating interference probabilities. In practice, users will probably need to keep readers on nearly all the time (a 100 percent duty cycle), and the current channel allocation is only 15 .
The report comes to the conclusion that interference levels will be acceptable in Europe if readers use AFA/LBT or a 0.1 percent duty cycle. ETSI is proposing that that LBT be made mandatory and that a reader must move to the next available channel when detecting a transmission in the current channel.
At an LBT level of –96 decibels, a 2-watt reader will detect another 2-watt reader (worst case) at a range of nearly 200 km. The AFA/LBT requirements of the current proposals will therefore make it very unlikely that two readers will be able to share a channel in one facility or even in one industrial area. Given the availability of just ten 2-att ERP channels, the regulations could limit the number of readers in a given area to a level that would make it impossible to use a UHF RFID system to track goods in a high-throughput distribution center.
Even the figure of 0.9 reader per square kilometer that is used in ECC Report 37 is still several orders of magnitude lower than what will surely be required by industry. Large distribution centers might need to run as many as 250 readers with a 100 percent duty cycle simultaneously at one site. With several distribution centers in one industrial neighborhood, the reader density at hot spots could easily exceed 1,000 readers per square kilometer.
In addition, the proposed requirement that the reader be off for 100 milliseconds could mean that 10 items will be missed when items pass a reader at a rate of 100 items per second. This would be totally unacceptable in an industry that requires an accuracy of 99.9 percent or better.
The current proposals will severely limit the rollout of UHF RFID in Europe and put European companies at a serious disadvantage compared with U.S. companies in terms of supply chain management productivity. Here are some suggestions for correcting the situation:
1. ETSI should review the proposed European spectrum allocation for UHF RFID.
2. The study that led to ECC Report 37 should be repeated with updated assumptions for reader densities and should include the possibility of allowing multiple UHF RFID readers in one channel.
3. The current proposals should be adapted to allow narrow-band UHF RFID readers to operate at 866.6 MHz without LBT and with a 100 percent duty cycle.
4. Passive and semi-active UHF RFID tags employing back-scatter for communications should be considered to be wide-band, low-power, low-duty cycle devices for which no compliance testing is necessary.
5. UHF RFID reader compliance testing should simulate practical RFID environments—i.e., reader emissions should be characterized with a continuous stream of tags (100 tags per second) with uncorrelated ID numbers, with the reader achieving better than 95 percent singulation success.
Failure by ETSI to act will not only harm European companies; it will needlessly slow the adoption of RFID systems, which could improve supply chain efficiencies, reduce waste and lower the cost of goods for consumers.
Hendrik van Eeden is the CTO of iPico Identification, a Pretoria, South Africa-based provider of RFID systems. To comment on this article, click on the link below.
RFID Journal Home
Attend RFID Journal University
There is less than a week left until RFID Journal University in the Washington, D.C., area. This unbiased educational course, presented by RFID Journal and members of Auto-ID Labs, is designed to provide the fundamental understanding of RFID needed to begin a successful pilot. Register today, or to learn more, visit RFID U.
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Academy President ‘Heartbroken and Frustrated’ by Lack of Diversity at Oscars
by Nick Roman on January 19, 2016 at 11:05 am
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is facing its second straight year of racial controversy after the nominations for the Academy Awards resulted in yet another year of all-white acting nominees. As a result, several stars, including Jada Pinkett Smith and Honorary Oscar recipient Spike Lee, have called for a boycott of the 2016 Oscars.
In response, Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs released an official statement to address the lack of diversity among the nominees, while also attempting to tactfully find a way to explain it, in a way. It’s a fascinating read, if nothing else. The statement:
Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
I’d like to acknowledge the wonderful work of this year’s nominees. While we celebrate their extraordinary achievements, I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation, and it’s time for big changes. The Academy is taking dramatic steps to alter the makeup of our membership. In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity in our 2016 class and beyond.
As many of you know, we have implemented changes to diversify our membership in the last four years. But the change is not coming as fast as we would like. We need to do more, and better and more quickly.
This isn’t unprecedented for the Academy. In the ’60s and ’70s it was about recruiting younger members to stay vital and relevant. In 2016, the mandate is inclusion in all of its facets: gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. We recognize the very real concerns of our community, and I so appreciate all of you who have reached out to me in our effort to move forward together.
Ultimately, I think the statement was a noble move, if nothing else. It’s going to be hard to satisfy everyone with a statement like this, since the issue of inclusion still remains, and it’s not as if the problem goes away simply by addressing that it’s something they’re trying to change. But addressing that it’s something that needs changing is significant, and having that statement come from the Academy president, who is a black woman herself, is similarly momentous. Of course, I’m not sure what, exactly, it’ll mean to the nomination process, since that is ultimately out of Isaacs’s hands.
What do you think of the Oscars race drama? Are there legit concerns? Is it being blown out of proportion? Sound off in the comments!
And for more on the 2016 Oscars, check out the full list of nominations for the 88th Academy Awards!
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SCE&G Opens Lake Murray Public Parks for 2016 Recreation Season
Cayce, S.C. (April 1, 2016) – SCE&G’s public parks on the Lexington and Irmo sides of the Lake Murray Dam are open for the 2016 season. The boat-launching park on the Irmo side will be staffed through Sept. 5. The beach/recreation area on the Lexington side will remain open through Sept. 9.
“We’ve been working to maintain and improve the shoreline and facilities for the season, and we’re looking forward to welcoming visitors,” said Tommy Boozer, who manages the parks for SCE&G. “We’re proud to provide a safe, fun place where people can enjoy Lake Murray.”
Operating hours will be from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. Monday through Friday until May 2, after which the park will stay open until 8 p.m. Weekend and holiday hours are from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m.
Parking fees are charged during normal operating hours to partially offset the cost of maintenance, security and improvements at the parks. Fees are $2 for motorcycles, $3 for cars or trucks and $5 for buses. Season passes can be purchased for $45 per vehicle.
The public boat launch has two ramps and is open 24 hours a day. The beach/recreation area on the Lexington side is staffed by security during operating hours, but the swimming area is not monitored by lifeguards. Alcoholic beverages are prohibited. Restrooms and picnic facilities are available.
For additional information, call SCE&G’s Lake Management Department at 803-217-9221 or visit https://www.sceg.com/about-us/lakes-and-recreation
South Carolina Electric & Gas Company is a regulated public utility engaged in the generation, transmission, distribution and sale of electricity to approximately 698,000 customers in 24 counties in the central, southern and southwestern portions of South Carolina. The company also provides natural gas service to approximately 347,000 customers in 38 counties in the state.
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Resources E-Focus Newsletters E-Focus Article
Focus on Not-For-Profits: 2009 Revisions to Form 990
The 2009 version of Form 990 is not as radically different as the 2008 version (which had been changed significantly from the 2007 version), but there are several important changes; and in many places, the instructions have been revised to clarify how organizations are to complete the Form and Schedules.
In addition to the changes in the Form 990 and its schedules, the IRS has also reduced the thresholds an organization must meet to file Form 990. For years beginning in 2009, an organization with gross receipts of $500,000 or more OR assets of $1,250,000 or more is required to file Form 990.
Form 990 Significant Changes
Prior to 2008, organizations that made significant changes to their program service offerings were required to notify the Exempt Organizations Determinations office of the changes. This notification could have been done either separately or with Form 990. The 2009 Form 990 Form and instructions clarify that this is no longer permitted; rather, the organization must describe these changes in Part III of Form 990 and on Schedule O.
Several of the questions in Part IV, Checklist of Required Schedules, have been revised to clarify when certain Schedules (or selected Parts of Schedules) are required. These include Schedule D, Balance Sheet details; Schedule F, Foreign Activities; and Schedule L, Transactions with Interested Persons.
In Part V, Lines 1a and 2a, an organization is required to report the number of Forms 1099, 1098, 5498, W-2G and W-2 issued by both the organization and its reporting agents.
The IRS has made several clarifications regarding the disclosures in Part VI related to governance.
If two Officers, Directors or Key Employees hold like positions for more than one tax-exempt entity, a reportable business relationship is not created between them.
Organizations are no longer required to report significant changes in governing documents to the Exempt Organizations Determinations office, but those changes should be disclosed in Schedule O.
Organizations are required to report if they became aware of a material diversion of their assets during the year. The IRS has clarified that "material" means the lesser of these 3 amounts:
5% of Gross Receipts
5% of Ending Assets, or
Organizations can indicate that a copy of their Form 990 was made available to the Board of Directors if a copy was placed on a password-protected website, the Board Members were emailed a link to the website, and the email states the Form 990 can be viewed at the website.
The situations in which a Compensation Committee member has a conflict of interest related to determining compensation of others are explained. These situations include, but are not limited to: if the person for whom compensation is being determined in turn can influence the compensation of the Compensation Committee member, or if the Committee Member or a member of his/her family will benefit from the compensation arrangement.
An organization can only indicate that its Form 990 is available on another’s website if the organization provided a complete copy of the Form 990 to the website.
Several required disclosures for Part VII related to compensation of Officers, Directors, Key Employees and other highly paid employees have been clarified, including:
If an individual meets the Key Employee responsibility test at any time during the year, then that individual needs to be identified as a Key Employee, and all compensation paid during the calendar year needs to be reported, whether or not the employee was a Key Employee at the time of payment.
If an employee received compensation from an entity that was considered a related entity for only part of the year, total compensation paid by that related entity during the whole calendar year needs to be disclosed.
Employee deferrals into Section 401(k) and Section 403(b) plans must be included in reportable compensation.
Compensation paid to leased employees who are treated as common law employees under State law, as well as compensation paid to employees of related management companies, should be reported.
How to determine the reported compensation of a foreign employee, who is not subject to U.S. payroll reporting.
Officers, Directors and Key Employees are not taken into consideration when determining the 5 highest paid employees with more than $100,000 in reportable compensation.
The business codes included in the instructions must be reported for program services and miscellaneous revenues in Part VIII, Statement of Revenues.
All technology-related costs (other than payroll costs and depreciation), including software, technology support, website maintenance, website security, etc., should be listed on Line 14 of Part IX, Statement of Functional Expenses.
Any Receivables from the 5 highest compensated employees should be included with any receivables from Officers, Directors and Key Employees on Line 5 of Part X, Balance Sheet. In addition, if the organization has more than 5% of its total assets invested in one publicly traded stock, this investment should be listed on Line 12, Investments – Other Securities, not on Line 11, Publicly Traded Securities.
If an organization has audited or reviewed financial statements, it must indicate whether the statements were issued on a consolidated basis, a separate entity basis or both.
Form 990 Glossary Changes
Audit – Must be performed by an independent certified public accountant.
Fair Market Value – Price at which a willing buyer and willing seller would buy/sell property or pay/receive to use property.
Principal Officer – The officer who has ultimate responsibility for implementing decisions of the governing board or is responsible for the management, administration and operation of the organization.
Control – Generally, one entity controls another if it owns 50% of the stock of a corporation, has a 50% capital or profits interest in a partnership or LLC, or has the power to appoint or remove 50% of the governing body of a not-for-profit entity.
Escrow and Custodial accounts do not include split-interest trusts.
Fundraising events – Casino nights (where prizes are non-cash items) are considered a fundraising event; however, the following activities are not fundraising events:
A regularly carried on trade or business
An activity that achieves the organization’s exempt function
Solicitations that only generate contributions
Permanent and term endowments are only established by donor restricted gifts.
Quasi-endowments are established by the organization and may be temporary or permanent.
Related organizations can include governmental units.
Reportable compensation includes Form W-2, Box 1 income for individuals, such as some clergy, who are not subject to social security, and the amount reported on Form 1042S and other compensation paid to foreign employees.
Form 990 Schedule Changes
Schedule A, Public Charity Status
If the organization reports on the accrual basis, pledges and grants receivable should be recorded at their net present value. Accruals of net present value increments should be reported as contributions in future years.
An organization can check any of the available reasons for being considered a non-private foundation that apply in Part I (a church, school, hospital, publicly supported organization, etc.); however, the IRS only updates its records (and supplies assurance that it agrees with the status) if the organization applies for a change with the IRS Exempt Organizations Determinations office.
Schedule B, Contributions
Clarifies that an organization should only indicate a donor is anonymous if the organization does not know the name of the donor (e.g. gift made via a donor’s agent without the donor’s name being disclosed).
Schedule D, Balance Sheet Details
Part V concerning endowments should include any endowments held by other organizations for the filing organization, as well as endowments held by others to further the filing organization’s exempt purpose.
Corresponding to the change in Form 990, Part X above concerning an investment of more than 5% of the organization’s assets in a single publicly traded stock, such an investment should be listed in Part VII of Schedule D.
Requires that the organization provide its financial statement footnote disclosure related to uncertain tax positions (often referred to as FIN 48 disclosure) verbatim in Part XIV of Schedule D. If the footnote disclosure is combined for several organizations, the disclosure can be summarized to describe the liability of the filing organization only.
Parts X-XIII (reconciliation to financial statement amounts) are only required to be completed if the filing organization issues separate entity audited financial statements (i.e. these Parts are not required if only consolidated financial statements are issued).
Schedule F, Foreign Activity
An interest in a Foreign Financial Account must be reported in both Part I of Schedule F and Part V of Form 990.
Foreign investments must be reported by region; however, only the region and the fact that investments exist need to be disclosed.
Clarifies that foreign investments, Board meetings held outside the United States, and sending employees to attend or participate in conferences outside the U.S. represent reportable foreign activities. The reported costs should include travel to and from the region.
The grants to individuals reported in Part III should include grants paid to U.S. individuals for a foreign activity, as well as grants to foreign individuals.
Schedule G, Fundraising and Gaming Activities
Part I, Line 3 requests the names of the States in which the organization has registered to be a fund raiser. In 2008, an entity could respond “all States” if it registered in all States that required registration. This option is not available during 2009, so each State must be listed separately.
Part II, which summarizes the income and expenses related to fundraising events has two new lines, “Food and Beverage Expenses” and “Entertainment Expenses”.
In Part III, related to gaming activities, Line 16 should only include the portion of the gaming manager’s compensation that is related to gaming management if that person fulfills more than one role.
Schedule H, Hospitals
In 2008, only selected information needed to be provided. In 2009, the entire schedule must be completed.
Indirect interests in joint ventures (e.g., a group practice of staff physicians) must be reported.
Schedule J, Compensation
If an organization relies on the “initial contract” exception to the excess benefit rules, it must also indicate whether it followed the procedures needed to take advantage of the “rebuttable presumption” rule.
Schedule K, Tax Exempt Bonds
If a bond issue is allocated among related entities, the amounts reported by the individual entities should agree to this allocation (i.e., the liabilities reported by the entities should not exceed the total bond issue).
For 2009, Part II, Line 5 related to issue costs paid from bond proceeds, the cumulative amount of issue costs paid for credit enhancement should be reported.
Schedule L, Transactions with Interested Persons
Tax-Exempt bonds held by an Interested Person do not need to be reported in Part II, Loans to/from Interested Persons.
Colleges, universities, primary and secondary schools are not required to disclose scholarships to interested persons. They do need to disclose the types of scholarships (need based, merit, etc.) paid to interested persons and the aggregate amount of these scholarships by type.
Business transactions with interested persons include joint ventures in which both the organization and the interested person own a 10% or more interest. Governmental units are not to be considered interested persons.
Schedule N, Liquidation, Termination, Dissolution or Significant Disposition of Assets
These transactions are to be reported in Schedule N. A separate letter to the Exempt Organizations Determinations office is no longer permitted or required.
Schedule O, Supplemental Information
Should be used to respond to all questions in the return. The only time a separate attachment should be used is to explain a late filed Form 990. Organizations should not include Social Security Numbers in Schedule O disclosures.
Schedule R, Related Organizations
Governmental entities, including foreign governments, should be treated as tax-exempt organizations in Part II, related tax-exempt entities.
Certain transactions with related controlled entities (payments of interest, dividends, rents, royalties, etc.) must be reported by the entity no matter the amount involved; and transactions in excess of certain thresholds with taxable and tax-exempt organizations other than Section 501(c)(3) organizations need to be disclosed if they aggregate more than $50,000 per year.
If the transactions described above consist of services or other assets, the method of determining the value reported must be explained in Schedule O.
The above summary is intended as an overview of the changes to Form 990 for 2009. Please contact RubinBrown with any questions you may have concerning these changes.
Under U.S. Treasury Department guidelines, we hereby inform you that any tax advice contained in this communication is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used by you for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed on you by the Internal Revenue Service, or for the purpose of promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter addressed within this tax advice. Further, RubinBrown LLP imposes no limitation on any recipient of this tax advice on the disclosure of the tax treatment or tax strategies or tax structuring described herein.
All Not-For-Profit News Not-For-Profit Overview
Judy Murphy, CPA — St. Louis
Not-For-Profit Services Group
judy.murphy@rubinbrown.com
Chip Harris, CPA — Kansas City
chip.harris@rubinbrown.com
Jim Ritts, CPA — St. Louis
jim.ritts@rubinbrown.com
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Optician Salary
What is an Optician?
An optician is one of the professionals who help people to choose an appropriate and suitable eye frame and lens style. Their part, among others, is to train their clients to use the eyeglasses. As an optician and a qualified person you are able to prescribe glasses as well as to dispense them, and contact lenses. You can also detect any eye disease this is the case of ophthalmic optician, or you can supply contact lenses as well as glasses being the case of a dispensing optician.
Job Description of an Optician
The job of an optician is built upon helping and assisting their clients who are in need and require vision tests, repairs, prescriptions. There are some cases in which these professionals intervene for minor eye surgeries. They also help their clients to establish which prescription they need and be there to answer any question that they might have as well as to assist them in their needs.
An optician will measure each customer’s vision how depth it is by using a piece of equipment called phoropter. Based on the measurements they will be able to determine the exact prescription that each client needs. As professionals, they can perform glaucoma tests that involve another piece of equipment called a tonometer that usually has the role of injecting a small amount of air pressure in the eyeballs.
Some opticians are also familiar with the laser surgeries machines that are used for the outpatient correction procedures. Those opticians that are working in a clinic office will perform as well administrative duties such as scheduling an appointment. Their work involves being able to work with two types of personnel one is comprised of the administrative staff and the other is the laboratory staff.
The first one will work with opticians concerning the schedule for appointments as well as to resolve the schedule conflicts in a timely manner, and as well as the billing or in other financial concerns that might arise from the patient. The laboratory staff is the one that has the job to create the prescriptions and in some cases the frames that are going to be received and used by the customer as part of the final product.
The daily tasks of an optician involve getting the right work order for the optical laboratory that usually contains the grinding and mounting lenses in the frames. They will measure the patient size for eyeglasses, and they will coordinate frames and the optical prescriptions. As optician, you are able to design lenses, measure and fit them as well as adapt them, according to the written optical prescription.
How to Become an Optician?
In order to become a great optician, you’ll have to follow a few educational steps. To be sure that this is the job that you really want to have and to enjoy start by doing a little research in this area. Find out what the role of an optician is and what daily duties he or she has to fulfill as well as search for the available opportunities in your area. See if you have what it takes for this job by checking out the required skills, as well as the typical payment that will certainly vary a lot according to several factors.
It is highly advisable that you’ll gain knowledge upon the educational requirements. Before getting all the info make sure that you’ve graduated from an entry-level education that usually involves a high school diploma or a GED. Do some research upon the license that is granted if you’ll needed or not, and if you need an internship for the practical experience. There are some states in which all that you need is a license that grants you the opportunity to practice.
After you’ve decided if this is the career you want to follow, start by enrolling into an optician program. Not all the institutions have the courses for this kind of program so there is a possibility that you’ll have to go to another city to complete it. Check the local higher educational institutions in your area for course details. There are some college communities that will grant you with the opportunity of earning an Associate’s degree and a practical experience in the field of optometry as future optician.
The Associate’s degree length program is for two years, and it can be completed in optometric technology or ophthalmic dispensing. There is also the alternative that in some states you can pursue only one year program. When you enroll in a training program, make sure that this training program has accreditation.
The course work for an optician program will cover typically the area of basic ocular science this including subjects such as anatomy, contact lenses, optics and other. Getting a license will assume first passing an exam, that is why it is important first to check all the options and find one that suits you the most. For instance, if you want to dispense contact lenses and glasses then you might need to sit for separate exams. It is the best practice to check the state regulations.
After obtaining the license, if required, you should complete a national certification test for opticians. Such a test is usually conducted by the NCLE else known as the National Contact Lens Examiners or by the ABO that is the American Board of Opticianry.
Obtaining a certificate is mandatory, but having one can mean a significant improvement in the job prospects as well as a boost in your career. Based on these types of certifications you will sit in for separate exams since they have their individual examinations. In addition to NCLE or ABO certifications, the Optician is indicated to have 2 or even three years of experience in the practical field.
An optician can find work in various settings in the health care industry such as clinical offices, eye clinics, retailers or contact lens shops and other. As an optician, you must provide the customers the best aid as well as you’ll have to project that professional image that will gain the customer’s confidence. Your appearance must be groomed and very neat since you are dealing with patient’s health and their well-being.
You can find work as full-time or part-time when it comes to this field. As a part-time job, you might need to work only on Saturdays and Sundays to supplement for the other full-time jobs. Those who are working on a full-time basis will have the regular and traditional working schedule. It might vary according to the type of industry in which you find work.
As an optician, you might also find work in a laboratory where the prescriptions are usually created and modified, or you may work outside in the field. For instance this can happen during wars, where soldiers might need eye care but they don’t have access to an institution that might provide them with that.
Pros and Cons of Being an Optician
When it comes to a career as an optician, you can always have a future view of what it means to be one. Here are some pros and cons that will make you understand better what is like to be one. Right from the start your working hours can be classified as regular with a time base from 9 and up to 17.30. The best news that can be added to this one is the little or not at all overtime that will be required, ever.
You can enjoy if a day schedule where you won’t have to do night shifts or to be on call unlike the norm of a doctor is. The downside when you think of your work is that you’ll have to be present on Saturdays, and this is recorded and acknowledge by many other professionals as being one of the busiest days of the week.
In this field of optometry, one other great news is that after you are done with the work on the site you don’t have to take any other work at home for the rest of the day. You won’t have any reports that need to be completed or any other activities such as meetings. Another plus point to all this is the fact that you’ll have time for your family life if you have one or just for you.
A contrast to all careers in the medicine and dentistry field that will relief you is the fact that after you’ve qualified as an optician you can say goodbye to study or continuous education requirements. Yes, no more extra learning to be mandatory for the rest of your life.
However like in any other fields you can expect to various cons that unavoidable will be revealed. The bad news that exist in this career is the fact that after a few years in this chain of industries everything becomes very predictable. If you are a person, that will be quickly bored then this might not be the perfect job for you.
With this job, you cannot expect at any career progression since as an optician that has been in this field for ten years your work is not different than to an optician, who is new in this field. The only distinction is that you are working faster. If from this point of view you’ll see all these as frustrating, then you can orient yourself for getting a medical degree.
Optician job growth
The employment growth for an optician is projected at 24% rate of increase, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The main factor that impacts this increase is the aging population as well as the increase of the chronic disease that leads individuals to appeal more and more to corrective eyewear. This leading to a strong increase in the number of demanding and the services of these professionals due to the nature itself of the job. There are plenty of job opportunities with a favorable future outlook in optometrist’s offices or physician’s offices as well as other working facilities or larger retail establishments.
The average annual salary that is received in the United States for an optician usually reaches about $45,529 per year. Those who are working as self-employed and are on the top positions can expect to an annual income around $52,742 per year and even more. At the same time, those who are among the bottom 10 percent of professionals can expect an income less than $21,032 per year.
One of the factors that influence and affect the earnings is the type of industry in which you are working for. For instance, those who are hired in health and personal care stores can expect to take home an earning that usually reaches about $35,472 per year. Also, those who are working in the physician offices will earn around $33,982 per year.
According to the working site, you can always expect to higher points as well as lower points. Being hired as optician in a department store you can expect to a lower income that is estimated at $29,662 per year and even less.
Every state has its specific laws and legislation. Due to the differences, according to every state the income will differ. However, there are still best-paying states for a career as an optician. You can find great working places and well-paid in states such as Connecticut where the salary for one of these professionals is estimated at $60,305 per year. Other states are good choices as well. For example, you can work in New Jersey where the income reaches an average of about $51,312 per year. Other states that will hire Opticians and pay well can be found in New York, District of Columbia, Rhode Island and a few more.
An optician can expect in the US to an average yearly salary that is estimated at $32,943 per year with an hourly wage that reaches about $15.86 per hour. The starting hourly wage for these professionals has an average that is comprised between $9.76 and up to $20.46 per hour. Gradually this hourly wage will increase by $1.48 and up to $5.05 per hour leading over time to a wage that can even exceed $30.05 per hour.
You can also add to the salary of an optician a yearly bonus that usually reaches at about an annual average of $3,623. This will lead to an estimated total payment that will vary from $20,886 per year and up to $47,816 per year.
One of the most common factors that in this field has a varied influence when it comes to the salaries are the years of experience. For instance, an optician with less than 1 and up to 4 years in the working field can expect to an income estimated to be ranging from $17,116 per year and up to $44,694 per year. Those who are already working for 5 and up to 9 years of experience can expect to an income that ranges from $22,409 and up to $45,431 per year. At the same time, having 10 and up to 19 years of experience you can take home an income that will range from $28,359 and up to $62,032 per year.
An optician who is already a veteran in this field can expect to an income that is comprised between $29,492 per year and up to $57,706 per year. If as an optician you have a license then you can expect to an increased salary. For instance, a licensed optician can expect in the US at an hourly wage that has an average from $12.83 per hour and up to $25.49 per hour. These payments will increase to $15.03 and up to $35.72 per hour in time.
The yearly premium that is granted, in this case, reaches about $3,936 per year, this bonus being included in the annual salary package. It will lead to a total annual income of a licensed optician estimated between $27,643 per year and up to $56,471 per year. With a license, you can also add the years of experience that will gradually modify your income.
For instance, a licensed optician with 1 and up to 4 years of experience in the field can expect to a salary that is between $35,804 and up to $40,712 per year. At the same time, an individual who has been working in this field for more than 5 years and up to 9 years can expect to take home an income that reaches between $30,427 and up to $43,467 per year.
As a licensed optician that has between 10 and 19 years of experience, the salary is estimated to be comprised between $38,510 per year and up to $62,410 per year. Also, those who are veterans in this field working for more than 20 years can expect to an income estimated to reach from $32,683 and up to $61,442 per year.
Salary of an Optician in 2015
An optician salary in 2015 in the US has an estimated hourly wage that reaches only at $14.79 per hour. On the other hand, the hourly rate can start from $10.08 per hour and go up to $20.78 per hour. With overtime work, you can expect to be paid from $13.21 and up to $30.71 per hour. The yearly bonus that is conferred in this field usually reaches at about $4,063 per year, while the profit sharing that is granted is comprised between $204.27 and up to $4,897 per year.
In this field, the pay can reach up to $6,637 per year this leading in the end to a total annual package salary estimated to be from $21,619 and up to $48,682 per year. The income of an Optician is also influenced according to the type of industry that hires these professionals. For instance, the highest salaries are gained at LensCrafters Inc. where the median revenue is estimated at $35,010 per year.
However like in any other paid economy there certain lower points. At Wal-Mart Stores, the median income for these professionals is about $25,010 per year. The earnings here are ranging between $19,010 per year and only up to $39,010 per year.
Optician Salary in 2016
The median wages, in the United States, for the year 2016, for an optician usually reach at an estimated hourly rate of $14.02 per hour, with a starting point that stretches from $10.21 and up to $21.24. The annual median income of an Optician has an average that reaches at $39,389 per year, according to the salary data information offered by PayScale.
The salaries in this job start at $25,658 per year and can reach up to $58,542 per year, with bonuses that can climb up to $4,124 and profit sharing that is estimated from $290.88 and up to $3,489. The commissions attributed for opticians can reach up to $6,467, this will lead in the end with all the benefits added at a total payment that starts from $22,043 and $49,329.
The main factors that affect and impact the incomes of these professionals are linked with the specific type of employment, followed by the demographic factor-the geographical location and the years of experience in the field. In this job according to the surveys provided by PayScale that are more female opticians than male opticians.
The years of experience in the field tend to offer various incomes to these specialists, and the earnings increase with more years gathered at the working site. For instance an entry-level optician, with less than five years of experience in the field will earn around $27,010 per year, while a mid-career specialist, with 5 and up to 10 years of work practice will take home around $32,010 per year.
An experienced optician, with 10 and up to 20 years of practice and more experience can expect to gain around $36,010 per year while a late-career professional, that is also considered to be a veteran in this field with more than 20 years of experience can expect to take home around $41,010 per year.
The national average salary of opticians reaches at $32,519 per year. The best payment for these professionals can be encountered in regions such as San Francisco that offers incomes above the national average. An optician located in San Francisco can expect at a median total payment that usually reaches at $48,685 per year. Great earnings with above the national average status, can also be found in New York where the median total payment reaches at $42,616 per year, followed by San Diego with 37,791 per year and Portland with $37,456 per year.
On the other hand you can find regions that offer an income that is estimated to be below the national average. For instance, Sacramento where the median payment reaches only at $31,210 per year, Huston and Atlanta, where the gained earnings tend to reach at $30,569 per year and $30,545 per year, and other as well.
According to Salary.com, the median earnings provided to an Optician, reach at an annual value of $42,583, with a range that is situated between $39,342 per year and up to $51,347 per year. These figures vary according to the up mentioned factors and other specific as well such as the costs of livening and the living expenses that are found in each particular area.
Optician Salary in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom
In Canada, the starting hourly wage for an optician has an average estimated between C$13.32 per hour and up to C$27.62 per hour. In time, this hourly wage will increase by C$0.76 per hour reaching up to C$50.96 per hour. On the other hand, the annual salary bonus has an average estimated to reach at C$2,556 per year. This bonus is usually included in the annual salary leading it to a total payment between C$30,289 and up to C$61,356 per year.
An optician salary in Australia has a yearly average that ranges from AU$50,571 per year and up to AU$70,594 per year. You can add to all these figures a yearly bonus that can reach up to AU$10,074 per year, this leading to a total salary that ranges from AU$52,673 per year and up to AU$77,432 per year.
In the UK the average income for an optician usually reaches up £33,916 per year while the hourly wage has an average estimated at £16.94 per hour. In this country, the salary is influenced according to the age of an individual. For instance, those who are in their 20s can expect to an earning that is up to £25,436 per year while those who are in their 30s will earn an income that reaches at about £33,238 per year. The income in this field gradually increases with the age. Those who are in their 40s and their 50s can enjoy an income estimated to reach at £ 39,343 per year.
Conclusion on Optician Salary
The salary of an optician is influenced by several major factors. The percentage of these salaries has lower and higher points. For instance based on many surveys in the US, the lowest income that an optician can receive is estimated at $21,072 per year and even less. The highest income is estimated at $50,782 per year.
With the number of demanding raising in this job, it becomes more and more valuable and appreciated because there are a lot of men, women and children who are in need for an optician.
First Published Date: 14 July, 2015
Last Updated Date: 27 November, 2016
Medical Coder Salary Medical Office Assistant Salary
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Salisburys Accountants Complete Second Acquisition
by Salisburys | Feb 11, 2019 | News | 0 comments
Banwell Accountancy Ltd, based in Penmaenmawr and owned by husband and wife team, Steve and Angela Banwell, has been acquired by Salisbury’s Chartered Accountants, of St Asaph.
This follows on from the successful acquisition of Businesswork Solutions Limited in Ruthin late last year.
From left to right: Steve Banwell, Angela Banwell, Aled Roberts and Jeremy Salisbury.
The combined firm will retain the trading name of Banwell Accountancy, as Steve will continue to work closely with the Salisbury’s team to ensure continued high quality of service for existing and new clients alike.
The offices of Banwell Accountancy, in Penmaenmawr, will continue as before with extra staffing and IT resource brought in to extend the range of services offered and develop the firm’s people.
Steve said:
“I am very excited to be working with everyone at Salisbury’s, whom I have known for very many years. I am looking forward to seeing how the firm develops and grows over the coming years and being part of a dynamic professional services firm, able to offer a complete range of advisory and compliance services.”
Aled Roberts, director of Salisbury’s said:
“We are thrilled to be joining forces with Steve, Angela and their exceptional team. They, just like us, put the client first, in everything that they do and we believe that we can expand the business into Gwynedd and Anglesey by offering additional accounting and taxation services.”
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Michele Bonelli
Artist and General Manager of PaintCan Studios
Michele's Studio Space at PaintCan Studios
Michele Bonelli is an accomplished artist as well as president and general manager of PaintCan Studios. She received her BA in studio art from Fordham University and an MFA from City College of New York (CCNY). Her paintings are a marriage of geometric and non-geometric forms, vibrant colors and a lack of precise focal point – encouraging the viewer to never pause too long on one section of the painting. Her series titled “Urban Abstracts” is a response to 9/11 - she wanted to recreate her city. She has exhibited in many renowned galleries throughout the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere. Her series “Another Look at Alice” received widespread praise.
In addition to all of her responsibilities as general manager of PaintCan Studios, Michele is a board member of the New York Society of Women Artists (NYSWA) and president of the Manhattan branch of the National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW).
"While the imagery of Bonelli’s paintings are intended two-dimensional microcosms of sights, sounds, and rhythms governing an array of subject matter from landscapes to still life expressed in the abstract, they are at their core an ongoing examination and exploration of the principles of the making of 20th Century Abstract Art. The paintings are the product of a synthesis of styles as expressed visually in the contemporary traditions of Pop Art, which evolved from Cubism. What is derived from this process is not about the experience of making art, but rather what comes out of the experience." ~ Metropolitan Artists, a nonprofit organization
Urban Abstracts phase 1: Drawing Study for 40X40 oil on linen
© Michele Bonelli
Urban Abstracts phase 3: Drawing Study for a 40X40 oil on linen
Partial Artist Statement:
"I view the making of “art” as a journey, a learning experience in which the artist is continually striving to better understand his craft and the principles of picture making. For me, it is an ongoing assimilation of the relevant art that came before, in order to move forward. It is a journey in discovering one’s own unique and personal vision of art, a vision used for the construction of the two-dimensional picture plane in which a select lexicon of colors, shapes and patterns dictates space."
About PaintCan Studios:
PaintCan Studios is located at 10-10 44th Ave. in Long Island City, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. It is part of a growing artists' community there. Artists at PaintCan work in a variety of media and enjoy spacious studios as well as a shared common space with a sitting area and kitchen. The studios are located on the 3rd and 4th floors. The artists there participate in exhibitions and open studio events.
Myrna Haskell, managing editor, visited Michele at PaintCan Studios to talk about this incredible space and to view some of her beautiful work.
Talk to me about this studio space. I’ve heard you designed it.
The original PaintCan studios was in northern Long Island City and was 3,500 square feet. This larger space is one I designed. I gave all of my drawings to an architect to finish off…but they were mostly done, and the drawing you see here (Michele shows me some of her original drawings) is pretty much exactly as the space is now, except for some changes to a bathroom to accommodate ADA regulations.
You wouldn’t believe it now, but this was an old factory in horrible condition when I first saw it. The windows were completely green. If the lights were off, it could have literally passed as a horror movie set. There are now 40 studios in the completed space.
Michelle asked if I had noticed the PaintCan sign when I first got off the elevator. Having been in a hurry when I first arrived, I hadn’t, so we took a tour of the shared entry space.
This half door has a story. It was our actual door for the original PaintCan space. There were all these empty paint cans from the paint used for all of the walls. I had this idea to have a truck run over the cans. We then took the flattened cans and made a collage to design our door. I wanted to take this with me, so I asked to have it cut in half so we could use it as a conversation piece in the new space.
Michele also pointed out the naked lighting with exposed wire and the retro furniture. It definitely has a shabby-chic vibe which is inviting and creative - just the kind of thing you’d expect of a diverse artist community.
Besides designing the space and having your personal studio here, do you have any other duties?
PaintCan Sign in Entry Area
I run PaintCan. I am the president, treasurer…the general manager. I rent the spaces, do the books…pretty much everything.
During the interview, an artist stopped by to rent an available studio space, so I took the time to look around. Michele’s personal studio has incredible natural light and a view of the Manhattan skyline and the Queensboro Bridge. She has an office area in her studio as well. The floor has an industrial surface. Michele shared that she didn’t want anything fancy on the floor because it is a space for working – it’s spacious and welcoming, with several of her paintings perched on easels, adding bursts of vibrant color to the expansive white walls. It makes you want to pick up one of the brushes and start creating.
Do you hold exhibitions for the artists here?
Yes. We have open studio exhibitions here. We apply for LIC-A shows. This is a nonprofit arts advocacy organization.
View of Queensboro Bridge from Michele's Studio
Besides you, how many other members of NYSWA have studios here?
There are five others with studio space here.
Contact Michele regarding available studio space.
Currently, there is space available on the 4th floor. The 3rd floor has a waiting list.
bonellistudio@earthlink.net
Sheila Hecht, a NYSWA member, stopped by while I was talking to Michele. I had met Sheila at the fall “Art as Sanctuary” reception, so I chatted with her and visited her studio briefly. It was great to see another studio space. She was working, so I didn’t want to take up too much of her time, but I did snap a quick photo.
Sheila shares her work in our Blank Canvas section.
Sheila Hecht in Her Studio: Click image to see her work
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Home > Business Link
EXPLAINED: Is racism in the workplace always a dismissible offence?
By Wouter Botes - Mar 25, 2019
Port Elizabeth - The concept of racism in South Africa demands a particularly high level of interest and to no lesser extent, debate.
It is commonly known that although significant strides have been made in battling the injustices of the past, racism in South Africa has not been eradicated in its entirety, as is evident within the recurring incidents thereof in the workplace.
It comes as no surprise that the CCMA, Bargaining Councils and the Courts have taken an extremely firm stance on the issue of racism in the workplace. It has been generally accepted that a perpetrator of racism in the workplace can be “guaranteed” of a dismissal once found guilty and due process has prevailed.
The comments made by the Courts in handing down judgments are particularly descriptive of this notion.
Judge Raymond Zondo, , had the following comments in the case of Crown Chickens (Pty) Ltd t/a Rocklands Poultry v Kapp and Others:
"Within the context of labour and employment disputes this Court and the Labour Court will deal with acts of racism very firmly. This will show not only this Court’s and the Labour Court’s absolute rejection of racism but it will also show our revulsion at acts of racism in general and acts of racism in the workplace particularly."
Similarly, in the case of SA Revenue Service v Commission for Conciliation, Mediation & Arbitration & others (2017) 38 ILJ 97 (CC), the following was held:
“The need to make a decisive break from the ills of the past, that non-racialism, human dignity and freedoms (which include freedom of expression without any trace of hate speech) are values foundational to our constitutional democracy. The healing of the divisions of the past, the national unity and reconciliation that need to be built and fostered respectively, are likewise intended to entrench peaceful coexistence, respect and the right to dignity of all our people.”
The above extracts confirm explicitly that racism in the workplace is not only viewed as conduct that is repulsive, but that the eradication thereof is a moral imperative. This view is further bolstered by the Constitutional Court, in the case of Rustenburg Platinum Mine v SA Equity Workers Association on behalf of Bester & others (2018) 39 ILJ 1503 (CC), where Mr Bester uttered the phrase “remove that black man’s vehicle”, after being disgruntled by a contractor parking in a particular parking bay on site.
The Constitutional Court found that the phrase uttered by Bester was in fact racist, by concluding that the objective test is to determine whether a reasonable and informed person would consider the language to be offensive, and that the language was “racially loaded.”
'It is possible to face dismissal for racism in the workplace'
The Court further stated that Bester’s dismissal should be upheld, based on the ideology that racism cannot be tolerated and that employees have a duty not to undermine harmonious working relationships. In addition to this, the Court mentioned that racism has the potential to tarnish the employer’s reputation and jeopardise the employer’s business interests to an equal extent.
It is noteworthy that Bester had no remorse for the conduct that he had committed, and that the Court considered this fact in upholding the dismissal.
It is thus clear from the above, that a perpetrator of racism is not likely to be absolved from dismissal, irrespective of the level of mitigation present.
Notwithstanding the judgment in the Rustenburg Platinum Mine-case, a more recent ruling by the Constitutional Court has resulted in a considerable level of perplexity for employers and Labour Law practitioners alike.
The case of Duncanmec (Pty) Limited v Gaylard N.O. and Others [2018] ZACC 29 has raised questions for its rather “unexpected” judgment.
In the Duncanmec-case, a group of employees participated in unprotected industrial action, albeit short lived. In doing so, the employees sang a song, the lyrics of which translated into “Climb on top of the roof and tell them that my mother is rejoicing when we hit/hurt the boer.”
The Constitutional Court found that the employees indeed made themselves guilty of racially offensive conduct, but that certain factors were nevertheless to be considered, namely:
1) There is no principle in law that requires dismissal to follow automatically when racism is perpetrated.
2) The employees who perpetrated the conduct had unblemished disciplinary records.
3) The industrial action that the employees partook in was peaceful and short-lived.
The Duncanmec-judgment and the Rustenburg Platinum Mine-judgment are very similar in nature, at least in regards to the fact that (1) both events were rather peaceful and (2) the discourse amounted to racist conduct. Why would the outcomes be so vastly disparate?
It is patently clear that the Constitutional Court sought to temper justice with mercy in the Duncanmec-case, and that even after the seriousness and revulsion of racism had been properly ventilated in prior judgments, the parity principle (consistency) is still very much a value-laden consideration in determining whether a perpetrator of racism should be dismissed. This means that each case should still be judged on its own merits, even in instances of misconduct as grim as racism.
In applying one’s mind as to whether or not a perpetrator of racism must be dismissed or not, the Constitutional Court made the following abundantly clear:
1) The test as to whether the conduct was actually racist is objective, and must be determined in such a way, having regard to reasonability and the subjective perception of the victim of the conduct.
2) The events surrounding the conduct must be assessed, was the racism paired with violent or peaceful conduct and, what is the degree of racism perpetrated?
3) The disciplinary record of the perpetrator must be considered.
4) Consideration must be given to whether or not the perpetrator is remorseful about his or her actions.
It would seem that there are degrees of racism and that historical context plays an important role when deciding on dismissal or not.
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The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle (2000)
Rene Russo as Natasha
Jason Alexander as Boris
Piper Perabo as Karen Sympathy
Randy Quaid as Cappy Von Trapment
Robert De Niro as Fearless Leader
Des McAnuff
Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family
Rated PG For Brief Mild Language
The original "Rocky & Bullwinkle" TV show was smarter than it needed to be, and a lot of adults sneaked a look now and then. It helped point the way to today's crossover animated shows like "The Simpsons." Now comes the movie version of the TV show (which was canceled in 1964), and it has the same mixture of dumb puns, corny sight gags and sly, even sophisticated in-jokes. It's a lot of fun.
The movie combines the animated moose and squirrel with live action--and even yanks three of the characters (Natasha, Boris and Fearless Leader) out of the TV set and into the real world (where they're played by Rene Russo, Jason Alexander and Robert De Niro respectively, and explain "we're attached to the project").
The breathless Narrator portentously explains: "Expensive animation characters are converted to even more expensive movie stars!" The Narrator of course always seemed to stand outside the action and know that "Rocky & Bullwinkle" was only a cartoon. At one point in this version, he (Keith Scott) complains he has been reduced to narrating the events of his own life. And the movie is also self-aware; when someone (I think maybe Fearless Leader) breathlessly announces, "There has never been a way to destroy a cartoon character until now!" he's asked, "What about `Roger Rabbit'?" The plot involves a scheme by Fearless Leader to win world domination by hypnotizing everyone with RBTV (really bad TV). Only Rocky and Bullwinkle have long years of experience at foiling the evil schemes of Fearless, Natasha and Boris, and as they fumble their way to a final confrontation we also get a coast-to-coast road movie (cheerfully acknowledged as a cliche by the Narrator).
The movie has a lot of funny moments, which I could destroy by quoting, but will not. (Oh, all right: At one point Rocky cries, "We have to get out of here!" and Bullwinkle bellows: "Quick! Cut to a commercial!") As much fun as the wit is the film's overall sense of well-being; this is a happy movie and not the desperate sort of scratching for laughs we got in a cartoon retread like "The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas." It's the sort of movie where De Niro parodies his famous "Are you talking to me?" speech with such good-natured fun that instead of groaning, we reflect--well, everyone else has ripped it off, so why shouldn't he get his own turn? The movie is wall-to-wall with familiar faces, including Janeane Garofalo as a studio executive, Randy Quaid as the FBI chief, Whoopi Goldberg as a judge, John Goodman as a cop, Billy Crystal as a mattress salesman, James Rebhorn as the president and Jonathan Winters in three roles. Russo makes a persuasive Natasha, all red lipstick, seductive accent and power high heels, and De Niro's patent leather hair and little round glasses will remind movie buffs of Donald Pleasance.
But the real discovery of the movie is its (human) lead, a 23-year-old newcomer named Piper Perabo, who plays an FBI agent. She has fine comic timing and is so fetching, she sort of stops the clock. Like Renee Zellweger in "Jerry Maguire," she comes more or less out of nowhere (well, a couple of obscure straight-to-videos) and becomes a star right there before our eyes.
Comedy is such a fragile art form. "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" isn't necessarily any more brilliant or witty or inventive than all the other recent retreads of classic cartoons and old sitcoms. But it feels like more fun. From time to time I'm reminded of George C. Scott's Rule No. 3 for judging movie acting: "Is there a joy of performance? Can you tell that the actors are having fun?" This time, you can. There's a word for this movie, and that word is: jolly.
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Colin Kaepernick, Eric Reid settle collusion complaint against NFL
Sporting Green // San Francisco 49ers
Eric Branch Feb. 15, 2019 Updated: Feb. 15, 2019 9:48 p.m.
FILE - In this Oct. 2, 2016, file photo, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, left, and safety Eric Reid kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Dallas Cowboys in Santa Clara, Calif. The Carolina Panthers have signed free agent safety Eric Reid to a one-year contract. Terms of the deal were not announced Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press
Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, who began kneeling during the national anthem to protest social injustice when they were with the 49ers in 2016, have settled their collusion complaint against the NFL.
The league and the attorneys representing Kaepernick and Reid released a joint statement Friday announcing that the parties had reached an agreement.
“For the past several months, counsel for Mr. Kaepernick and Mr. Reid have engaged in an ongoing dialogue with representatives of the NFL,” the statement read. “As a result of those discussions, the parties have decided to resolve the pending grievances. The resolution of this matter is subject to a confidentiality agreement so there will be no further comment by any party.”
It’s likely Kaepernick and Reid received a financial settlement in exchange for withdrawing their complaint. Yahoo! Sports reported a final hearing in their case against the NFL, in which final evidence was to be presented before an arbitrator, was scheduled for this month.
Kaepernick led the suit against the NFL in 2017, alleging that the league had colluded against him by not offering him the opportunity to play after his anthem protests prompted national controversy.
Kaepernick hasn’t played in the NFL since he threw 16 touchdown passes, four interceptions and posted a 90.7 quarterback rating in 11 starts with the 49ers in 2016.
Meanwhile, Reid, a 2013 first-round pick with a strong resume, remained on the free-agent market for more than six months last year before he signed a one-year, $1.69 million deal with the Panthers three games into the regular season. In May, during his unemployment, he joined Kaepernick’s collusion grievance.
On Monday, Reid signed a three-year contract worth more than $22 million with the Panthers. Reid, who earned $5.67 million with the 49ers in 2017, said to reporters his new contract provided more proof owners colluded to keep him out of the NFL last year.
“If anything, it proves my point from last year,” Reid said. “I didn’t sign until the (fourth) week and did for almost the league minimum. And this year, I signed a more substantial contract. And nothing has changed. I’m still the same player.”
Reid also said he didn’t expect Kaepernick to return to the NFL in the near future.
“Knowing what I know,” he said, “my hope tank is on” (empty).
On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that the new Alliance of American Football — which made its debut last weekend — had spoken with Kaepernick about joining the league. The report said talks broke down when Kaepernick sought at least $20 million to play.
In 2016, numerous players throughout the NFL joined Kaepernick and Reid in kneeling during the national anthem, and their protests became a polarizing issue. Kaepernick was on the cover of Time magazine in October of that year, but the conversation had quieted by the start of the 2017 season when President Trump reignited it by referring to a player who protested as a “son of a bitch.” He urged NFL owners to fire players who knelt.
Two months later, in November 2017, the league reached agreement with a coalition of NFL players to donate $89 million over seven years to various social-justice causes. Reid said he left the group when a member of the coalition, Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins, asked if he would stop protesting if the NFL donated money.
“I give kudos to the NFL for wanting to step up and help us with regard to systemic oppression,” Reid said. “I question their intent behind it. I personally think they just want the protests to end because it’s affecting their bottom line.”
During Kaepernick’s extended unemployment, a laundry list of quarterbacks who don’t possess his career credentials have been signed by NFL teams.
In 2012, when he made his first 10 career starts, Kaepernick had the most rushing yards by a quarterback in NFL history in his playoff debut, directed the biggest comeback in NFC Championship Game history, and became the only quarterback to pass for 300 yards and rush for 60 in a Super Bowl. In 2013, his first full season as a starter, Kaepernick became the fifth quarterback to have 3,000 passing yards, 20 touchdowns and 500 rushing yards with fewer than 10 interceptions in a season.
His performance dipped in the next two seasons — he was benched after eight starts in 2015 — but he had a resurgence in 2016.
In that season, Kaepernick threw two interceptions in his last 260 attempts. In his penultimate start, a 22-21 road win over the Los Angeles Rams, he had a touchdown run, a touchdown pass and game-winning two-point conversion run in the final 5 minutes, 6 seconds to lead the 49ers to their first 14-point, fourth-quarter comeback since 2004.
Despite his accomplishments, the Seahawks and Ravens are the only NFL teams to publicly express interest in signing Kaepernick since then. In May 2017, Kaepernick visited the Seahawks, who eventually signed Austin Davis. During training camp in 2017, Ravens coach John Harbaugh said he’d been in contact with Kaepernick. Baltimore eventually signed Thaddeus Lewis.
Davis and Lewis have combined to throw 18 career touchdown passes and 16 interceptions. Kaepernick has thrown for 72 touchdown with 30 interceptions, and has the second-lowest interception percentage in NFL history.
During his absence from the NFL, Kaepernick, 31, has been embraced by others for his social-justice work and philanthropy. In 2017, he was named GQ’s Citizen of the Year, and he received Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award. In October, he received Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal.
Last year, Kaepernick signed a deal with Nike and became a prominent face of its “Just Do It” campaign.
In a commercial, Kaepernick, serving as narrator, says: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch
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Follow Eric on:
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Eric Branch has worked at the San Francisco Chronicle since 2011 as the 49ers beat writer. Before that, he covered the 49ers for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in 2010. Since he began his career in journalism in 1997 in Logansport, Ind., he’s covered events ranging from archery tournaments to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
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Unusual Cures For Social Anxiety #1 – Raves
by Dr. Aziz | Mar 8, 2017 | Podcast | 2 comments
New Series- Unusual Cures to Social Anxiety
These are from my personal experience of things I have learned that have been extremely liberating and big part of what helped me to break free of a social anxiety.
Click below to hear this episode!
http://traffic.libsyn.com/shrinkfortheshyguy/Shrink-For-The-Shy-Guy-Episode-143-Unusual-Cures-for-Social-Anxiety-1-Raves.mp3
Hey welcome to today’s episode of the show. Today is going to be interesting. Today is where I’m going to talk about— it’s going to be a series I’m going to do— about Unusual Cures for Social Anxiety. These are things that I’ve done in my own life that have greatly help me build my confidence and break free from social anxiety.
These are for entertainment purposes only and in no way am I advocating that you follow in these exact footsteps and do the things that I did especially anything that may be illegal or against the laws of your country. There’s a disclaimer there, and if you’re enjoying the show, by all means, please go to iTunes and give it a great review that allows me to reach more people and carry out my mission of Operation Mass Liberation. And it helps me reach more people which actually fuels me. And this is all part of what I’m here to do. And that fuel helps me keep doing these for free, so you can benefit.
If you’re looking for something else cool for free, go to shrinkfortheshyguide.com and there you can get my e-book, “Five Steps to Unleash Your Inner Confidence” which will help you do exactly that— unleash your confidence in all areas of life.
So, this unusual cure for social anxiety is something that I’ve experienced in my life, which is raves. I don’t know if anyone even calls them raves anymore. They might’ve morphed into… I guess you would say EDM, Electronic Dance Music show, maybe is the equivalent of that now. Raves have a long history. I can’t say I’m super versed in that. I think I watched a few documentaries. But originally they had a very very underground quality to them, like not sanctioned, not allowed. You had to be in the know sort of thing, and I’ve definitely been to a few of those.
By the time that I really got into them they were already really big, and they were kind of sanctioned EDM shows, in a way. I wasn’t the cool guy in the 90s who was aware of this. I got into them in the 2000 so this is my experience of those.
If you are not familiar with what a rave is, or an EDM show. EDM stands for Electric Dance Music, again. What that is, it is basically a certain kind of music and there’s a rage of electronic music, but a core theme is usually not a whole lot of vocals, tons of bass, and different rates and speeds. But think, a lot of instrumental electronic music and tons of people dancing. Usually a kind of a big area where people are dancing. There’s usually a DJ up in the front and a lot of… I don’t know… anonymity or something. People aren’t really looking at you. It’s different than being in a bar. In bars, you’re standing around, and talking to each other, and kind of looking at each other, and aware of each other. It’s a lot more like free. It’s kind of dark, and there’s lasers and shit, and it’s kind of like you can dance however you want. And I’ll get into that in a little bit.
I found raves to be extremely liberating and a big part of what helped me break free from social anxiety. The first rave I ever went to was after the Love Parade. This was when I was living in the Bay Area. I was in San Francisco in 2005. First year of graduate school. I was going to a friends house before we were going to travel up to San Francisco, and we were going to this thing called a Love Parade, and I didn’t even know if there was anything afterwards. But her roommate at that time, this guy named Brian, who was awesome. I got to the house and I’m just chatting with her, and then she’s like, “Yeah, my roommate Brian’s going to come with us and someone else as well, and you can go and meet them inside.” So I walk into the house and the door to his room was partially open and I look inside and I see this guy with his hair dyed blue, and he’s cutting some synthetic orange fur. And I look at this guy, and I’m like, “I like him.” Instantly, I liked this guy. I had gone to Burning Man two or three times at that point. And so I instantly saw that orange fur, and I was like, “Oh that’s what people at Burning Man always have,” so I knew I would like that guy.
That’s a whole another unusual cure for social anxiety. That’s going to get it’s own episode because that’s beyond raves. That is the ultimate place for liberation, in my experience. Massively helped me shift my social anxiety and gain confidence in so many areas. So, I’m going to do a whole episode… that would be another one in the series.
But anyway, I instantly liked him. We hit it off right away. Brian’s an amazing guy. So I’m hanging out, we go to this Love Parade, and he’s like, “Oh by the way there’s this thing afterwards called something or other, it’s at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. It’s like an all night dance party.” I was like “Ooh, all night dance party you say.”
Now I used to have tons of anxiety about dancing. I used to always judge myself and dislike it. I have recorded an episode about it, but it was very different in these settings because no one gave a shit, no one’s looking at you, no one cared, you can literally just jump up and down with your arms above your head going “weeee” for like an hour, and no one’s going to care. So you don’t have to be good and it was just about really being free.
I loved that, and when he told me that there’s this all night dance party, I was into it. So we go to this Love Parade and that’s like just a bunch of cars and decked out floats and stuff, and people dancing on them and celebrating all kinds of love between all kinds of people, and it was great. And it was fun. And then we took a little dinner break, and then we were going to go to this all night dance party. So far so good. I’m having a great time connecting with Brian and really enjoying hanging out with him. And then, over dinner, the topic of substances comes up. And Brian’s like, “So, are you going to take anything tonight?” And I was like, “Uhh… maybe? Depends? What do you have?” And he’s like, “Well I have something called GHB.”
Now, I’ve never done GHB, I don’t even know what it was at that point. So I had him described it to me, he told me about it. And this thing is pretty controversial, so I’m not going to get into all of that. If you got opinions about them, don’t tell me, I don’t care. It can be used in a lot of ways, some of which are really negative. But in this context it was good stuff, or somehow dosed right, mixed with the right alcohol, or something. I don’t know but holy shit it was awesome. I was like… what it was, it was like it eliminated fear, is what it did. Completely neutralized fear.
Now I had been doing a lot of confidence building work already at this point by 2005. I mean I’ve been working on stuff for maybe five years? No. That’s not true. Two years. A year or two. Not that long but I’d already overcome my fear of talking to women. I’ve been able to approach women, all that stuff. But there was still ton of fear there and a lot of self doubt and all that stuff that I have to work through it, and work my way up to it, and this was like… free pass night. I just walk up and say whatever I want. And on top of that, the environment was fantastic. Something about the environment really encouraged— and it wasn’t just the substance— it was the environment. And I’m going to talk more about the environment of these raves and how they transformed my life and some fantastic stories from this rave at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and others. Stay tuned.
So, during the break, did you secure some GHB or some other illicit substance and consume it? Because that’s definitely what I’m encouraging, especially if you are a child. That’s what I want: is all children to do drugs. No. Again this stuff is all about just my experience and you got to make your own choices for you. And I’m obviously not actively encouraging you or saying this is what you need to do, or should do, in order to build your confidence. This is just some stories from my life that I thought you might find interesting.
So, I’m at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, had the GHB, and I’m on fire. It wasn’t just women, it was men too, like being willing to be open with people. And the environment of rave, they have an acronym that was part of it… It was a rave culture, this whole thing where people take a lot of ecstasy at these events too, which tends to be a very opening substance— melt barriers, that kind of thing, and there is this acronym which you might’ve heard of if you’ve done this kind of stuff: P-L-U-R, PLUR. Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. And the environment, it’s like a counterculture movement where people are like, “Hey we want to get together, we want to dance, and we want to be free, and we want to love each other, and we don’t want to be judgmental and critical, and all that stuff.” Accepting, tolerating, kind of community.
You walk up to talk to someone in the real world and they might have a sense of hesitation, fear, like, “What do you want? What are you doing? Why are you talking to me?” Not all the time and if their energy is good, often times people are very open, and that’s what I demonstrate with clients. But there can be kind of a guard up around, and at these places the guard is way down.
People around aren’t like “What do you want?!” They’re just like, “Hey!” It was an amazing experience for me to walk up to beautiful woman after beautiful woman or groups of women, and just experiment with being extremely open! Extremely open! So instead of having to do this little dance of like, “Hey what’s up! I noticed you over there and oh, what are you drinking?” I just walk up to a moment like, “Woah, you are incredibly beautiful.” And the fact that I was on GHB probably helped, right? Like, “You are incredibly beautiful!”
Maybe in the real world, again, someone might be like, “Whaaat?” On guard, or scared or uncomfortable with that. But the environment encourages us and people are jumping up and down and dancing for hours, which totally transforms your state and your physiology and puts you in a much more energized, happy, upbeat, confident state. And my experience doing it, especially because I was very heartfelt with it, and I wasn’t like… I don’t know… trying to quickly seduce them or trick them or something. It was just like about really being authentic and connecting. They felt it and I got tons of positive responses like, “Oh thank you.” And I would take it one step further, I’d be like “Yeah! Wow!” You know? Over-the-top. And then I would get pictures of women and it was just super super fun.
One thing I’ve always heard about… I’ve been studying a lot of pick up artist stuff too, and these guys would always… kind of as a badge of honor would be like, “Yeah I made out with the girl at the bar like two seconds after I met her. Then I made out with her friend, yeah.” And I heard these stories and be like, “I don’t know if I really needed that,” but part of me is like, “Oh I want to do that. If I could do that that would prove something.” But I thought you had to do this weird pickup artist trickery to make that happen and do some sort of mind game with her, and then just do the right sequence in the right way and then it would happen. And I never really learned the sequence or wanted to. I had all of these ambivalence around it. But I remember this was later in the night, I was having just a phenomenal time and the better time you have, your energy changes. And you are like totally confident, totally fearless, totally in love with yourself, and open to other people. It just influences people. Their guard melts.
I remember I was walking one of the hallways between the different stages and rooms, and as I was walking down I saw this beautiful woman with fishnet stockings sitting there on the steps, and she looked neutral. She didn’t look happy or sad, either way. I remember I sat down next to her and I said, “How are you doing?” And I remember something really shifted for me that night. As I’m saying this, I’m remembering that. It wasn’t like… the way I asked that question was very different. It wasn’t like, “Hey how it is going?” And I’m like trying to figure what to say, it was just like I really was curious. “Hey how was it going?” I wanted to know. It’s really fascinating, this different way of relating with women and people where I actually became a lot more interested in them and a lot less scared of what they’re going to think of me, because that fear was gone.
So, I asked her that. We chatted for just a really relatively short period of time and I said, “Can I ask you a question?” She’s like, “What?” I was like, “Can I kiss you?” and she said, “Yes.” And we made out and it was awesome. And it felt really good because I didn’t do any trickery. I just connected with her for a minute and I asked her and I was really okay if she would say “no” too. Because I’ve gotten some Nos that night, of course, just talking to women in general but something really opened up there. And then it shifted about like, “How I had to be in order to get women.”
It’s really an amazing experience. And then I was able to connect with men there more too. I remember I was dancing at one point… they played a remake, an electronic remake of a Rage Against The Machine song. I don’t know the name of the song but it ends… he says this like 50 times, “F*ck you! I won’t do what you tell me!” which is awesome and I remember jumping up and down, the song builds, it gets more and more intense and it’s got an even heavier beat because it’s electronic. I remember I was jumping up and down. The guy next to me, I threw my arm around him, I didn’t know the guy! And then we’re both pumping our fist in the air, and like, “YEAH!”. And I remember talking to the other guys that night and just connecting, and laughing, and joking, and treating them like they were my good friends like Brian, my new friend, or one of my best friends from college. I would be with them and I’d be joking, and shooting shit, and laughing, and I’ll be doing that with strangers that I just met. It was fantastic and liberating. The power of this experience was not just in that night. The power of this experience is what I took away with me. I’m going to share more about that, like how it impacted me beyond that night, influenced how I saw the world, what I did as a result of experiencing that one night and other raves that I went to.
Fun trip down memory lane, of the rave at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, but you might be wondering, “Okay what about the next day? Wasn’t this all you just being high, on some drugs, and having this experience, and you woke up the next day and you felt worse and more anxious and all that stuff?” No! Actually, it wasn’t that. I mean we’ve all had that experience. You get drunk or whatever and then you feel hung over the next day, and you don’t feel great. But I’ve been up all night, I had taken the substance, by all rights the next day, I should have felt terrible, but I didn’t. Because it was such a massive breakthrough that I felt high. I felt like on a cloud for weeks after that. Something popped. These intense experiences, these massive shifts can pop something inside of us. And it was like, up until that point, the last couple years, the growth I’ve been doing, doing what scares me, facing my fear, building up my confidence, it had this effort to it. Like I’ve got to fight my way through my fear in these barriers. I’m going to do it though because I’m so fucking sick and tired of being stuck. And there is this pop, this breakthrough that night, where I was like, “Oh!” I didn’t say it like this in my head. This phrase didn’t come in to my head until years later when I started helping clients, but it was, ”Oh the world is a friendly place.” Now that’s something that I teach and we have it on a banner that we put up in my live events.
The world is a friendly place because that’s what that experience taught me. And does that mean that everyone’s going to love you? No. That everyone’s going to want to talk you? No. That everyone’s going to make out with you? No. But it means that when you approach the world with that energy, with that attitude, you get so much positivity in return. And that you can just ask someone, “Hey how was it going?” and be really curious. You don’t have to fight for anything, or overcome anything; and there’s no threat, there’s no danger to even be scared of in the first place. And also what I did that night is massive action and repetition. I didn’t just take a substance and sit in the back and be like, “Whoah man, I feel so free.” Who knows, that could be good too, right? But what I did is I took massive action. I approached people all over the place, did all kinds of things I never would’ve done. So it built up this massive muscle really quickly. It was like momentum. I remember for weeks after that I was just walking up to people, talking to people, having conversations, approaching women, and it was like, “Oh this is how I want to be. I want to be this kind of open person.” And not everyone’s going to like that, not everyone’s going to be on board with that, but it feels so much better than all the trickery and the pickup artist stuff that I learned. And I realized that if your confidence is on, and you do the discipline of confidence, you build up the habits of confidence and you really are strong in yourself and love who you are and not afraid of other people who’re going to judge you, and just show up fully, and boldly, and outrageously sometimes, then man, women want to date you. They want to be your girlfriend, they want to marry you. Guys want to be your friend. People want to hire you. People want to promote you. Everything falls into place. It’s what I realized. So I started to shift and pivot from like learning the pickup tricks and how to do it into like, “Oh how do I get to that state of being just raw fucking awesome Aziz,” because then I don’t need to know what to say to start a conversation, I just boom here I go, I’m in. So that’s how I took it with me.
I kept going to events like that, and kept having experiences like that. Sometimes with the substance, and sometimes not. I’ve always been very cautious around the use of any like that because I don’t want to mess with my emotions too much, especially around chemicals like MDMA. I’ve never done GHB again actually but MDMA is a common thing at raves and so I have a lot of exposure around it, but I was very limited and selective about how I would use it because I had a fear about repeated use messing with my serotonin and other emotional side of things. It’s probably my biggest reason. I stand by that I’ve been pretty limited in how I use that substance. So I also wanted to experience like, “Could I go to these things and have a good time, have fun, and feel free without being on something?” and I did. I did a ton actually. I remember one Burning Man I went to, I didn’t use anything for the whole time. And it was awesome. I had so much energy. That’s great!
But anyway, how does this story help you? What are you seeing? What are you learning? Maybe you are going out to go to an EDM show, I don’t know, maybe not. But what are you taking from this? What are you learning? What could you use in your life from this? Good!
Before we end today let’s end with our action step.
Action Step
Your action step for today, I would say go and find some electronic music and just check it out. Now that might not be your thing, you might hate it, you might say, “Trance is stupid, anyone can make it on their computer.” I have friends that say that. But maybe just check it out. You never know man. It’s very different listening to it on your on your headphones or on a computer and the music is… you feel it in your body. And just getting in that environment like there’s shows everywhere in every big city. There’s these festivals that happen like Electric Daisy Carnival in Vegas now is where it is, and every big city’s got a thing once a year, wether it’s just a bunch of electronic music. There’s stuff maybe more regularly in your city. A particular DJ comes into town. Even if it’s not your thing just go get a ticket, go get a friend to go with you, or go by yourself. Even if you just hang out there for like an hour or two, just notice what it’s like. Maybe experiment with jumping up and down around a group of people. Everyone’s dancing. You just dance how you want to and notice how no one cares. You can do whatever you want. And maybe even close your eyes and know what it feels like just move around to the music and actually get into it and not have a care in the world. Not even have a thought about what other people think. There’s tremendous opportunities. So that’s the invitation for the action step. Do it if you want, do it if it feels right for you. It profoundly transformed my life, and was one of several very unusual cures for social anxiety. I have several coming up, that I’ll talk about in future episodes over the next few months here. One of which is Burning Man, the other one is even crazier and I’ll keep that one a mystery until that episode. Until we speak again may you have the courage to be who you are, and to know on a deep level, that you’re awesome. I’ll talk to you soon.
Music Credit
All music is licensed or royalty free.
DeepSound – Rain Clouds
(Licensed through Pond5.com)
Ask The Shrink:
Boccherini Minuet
Action Step:
Justin Crosby – Skrillit
Lokfield – Terra’s Theme Dubstep
soundcloud.com/lokfield
(Creative Commons License)
tam on March 15, 2017 at 4:21 pm
I like this one a lot. I quoted from it on Facebook.
“And does that mean that everyone’s going to love you? No. That everyone’s going to want to talk you? No. That everyone’s going to make out with you? No. But it means that when you approach the world with that energy, with that attitude, you get so much positivity in return.”
Marnie on May 9, 2017 at 11:09 am
Oh my, LOVE the aqua pose.r.t. must check that out. I'm finishing up my holiday decor and one of those would be perfect in my kitchen! Early Happy Canada Day all!
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Pogba must give everything for Manchester United, insists Bryan Robson
UK & international sports | Published: Jul 14, 2019
The France midfielder’s future is one of the top football transfer stories of the summer.
Paul Pogba in training with Manchester United at the WACA in Perth
Bryan Robson believes agents have too much influence on modern players and the Manchester United great hopes wantaway midfielder Paul Pogba continues to knuckle down amid ongoing speculation.
Three years after being brought back to Old Trafford in what was a world-record deal, the 26-year-old has openly admitted that he is ready for “a new challenge somewhere else”.
Pogba said there was “no need” to speak about his situation after United opened their pre-season tour of Australia with a 2-0 win against Perth Glory on Saturday but talk continues of a move to former club Juventus or Real Madrid.
Robson knows a thing or two about being a star with the Red Devils when things are not going so well and has also been in the unique position of attending most of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s training sessions in Perth.
“There is a lot of speculation in the media about Paul,” the former midfielder said. “He is a top player.
“You are contracted to Man United, (so you have to) get your head down, do your pre-season, which, from what I have seen in the training sessions he has done and if something happens and the club want it to happen, or if it doesn’t, you have to get on.
Up and running on #MUTOUR 2019! ?
A post shared by Manchester United (@manchesterunited) on Jul 13, 2019 at 6:15am PDT
“You are contracted to Manchester United. You have to give everything for that club, that team and the fans.”
Pogba is not the only United player whose future is unclear but his agent Mino Raiola has been more vocal than some when speaking about his client.
“Players are influenced far too much by their agents instead of making their own decisions,” Robson, who played for United between 1981 and 1994, said.
“OK, you might want some advice on what you might sign for and when you do move but you are your own person, you can show the path you want to do in your own career.
“I don’t think many players do that. They are always taking advice from agents.
“Obviously agents want players to move on because they make money.
“If a player is loyal to a club and stays there, the agent doesn’t make as much money. That is a big influence, not just at Manchester United but all across the game.
“Players should have a good look at themselves in the mirror and make what they want to make from their football career.”
United are still planning for an immediate future with Pogba and preparations are going well, even if the transfer activity has yet to heat up as they look to make up for last season’s disappointing sixth-place finish.
“Our stats last season were well down on other teams,” Robson added. “That can’t be right.
“As a coach and a manager, you want your stats to be right up there with the best.
“It doesn’t mean you are going to be a great player just because your stats are good for running about, but when you have the ability of some of our players and your stats are down, that is definitely something you can work on.
“I think Ole realised that when he came into the club and he wanted to improve on it, so you can compete with the top teams.
Bryan Robson was a Premier League winner with Manchester United (Malcolm Croft/PA)
“They know they’ve got to improve on last season. I was at the Player of the Year do right at the end of the season and you could see the disappointment in the players, that they knew they hadn’t achieved what they wanted to achieve.
“And we know that we’ve got to step up our game if we want to compete with Man City and Liverpool next year – and it all starts from here.
“We’ve made a couple of good young signings. Hopefully we can maybe get a few more players in, but in saying that you can only get the players in if the players are available and they’re as good as what the manager and coaching staff want in the club.
“But I think we’re going in the right direction.”
Solskjaer hopeful ‘loved’ Pogba will stay and wants Sanchez back to his best
UK & international sports | 15 hours ago
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May 13, 2019 Medical/Health Care
UN Warns Crisis in Anglophone Cameroon Worsening
UNITED NATIONS The U.N. warned Monday that Cameroon has become one of the fastest-growing displacement crises in Africa, and that the security and humanitarian situations are deteriorating and risk spiraling out of control.
Last year, 160,000 people were estimated to need humanitarian assistance in the Northwest and Southwest regions, U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock told an informal meeting of the Security Council. Today, there are not 160,000, but more than 1.3 million people � at least eight times as many in need.
The county's English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions have been wracked with instability since fighting broke out in 2017. More than 1,500 people have been killed and a half-million internally displaced.
The violence has impacted livelihoods, but also left more than 600,000 children out of school and disrupted the health sector, rendering 40% of health facilities not operational in some areas.
The U.N. and nongovernmental groups have scaled up humanitarian assistance, but Lowcock said more funding is urgently needed.
This year, the U.N. and NGOs are looking for $300 million to reach 2.3 million people, including one-third of them in the Northwest and Southwest regions, Lowcock said. Only $38 million has been received so far.
Cameroon also faces humanitarian situations in two other parts of the country � in the far north, it hosts Nigerian refugees fleeing Boko Haram militants from the Lake Chad region, and in the east, it has hosted refugees from the neighboring Central African Republic since 2013.
Unrest in the Northwest and Southwest was sparked in 2017 by English-speaking teachers and lawyers protesting Francophone dominance. Armed rebels took over the movement, demanding independence for an English-speaking state they call "Ambazonia." Their demands were met with a government crackdown.
Cameroon's U.N. ambassador objected to Monday's informal council session, which was held in a conference room and included two speakers from Cameroon civil society. Organizers intended it to raise awareness of the worsening situation.
The very subject under consideration � namely the humanitarian situation in Cameroon � in no way constitutes a threat to international peace and security, Ambassador Michel Tommo Monthe said. He warned that some wanted to use the session to tarnish Cameroon as hellish country of unspeakable ills.
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Explore the world with Singapore Airlines
News from SIA
KrisFlyer
8 major sports events to look forward to in 2019
From football tournaments to cricket, these events coming up this year are worth noting in your travel calendar for an added adrenaline rush
Story by Darcel Al Anthony
Published on May 14, 2019, Updated on May 14, 2019
1. Cricket World Cup, England and Wales
The flagship men’s event of the international cricket calendar is back for its 12th run in 2019. With England and Wales playing host, the Cricket World Cup 2019 will be the first World Cup to not include any of the 93 associate members of the International Cricket Council, due to their elimination at the qualifying stage in which both associate and full member nations may participate. As a result, new associate member the United States, as well as the renowned Netherlands national cricket team, will not be part of the season. London will be a significant venue for the tournament, with the opening match taking place at The Oval and the final to be played at Lord’s Cricket Ground.
30 May-14 July 2019
2. UEFA Champions League Final, Madrid
The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League Final 2019 marks the fifth time the match will be played at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium in Madrid as well as the first time the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system will be used in a UEFA final, with its decisions being announced on the big screens around the stadium if they are overturned. As one of the most notable European football competitions of the year, the final will be an all-English affair between Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur after both Barcelona and Ajax were knocked out of the competition in a series of thrilling semi-final matches.
Pebble Beach Golf Links
3. U.S Open Championship, California
Happening on world-renowned Pebble Beach Golf Links, just a two hours’ drive from San Francisco, the 119th edition of the U.S. Open takes place in the summer and is sure to attract some of golf’s biggest names, including former champion Lucas Glover and newly minted Masters champion Tiger Woods. The tournament is the third of four major golf championships this year.
13–16 June 2019
Wales vs England at World Cup Qualifier 2018
4. FIFA Women’s World Cup, France
For the first time, France will be hosting the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup, making it the third European nation to do so. Spread across nine cities, the quadrennial competition will see champions the United States, with three tournaments under its belt since the beginning of the competition in 1991, returning to defend the title against 23 other teams. The final will be played in Lyon, home of the 2018 UEFA Women’s Champions League winners Olympique Lyonnais.
7 June-7 July 2019
5. World Aquatics Championships, Gwangju
Having previously hosted the Summer Universiade aquatics events in 2015, Gwangju will be hosting the World Aquatics Championships 2019 in the same venues. The opening as well as the closing ceremonies will take place at Nambu International Aquatics Center. One of the most anticipated highlights of the competition would be watching Singaporean Olympic gold medallist Joseph Schooling in action, as he pursues a major butterfly medal. Gwangju is easily reached by train from Seoul in under two hours.
6. Rugby World Cup, Japan
The ninth edition of the Rugby World Cup will be held across 12 different cities in Japan, making the country the first Asian nation to host the international competition. While the Irish and Australian teams are rising forces, New Zealand will be focused on chasing a third consecutive win this season. The Tokyo Stadium and the International Stadium Yokohama will be hosting the opening and final matches respectively.
20 September-2 November 2019
The O2 Arena in London
7. ATP Finals, London
The season-ending event for the highest-ranked singles players and doubles teams on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) World Tour 2019 will be held at the O2 Arena in London. Eight of the world’s best singles and doubles players will be battling it out for the championship titles, with many speculating another showdown between last year’s singles winner Alexander Zverev and tennis legend Novak Djokovic.
8. SEA Games, The Philippines
The Philippines will be hosting the 30th edition of the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, which will be the first time the competition will include e-sports and obstacle course racing. The competition will comprise 56 sports, the highest number of sports in the history of the Games. The opening ceremony will take place at the Philippine Arena in Bulacan while the closing ceremony will be held at the Athletics Stadium in New Clark City.
30 November-11 December 2019
SEE ALSO: Trail running northern Thailand’s forgotten mountain paths
By the numbers: Fun facts about Wimbledon tennis
3 facts about newly developed CopenHill in Copenhagen
5 facts about the HSBC Singapore Rugby 7s
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Donna McKechnie
Donna McKechnie is the legendary actress best known for her Tony Award-winning performance in A Chorus Line. She made her Broadway debut in 1961 with How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Her other Broadway shows include Promises, Promises; Company; Sondheim: A Musical Tribute (which she also choreographed); On the Town; Sweet Charity (national tour); and State Fair, for which she won a Fred Astaire Award in 1996. Reviewing her recent one-woman show, My Musical Comedy Life, Ben Brantley wrote in the New York Times: "She remains the essence of the heroic drive that A Chorus Line celebrates." She lives in New York.
Books by Donna McKechnie
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Scrap Monday's holiday: Republicans
June 10, 2010 — 8.43pm
Workers might be looking forward to their day off on Monday, courtesy of the Queen's Birthday holiday, but republicans want it scrapped.
Major-General Michael Keating, chair of the Australian Republican Movement, said the day was "just a day off work" and people did not celebrate the monarch's birth.
"The Queen's birthday has become a pretty lacklustre event when it is compared to other national days such as Anzac Day and Australia Day," he said in a statement.
The republicans have suggested the monarchist overtones be dropped and a new holiday be created, such as "Reconciliation Day", "Diversity Day" or "National Appreciation Day".
Major-General Keating said such a change was not meant as a reflection on Queen Elizabeth II, rather it was about building national identity.
The Queen herself might not be celebrating too hard on Monday. Her birthday actually falls on April 21.
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By Alyssa Erdley
News with Attitude
Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the SamoHi Titanic with a $385 million "Discovery" Building
We need quality teachers and hardworking administrators. We got entitled staff and overpriced construction.
David Ganezer
Santa Monica High School's softball field has been replaced with a $385 million building
Ground broke on Tuesday for a new structure, dubbed the Discovery Building, at the santa monica high school campus. Its function is to replace the Science and Technology buildings which were demolished last summer.
The building will form a U around an interior courtyard. Planned to open at the end of 2021, it will contain 38 classrooms, offices for the M and O houses, 3 multipurpose rooms, some common areas, and a full kitchen and cafeteria. A rooftop garden will serve as another classroom and a suite for medically fragile students is planned. The current indoor swimming pool will be abandoned in favor of a new outdoor swimming pool beside the new structure.
Bond measure ES, approved by voters in 2012, funds the construction with $385 million.
According to Samohi Principal Antonio Shelton, "This building is planned to support 21st-century, future-ready learning with larger classrooms, breakout spaces and common areas that will support differing modalities of learning."
A PowerPoint presented in April, 2018 shows detailed plans for the building and includes a three-dimensional view of the ultimate plan for a new and improved high school. In the illustration, there are only two or three currently-built structures that will remain undemolished.
That's the news. Here's the attitude.
There are so many things wrong with this picture that it's hard to know where to start. Let me break it down:
1. The idea that new buildings are necessary or will be effective at improving education
As a former architect, I am well aware of the importance physical space can have on the human interactions that occur within that space. Having said that, no architecture, no matter how clever and "innovative," is going to have a significant effect on quality of education. A new building will certainly not enable the high school to "support 21st century, future-ready learning."
What is needed are quality teachers supported by hardworking administrators - all of whom make the focus the student rather than the teacher. Several years ago, the school district received an outside audit of their effectiveness, and the main flaw revealed was that the district was "adult-based." In other words, the teacher's union runs the show. Policies and practices all revolve around what's good for teachers, not what's good for students. As far as I know, that culture has not changed one drop since the report was published. Certainly, it was never addressed.
A new building and oddly-configured classrooms that enable "breakout sessions" will probably have zero effect on educational outcomes. By the time students arrive at high school, they have already decided whether or not they want to learn. To engage students who have been disengaged for years because they may have learning disabilities, emotional issues, or who simply will not thrive in the factory-style classrooms of public school, you will need more than a wall that opens up the classroom or a whiteboard placed in a public space.
Furthermore, the classroom of the future will probably not be at a school at all. Truly 21st century teaching should probably be done by competitive, high-production-value studios such as those that produce National Geographic and Discovery Channel videos. In fact, the videos don't even have to be that expensive. Anyone with a child under the age of 20 knows that kids learn from YouTube. A lot. Most of my child's grasp of history and economics comes from videos created by passionate amateurs. That sort of passion reaches kids a lot more effectively than wage-guaranteed union hacks who rush out of school as soon as the bell rings in order to get to their moonlighting job.
Yes, there are many dedicated, wonderful teachers in our school district. But there are too many others who have no interest in the students at all.
And can we please stop talking about a 21st century education? In any century, we must teach children the fundamentals of mathematics, good writing, and real history (as opposed to revisionist brainwashing). They can move on to what is necessary for the 21st century once they have mastered the basics.
2. You are going to move the swimming pool. An indoor swimming pool. To build an outdoor swimming pool. Really.
Santa Monica High School already has a swimming pool. An indoor swimming pool, a place secure from weather that is far too cold for much of the school year to invite anyone to want to wear a bathing suit and jump into the water.
But adults seem to think kids have no nerve endings. Expecting children to jump into a swimming pool in December is so similar to expecting children to study for five hours after they get home from school - and baseball practice. It is an interesting psychological phenomenon that a certain group of adults, usually those who make the kind of decision to exchange an indoor pool for an outdoor one, practice uninhibited sadism on youth.
Of course, moving the swimming pool is also a colossal waste of money.
3. Bond measures for new construction at SMMUSD schools is a huge scam in general.
Santa Monica High School does not need new buildings. It needs far, far better maintenance of the structures it already has. The pavement at Samohi is littered with debris that has been there so long it is engraved into the concrete. The bathrooms are old with malfunctioning fixtures, plumbing problems, and piss-poor maintenance. Students complain of chronically broken toilets and filthy litter in the bathrooms.
Blaming the students for poor maintenance is a common way of avoiding the issue. Ask the manager of the fanciest hotel in Beverly Hills: you can not expect 3,000 people to keep bathrooms clean. Not even in the snootiest hotel with the snootiest clientele would expect that. You hire staff who must constantly clean up and maintain the function of the fixtures.
These bond measures only profit those who get the contracts (or who are paid to oversee the contracts) to build structures that don't significantly affect quality of education or even the quality of the environment.
It is an expensive and unnecessary rearrangement of the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
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Solano Canyon
Street Name Histories >
Solano Avenue
Buena Vista Road
People of Solano >
Francisco Solano
Rosa Casanova
Alfredo Solano
María Solano
Guillermo Bouett
1866 Org.
City Service Requests
INCIDENTS REPORT
Solano Canyon Is Under Attack!
The City of Los Angeles, in 2012, adopted what is called “The Plan for a Citywide System of Neighborhood Councils” (see the link here). Included in its six-point ‘goals and objectives’ is the statement that its intent is to
Promote public participation in City governance and decision making processes so that government is more responsive to local needs and requests and so that more opportunities are created to build partnerships with government to address local needs and requests
Unfortunately, the original plan did not foresee, and therefore did not address, the notion that it might be desirable in the future to subdivide an existing neighborhood council for a number of reasons, including unexpected population growth.
One such neighborhood council is the Historic Cultural Neighborhood Council (HCNC), that includes the historic neighborhoods near Downtown Los Angeles of Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Victor Heights, the Arts District, El Pueblo (essentially the Olvera Street area), and Solano Canyon, the historic neighborhood that was founded in 1866 by Francisco Solano. The website of the HCNC may be found online at https://empowerla.org/hcnc/.
The Problem Facing Solano Canyon Today
A cohort from Chinatown is currently trying to subdivide the HCNC, cutting out Little Tokyo and the Arts District and consolidating the HCNC’s political power in Chinatown. The proposed subdivision would be called the Historic Cultural North Neighborhood Council (HCNNC). This blog is an attempt to document the chaotic, underhanded, and completely unprofessional manner with which the HCNNC subdivision application has been handled by the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) and the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) from the beginning of this unfortunate and one-sided process and make it a matter of public record. DONE and BONC are staffed by public servants, who are bound by a set of standards that, when they are violated, may leave the individuals involved subject to administrative, civil, and sometimes even criminal, sanctions.
There is ostensibly a process (see http://empowerla.org/subdivision/) for subdivision of a neighborhood council; but the process as it is described online has either not been followed or seems to have been changed at the whim of DONE, in particular by Mike Fong, Director of Policy and Government Relations. Mr. Fong clearly has political aspirations: he was a Field Deputy for former Councilman Ed Reyes; he ran, unsuccessfully, for the California Assembly (losing to Jimmy Gomez); and he has expressed his interest in running for a Los Angeles City Council seat. The leading proponent of the HCNNC subdivision proposal is Angelica Lopez Moyes, who is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the HCNC, the host council.
Communication between Mike Fong and Angelica Lopez Moyes has been sporadic and contradictory — at least that part of their communication that is a matter of public record; Mr. Fong seems to have gone out of his way to apply existing procedural rules only when it suits or abets Ms. Moyes’ project. That Ms. Moyes is leading an effort to subdivide the Historic Cultural Neighborhood Council (HCNC) is curious, since Ms. Moyes is a resident of Echo Park and not of any of the communities that are part of either the existing HCNC or the proposed HCNNC.
A case in point: On Thursday, 16 November 2017, Mr. Fong wrote to Ms. Moyes in an email, which says, in part
Hi, Angelica ... The subdivision process will open soon. Applications will be accepted until January 15, 2018.
This shows clearly that Mr. Fong was well-aware, at least by 16 November 2017, the date of this email, that Ms. Moyes intended to submit a subdivision application. While there is, on the surface, of course, nothing wrong with the fact that Mr. Fong and Ms. Moyes had communicated prior to that date, it clearly establishes the fact of their early communication. There has been a pervasive feeling on the part of some stakeholders that much of the subdivision process has been conducted ‘behind closed doors’ in an apparent effort to conceal the overall process from a large number of stakeholders in caucuses surrounding Chinatown, especially those areas where Ms. Moyes believed there was latent opposition to her proposal.
It is clear from the actions of Ms. Moyes and the HCNNC Formation Committee that the purpose of the subdivision is to consolidate political power in the Chinatown caucus. There are numerous examples, but this one is striking; this is an email from Ms. Moyes to Mr. Fong on 14 March 2018 (using one of the three email addresses she uses):
Mr. Fong,
Attached please find a cover letter and the updated Bylaws.
Note: There is a significant Bylaws change under the Board Structure section. This change resulted from opposition feedback received at the BONC meeting held on March 12. Support documentation to follow in a separate email. Most of the documentation is in response to criticism received and it demonstrates that we have engaged further with fellow Stakeholders throughout this process [Emphasis added].
HCNC Subdivision Application Committee
An attachment to this email included the ‘significant bylaws change’ referred to by Ms. Moyes in her email. In it, of 20 proposed board positions for the subdivided neighborhood council, three each are allotted to Victor Heights, El Pueblo, and Solano Canyon; five are allotted to Chinatown; and there are five at-large seats plus one youth representative. If the five at-large seats were to be acquired by Chinatown, then that caucus would constitute a quorum at any Board meeting, which is defined in the proposed by-laws as ten members’ being present. This means that, any time Chinatown would wish to conduct any business of the council on its own behalf and for its own benefit, that caucus would then be able to do so without the participation of any other caucus.
It appears that someone is intent on structuring the board positions for the proposed HCNC subdivision in such a way that guarantees that Chinatown will retain enough power to determine any decisions made by the new board. In an email dated 15 March 2018, three days after a BONC meeting on Monday, 12 March 2018, Ms. Moyes sent an email to Mr. Fong at DONE that stated the following:
We went ahead and inserted the language for limiting seats in a section of the Bylaws which were sent yesterday. Perhaps we may explain in more detail our concern when communicating about the other questions that we had. Hopefully, we are able to connect soon. Currently working to pull together all of the work done since the BONC meeting including correspondence with those opposing the solutions we arrived at together [Emphasis added].
One can only conclude that the first sentence of this email refers to the concern on the part of the subdivision committee that they need to structure the allocation of board member positions in such a way as to confer as much political power in Chinatown as possible so that the result will be complete control of the new neighborhood council by Chinatown.
Ms. Moyes is always quick to assert that all of her actions are for the benefit of the proposed subdivision council as a whole; notice how, in the above-referenced email, she makes that very assertion. In fact, however, the actions of the HCNNC Formation Committee demonstrate nothing of the sort. The committee has gone to great lengths not to conduct outreach in areas that it feels are not completely supportive of the subdivision process.
As a result of several California Public Records Act (CA PRA) requests, it has become clear that much of what Ms. Moyes writes is simply gratuitous nonsense and, in many cases, is simply untrue — that is, unsupported by fact. Whether that failure of truth is intentional on the part of Ms. Moyes is unclear. Ms. Moyes, however, has positioned herself as an expert in everything she says, and her attitude is clearly that the reader is expected to accept that whatever she says is unimpeachable because she says it; the email to Mr. Fong from Ms. Moyes on 14 March 2018, referred to above, is typical of her expression of that attitude. By her saying that
... [M]ost of the documentation is in response to criticism received and it demonstrates that we have engaged further with fellow Stakeholders throughout this process [Emphasis added].
This ridiculous assertion on the part of Ms. Moyes lauding the subdivision committee’s outreach again demonstrates nothing of the sort; what it shows is that Ms. Moyes’ attitude is that everything she says is always right, and that her assertion at the moment should suffice as proof of that ‘fact’.
The HCNNC subdivision application has apparently been a part of Ms. Moyes’ plan for more than a year; the actual application was put together hastily after that 16 November 2017 date. In an email from Ms. Moyes to board members of the HCNC dated 20 December 2018, Ms. Moyes states:
Further in the same email, Ms. Moyes asserts the following:
Ms. Moyes’ contention that she (or members of her committee) contacted — or at least intended to contact — all HCNC board members individually is patently false. On the basis of their statements, no HCNC board member from Solano Canyon or Victor Heights (the two neighborhoods referred to in the email quoted above) has ever been contacted by Ms. Moyes’ committee. Several HCNC board members report that they attempted to schedule a meeting through Ms. Moyes, but she made herself conveniently unavailable. This issue is but one of the many falsehoods that the subdivision committee has perpetrated.
Ms. Moyes submitted a three-page document as part of a CA PRA request that consisted of responses to comments from people who spoke on the record at the 12 March 2018 BONC meeting; a sample is provided, below.
Alejandra Flores, Los Angeles Theater Academy (Solano Canyon Stakeholder)
“feels all behind closed doors”
Documents included : Email correspondence with Ms. Flores following meeting to address her concerns
Allison Rubenfeld, Solano Canyon Resident
“Inadequate outreach”
Ron Fong, HCNC Board Member (Little Tokyo)
“I support self-determination, but I don’t feel Solano, El Pueblo and Victor Heights outreached to”
Danny Young, HCNC Board Member (Solano Canyon)
“residents were not contacted”
Ron Fong and Danny Young are HCNC board members who have stated that they were never contacted by anyone from the HCNNC formation committee, including Ms. Moyes; her response, however, is another example of the rationale she uses to convince everyone that the committee is ‘doing everything right’.
Outreach has been ongoing.
Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Outreach, especially in the peripheral caucuses like Victor Heights and Solano Canyon, ranged from limited to nonexistent. The emphasis from the beginning has been on Chinatown, Chinatown, and only Chinatown.
While the 15 January 2018 deadline appears, on the surface, to be a hard date for submission of subdivision applications, that date quickly became meaningless in the present instance.
Quoting from the above-referenced website,
Outreach – the outreach process used to identify stakeholders within the proposed Neighborhood Council boundaries must be described in detail and 200 to 500 signatures from stakeholders that have an interest within the proposed Neighborhood Council boundaries must be submitted and should reflect the broadest array of stakeholders who will actively participate in the proposed Neighborhood Council [Emphasis added]. Stakeholder signature petitions must include the stakeholder’s first and last name, a contact email and/or phone, type of stakeholder (live, work, own real property or community interest) and the physical address associated with their stakeholdership. The physical address cannot be a post office box. The petition should also include language that states that the stakeholders understand that they are signing to support the creation of a new Neighborhood Council via the subdivision of existing Neighborhood Councils [Emphasis added]. Please include the names of the proposed and existing Neighborhood Councils.
This section was violated repeatedly in the case of the HCNNC subdivision application. First, the stipulation of ‘200 to 500 stakeholders’ is vague as to its exact meaning: does it mean that any number between 200 and 500 is acceptable? Does it mean that 200 and 500 signatures are minimum and maximum numbers? Does it mean that 201 signatures may be acceptable in one case, but 499 may not be in another? Does it mean that DONE may accept whatever number it wishes, and if that is so, depending on what, exactly? No criteria are specified.
Second, the language regarding a certification that stakeholders understand that they are signing is critical here. How is that certification made? Of the eventual total of about 250 signatures that were submitted — and I maintain that there is ample evidence to suspect that many of those signatures were obtained fraudulently — more than 90% were Chinese names; and at the above-referenced public meeting held by BONC on Monday, 12 March 2018, Don Toy said on the record that many signatures from Cathay Manor were obtained from stakeholders who not only did not understand what they were signing, they signed because they were told to do so. (One of the reasons many of these signers did not understand what they were signing is that the subdivision application was never translated from English into Chinese or any other language for those who are not proficient in English.) Several observers at the meeting say that the advising Deputy City Attorney who is assigned to advice the HCNC, Carmen Hawkins, appeared to be signaling to Mr. Toy while he was speaking. What message was Ms. Hawkins attempting to convey to Mr. Toy? It was as if she were ‘warning’ Mr. Toy not to say too much on-the-record, thereby revealing himself.
The application process is specified in the “Plan for a Citywide System of Neighborhood Councils (Plan)”. Article III, Section 2 of the above-named ‘Plan’ states, in part,
If, at any time during the processes described in this section, DONE determines that an application is incomplete, it shall return the application to the applicants along with a detailed list in writing of the missing components required in a certification application and suggestions on how to incorporate missing components. Applicants whose certification application was determined to be incomplete and returned by DONE may at any time re-submit the application after amending it to meet all the necessary criteria [Emphasis added].
A CA PRA request to DONE to determine whether this proscription was followed failed to provide evidence that such notification was ever made, which is yet another failure on the part of DONE to follow established protocol and procedure.
Third, the HCNC is the neighborhood council that would be affected by the HCNNC subdivision, were it to become finalized; yet, a number of emails provided through a CA PRA request to HCNC clearly demonstrates that there was significant communication going on between Ms. Moyes and others about the proposed subdivision well before the Board of HCNC was first notified of the subdivision. This smacks of an effort, lead by Ms. Moyes, to keep information from HCNC, while at the same time, Ms. Moyes was working with the Echo Park Neighborhood Council (EPNC) to garner support for the subdivision. This is particularly troubling, especially since Tad Yenawine, the President of EPNC, and Ms. Moyes, at least at one time, had an easily-provable romantic involvement. Mr. Yenawine should have insisted on recusing himself in all matters related to the HCNNC subdivision application because of his relationship with Ms. Moyes; yet he did not. In fact, Ms. Moyes actively solicited, and even was able to obtain, a letter of support from EPNC for the subdivision application. It was only after vigorous and vocal objection on the part of HCNC to this behind-the-scenes activity that the letter of support was eventually rescinded. All of this occurred before anyone on the HCNC board was even made aware that Ms. Moyes was preparing a subdivision application.
Fourth, there is ample reason to believe that some — perhaps many — of the signatures that were obtained in support of the subdivision application were obtained fraudulently. As a case in point, one such signature was that of Mei Lau. Ms. Lau has stated on the record that she did not sign the signature page. Her on-the-record assertion must be accepted at face value, absent proof to the contrary. This is a portion of an email from Ms. Lau that was part of a CA PRA request #20265
In the manner that has become typical of the tenor of Ms. Moyes’ response to any and all criticism, she said that she believes that the signature of Ms. Lau is genuine. It should be pointed out that what Ms. Moyes believes is of no relevance whatsoever; in point of fact, if Ms. Moyes cannot prove that Ms. Lau’s signature is genuine, then one must believe the on-the-record assertion of Ms. Lau that she did not sign the page; and the only conclusion that can be drawn from this conflicting evidence is that Ms. Lau’s signature was obtained fraudulently. If that is the case, one must wonder whether other signatures were also obtained fraudulently. Given that it was proved that signatures were obtained fraudulently for the HCNC board election two years ago, in which 430 people were registered using a single email address (the original owner of which was Don Toy) as well as from a single physical address (Cathay Manor), is it not prudent to verify the method that was used to verify signatures for something as important as a subdivision application that will physically divide the HCNC? Remember that Don Toy stated on the record at the BONC meeting12 March 2018 that he obtained signatures for the HCNNC subdivision application from the same Cathay Manor, the subject of the fraudulent signatures from the HCNC election two years previously.
The issue of an insufficient number of signatures — some likely fraudulent or, at best, fraudulently-acquired — was addressed by several people at the 12 March 2018 BONC meeting; here is a sample, including Ms. Moyes’ response:
Lydia Moreno, HCNC Board Member (Solano Canyon)
“incomplete and fraudulent”
Laura Velkei, HCNC Board Member (At Large)
“Flawed subdivision process” and number of required signatures not met
Response : Signatures were vetted by DONE and not all were accepted, yet the minimum requirement of 200 signatures was met. All signatures gathered through January 15, 2018, and pages sent to DONE before January 16, 2018. All pages resent to DONE upon request.
This is a blatant falsehood. The fact is that there were many, many pages of signatures that were not submitted to DONE until 30 January 2018, which is evidenced by the following email, and which date is two weeks after the 15 January 2018 deadline. This is a portion of an email from DONE dated 16 February 2018 in response to CA PRA Request 20265 that was submitted 10 February 2018:
In other words, Ms. Moyes assertion that “... all pages [were] sent to DONE before January 16, 2018” is not simply a falsehood; it should be called for what it is: a lie. It is a statement that is used intentionally for the purpose of deception. And ‘... before January 16, 2018” means that the signature pages had to have been submitted at least by the day before, which was 15 January 2018, the ostensible deadline for submission of the subdivision application; yet the initial subdivision application was submitted at 9:17 pm on 15 January 2018 by Ms. Moyes. The document was incomplete in that it contained only 128 signatures, 12 of which were from EPNC board members who were ineligible to sign and were subsequently invalidated. The ‘bottom line’ here is that, by any standard, the subdivision application was incomplete as of 15 January 2018.
As stated above, a CA PRA request provided no evidence that DONE rejected the initial submission or sent the required letter of explanation to the formation committee to explain the nature of the deficiency or deficiencies. A separate CA PRA request to DONE on 22 January 2018 requested all attachments to the HCNNC subdivision application. The request was answered the following day, 23 January 2018. The requestor, Lydia Moreno (HCNC Board member and Treasurer) then asked, by email,
Is this all the pages? I’m interested in the signature pages? Is this all there is[?]
This query was answered by DONE on 24 January 2018:
I confirmed with staff that everything that was attached to the application was forwarded to you.
In short, Ms. Moyes’ statement,
All signatures gathered through January 15, 2018, and pages sent to DONE before January 16, 2018 [Emphasis added].
was a lie.
Finally, this statement by Ms. Moyes is staggering in its falsity. Falsity is ‘the fact of being untrue, incorrect, or insincere’.
Speaker (name to be confirmed)
Solano Canyon will be negatively impacted by development projects as a result of subdivision.
“Steamrolled by development”
A. Moyes Response : In fact, the opposite is true. Since giving more focus to the areas within and around Chinatown and demanding more outreach, presenters of development projects have come to area community groups to gain feedback and respond to community concerns.
Ms. Moyes, once again, is employing her tactic of assertion in the face of any challenge in an attempt to dominate opinion — even if her assertions are, in fact, lies or at best inaccuracies — and it is clear that one of the primary reasons, and perhaps the only reason, for the current HCNNC subdivision application is that Chinatown wishes to be its own neighborhood council — at least, that is what Ms. Moyes has asserted.
The relevant statement is
... a group has gathered in Chinatown to organize a campaign to separate from the Historic Cultural Neighborhood Council (HCNC), and form its own Council.
Notice that the contact person is none other than Ms. Moyes. Since Ms. Moyes asserts that Chinatown wishes to become its own neighborhood council, then what is the need for the deceptive tactics and falsehoods surrounding the fraudulent HCNNC application? Would Ms. Moyes not be better-served if she were simply to submit an application to create a stand-alone Chinatown Neighborhood Council?
One of the primary objectives in Ms. Moyes desperate attempt to force the ill-conceived HCNNC subdivision application through the process, aside from the obvious attempt at a power-grab by Chinatown at the expense of the surrounding neighborhood caucuses, is to paint a derogatory and altogether false picture of the state of the HCNC:
Thank you for the opportunity to submit this Application for Subdivision of the Historic Cultural Neighborhood Council. We, The Committee, place our trust that you will thoroughly consider not only the Application, but also the current state of our neighborhood and the ongoing problems we have neither overcome nor addressed for many years [Emphasis added].
Collusion, Dereliction Of Duty, and Denial Of Due Process
This entire subdivision application process is so fraught with dishonesty, outright lies, fraud, and likely collusion between Ms. Moyes and Mr Fong that it deserves nothing more than to be dismissed out-of-hand in its entirety.
Finally, one must ask: Why has Carmen Hawkins, as the advising Deputy City Attorney, not addressed these many obvious problems and clear violations of protocol and procedure with the HCNNC, DONE, and BONC during this process; it seems that the City had taken the position simply to turn its head and blindly allow this fraud to be perpetrated on the HCNC. In the end, it may be likely that litigation is the only remedy that the stakeholders of the HCNC have left to them to correct this atrocity.Here, Ms. Moyes is, once again, attempting to assert her clear authority to determine what is, and what is not, either important or true. Were it not so potentially damaging to the neighborhood caucuses of the HCNC, her patently self-serving attempts would be pathetic.
Lawrence Bouett is a retired research scientist and registered professional engineer who now conducts historical and genealogical research full-time. A ninth-generation Californian, his primary historical research interests are Los Angeles in general and the Stone Quarry Hills in particular. His ancestors arrived in California with Portolá in 1769 and came to Los Angeles from Mission San Gabriel with the pobladores on September 4, 1781.
Lawrence Bouett may be contacted directly here.
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Home | News | Bruno Latour elected to British Academy
Bruno Latour elected to British Academy
Emeritus Professor at Sciences Po, Bruno Latour has been elected to the British Academy for the humanities and social sciences. Specialist of sociology and the philosophy of sciences, he has developed an analysis of our societies through the prism of anthropology of modernity. As Vice-President of Research at Sciences Po from 2008 to 2012, he impulsed new directions, in particular by creating the medialab, a unique unit of digital analysis of societies.
The British Academy is the UK’s national body for the humanities and social sciences, and an independent fellowship of around 1,400 world-leading scholars and researchers. Each year, the British Academy elects up to 76 outstanding scholars who have achieved academic distinction in the humanities and social sciences, as reflected in scholarly research activity and publication.
Bruno Latour joins the British Academy, a community of over 1400 of the leading minds that make up the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Current Fellows include the classicist Dame Mary Beard, the historian Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Sir Winston Churchill, C.S Lewis, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb.
This year, 76 world-leading academics have been elected from universities across the UK and around the world. As well as a fellowship, the British Academy is a funding body for research, nationally and internationally, and a forum for debate and engagement.
Read the British Academy's press release
Photo: Bruno Latour
Credits: Sciences Po / Manuel Braun
In Support of Fariba Adelkhah
We were shocked to learn of the arrest in Iran of our colleague Fariba Adelkhah and her detention for apparently several weeks, with no possibility of contact with the French authorities.
Lifting the barriers to female entrepreneurship
Whether setting up a new business, negotiating a pay rise or taking on more responsibility in the workplace, women can be supported in reaching leadership positions. As of 2018, Sciences Po's Women in Business Chair aims to improve understanding of the obstacles women face and spearhead action to remove them. Interview with Anne Boring, researcher in charge of the Chair. Anne’s work focuses on the analysis of gender inequalities in the professional world.
Mary Robinson’s 3 Steps to Tackle Climate Change
Mary Robinson, now President of the Elders and climate justice activist, was the seventh President of Ireland, and the first woman ever to hold this office. She also served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002 and as Chancellor of the Trinity College Dublin for twenty years. In June 2019, she was the guest of honour at the Paris School of International Affairs’ graduation ceremony. In her talk, she gives graduates 3 key steps to do their part in the fight against climate change. Watch the video to find out what they are.
U7+ Alliance: A University Alliance To Weigh in on the G7 Agenda
Under the high patronage of the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, the first annual U7+ Alliance Summit took place at Sciences Po on July 9 & 10, 2019, with 47 university leaders from 18 countries. The purpose of the summit was to formalise and vote on a series of founding principles for the U7+ Alliance, and for universities to commit to associated concrete actions to tackle global issues, within their own communities, in the context of the upcoming G7 Summit in Biarritz in August 2019.
Blended Learning: Focus of the 2019 International Teaching and Learning Workshop
This June 2019, Sciences Po hosted the second annual Teaching and Learning Workshop with our global university partners to discuss, debate and share research and methods on the latest innovations in education. This year, the focus was "Blended Learning and Educational Impact," with participants from Harvard University, the National University of Singapore, the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, LSE, King's College London, the African Leadership University, and more.
Highlights of the 2019 Graduation Ceremonies
Over 7,300 people attended the four graduation ceremonies of the Class of 2019 on June 28 & 29, 2019. Graduates walked under the proud gaze of their parents, friends, teachers, companions, and sometimes children to receive their diploma. Relive these unforgettable moments in video.
2019 Graduation: Who Are Our Graduates?
Bright and engaged citizens. Promising futures. Inspiring guests and motivational speeches. Parents brimming with pride. On Friday, 28th of June and Saturday, 29th of June 2019, the Sciences Po graduation ceremonies brought together over 2,500 graduates and their guests at the Philarmonie in Paris. So who are the graduates of the Class of 2019? More
“I challenge each of us to think of humanity”
Mas Mahmud came to France as a refugee. This June 2019, he graduated with a Master’s from the Sciences Po Paris School of International Affairs.
Green China: A Quixotic Vision
Despite an overarching negativity where China and the environment are concerned, it is set to become the leading power in the green economy. However, it is the political elective which must make the policies to make China’s future green. As a one-party-state there is very little green opposition should environmental reforms not be put into practice.
An Early Alumnus from Across the Channel
Since its opening in 1872, Sciences Po has welcomed thousands of British students from neighbouring universities across the Channel. Among the very first Brits to enrol at the university was Sir Austen Chamberlain, an ambitious Cambridge graduate with a brilliant future in European diplomacy. Best known for his role negotiating the Locarno Treaties, for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Chamberlain held the position of Foreign Secretary in the inter-war years from 1924 – 1929. What did he take away from his time as the only British student in Sciences Po’s Class of 1886, and how was that to shape his policy during such a pivotal period in Europe’s history?
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Home » A Smart and Healthy Veggie
A Smart and Healthy Veggie
Couple of news items. First one found by Jane O.
Via the Beeb:
High IQ link to being vegetarian
Intelligent children are more likely to become vegetarians later in life, a study says.
A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10.
Researchers said it could explain why people with higher IQ were healthier as a vegetarian diet was linked to lower heart disease and obesity rates.
The study of 8,179 was reported in the British Medical Journal.
Twenty years after the IQ tests were carried out in 1970, 366 of the participants said they were vegetarian – although more than 100 reported eating either fish or chicken.
Men who were vegetarian had an IQ score of 106, compared with 101 for non-vegetarians; while female vegetarians averaged 104, compared with 99 for non-vegetarians.
Full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6180753.stm
Via Yahoo News:
Low-protein diet might reduce cancer risk
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Researchers studying a group of vegetarians who’d maintained a diet relatively low in protein and calories found that they had lower blood levels of several hormones and other substances that have been tied to certain cancers.
A comparison group of distance runners also had lower levels of most of these substances compared with sedentary adults who followed a typical American diet — that is, relatively high in protein from meat and dairy.
However, the low-protein group also had a potential advantage over the runners: lower levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), a body protein that helps cells grow and multiply. High IGF-1 levels in the blood have been linked to breast, prostate and colon cancers.
It’s not clear that this all translates into lower odds of developing cancer, but the findings are a “first step” in showing how lower-protein diets might alter cancer risk, according to the researchers….
…. Many people are eating too many animal products,” Fontana said, as well as too many processed foods and sugars.
He advised that people try to eat more fruits and vegetables, fiber-rich whole grains, beans and fish, and less red meat. Doing so could bring the amount of calories and protein the average American eats closer to recommended levels — and possibly lower IGF-I levels, according to Dr. Luigi Fontana, an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.
“We hope to further clarify what happens to cancer risk when we are chronically eating more protein than we need,” he said.
Full story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061213/hl_nm/low_protein_dc_1
⟵Soy-based Substance Might Help Fight MS
Have A Green Christmas⟶
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News and culture through the lens of Southern California.
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Many Rose Bowl neighbors oppose hosting an NFL team
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Robert Woods #2 of the USC Trojans leaves the field after losing to the UCLA Bruins 38-28 at Rose Bowl on November 17, 2012 in Pasadena, California.
Harry How/Getty Images
Take Two® | December 31, 2012
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Visitors from the across the country and the world have converged on Pasadena for the Rose Bowl and Parade. People who live near the stadium love the marching bands and intricate parade floats and at least tolerate the traffic tie-ups and tailgaters.
But not everyone is as warm and fuzzy about a National Football League team adding more big games to the Rose Bowl's schedule.
That became a real possibility last month when the Pasadena City Council passed an ordinance that doubles the number of large events allowed each year at the Rose Bowl in order to possibly accomodate an NFL team.
The ordinance passed by a vote of 7 -1 at a meeting attended by more than a hundred people, most of whom were there in opposition to an NFL team renting the Rose Bowl while a permanent home is built elsewhere in the L.A. region.
The councilman who represents neighborhoods near the stadium, Steve Madison, voted along with the majority, acknowledging that he too endures the game-day hassles of living near the Rose Bowl. Six years ago, Madison cast the swing vote against a plan to bring an NFL team to the Rose Bowl permanently. But that was before the great recession, and before major renovations at the 90-year-old Rose Bowl faced a funding gap of $30 million.
“This is different," Madison explained before the vote. "This is a temporary matter where we have dire financial needs and an opportunity to address those."
Madison and his colleagues who supported the ordinance insisted the vote was not for a deal with an NFL team, but to give Pasadena a chance to negotiate one if a team comes to L.A.
"I know this won’t be popular unanimously in my district," Madison said. He was right: a number of his constituents have launched a campaign to recall Madison. The campaign's web site features a harrowing video of a fistfight breaking out in the stands at an Oakland Raiders game against the San Diego Chargers.
“When you Google 'NFL fights or drunkenness,' you will see an infinite amount of fights and videotape on what happens both in and outside the stadium,” says Mike Vogler, the leader of the recall effort and a major opponent of the NFL at the Rose Bowl.
Vogler, an attorney and accountant by training, lives about a mile from the stadium. He lives with his three young daughters in a beautiful old home on what he likes to call "the loveliest street in America."
The Rose Bowl is already home to UCLA football games. Vogler, a UCLA grad, is OK with those games. But he says NFL games would be too much.
“The NFL brings an element with it that is not particularly conducive nearly every week of large transitory and regional traffic," Vogler says. "It’s no secret that there are often drunken tailgaters at NFL games.”
Vogler dismisses suggestions that he and his affluent West Pasadena neighbors are crying "not-in-my-backyard."
“The NFL is an oligarchy of billionaires. We are the 99 percenters here who live in this community. The NFL isn’t," Vogler insists. "People from all walks of life come down to the Arroyo Seco and utilize it. They hike around it, they bike around it. Kids play soccer and fly kites.”
Indeed, near the stadium in the Arroyo Seco is the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center, Kidspace Museum, and the Brookside Golf Course. On UCLA game days, and during the Rose Bowl, those facilities are closed. The golf course serves as a parking lot. Two days after this year's UCLA-USC game on a rainy Saturday, tire tracks marked the fairways.
“It’s all muddy, everything’s messed up," said George Andre, who'd taken off early from his marketing job to play a round. "Kinda sucks being out here.”
But Andre said he'd be willing to sacrifice the golf course, or at least its appearance, for an NFL team. He sees pro football as an opportunity to bring more jobs and money to the area.
Andre doesn't live near the Rose Bowl. He lives miles away in Hacienda Heights — not a neighborhood that could be affected should the NFL temporarily use the Rose Bowl. A future NFL team would be based permanently in downtown L.A. or the City of Industry. When reminded of that, Andre changed his tune.
“Keep it here. I don’t want it in Industry," he said, laughing. "That’s too close to me. I have enough traffic on the 60 freeway already. I don’t want anymore.”
If the NFL does come to L.A, it will be in someone’s backyard. But some people living in Pasadena don’t want the NFL to use the Rose Bowl — even temporarily.
More from this episode: Take Two® FOR December 31, 2012
Take Two for December 31, 2012
Health insurance companies plan to increase rates in 2013
Will Congress reach a deal on the fiscal cliff by midnight?
Junior's Deli closing after 53 years due to rent dispute
Neighborhood Watch groups go online to stop crime
South Asian community in CA reacts to assault of 23-year-old woman in New Delhi
The biggest TV trends in 2012
Charles Phoenix on the history and tradition of the Rose Parade
Hollywood Monday: 2012's record $10.8 billion box office & Oscar buzz
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Boys basketball: St. Cloud Cathedral 80, Bemidji 45
Brindley Theisen scored 45 points and changed the school record books
Boys basketball: St. Cloud Cathedral 80, Bemidji 45 Brindley Theisen scored 45 points and changed the school record books Check out this story on sctimes.com: http://www.sctimes.com/story/sports/high-school/2015/02/14/boys-basketball-st-cloud-cathedral-bemidji/23439901/
TIMES STAFF REPORT Published 8:42 p.m. CT Feb. 14, 2015 | Updated 8:45 p.m. CT Feb. 14, 2015
Cathedral(Photo: Times graphic)
Brindley Theisen scored 45 points and changed the school record books in St. Cloud Cathedral's 80-45 nonconference win Saturday over Bemidji at Cathedral High School.
Theisen's point total was the second-highest for a single game in school history and three fewer than record-holder Tom Hamm, who set the record of 48 in 1962.
The senior guard also hit nine three-pointers to break Rob Mettenburg's single-game record of eight, which was set in 1987.
Bryant Bohlig added 16 points for the Crusaders (20-4). Nate Snell led the Lumberjacks (4-20) with 12 points.
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Home / Southcoast News / Community / St. Luke’s Hospital Auxiliary announces 2016 scholarship winners
St. Luke’s Hospital Auxiliary announces 2016 scholarship winners
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — The St. Luke’s Hospital Auxiliary, a part of Southcoast Health, recently announced $5,000 in scholarship awards for Greater New Bedford students who are pursuing a career in healthcare.
The awards were presented by Shauneen Crane, Scholarship Chair for the St. Luke’s Hospital Auxiliary, during the annual Scholarship Luncheon on June 7 at the Century House in New Bedford.
The 2016 Scholarship winners are:
Rumyana Lazarova, a Dartmouth High School graduate, will be entering University of Mass-Amherst to begin her studies in biochemistry.
Megan Pereira, a graduate of Bishop Stang High School, will be entering Simmons College’s Nursing Program and the accelerated 3+3 Exercise Science Program/Doctorate in Physical Therapy Program.
Madison Raposa, a graduate of Greater New Bedford Vocational Technical High School, will be entering the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she will major in Pre-Medical Studies.
Ashley Rice, a Fairhaven High School graduate, will be entering the University of Massachusetts Amherst to begin her studies in Health Sciences.
Elizabeth Rodericks, a Fairhaven High School graduate, will be entering Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences to begin studying in the field of medical science – anesthesiology, pathology, and molecular biology.
The St. Luke’s Hospital Auxiliary is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to render service to St. Luke’s Hospital, its tax-exempt subsidiaries, its patients and to assist in promoting the health and welfare of the community.
Joining the Auxiliary is a great way to become involved in your community hospital. Members serve as ambassadors to the community on behalf of the hospital. For more information or to join, please contact Jessie, Membership Chair, at 508-636-5324.
Charlton Memorial Hospital Auxiliary awards $5,000 in college scholarships to Fall River area students
Tobey Hospital Guild grants scholarships to three Wareham area students
St. Luke’s Hospital Auxiliary awards $5,000 in college scholarships to Greater New Bedford students
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“Old Man Take a Look at My Life” – Age Discrimination in California
November 2, 2018 | Daniel A. Thompson
In 1970, after finding early success as a musician, a twenty-five-year-old Neil Young purchased the Broken Arrow Ranch in Northern California. As part of the purchase, Mr. Young inherited two elderly employees, Louis Avila and his wife Clara, who lived on the ranch as caretakers. A fond relationship developed, and Mr. Young eventually wrote the song “Old Man” as a tribute to Mr. Avila. The lyrics of the song compare two men born decades apart by musing, “Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like you were.”
Forty-eight years later, baby boomers who enjoyed this folk-rock tune are now finding themselves in situations more akin to Mr. Availa than Neil Young and are now the employees of younger owners and managers. Unfortunately, many of these employees are not inspiring soulful ballads. Instead, they are being treated poorly or forced out after years of dedicated employment.
The first thing to understand about age discrimination is that it’s not just for baby boomers. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (“ADEA”) and California Fair Employment and Housing Act (“FEHA”) protect workers and job applicants over the age of 40. So, the government considers employees who rocked out to Bon Jovi and Madonna just as old as those who rocked out to Elvis and the Beatles.
The second thing to understand is how age discrimination occurs. There are a number of ways that employers might use to subtly undermine and undervalue older workers, including:
Demotion in favor of younger employees
Dismissal or “reduction in force” that has a disproportionate impact on older workers.
Being passed over for a promotion.
Harassment and unwelcome comments such as, “Hey, old timer, when are you going to retire?”
Favoritism and unfavorable comparisons. This could include comments or even giving better assignments to younger workers.
Uneven discipline
There is a four-part test that courts use to determine whether age discrimination occurred: 1) at the time of the adverse action the employee was 40 years of age or older, 2) an adverse employment action was taken against the employee, 3) at the time of the adverse action the employee was satisfactorily performing his or her job and 4) the employee was replaced in his position by a significantly younger person. Hersant v. Cal. Dept. of Soc. Serv. (1997) 57 Cal.App.4th 997, 1002-1003.
Courts differ on how much of an age gap between plaintiff and the workers treated more favorably is enough to infer a discriminatory intent. Some courts hold that any gap of less than 10 years is presumptively insignificant, putting the burden on plaintiff to produce evidence that the employer considered the age gap significant. Guz v. Bechtel Nat’l, Inc., supra, 24 Cal.App.4th at 366-367. In other words, if you were terminated for no reason at age 65 and replaced by someone younger than 55, age discrimination can be inferred.
Salary is also a factor. In the case of a reduction in force, the use of salary as the basis for determine who to layoff may be found to constitute age discrimination “if use of that criterion adversely impacts older workers as a group.” Gov. Code. § 12941 (emphasis added). In other words, the law recognizes that salary is reflective of experience and tenure. Therefore, cutting costs by terminating an older employee may very well be age discrimination.
The sad truth is that some employers value cost-cutting over experience. If you believe you are being targeted because of your age, it is important to seek the advice of a qualified employment law attorney.
Daniel Thompson is an employment lawyer with Davis & Wojcik APLC, a Southern California based law firm with offices located in Temecula and Hemet. He can be reached at (951) 652-9000.
Posted in: Age Discrimination and Posts for Employees
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Which Walking Dead Storylines Will Pop Up In Season 6?
Photo: AMC
The Walking Dead TV show has never been a note-for-note adaptation of the Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard comic books it takes its name from; instead, the writers room has opted to cherry-pick certain stories and character moments from the comics, and remixed them for the shows in ways that often surprise even the most devout “Dead” heads.
It looks like the remix approach is rearing its head again in season six, according to show runner Scott M. Gimple. He sat down with Entertainment Weekly recently to talk about his plans for the upcoming run of “Walking Dead,” and those plans involve exploring something largely unseen in the comics, but still very much present.
“I’ll say this: I think there’s a really cool aspect to the first half of the season that serves almost as a prequel to some direct comic stuff in the second half of the season,” he says. “I think there’s a way that Robert did some of the story that we’re reaching that had a real past to it, where people are referring to some things in the past in the comic. And we’re able to portray some of that backstory in some ways that you didn’t get to see in the comic.”
more: Everything You Need To Know About San Diego Comic-Con 2015
Given that The Walking Dead comics number 140+ issues at this point, there’s no shortage of material available for Gimple and his team. Here are three possibilities, based on the show’s current events in relation to comic book events. Potential spoilers ahead.
Down Goes Davidson
In the comics, when Rick and company first arrive in Alexandria, we meet Douglas Monroe, the leader of the community. (Douglas was more or less split into two characters, Deanna and Reggie Monroe, for the show.) Although Monroe seems cool, calm and collected on the surface, there’s a rage bubbling underneath, specifically stemming from a man he was forced into exiling early on in Alexandrian history.
The man, named Davidson, never actually appears in the pages of Walking Dead, at least not yet. But it’s eventually revealed that Davidson was the original founder and leader of Alexandria, and was manipulating members of the community, specifically women, so much so that one of his victims ultimately killed herself. Once Monroe and others caught onto Davidson’s schemes, they burned a walker body to double as Davidson’s body, and then sent the man out into exile. He’s never been seen or heard from since.
Based on Gimple’s comments, it’s possible we could see a Davidson story play out in the first half of season six. It’s the exact kind of sociopolitical dilemma that the show loves to toy with, especially in a setting like Alexandria. There’s a perfect fill-in for Davidson on the show, too, in the form of Nicholas, the sniveling coward whose spinelessness got Noah and Deanna’s son killed during a supply run.
In an even more extreme scenario, the first half of season six could continue the discussion of whether or not to exile Rick; after all, in the comics, Doug Monroe consistently compares Rick to Davidson, so the link already exists. On top of that, the Walking Dead Comic-Con poster has already made it clear that a potential civil war is brewing in Alexandria. Could it erupt over the issue of Rick’s future in the community?
All possibilities, and all speculation until proven otherwise.
Negan Begins
Even if you haven’t read The Walking Dead comics, odds are that you’ve at least heard of Negan already. He’s infamous in Walking Dead lore, the kind of villain that makes Governor Don’t-Call-Him-Philip Blake look like a total hero. There’s no way Walking Dead wraps its run without bringing Negan into the mix, and frankly, there’s almost no way we leave season six without spotting him — and, as a word of warning, his very first scene will absolutely break your heart and bash your brains in.
Assuming Negan’s first scene from the comics is his first scene on the show, that is. A bit of background: Negan runs a group called the Saviors, a community that derives the lion’s share of its power from dominating other similar communities — places like Alexandria, for instance. How did Negan and the Saviors come into such a position of power? We never see it for ourselves in the comics, but perhaps that’s something the Walking Dead show writers are interested in playing out.
Building up Negan from the ground up paves the way for the show to similarly explore some of the other communities in the Walking Dead universe that we haven’t seen yet. It could be the gateway toward meeting folks like Paul “Jesus” Monroe (no relation to Doug/Deanna/Reg) from the Hilltop and King Ezekiel from the Kingdom… which means getting a tiger on the show. (It’ll make sense when we get to it. Honestly, maybe it WON’T make sense, but it should be pretty awesome anyway.)
In other words, beginning Negan’s story at the beginning — or at least earlier than we meet him in The Walking Dead comics — could mean the beginning of a whole bunch of other pivotal stories as well. Then again, the first half of season six feels early to start exploring all of those characters and corners of The Walking Dead. It also undercuts the sheer impact of Negan’s introduction in the books, and it’s a moment the show will undoubtedly want to recapture — unfortunately at the expense of one fan-favorite character or another.
No spoilers on that death here, but it’s not hard to look up if you’re truly curious. Just be warned that it’s a big one, so (a) DON’T LOOK IT UP, (b) bring tissues and a barf bag if you DO go looking (but DON’T), and (c) keep in mind that the show loves remixing events from the comics, so this person’s fate is not completely signed, sealed and delivered just yet.
But seriously, why did you just look that up? Now your whole week is ruined!
This is a dark horse contender, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Talking about these characters means getting deep into current events in The Walking Dead comics, which are pretty damn different from where we are on the show. Tread lightly, if you wish to tread at all.
Kirkman and Adlard’s current run on Walking Dead has introduced an all-new group of potential bad guys into the mix, a threat far worse than any walker horde or individual man has ever posed before. They’re known as the Whisperers, and they’re human beings who roam the world blending in with the zombies, thanks to the rotting flesh suits they fashion for themselves. It’s… really gross.
The Whisperers walk and act like walkers, in other words, but talk and scheme like the humans they are beneath their zombie skin-suit surfaces. They are led by a bald woman named Alpha, who long ago abandoned her name and conventionally civilized ways. She has an enormous army of walkers at her disposal, ready to unleash them on anyone at any time — the zombie apocalypse’s equivalent of a nuclear bomb, pretty much. And guess what? She does not like Rick Grimes and his people. Not one bit.
Alpha and the Whisperers have yet to strike with full force, as their story remains ongoing, but even still, they are the most frightening villains we’ve met in The Walking Dead comics so far, and it’s not close. It’s such an amazingly visual idea, too, seeing humans walking around wearing walker skins as camouflage; in a very real way, the Whisperers feel like the first Walking Dead comic book characters designed with their future appearance on the show in mind.
If the show moves forward at the pace of the comics, then we won’t see the Whisperers until season seven or eight. But the show doesn’t move forward at the pace of the comics. It spent a full season on Hershel’s farm, when Hershel’s farm only lasted three issues. It spent one and a half season at the prison, even though the prison was one of the most enduring locations in the comics. Time-tables constantly change between The Walking Dead show and source material, and it’s entirely possible that we’ll see the origins of the Whisperers well before we see them arrive fully-formed on the show. If that’s the case, don’t say we didn’t warn you when they come a-crawling.
#television post
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SIU Closes Investigation into Vehicle Injuries sustained near Marathon
Case Number: 11-PVI-185
Other News Releases Related to Case 11-PVI-185
SIU Investigating Collision near Marathon
Mississauga (3 November, 2011) --- The Special Investigations Unit (SIU) has reviewed the facts around the September 2011 vehicle injuries sustained by a fourteen-year-old driver and his sixteen-year-old passenger. Ian Scott, the Director of the SIU, has concluded there are no reasonable grounds to believe an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officer committed a criminal offence in this case.
The SIU assigned four investigators and one forensic investigator to probe the circumstances of this incident. As is his legal right, the subject officer did not consent to the release of his duty notes or to an interview with the SIU. Twelve witness officers were interviewed or provided duty notes and eighteen civilian witnesses were interviewed. Due to delays in flight availability and the fact that the Trans-Canada Highway was closed because of the collision, it was agreed that OPP collision investigators and reconstructionists would process the scene, take measurements, photograph and collect the evidence.
The investigation found that the following events took place on September 11:
• At approximately 2:30 p.m., the subject officer and another officer saw a Toyota Corolla drive past them at an excessive rate of speed while they were involved in other matters in Schreiber on Hwy 17. They had previously been made aware that a car fitting its description was seen speeding.
• They began a pursuit of the vehicle with the subject officer driving and his partner reporting to the Communications Centre in Thunder Bay. They activated their emergency equipment and stayed in contact with dispatch throughout the suspect apprehension pursuit. They drove toward Terrace Bay at speeds of up to 170 km/h but had difficulty maintaining visual contact of the pursued vehicle. They slowed down as they drove through Terrace Bay. At a hill near Jackfish Lake, east of Terrace Bay, the partner was able to read the rear licence plate, called it in, and ascertained that the car was stolen.
• The officers lost sight of the car, and at an ‘S’ turn, saw fresh skid marks and the vehicle in question in the eastbound lane against a guard rail. The pursued vehicle had left the highway and slammed into a rock cut beside the highway.
• They approached the two individuals in the vehicle. The driver sustained a fractured left clavicle and lacerated liver and the passenger sustained a compound fracture to his right forearm, facial fractures, a hemothorax to his lung and a lacerated spleen.
Director Scott said, "In my view, the subject officer followed the criteria set out in the ‘Suspect Apprehension Pursuits’ section of the Police Services Act. The subject officer had the lawful authority to initiate and engage in this pursuit because the pursued vehicle refused to stop for police and continued to flee. In addition, once the officers ascertained that the vehicle was stolen, they had further authority to pursue the vehicle. The subject officer activated his emergency equipment and kept in constant contact with the Communications Centre. Further, they took into consideration the road conditions. Finally, there is no suggestion of physical contact between the pursuing and pursued vehicles. Accordingly, the driver of the pursued vehicle was the cause of this serious motor vehicle collision and the subject officer cannot in my view be held criminally liable for the injuries that he and his passenger sustained as a result."
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Weekly Gem #170 Make a stand here, and every American will be behind you!
Location: This ‘hidden gem’ is located at the east end of South Lubec Road, on West Quoddy Head, in Maine (see the Clue Me! Map).
You can stand there on the rocks between the sea and the forest of spruce and fir and feel, backing you up, the whole expanse and power of this country, reaching away behind you to the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. It's quite a sensation.
~~ Louise Dickinson Rich,”The Coast of Maine.”
Being the farthest point east on the U.S. mainland, West Quoddy Head is a geographically extreme location - yet very easy to visit. The red and white lighthouse and the attached keeper's house we see today is the third tower on this site.
The first was built in 1808 by order of Thomas Jefferson. It was made of wood and the "light" was a flame from a wick that used sperm whale oil, lard oil or kerosene for fuel. Try keeping that candle lit during a nor'easter! It certainly makes a person appreciate "the keeper of the light" and admire the job he did to keep sailors alive.
The second was built in 1830. It was made of stone. Electricity was introduced for light in the tower in 1834.
In 1857 the lighthouse we see today was built. It included a Fresnel lens from France, which was far superior to those made in the U.S.
You might think that light is the most important function of a lighthouse, and generally that’s true. But in the case of West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, the fog signal is often most important. The light simply can’t penetrate the pea soup! (Some sailors suspect that fog is manufactured in Canada’s Fundy Bay and shipped south to the Maine coast!) The lighthouse received one of the nation's first fog bells in 1820. By 1827, Congress gave the keeper of Quoddy Head Lighthouse an extra $60 per year because he spent so much time ringing the fog bell. In 1885, the steam whistle at West Quoddy logged more hours of operation than any other fog signal in the United States – 1,945 hours (that's about 81 days!)
Does anybody else smell peppermint infused fog?
West Quoddy lighthouse.
This lighthouse is built on the easternmost point in the United States mainland. It is only one of two U.S. lighthouses to be painted red and white. The striped color helps it stand out against the snow.
Pickpockets are blue, their faces are red. Foiled again! 130°® satchels, here to protect your good stuff.
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Ike Barinholtz on Making His Directorial Debut With ‘The Oath’ [Interview]
Posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2018 by Steven Prokopy
Chicago native Ike Barinholtz has made a career out of scene stealing, from his earliest days as an improv performer with Improv Olympic and Second City (among others) and a cast member on MadTV in the early 2000s to bigger television roles in Eastbound & Down to The Mindy Project. In more recent years, Barinholtz landed sizable supporting roles in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, Suicide Squad, Snatched, the Netflix film Bright, and a very funny turn in Blockers earlier this year.
But his latest work, The Oath, not only features his largest role to date, but it also marks his debut as a writer/director of a film that is part dark comedy, part family drama, and eventually, part high-tension thriller. Set primarily over the 24-hours surrounding a Thanksgiving feast hosted by Barinholtz’s Chris and wife Kai (Tiffany Haddish, in a wonderfully dialed-back performance) at their home, the story involves the (fictional) president wanting every American to sign a loyalty oath to the country.
As the nation grows closer to the oath’s Black Friday deadline, tensions and conflicts are on the rise, and while the oath is said to be voluntary, those who refuse to sign are treated like criminals and traitors. Imagine that, and then put the pressure of preparing a meal the entire family, which includes Chris’s mom (Nora Dunn), brother (Jon Barinholtz, Ike’s real-life sibling) and his instigator girlfriend (Meredith Hagner), sister (Carrie Brownstein) and her sickly husband (Jay Duplass). The situation spins out of control when two government agents (John Cho and Billy Magnussen) arrive at the front door. The film feels timely, relevant, and works as a genuine conversation starter. More importantly, The Oath makes me genuinely interesting to see what Barinholtz does next as a filmmaker.
/Film spoke to Barinholtz recently in Chicago about The Oath and how much of it was based on real-life conversations/arguments amongst his friends and family, the inspiration behind the film “loyalty oath,” and how he made sure the film found ways to poke fun at both conservatives and liberals who watch too much 24-hour news. The film is now playing in select theaters.
For context, this interview occurred just a few hours before a Q&A screening of The Oath Barinholtz and I did, along with Nora Dunn. The publicist has just informed him that I’ll be moderating as we begin…
Ike: Holy shit, man. Thank you. We’re going to have some fun tonight. I’ve got a lot of old Chicago Jews coming, so they’ll be yelling “What?!” My 94-year-old grandmother is seeing it; I’m worried she’s going to ask a lot of questions…during the film.
First of all my condolences on the Cubs not winning the wildcard game earlier today.
Ike: Aw, god damn. What were they swinging at. I wish I hadn’t seen it. It sucked.
I saw that Cubs commercial you made for them, where you basically just get to infiltrate every part of Wrigley Field. What a fan’s dream come true that must have been to shoot.
Ike: There’s a guy who works for the organization, and once a year when the Cubs come out to play the Dodgers, the Cubs have a box and the they invite all of the Chicago people who live in L.A. It great. You get to see Bob Newhart, Bob Odenkirk. And I met this guy, and he’s the one who got me to throw out the first pitch a couple of years ago, and he said we might be doing this commercial, and I said, “Absolutely.” I’m doing this for the Cubs; I grew up in the neighborhood. Being inside the scoreboard was pretty amazing. I’ve wanted to go in there since I was young, when I thought working in there would be a dream job. And then I got in there and was like “This is a rough job.” It’s hot in there, and there aren’t a lot of bathroom facilities, but it was a dream come true.
This idea of the family dinner table as a battlefield is a tried-and-true, family-drama idea, and we all have a relative who’s problematic, and The Oath is that to the Nth degree. Where did you get the idea of combining that idea with living in the most problematic times we’re seen in decades?
Ike: It was shortly after the 2016 election, and I had my family come out to Chicago for the holidays, and after diner, my mom, my brother and I got into this conversation—a nasty argument, really—about what happened. And I woke up the next day realizing “We all voted for the same person. What the hell is going on? What is happening at this friendly house? What’s going on across the country?” As I started talking to my friend who had all flown home and reading articles and talking to my own family, I knew that that landscape of the holiday table in America and the age-old maxim of not talking politics at the table had blown up. It was over. If you were able to get through a Thanksgiving in 2018 and you don’t talk about politics, you have a level of discipline that I just don’t understand. Or bad communication. One or the other—either way, it’s not good.
So I knew that that kind of arena would be a ripe place for satire, and I knew I needed another big component. I love dystopic movies, I’m always curious about the genesis of dystopia—how did this begin. So I came up with this concept of this semi-compulsory oath, and once I layered that in, it just worked and it seemed to be successful at being the thing that pulled people apart when they were already apart to begin with. It was taking that thing we know and love, or hate, and combining it with this looming government crisis, and luckily we hit the balance.
It’s fascinating to watch Tiffany Haddish in this. I don’t think we’ve ever seen her in a role like this, where she gets to play such a great range, from being really dialed back and trying to keep the peace, and eventually we get to watch her degenerate and explode. Because of the nature of everyone in the film slowly getting riled up, were you able to shoot things more or less chronologically?
Ike: Somewhat. We were able to get out first parts. It’s loosely based on my own life and me being slowly driven crazy after the election. With every headline, I had to tell my wife “Can you believe this shit?” Eventually, she gets numb to it and starts to feel like she’s married to Chicken Little. So to see Tiffany in that internalized, small, quietly trying to get her daughter to school, trying to get the family fed, and slowly being worn down. We shot a lot of that first. Then as she hits that point, we really did shoot all of the Thanksgiving and the more bloody stuff somewhat chronologically. Then we went back in time to the early scenes in the movie, where I’m clean shaven and slightly leaner. But yeah, she really did an amazing job.
How much of that was her understanding the tone and just getting it right, or did you have to direct to change up the performance at all?
Ike: When I first met with her to talk about the script, she said, “I’ve never seen this movie before. I get it, I want to do it, it’s happening now, and it’s exactly what’s happening in my life now.” I clearly said to her, this character is suffering, she’s quietly suffering, and she wants to tell her husband “Shut the fuck up!” but she can’t because she loves him and understands the stress he’s in, but it’s wearing her down. I did not have to give her a whole lot of direction on that; she really nailed the tone. There was some calibration stuff throughout the story: “You’re at a seven, and you can go to a nine here. Or go to a five.” She’s incapable of being false, and for this movie, which is very much based in reality, she delivered from the jump.
You mentioned that this sprung from this family conversation, and your brother is in the film. Is Nora playing a version of your mom from that conversation?
Ike: In a way, she is, in that mothers are inherently peacemakers. They do foresee the problem and they know it’s coming and they will see “Just so you know, let’s not talk about that.” But unlike Nora’s character, my mother is more vocal and doesn’t give a shit. She’s a cancer survivor, so she doesn’t give a shit. She’s say what’s on her mind. But she is a still a mama bear, and the worst thing for her is watching her sons fight.
Speaking of which, you do get many chance to got ballistic on your brother. Is that an easy thing to tap into after a lifetime of what I imagine is nonstop sibling abuse?
Ike: That’s why I cast him. There are a lot of great actors who could have played that part, but no one that I threw a bag of change at in 1989 and gave a black eye. I really, truly knew that because our characters were so combative that I can push him. You know how you’ll protect you brother more than anyone, but you will also get madder at your brother more than anyone? There’s 35 years of shit between us, and I knew that I could scratch at this—I was really very manipulative—and when my mom saw the movie, she said, “I know there are scenes where you’re really being mean to your brother.” I said, “Yeah, but I paid him.” But no one pisses you off more than you’re brother, I knew I could get there with him and vice versa. That fraternal love, my man.
Continue Reading The Oath Interview >>
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‘The Oath’ Red Band Trailer: Thanksgiving Drama Turns Violent With Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz
Trailer Round-Up: ‘Hunter Killer’, ‘Camping’, ‘The Oath’, ‘F*ck You All: The Uwe Boll Story’, and Many More
/Featured Stories Sidebar, Comedy, Features, Interviews, Ike Barinholtz, The Oath
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HP Wraps Up Final Round Of Layoffs In Conway
Oct 29, 2013 at 12:14 AM Oct 29, 2013 at 10:54 AM
CONWAY — A round of layoffs announced this summer is wrapping up at Hewlett Packard’s Conway facility.
The company announced in July that 500 jobs would be cut locally. Some employees lost their jobs immediately while other jobs were phased out over time.
Conway officials said Monday they understood HP employees let go this month would be the last, or among the last, of the layoffs announced in July.
The layoffs were part of a global restructuring announced by HP in 2012, in which the company said it planned to cut 9,000 positions in the United States to stabilize declining revenues. HP CEO Meg Whitman said earlier this month that after 2014, HP would "not do another big restructuring."
Conway Development Corp. Vice President Jamie Gates said a silver lining in the layoffs has been that the release of a few hundred skilled workers into the local job pool has "attracted the attention of a lot of companies to Conway."
"These are well-educated employees who have been vetted by the largest tech company on the planet," Gates said. "They’re all eminently employable."
With the 500 layoffs, HP still employs about 800 workers at its Conway facility.
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Irish women obtaining abortions in UK
Not one Irish woman has had an abortion in the UK in order to save her life since 1992, new research from the Committee for Excellence in Maternal Healthcare (CEMH) has shown.
A response to a freedom of information request by the Committee to the British Department of Health shows that, between 1992 and 2010, no abortions were carried out on Irish women under section F of the UK Abortion Act, which requires records to be kept of abortions that were carried out to “save the life of the mother”.
Further, the same data shows that no abortions were carried out on Irish women between 1992 and 2010 under Section G of the same Act, which requires records to be kept of abortions conducted to “prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman”.
Commenting on the data for CEMH, Dr Eoghan de Faoite said:
“This data makes clear what Irish women have known all along – they do not have to leave Ireland to seek abortions if their life is in danger. In fact, not one abortion has been carried out to save an Irish woman’s life since the X case, despite the frequent and misleading claims of those who support the provision of induced abortion.
“As the Dublin Declaration, issued following the International Symposium on Maternal Health, confirmed: ‘the prohibition of abortion does not affect, in any way, the availability of optimal care to pregnant women’. ”
“Further, the data makes clear that not one single abortion has been carried out on an Irish woman in the UK to protect her from grave permanent injury to her physical or mental health”.
“The results of this investigation are hugely significant for the government at this current time. Policy makers must be aware of the facts revealed by the official British records which show that abortions are not being carried out on Irish women in order to save their lives.
“Irish women will not be surprised by these figures. Pregnancy is not a disease and abortion is not a cure. The oft-repeated claim that Irish women are travelling for so-called ‘life-saving’ abortions are shown to be false and without foundation. The truth is that British statistics show not a single life saved by an abortion in 20 years,” he added.
What we do know from the British experience is that in 2010, 66 children were born as a result of botched abortions in the United Kingdom and left to die. This is not a record to emulate in regard to human rights, or maternal health.
These figures make absolutely clear that Irish women are not traveling to Britain from Ireland to procure abortions in order to save their lives. Excellence in Maternal Healthcare should strive to obtain the best possible outcome for both mother and baby.
Symposium is awarded 6 CME points by the RCPI August 31, 2012 0 comments
International Symposium to be held in Dublin August 14, 2012 0 comments
Symposium is awarded 6 CME points by the RCPI
International Symposium to be held in Dublin
International Symposium on Maternal Health. Copyright © 2011. All rights reserved.
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Team England’s greatest moments of 2018
As 2019 fast approaches, it’s that time of year where awards ceremonies are in full flow and the question of who will win Sports Personality of the Year is on everyone’s lips as we look back at the nation’s sporting achievements from the past 12 months.
With that thought in mind, we thought we’d make December the time to celebrate Team England’s greatest moments from 2018 – and with 45 gold medals, 45 silver medals and 46 bronze medals from this year’s Commonwealth Games, there’s plenty to great moments to pick from.
For the next three weeks across Team England’s Facebook, Twitter & Instagram pages we’ll be celebrating a few of our highlights from a medal-laden 2018. Here’s a few that might well make the cut…
Big Fraze gets his moment
A long-standing member of the GB boxing set-up, Frazer Clarke had been made to wait for his moment in the ring.
First he missed out to Anthony Joshua in selection for the London 2012 Olympic Games, then experienced the same fate when Joe Joyce filled the super-heavyweight slot at both the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games and the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. But good things come to those who wait.
With eight medals already in the hands of the 12-strong England boxing team, Clarke’s gold medal bout brought the Gold Coast boxing competition to an end and the big man didn’t disappoint, beating India’s Satish Kumar by unanimous decision to follow in the footsteps of Joshua and Joyce.
Frazer Clarke celebrates Super Heavyweight gold
Fourth time lucky for James Willstrop
Representing Team England at his fourth Commonwealth Games, James Willstrop already had a stack of Commonwealth medals to his name leading into the Games. But not the one he coveted the most.
In all three previous Commonwealth Games, Willstrop had lost out to teammate Nick Matthew in the men’s singles event – including twice in the final.
However aged 34 and at the fourth time of asking, Willstrop claimed the biggest win of his career in what could potentially be his final Commonwealth Games experience.
James Willstrop wins Commonwealth gold at fourth attempt
Sophie Hahn completes the set
Already a European, World and Olympic champion, not to mention a world record holder too, Sophie Hahn only had one title missing from her impressive résumé, a Commonwealth title.
Still aged just 21-years-old, Hahn was undoubtedly the hot favourite leading into the T38 100m final and it was to be a case of business as usual as the Nottingham-born athlete stormed to victory in a Games record time of 12.46 seconds to complete her set of major event titles.
Sophie Hahn breaks Games record in T38 100m final
Roses make history
Since Netball was first introduced to the Commonwealth Games in 1998, never before had Australia and New Zealand failed to reach the final. But in 2018 England’s Roses had other ideas.
First making history as Jo Harten’s semi-final winner in the final second of play put England in the Commonwealth Games final, the class of 2018 had gone further than any Roses team before them.
Then in the early hours of Sunday morning on April 15 2018, lightning struck twice as Helen Housby’s last-second goal in the Commonwealth final sunk the hosts and defending champions Australia as The Roses wrote their name in Commonwealth history.
Helen Housby reacts after scoring in the final second to secure gold in Commonwealth games final versus Australia
Athletics Boxing Frazer Clarke James Willstrop Netball Sophie Hahn MBE Squash
Team England announces new scholarship for young athletes
Sports & venues confirmed for Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games
Birmingham 2022: Four years to go!
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Talktalk aftermath are we all failing to deliver on security
The TalkTalk aftermath: are we all failing to deliver on security?
Date: 26 October 2015
At the end of last week, broadband and telecoms company TalkTalk announced it had been hit by a cyber attack. As a result, there was a chance sensitive customer data had been accessed.
This is just the latest in a string of high-profile attacks. From eBay and Kickstarter to Tesco and more, TalkTalk and its customers aren't alone in suffering at the hands of digital criminals.
Is security tight enough?
Clearly, the ultimate blame for these incidents lies with the attackers who set out to steal data. They're the real criminals in this scenario.
But at the same time, it's fair to say that some organisations are making it too easy for hackers to steal sensitive data. Although we don't yet have full details of the TalkTalk incident, other newsworthy breaches have involved below-par security measures.
Such is the frequency of these stories that you could be forgiven for shrugging each off as 'yet another cyber attack'. But as new research reveals a lack of trust in business, it would be unwise to ignore the cumulative impact of these incidents.
Low trust is higher than ever
Digital identity experts Intercede recently released some interesting research. It suggests people don't tend to trust businesses when it comes to protecting their personal information.
The survey questioned around 2,000 people aged 16-35. These people are often referred to as 'millenials', and tend to be comfortable using technology during their everyday lives.
It might therefore come as a surprise that the research found a significant proportion of these people have little trust in business to protect their personal information.
The research asked people to rate their trust in businesses from different sectors. When it comes to data security, 61% of respondents described their level of trust in social media platforms as 'none' or 'a little'. The figure was 38% for retailers and 19% for financial institutions.
Indeed, few people describe their level of trust as 'complete' - just 13% for their employers, and 4% for telecom operators.
Time to up our security game?
The same group of people was asked about how organisations share data. Many respondents said that their personal data should only be shared with companies they have specifically authorised.
Over 74% of people said that it was 'very important' or 'vital' that they should be able to specifically authorise how their location data is shared. 58% said the same for social media content and 57% for data on their purchasing preferences.
"Millennials are hungry for change," reckons Lubna Dajani, a communications technology expert and futurist. "Major data breaches happen every week and millennials, along with the rest of the general public, have found the trust they put in government institutions and businesses to protect their digital identities are being shaken."
"This is by no means an apathetic generation. If business and government leaders don't adopt better protocols now, millennials will soon rise up and demand it."
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Harnessing Big Data in the Fight Against Pediatric Cancer
Blog Mar 09, 2018 | by Ruairi MacKenzie and Laura Elizabeth Mason, Science Writers, Technology Networks
Laura Elizabeth Lansdowne
Science Writer
Ruairi J MacKenzie
@rjmsci
We recently spoke to Dr Samuel L. Volchenboum to learn more about his current research within the areas of pediatric cancer and inflammatory bowel disease. He discusses current challenges of harnessing data and informatics, the importance of robust data collection and standardization, and strategies for optimizing data to enhance the efficiency and impact of research.
Your current research is mainly focused on harnessing data and informatics for pediatric cancer research, could you tell us more about this research?
Samuel L Volchenboum (SV): My main academic interest is in harnessing large sets of data for research. For the pediatric cancer community, this means bringing together international groups of researchers to create common data models for sharing information. Ultimately, the goal is to have data collected all over the world using standardized data dictionaries and then making those data available in a de-identified format to the worldwide research community for study. Of course, there are myriad issues with doing this – everything from lack of data standards, to worries about security and privacy, to issues with data embargo and proprietary claims. But these issues are surmountable, and I continue to be highly optimistic about our success.
In addition to my research as the Director of the Center for Informatics, I am also working with the University of Chicago and Dr David T. Rubin as the Chief Medical Officer of Litmus Health to study inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The project is to collect real-world data about activity, sleep, heart rate, and diet to better understand how these factors affect patients with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis. Harnessing these data effectively could mean the foundation of personalized medicine for chronic diseases, IBD.
In a recent publication, you reviewed the use of data commons in modern healthcare. To what extent has health data been taken out of non-sharing ‘silos’ and made freely available? How much further does data sharing have to go?
SV: When the 21st Century Cures Act was passed in 2016, it created a mandate to bring medical innovations to market more efficiently. As a result, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is focusing more on data sharing.
There are many impediments to effective data sharing, but the two main issues are a lack of interoperability and misaligned incentives.
Most data are still collected without regard to any standards. This means that clinicians and researchers often choose their own ways to collect and store data. So, when it becomes the time to share or combine data, the points do not align and the data have to be transformed into a common standard. This process often leads to data loss or compromise. Organizations like the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) are working with clinicians, pharmaceutical companies, and governmental agencies to create mandated standards for data reporting. Of course, this will help ensure that data are transformed into a common standard, but we have a long way to go before the data are actually collected in a standardized fashion without the need for one or more transformations.
Of course, there must be an incentive for a clinician or researcher to share their data. There must be the right kind of governance in place to assure data contributors that the data will be kept safe and shared only under appropriate conditions and with the proper attribution. This is one of the most thorny areas and must be addressed through data sharing agreements.
Your publication “Data Commons to Support Pediatric Cancer Research” references the discrepancy in data driven-progresses for adult cancers compared to pediatric cancers. It highlights that rareness of pediatric cancer cases could be why children with cancer are failing to benefit from the technological revolution, driving the precision-medicine age. What can be done to help combat this discrepancy?
SV: Pediatric cancer is rare – only about 15,000 new cases in the US each year, compared to over 1.6 million adult cancers. Discoveries are made when studying large numbers of subjects, the characteristics of their disease, and their treatment outcomes. When trying to associate genomic findings with clinical outcomes, it is even more critical to have large numbers of patients and associated rich clinical data. Because of the paucity of cases for pediatric cancer, innovations have been driven by consortium trials. But even then, a Children’s Oncology Group study over many years might only enroll dozens or hundreds of patients, depending on the disease. This has led to incredible improvements in survival for most kinds of pediatric cancer. But there remain many cancers that are incurable or curable only with incredibly toxic regimens. To understand and develop better cures, two important innovations need to occur. First, groups around the world need to come together to build standardized data models, so that data can be collected and shared worldwide. Second, much richer clinical data need to be collected alongside the genomic information. Right now, genomic sequencing studies are severely limited by the lack of clinical data and could be significantly enriched though linkage to the associated information from the medical record.
To help solve these vexing problems we are working to bring together groups from around the world to build common data models for pediatric cancer. By creating a commons of pediatric cancer clinical trials data, we hope to provide the world with a rich source of phenotype data to enrich the incredible amount of genomic data being collected.
Could you tell us more about Litmus Health? What impact can the Litmus platform have on clinical research?
SV: As they currently stand, most trials still use outdated data tracking methods to monitor successes. When researchers use digitized forms and questionnaires to touch base with their patients once a month, they sacrifice a lot of the data that the client is generating. Until recently, we have lacked a reliable way to gather continuous, objective data about our patients in a rigorous and compliant way that adheres to industry standards for clinical trial data collection.
Litmus is a clinical data science platform focused on health-related quality of life. We use real-life data collected at the point of experience from wearables, smart devices, and home sensors to guide management and to inform endpoints, and describe the full value of their work in observational studies, therapeutical trials, and post-market research.
Big picture – we make trials more efficient with these new devices. Wearables and other sensors are incredibly rich sources of data, but manufacturers have not yet figured out how to make these data ready for analysis in a clinical setting.
One of our core value props is that we take these real-life data and make them research-ready.
This smarter methodology allows for better tracking of patient data and can streamline the drug-to-market route and help clinicians make better go/no-go decisions and realize the full value of their drug.
In an industry of life or death, where we see one success for a dozen failures, it is imperative to make those successes count from research phase to market adoption.
Biomedical data comes in many forms, and different institutions will store and handle their data differently. How can researchers overcome these inconsistencies when data is grouped to enable maximum value to be taken from these big datasets?
SV: As described above, we lack both the tools and incentives for data standardization and harmonization. Each stakeholder has developed their own, sometimes proprietary ways of collecting and storing data. Data managers running clinical trials at academic medical centers routinely have to copy and paste or re-enter data into vendor-specific platforms for their clinical trials. The trial protocols are usually in static formats like Microsoft Word or PDF, requiring each study site to manually abstract terms for the study and create order sets and data collection forms de novo. Data for studies must be transformed into a common format for reporting to federal agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Outside of clinical trials, there are even less incentives for data harmonization and sharing. While many large hospitals have robust data warehouses, few adhere to accepted standards for data collection and storage, and fewer still use available reference data from public sources to inform their data collection modalities. In short, collecting data so it can be shared and studied is not the priority for most medical centers that are struggling with payments and services and an over-abundance of regulations.
The solutions to these problems will require a realignment of the incentives for robust data collection and sharing. This will come from federal agencies, disease-specific consortia, industry, private foundations, and maybe even the electronic health record vendors. We are starting to see some of these emerging trends now in the form of new grants designed to encourage data standardization and private granting agencies requiring best-practices for collecting and managing data. We are very hopeful that the industry is finally waking up to the need for better data collection, and that we are now beginning leverage these larger and more rich sets of data.
Samuel L. Volchenboum was speaking to Ruairi MacKenzie and Laura Elizabeth Mason, Science Writers for Technology Networks.
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OKALOOSA, WALTON ROAD CLOSURES
Florida Department of Transportation
Drivers will encounter traffic disruptions on the following state roads in Okaloosa and Walton counties as crews perform construction and maintenance activities.
In preparation for the Independence Day holiday weekend, there will be no lane closures or other activities which impede traffic on state roads beginning at 9 a.m. CST Wednesday, July 3 and ending at 12:01 a.m. CST Monday, July 8.
Okaloosa County:
U.S. 98 (Harbor Boulevard) Improvements from East Pass (Marler) Bridge to Airport Road- Drivers can expect intermittent east and westbound lane closures between East Pass (Marler) Bridge and Gulf Shore Drive from 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. Sunday, June 23 through Thursday, June 27 as crews to continue sidewalk and driveway replacement.
State Road (S.R.) 293 (Mid-Bay Bridge) Traffic Restrictions-
Continuing through Labor Day, Lakeshore Drive and White Point Road will be closed to southbound traffic (towards S.R. 293 and the Mid-Bay Bridge) on Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. The closures are intended to maintain safety through residential neighborhoods.
Traffic on the bridge remains limited to two-axle vehicles including cars, trucks, SUVs, school buses and limited EMS and first responder equipment only. Semi-trucks and commercial vehicles will be required to use alternate routes until permanent repairs to the Mid-Bay Bridge are complete. Variable message boards will be placed on both ends of the bridge to alert drivers about the temporary restrictions.
U.S. 98 Widening from Airport Road to the Okaloosa/Walton County Line- Work to adjust the elevation of Restaurant Row at the U.S. 98 intersection will begin Monday, June 24. This work will require the closure of Restaurant Row at this intersection 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday. During the daytime closures, drivers will access Restaurant Row via Scenic Highway 98. Work at the Restaurant Row intersection is currently estimated for completion in July.
S.R. 397 (John Sims Parkway) Bridge Replacement Project over Toms Bayou- Alternating and intermittent southbound (toward Eglin AFB) lane closures on the Toms Bayou Bridge after 9 a.m. Monday, June 24 through Friday, June 28. Crews will continue pile driving operations and widening work on the southbound bridge.
U.S. 98 Turn lane Extension at Florosa Elementary School- Motorists can expect lane restrictions from 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. Monday, June 24 through Thursday, June 27 as crews continue paving operations.
U.S. 90 in Crestview Utility Work- There will be eastbound, outside lane restrictions between Brackin Street and Henderson Drive east of Crestview from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday, June 25 and Wednesday, June 26 as crews perform tree trimming operations.
S.R. 4 over Blackwater River Bridge Construction- Over the next three months, motorists can expect intermittent lane restrictions near the Blackwater River Bridge, 4.1 miles west of County Road (C.R.) 189N, as crews prepare the construction site.
Walton County:
U.S. 98 Widening from Emerald Bay Drive to Tang-O-Mar Drive- Crews continue road widening and drainage improvements. Traffic and pedestrian impacts include:
On the south side of U.S. 98, South Shore Drive will be intermittently reduced to a single travel lane as an "entrance only" during daytime working hours (5:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.). Signs will be placed and traffic flaggers will be on-site to safely direct drivers through the work zone. The lanes will be narrower, and the driving surface will be temporary until the work is complete. The work is anticipated to be complete this summer.
Crews will continue to install drainage pipe beneath Seascape Drive on the south side of U.S. 98 this week. The work will occur between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. and may require Seascape Drive to be reduced to a single travel lane, Sunday, June 23 through Thursday, June 27. Traffic flaggers will be on-site to safely direct drivers through the work zone.
Crews will continue installing drainage beneath driveways on the south side of U.S. 98, between Geronimo Street and C.R. 2378, from Sunday, June 23 until Friday, June 28. Only one driveway will be constructed at a time, and the work may require single lane or full driveway closures. Each night, the driveways will be reopened. Access to all businesses will be maintained. Traffic flaggers will be on-site to safely direct drivers through the work zone.
Driveways and side streets on the south side of U.S. 98, between Emerald Bay Drive and Tang-O-Mar Drive, may be temporarily impacted by construction equipment crossing the roadway from 5:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday, June 24 until Friday, June 28. Additionally, drivers may encounter uneven pavement in this area.
Access to all businesses and side streets will remain open and traffic flaggers will be on-site to safely direct drivers through the work zone.
I-10 Bridge Painting under C.R. 280 (Bob Sikes) Bridge- East and westbound traffic, just west of DeFuniak Springs, can expect intermittent lane restrictions from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Wednesday, June 26 and Thursday, June 27 as crews perform construction activities.
S.R. 20 Erosion Repairs in Choctaw Beach- Drivers will encounter intermittent, westbound lane restrictions at the following locations on S.R. 20 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. as crews continue erosion and drainage repairs:
Cedar Avenue to Water Oak Street, Monday through Friday, from Monday, June 3 until Friday, June 28.
All activities are weather dependent and may be delayed or rescheduled in the event of inclement weather. Drivers are reminded to use caution, especially at night, when traveling in the work zone and to watch for construction workers and equipment entering and exiting the roadway.
For more information visit the Florida Department of Transportation District Three on the web at www.nwflroads.com, follow us on Twitter @myfdot_nwfl, or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MyFDOTNWFL.
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Birmingham Welcomes the Greatest Increase in Start-Ups in the UK
Number of new companies in the city rises by 95% during last financial year
Birmingham also has more start-ups than any other regional city
Birmingham has delivered the biggest growth in start-ups of all UK core cities, attracting a 95% increase in new companies during the last financial year.
The city is also still home to more new companies than any other regional destination, according to analysis of Bureau van Dijk’s FAME database* for the Greater Birmingham Growth Hub.
Nearly 13,000 companies were set up in the city during 2014/15, compared with 6,640 the previous year – a 95% rise. This growth outstrips all other UK cities; Bristol was the second most successful city, with an increase of 83%, followed by Manchester with 77%. London was fifth, with a 70% increase.
The findings reflect Birmingham’s reputation as an entrepreneurial hotspot. The city has the most incubator programmes in the UK outside London, and has doubled its number of accelerator programmes in just two years, as highlighted by research from Telefonica.**
Birmingham also recorded the highest number of start-ups outside London. A total of 175,385 new companies were registered in the capital during 2014/15, followed by Birmingham with 12,972 and Manchester with 7,516.
Support for start-ups in the city and its surrounding areas includes facilities and mentoring offered through the Greater Birmingham Growth Hub and its partners across the public and private sectors. The Growth Hub – which is run by the Greater Birmingham & Solihull LEP – provides a single point of access for local SMEs and start-ups wanting business advice, access to finance and support.
Growth Hub Manager Ian Mclaughlan commented:
“The Greater Birmingham Growth Hub is attracting more enquiries about starting a company than any other topic. It is clear that Greater Birmingham is full of ambitious potential entrepreneurs that want to set up, and grow, a successful business.
“The economic strength of this region relies on new companies establishing secure and sustainable plans for growth. By coordinating the support available to these firms, the Growth Hub enables our start-ups to access the guidance they need to realise their full potential.”
SMALL BUSINESS DEMAND FOR ALTERNATIVE FINANCE CONTINUES TO SOAR
· 53% of small business owners expect demand for alternative finance to increase over the…
SUNDAY TRADING SET TO BENEFIT ECONOMY TO THE TUNE OF £1.5 BILLION
Estimated savings of £29 per household in areas that take advantage of extended Sunday trading…
Paperclip named top stationery
The humble paperclip has been named the most essential item of office stationery British professionals…
NEW QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2016
1 in 4 have vowed to ‘drink less’ at this year’s office Christmas party for fear of saying or doing something embarrassing
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25. Donors and Investors
Open Data Stakeholders - Donors and Investors
Open data programming and funding is becoming more mainstreamed across sectors, but progress is uneven. Many donors have focused particularly on open data for anti-corruption initiatives, journalism and media, national statistics, extractives, international aid and disaster relief, government finance, and agriculture.
Open data has become a global and diverse movement. Investments in open data have happened on multiple continents, targeting a variety of stakeholders, but more should be done to make their collective impact more coherent.
A global infrastructure to support a somewhat fragmented open data community has begun to emerge, including elements of a global agenda, coordinated investment mechanisms, measurement, and global and regional events.
There is a need for substantial new and joint investments among open data funders, and donors in general, especially to meet cross-cutting needs that are hard for any one project, organisation, or donor to address alone.
Perini, F. & Jarvis, M. (2019) Open Data Stakeholders - Donors and Investors. In T. Davies, S. Walker, M. Rubinstein, & F. Perini (Eds.), The State of Open Data: Histories and Horizons. Cape Town and Ottawa: African Minds and International Development Research Centre.
Knight News challenge is launched
Starting as a journalism challenge, winners of the 2008 edition focus on open data projects.
Hewlett Foundation awards grant to support open data
Hewlett awards a grant to Development Initiatives to complete work on the International Aid Transparency Initiative.
The Open Data for Development Network started
OD4D Network establishes regional hubs in Latin America (later becomes ILDA) and the Caribbean (Caribbean Open Institute), Africa, and Asia.
Establishment of Global Open Data Initiative (GODI)
GODI aimed at “developing, finding, and sharing tools, guidelines and lessons relating to policy, institutions, and activities that governments can use to build successful open data initiatives”.
Partnership for Open Data (POD) is founded
The World Bank announces the Partnership for Open Data, a collaboration with the Open Data Institute and Open Knowledge.
OGP Open Data Working Group
Backed by a grant from IDRC, the Web Foundation and the Government of Canada announced the establishment of the OGP Open Data Working Group, which becomes a key forum for coordination on open data activities.
OD4D works to establish an International Open Data Roadmap
OD4D Network and the Partnership on Open Data merge creating a multi-donor programme. Global Affairs Canada subsequently joins the OD4D programme, and OD4D co-hosts the third International Open Data Conference (IODC) in order to build a collaborative roadmap for the open data community.
Ever since government and civil society actors first started calling for greater openness in government data, donors have played an important role in supporting the expansion of the open data community. They have helped to convene a multiplicity of actors to explore how best to produce, publish, and use open data, and their contributions have provided seed funding for entrepreneurs to test the waters with riskier and more innovative initiatives. Some have even opened their own data and championed open data as part of government reforms. Donors have commissioned and supported research on open data that has helped to articulate emerging outcomes around the world and have supported the case for future investment, as well as more coordination among the range of donors interested in the advancement of open data.
That said, we should not overestimate the importance of donors. Public and private donors represent just one part of the financing ecosystem for open data. For-profit actors, governments, and civil society groups investing their own resources have been critical in scaling open data applications around the world. Nonetheless, donors can and must play a key role where there is a lack of incentive for the private sector to provide investment, most notably, in providing support for the development of public goods that often underpin open data impacts. This might include supporting standards development to enable interoperability and investing in the necessary guidance on how to use and manage open data to maximise its public use and value.
As the open data movement emerges from its first decade, it is an appropriate time to assess whether donors’ contributions, using their money and influence, have succeeded in building a more resilient, inclusive, and coherent global open data movement. To that end, this chapter reflects on the role that international donors have played as stakeholders in developing the global open data ecosystem. Donors are frequently considered external actors to any cause, taking rational investment decisions based on clear evidence of impact. However, when we look back at the nascent open data movement, the causal relationship between open data and its intended benefits has rarely been well-defined, taking on instead what Weinstein and Goldstein have categorised as a “big tent approach”.1What constitutes success is often only broadly articulated and evidence of impact is usually scarce. Donors have, therefore, had to take more of a leap of faith on the potential impact of open data when they invest in its many different agendas.
In order to substantiate this reflection, we have made a preliminary attempt to map the social network of donors supporting open data within specific communities or sectors. In addition to their financial resources, donors may also operate as knowledge brokers and connectors within sectors. Digging into this donor “view of the world” can also be useful in identifying some of the perceived achievements and challenges that may affect the broader community. Accordingly, we have extracted some lessons learned from several recent reports, as well as discussions with and among donors, in order to identify some of the challenges faced by donors and explore the potential for motivating ongoing support moving forward.
This chapter focuses on both public and philanthropic donors, particularly those that are internationally active (perhaps overly reflective of the missions of the authors’ own institutions, an international development research organisation and a donor collaborative that prioritises effective data use).2This chapter does not attempt to cover the whole ecosystem of open data investment nor the data publishing activities of donors themselves.3
What are public goods that merit donor support and investment?
There is much talk currently of data infrastructure and the potential for confusion over terminology. For the purposes of this chapter, data infrastructure refers to “public goods” that would enable quality data to be easily shared, combined, and accessed by different users (see also Chapter 18: Data infrastructure). In particular, we refer to elements of data infrastructure that could and should be the focus of donor support and investment.
The International Open Data Roadmap, the result of a community collaboration at previous International Open Data Conferences in 2015 and 2016 highlights many calls for action in the development of a global infrastructure.45Examples include:
Development of norms and data standards and their support systems, such as the reconciliation of organisational identifiers and open source data cleaning tools.
Innovative solutions and research on the state of open data, such as the Open Data Barometer and the Open Data Index.
Capacity-building activities in government and civil society, particularly in less developed economies, where the capacity for long-term investments is smaller and building initial human and social capital is crucial to sparking change.
Investment in these foundational activities for effective data use may not generate sufficient revenue to attract private sector investment; therefore, public and philanthropic investments are needed to help build a more robust and open data ecosystem.
Exploring the network of funding and support
There is no comprehensive way to track all funding for open data initiatives. As just one small element of the investments made by government, not-for-profits, or the private sector, it is likely that most of the support for open data initiatives is invisible to traditional official indicators and international mechanisms that track funding. In recent analyses related to “data for development”, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) 2017 Data for development report6and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data’s (GPSDD) 2016 report on the state of development data funding,7investment in open data is acknowledged, but it is impossible to disentangle it from broader investments in statistical capacity building, information and communications technology (ICT), innovation, open science, and other categories. Investment “bundling” limits our understanding of which investments are dedicated specifically to open data efforts.
However, there are a few select tools to draw on that offer some useful detail. For example, grants data published to the 360Giving Standard can be searched by keyword. A search in the GrantNav database using the keywords “open data” reveals 51 grants provided by eight different funders based in the United Kingdom.8A search using the same keywords on the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) database identifies 360 projects from 52 publishers.9However, it is unclear how many of these projects are explicitly open data projects or if they simply include “open data” in filenames or boilerplate text. As an investment in open data is not considered an explicit development area by the OECD or IATI, it is hard to track the amount invested in open data as part of larger investments. Digging into the data does highlight the different ways donors associate projects with open data, although the subset of real open data projects may be under one hundred records.
Thus, given the limited availability of quality data on open data investment, we turned to the environmental scans developed for each of the chapters in the State of Open Data project to try to understand how donors support the global open data community. These environmental scans have identified key funders for each sector, region, and stakeholder group. We have used this input, corrected the underlying data to create Figure 1, and complemented the analysis with interviews with key actors, a qualitative review of available IATI data, a review of recent programme evaluations, and a review of the initial drafts of other chapters in this book.
Figure 1: Network analysis based on State of Open Data environmental scans. Note: The graph above illustrates thematic areas, related funders, and the links between them identified by an analysis of State of Open Data environment scans.10
This approach builds on snowball sampling methodology11frequently used in social network analysis. While this may still be a limited view, this type of network topology can help to understand the community, offering some insight into the complex relationship dynamics in an emerging field. There are some limitations to this approach. For example, it does not provide information on the intensity (i.e. total dollar amounts) of the investment made. Thus, donors that make small investments in many sectors and regions are more likely to be central (more networked) than donors that make larger investments in specific countries or issue areas. The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is an example of the first type of donor. The Millennium Challenge Corporation collaboration with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (MCC-PEPFAR), a USD 21.8 million partnership that created the Data Collaboratives for Local Impact programme, is an example of the latter. The analysis shown in Figure 1 offers only a partial view of the funding commitments made over the last decade, not a dynamic view of what is currently in play today. It does not tell us what constitutes core funding support to organisations or about project-specific funding. Being able to gauge core funding amounts would be useful in assessing the flexibility that open data-focused organisations might have in directing resources toward changing or evolving priorities.
So what can this network analysis tell us about resilience, diversity, and coherence within the open data ecosystem? Three key areas of insight are outlined below.
Assessing the ecosystem: Potential metrics
How can we assess resilience, diversity, and coherence of the open data ecosystem? In developing the analysis in this chapter, we have drawn upon the following outline metrics:
Resilience – an increase in the number of donors contributes to the resilience of a specific community.
Diversity – a diverse data ecosystem requires donors supporting different types of stakeholders and communities in different regions.
Coherence – the presence of central actors (donors and organisations with more connections) and established coordination mechanisms.
Resilience: Open data is becoming more mainstreamed into key sectors
Figure 1 shows a total of 55 donors funding 28 different communities of practice in the open data space. Funding covers a range of open data-related issues from standards development and capacity building by both government and civil society to work on strengthening ICT and data systems.
The network analysis shows that there have been some core players funding the open data community and ecosystem, including basic infrastructure and practice; however, there is also a growing list of new donors supporting open data as part of their specific sector programming. This is a positive sign in terms of creating a more sustainable financing base for open data.
If we hypothesise that a diversity of donors increases the resilience of a specific community at the international level, we can group the sectors according to three categories: low resilience (less than three donors), medium (three to five donors), and high resilience (more than five donors).
The first group, with less than three donors, includes crime and justice, environment, education, and transport. Some communities could not identify any international donor support, as is the case of open data for Indigenous communities. While there are a range of examples and cases in these sectors, we could argue that donor support for these topics remains relatively weak.
The communities working on open data in relation to gender equality, health, urban development, and corporate ownership were able to identify between three and five donors. Potentially, these sectors could be seen as emerging communities in the open data movement. Their modest but growing presence in international events, such as the International Open Data Conferences in Madrid and Buenos Aires, would support this claim.
The sectors which could identify more than five donors include open data for anti-corruption, journalism and media, national statistics, extractives, international aid and disaster relief, government finance, and agriculture. As can be observed in international events and in the related chapters in this publication, these open data communities also tend to have better articulated priorities, existing or emerging standards, stronger community coalitions, and more evidence to date of effective results.
Across these different groups, there is much that donors and communities could learn about how to better mainstream open data into the different sectors, how progress has been achieved, and how it can be sustained. There is no question that many communities have developed specific partnerships and alliances to catalyse social change which are, in turn, more successful in attracting multiple donors (e.g. the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) and Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) networks).
Diversity: Open data is an increasingly global and diverse movement
In order to examine whether donors have supported open data with a specific emphasis on inclusiveness, we explored two dimensions: geographic presence and programmatic modalities.
There is some indication that there are emerging patterns for how donors and communities operate within the different global regions with at least three donors in each region and up to seven in Sub-Saharan Africa. Open data activities may target evidence-based policy-making to advanced democratic governance, economic development, and other objectives specific to particular sectors. This has allowed local, national, and regional open data communities to emerge with different priorities in order to serve multiple agendas and simultaneously adjust to cultural differences.
The data also indicates that there is a range of donors focusing on specific stakeholders. Many donors, particularly multilateral organisations, tend to target governments. Others focus on civil society organisations and broader data literacy efforts. A smaller number of donors fund researchers and standards development or have an explicit interest in private sector activities.
Preferences for funding particular stakeholders often align with donor modalities. Multilateral and bilateral donors are set up specifically to provide support to governments. Private philanthropic organisations are best structured to support civil society directly. All have ways to support specific research agendas. Finding ways to leverage the comparative advantages of different donors is important in considering the sustainability needs of the open data ecosystem as a whole.
While the overall picture may sound positive, it is important to note that there are plenty of blind spots and gaps in support in terms of geographies, themes, and sectors, reflecting the fact that donors have specific preferences and constraints in terms of the types of actors and modalities needed to deliver their particular programmes. For instance, some multilateral organisations have specific constraints related to time-bound support to governments in low-income countries. Too many development projects require longer-term support, leading to investment cycles, which cannot be sustained by one investor. The past decade has seen more than its fair share of funded initiatives that failed to gain traction, often leaving behind “white elephant” data portals which cannot be maintained or supported locally. Also, a focus on the creation of new global organisations has led to greater fragmentation within the broader open data community. Northern-based organisations have been involved in many donor-supported activities in the Global South, but, in most cases, the global expansion efforts of Northern open data organisations have failed to sustain long-term engagement in developing countries.
Like other funded movements, the open data field has not been immune to the effects of donor-skewed priorities and the potential duplication of efforts. Yet, there is still the potential to find smarter approaches. Clearly, lone actors cannot support the needs of the entire open data value chain. Therefore, rather than devolving toward a simplistic supply versus demand-side framing, there is a growing recognition that investment needs to be coordinated to create functioning data ecosystems.1213Donors need to understand how open data interacts with contextual variables and be able to adjust their decision-making processes to specific sectors or regional settings.14
As the sector matures, funders, alongside other stakeholders, will play an important role in “connecting the dots” and even exploring what kind of consolidation might be useful and/or practical. They will also seek to clarify comparative advantages among different stakeholders focused on open data efforts. Leading open data and governance data groups began one such exercise in spring 2018 with support of the Hewlett Foundation and the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (TAI). Better coordination could increase effectiveness and free up donor funds to focus on those areas for which there is no market alternative, but which are still vital to the open data ecosystem.
Coherence: Key elements of the global open data infrastructure have emerged
In order to discuss coherence, we have reviewed reports and conducted interviews with the central actors identified in our network analysis. IDRC, Omidyar Network, the World Bank, and the Hewlett Foundation were identified as donors with more than ten connections to different sectors or communities of practice. Given their greater relative centrality, they are in a position to play a significant role in building an open data infrastructure that can spread good practices across regions, sectors, and stakeholder groups. See box, What are donors learning? A moment of introspection, which identifies some of the documents and processes reviewed during this research.
What are donors learning? A moment of introspection
Several funders of open data efforts have been providing support in the field for a decade, if not longer, and this has provoked some reflection on progress to date. Some have gone as far as to commission evaluations of their investments in open data:
The World Bank has been a key leader and investor at the multilateral level and recently published a review of its investments over the past five years.15
IDRC, the host of the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network, a programme jointly funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Department for International Development (DFID), the World Bank, and Global Affairs Canada, recently published an evaluation of the programme16and a management response.17- Omidyar Network is a leading investor in open data investment among philanthropic funders and recently commissioned an evaluation of its decade of investments in open data.
The Hewlett Foundation has not put out a specific publication reviewing its open data portfolio, but it is currently supporting a collective reflection by several open data organisations through the TAI. Arguably, Hewlett investments have been primarily thought of in terms of fiscal governance rather than open data, supporting global norm-setting bodies, including the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI),18Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT),19the IATI,20and Open Contracting Partnership (OCP).21
Building the field?
Do steps toward resilience, diversity, and coherence of funding add up to field building around open data? In this section, we look back and look forward to assess progress to highlight the remaining challenges still to be addressed in establishing ongoing support for open data activities.
The need for greater coordination
As the open data community has grown and become more diverse, calls for coherence across fragmented efforts have mounted from donors and practitioners alike. Over the years, there have been a number of efforts to coordinate agendas and reduce duplication in the open data field. One indicator of this is the increasing popularity of global open data events, which focus on providing opportunities for networking and collaboration. For example, the first International Open Data Conference (called the Open Government Data Conference for its first edition) took place in 2010 with no more than 50 people, while the last edition, in 2018, brought together more than 1,600 participants.
Efforts toward greater strategic coordination across the regions and sectors that make up the open data community have increased over the last few years. For instance, in June 2013, a number of leading open data organisations announced the establishment of the Global Open Data Initiative (GODI),22which aimed at “developing, finding and sharing tools, guidelines and lessons relating to policy, institutions, and activities that governments can use to build successful open data initiatives”.23While the aim was to become an authoritative voice for the sector, the initial plans for GODI did not receive funding support from donors and the initiative eventually disappeared.
A few months later, in September 2013, the World Bank announced the Partnership for Open Data,24a collaboration with the Open Data Institute25(ODI) and Open Knowledge International26through a grant from the World Bank’s Development Grant Facility.27In October 2013, backed by a grant from IDRC’s OD4D initiative, the World Wide Web Foundation, and the Government of Canada announced the establishment of the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) Open Data Working Group.28
In order to avoid duplication, the Partnership for Open Data merged into IDRC’s OD4D Network, creating a multi-donor programme to support key initiatives for the open data community. The Network also became the host of the International Open Data Conference (IODC) and refined its programmatic strategies based on the Roadmap that was produced as a result of community engagement at the IODCs in 201529and 2016.30The Roadmap ultimately led to OD4D support for the development of the Open Data Charter and the open data measurement initiatives, such as the Open Data Barometer and Open Data Index, as well as grassroots open data initiatives across the Global South that sought to build open data capacity and local expertise.
Activities organised by OD4D and by TAI have started to build fora to encourage more dialogue among donors; however, we have yet to see an effective donor coordination mechanism emerge that might help better address coordination gaps among key donors in the field.
Looking to the future, there are still some questions about the coherence of the global open data agenda. Has a lack of coordination among some of the core donors or a shared strategic long-term vision, led to a proliferation of pet donor-funded projects and concepts? Or are we simply seeing the results of a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach? While specific donors have articulated their strategy, it can be argued that funding decisions are not made in the context of a coherent forward-looking vision for an efficient open data ecosystem or to meet the specific needs of a range of open data sectors and communities.
Taking into consideration the future priorities of key donors, we can observe some developing trends. For instance, IDRC, through OD4D, has emphasised the establishment of a network of regional initiatives with lighter coordination at the global level using the IODCs and regional events as key tools. The World Bank has increasingly prioritised their work with the OGP and GPSDD, which still touches open data in many different ways. Omidyar Network has backed the establishment of the Open Data Charter as a new organisation, which is focused on updating its principles based on emerging trends in open data.
Some argue that the amount of duplication among the main international actors is too significant, and, as donor funds have not increased, there is still room for further consolidation. The recent agreement established between OD4D and the OGP31to advance a more coordinated agenda should be welcome news to the open government and open data communities. The acid test, however, will be whether this unlocks more opportunities for coordinated support of the open data agenda or simply shifts donor coordination priorities yet again.
Amid mainstreaming, who funds cross-cutting open data issues?
Subsidising the cost sharing of field-wide public goods may not be feasible for a donor looking at leveraging open data in a particular sector or region. For example, if a donor wants to target an open data initiative to improve domestic resource mobilisation in Francophone West Africa, are they likely to assume a responsibility to fund the international infrastructure that enables the interoperability of the relevant datasets? Probably not, even if they come to realise the need for such interoperability.
Much of the progress that has been achieved in recent years in terms of global and regional coordination may be in jeopardy as donors look to mainstream open data into specific sectors and country operations. This trend will be exacerbated if open data is no longer the “shiny object” that attracts donor attention. New data-related issues will compete for funding, including big data, research data, data privacy, and data for the Sustainable Development Goals. Should funders try to align these competing themes? Will they each pick a different area to focus on or will they shift to a broader framing of “data funding” within which open data is just one integrated element?
Donor modalities: An orphaned donor agenda
Open data can be relevant to a whole host of programmatic objectives for donors, including evidence-based policy-making, democratic governance, economic development, and a range of social and/or sector issues. This potential to serve multiple agendas may lead to a real ownership challenge within donor organisations, as well as their grantees.
There is a risk that open data is everyone’s agenda and, therefore, no one’s. It is rare for donor organisations to have a programme officer or team lead explicitly for open data. Typically, engagement with open data-related issues gets spread across several different thematic units (e.g. agriculture units support GODAN, governance units support transparency and anti-corruption data initiatives, and science units support open research data). Sometimes, responsibility may be bundled with broader ICT infrastructure investment teams. This diversity of “homes” for open data within funder organisations may have hindered the sharing of tested donor approaches. It is harder to support development of a nascent field without a sufficient or coherent pool of champions on the donor side and among practitioners.
This chapter has provided some reflections on the impact of donors on the development of resilience, diversity, and coherence across the open data ecosystem as a result of their efforts over the past decade. Examining a network analysis of how donors fund different open data activities and communities, and taking into consideration recent reports from key donors, we can draw several conclusions.
Open data is becoming more mainstreamed into sector-specific funding, but progress is uneven among sectors. A few sectors, such as anti-corruption, agriculture, and data journalism, have built a greater diversity of donors, while others experience challenges to secure ongoing support.
Open data is increasingly a more global and inclusive movement, but much remains to be done. Different donors have supported different communities in different regions, and many programmatic modalities have been developed to accommodate the need to support different stakeholders. Nevertheless, many blind spots and coordination challenges exist due to the complexity of building a functioning global data infrastructure.
Some of the core infrastructure for the open data field has been created, including a network of global, regional, and national events, common principles, capacity-building resources, peer networks, and measurement tools. However, donors may be moving away from open data in general to focus more on sectoral issues or other emerging issues that might more directly articulate impact. This can potentially jeopardise any achieved coherence to date within the global open data community.
What can donors do to build more resilience, diversity, and coherence in the open data community? There are a wide range of potential actions, such as better tagging open data grants through IATI or other reporting instruments or increasing the sharing of funding strategies and lessons learned at key events (e.g. the annual IODC and regional meetings) to create opportunities for donor collaboration. More substantive progress will require a shared sense of field needs and moving beyond the current “loose touch” approach to cross-donor coordination. There is a strong need for substantial new and joint investment among open data funders and donor organisations in general. Donors need to explore more targeted investments in the core building blocks of the data ecosystem, including civil registration and vital statistics systems (CRVS), censuses, surveys, and analytical and leadership capacity in the field. Considering the significant experience within the community and the range of open data projects and initiatives to date, there is now a foundation to build upon, but it may start to erode without new investment. Greater coherence among donors will support increased alignment with regional and country priorities, help to avoid duplication, fill funding gaps, and contribute to an overall strategic approach in consideration of different programme priorities and funding methodologies.
Fernando Perini
IDRC
Fernando Perini coordinates the Open Data for Development (OD4D) for Canada’s International Development Research Centre. OD4D works with global open data advocacy organisations and a network of regional partners committed to the creation of locally-driven and sustainable open data ecosystems in developing countries.
Transparency & Accountability Initiative
Michael Jarvis has over two decades experience working on global good governance, openness, and corporate responsibility. He is the Executive Director of the Transparency and Accountability Initiative which works specifically to help donors improve grant-making practices in order to boost collective impact.
Acevedo-Ruiz, M. & Peña-López, I. (2017). Evaluation of the Open Data for Development program. Ottawa: OD4D Network. http://od4d.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/OD4D-Final-evaIuation-report-v2_31-May.pdf
Boyera, S. & Iglesias, C. (2014). Open data in developing countries: State of the art. Partnership for Open Data. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FMyfLu-jouL7j7Pw0kEwUn_B07aZ9IX3vlFGqPO0gX0/edit
Carolan, L. (2017). Mapping open data for accountability. Washington, DC: Transparency and Accountability Initiative and the Open Data Charter. http://www.transparency-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/taiodc_draft_data4accountabilityframework.pdf
Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. (2016).The state of development data funding. Washington, DC: Open Data Watch. https://opendatawatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/development-data-funding-2016.pdf
World Bank Group. (2017). World Bank support for open data – 2012–2017. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28616/120801-WP-P133276-PUBLIC.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
1: Weinstein, J. & Goldstein, J. (2012). The benefits of a big tent: Opening up government in developing countries. UCLA Law Review, 60(38). https://www.uclalawreview.org/the-benefits-of-a-big-tent-opening-up-government-in-developing-countries/ ↩
2: The International Development Research Centre, https://www.idrc.ca/en and Transparency and Accountability Initiative, http://www.transparency-initiative.org/, respectively. ↩
3: It should be noted that donors are also open data publishers and aggregators. They publish to dedicated portals and many support and adhere to the implementation of the International Aid Transparency Initiative and other data standards. In this chapter, we do not focus on donors as publishers. The focus is on how donors, particularly international donors, support different open data communities and priorities. ↩
4: IDRC. (2015). Enabling the data revolution: An international open data roadmap. Conference report. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. http://1a9vrva76sx19qtvg1ddvt6f.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IODC2015-Final-Report-web.pdf ↩
5: OD4D (Open Data for Development) Network. (2016). IODC 16: International Open Data Roadmap. Ottawa: OD4D Network. http://od4d.net/roadmap/assets/files/report-iodc-2016-web.pdf ↩
7: Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. (2016). The state of development data funding. Washington, DC: Open Data Watch. https://opendatawatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/development-data-funding-2016.pdf ↩
8: http://grantnav.threesixtygiving.org/ ↩
9: http://d-portal.org/ctrack.html?search=open%20data#view=main. D-Portal provides a view of all IATI data by recipient country or publisher that is comparable with the latest OECD Development Assistance Committee’s (DAC) Creditor Reporting System (CRS) data. ↩
10: An interactive version of the network chart, with access to the underlying data, is available at http://bit.ly/2Qm5FT9 ↩
11: Wikipedia. (2018). Snowball sampling. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Snowball_sampling&oldid=856893462 [accessed 27 December 2018]. ↩
12: Open Data Watch. (2018). The data value chain: Moving from production to impact. https://opendatawatch.com/publications/the-data-value-chain-moving-from-production-to-impact/ ↩
13: Carolan, L. (2017). Mapping open data for accountability. Washington, DC: Transparency and Accountability Initiative and the Open Data Charter. http://www.transparency-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/taiodc_draft_data4accountabilityframework.pdf ↩
14: Davies, T. & Perini, F. (2016). Researching the emerging impacts of open data: Revisiting the ODDC conceptual framework. The Journal of Community Informatics, 12(2). http://ci-journal.org/index.php/ciej/article/view/1281 ↩
15: World Bank Group. (2017). World Bank support for open data – 2012–2017. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28616/120801-WP-P133276-PUBLIC.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y ↩
16: Acevedo-Ruiz, M. & Peña-López, I. (2017). Evaluation of the Open Data for Development program. Ottawa: Open Data for Development Network. http://od4d.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/OD4D-Final-evaIuation-report-v2_31-May.pdf ↩
17: Faruqui, N. & Federico, B. (2018). Management response to the evaluation of the Open Data for Development program. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. https://idl-bnc-idrc.dspacedirect.org/handle/10625/56937 ↩
18: https://eiti.org/document/eiti-open-data-policy ↩
19: http://www.fiscaltransparency.net/ ↩
20: https://iatistandard.org/en/ ↩
21: https://www.open-contracting.org/ ↩
22: http://globalopendatainitiative.org/ ↩
23: GODI (Global Open Data Initiative). (2013). Announcing the Global Open Data Initiative. https://web.archive.org/web/20140301110448/http://globalopendatainitiative.org/2013/06/12/announcing-the-global-open-data-initiative/ ↩
24: World Bank. (2013). New Partnership seeks to bring benefits of open data to developing countries. World Bank press release, 18 September. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/09/18/new-partnership-seeks-bring-benefits-open-data-developing-countries ↩
25: https://theodi.org/ ↩
26: https://okfn.org/ ↩
27: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/829141468329986040/World-Bank-support-for-global-and-regional-initiatives-under-the-Development-Grant-Facility-DGF-compendium-of-DFG-programs ↩
28: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/ ↩
29: IDRC (International Development Research Centre). (2015). Enabling the data revolution: An International Open Data Roadmap. Conference report. Ottawa: IDRC. http://1a9vrva76sx19qtvg1ddvt6f.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IODC2015-Final-Report-web.pdf ↩
30: OD4D Network. (2016). IODC 16: International Open Data Roadmap. Ottawa: Open Data for Development Network. http://od4d.net/roadmap/assets/files/report-iodc-2016-web.pdf ↩
31: Perini, F. (2018). Open government partnership and the open data for development network join forces to support open data initiatives around the world. Open Government Partnership [News post], 10 May. https://www.opengovpartnership.org/stories/open-government-partnership-and-open-data-development-network-join-forces-support-open-data ↩
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St Fintan’s 75th Anniversary
There are celebrations on the horizon and we at St. Fintan's High School want all of our past pupils to share in the occasion of our 75th anniversary!
75th Anniversary Gala Ball
Join us on the 10th of November as we commemorate our 75th Anniversary with a gala ball in the splendour of Clontarf Castle. Tickets are available from the school office or by email at [email protected]stfintanshs.ie.
To Book your tickets:
Email [email protected] with number of tickets required. (Provide us with your school year if you are a Past Pupil)
We will contact you with an authorization number.
Upon receipt of authorization number, Log onto our school website: www.stfintanshs.ie click on payment and follow the link to pay for your tickets.
Note: Tables of 10 €750 ( Please try and have one person pay for the table of 10 if possible.)
Clontarf Castle have reserved discounted rooms for the night please contact them directly to reserve. Ph: 01-8332321.
4 Course Meal with wine
& band
Tickets for sale on a first come first served basis. Tickets when paid in full online will be delivered to you or left at the door for collection on the night. A confirmation email will be sent to confirm.
If you have any historical school photos which you want to share please email to us at the above address or send to St Fintan’s High School Alumni page!
If you have contacted us already we will be sending you an email this weekend!
We look forward to having a great 75yrs celebration with our Past Pupils, Families and Friends of St Fintan’s High School.
A History of St. Fintan’s High School:
This year St. Fintan’s High School is opened 75 years! St. Fintan’s has been successfully running since the 8th of September 1943.
Originally the school was opened in the Burrow, Sutton in a place called Bellevue House, which was located on Station Road. Bellevue House School consisted of primary school boys and girls and secondary school girls joined in 1924. It was run by Mrs. Helen McAlister, Mrs. Watson and some Christian Brothers as a mixed school, calling it St. Catherine’s. St. Catherine’s was also a vacation residence for the Christian Brothers during WWII. After Mrs. Watson’s passing in 1940 and the whole school was then taken over by the Christian Brothers. This heralded the end of St. Catherine’s school, which was lovingly remembered by those who attended it.
Then in 1943, at the request of Rev. Patrick Clarke, parish priest of Howth, the school was turned into St. Fintan’s Christian Brothers High School by Edmund Rice Trust’s Christian Brothers. Under the direction of Reverend Brother P.J Walsh, the school was reopened as an all-boys preparatory and secondary school. The new St. Fintan’s School had a total roll call of 48 students. By 1954 the roll call reached a staggering 305 students. The school on the Burrow Road was exceeding its maximum capacity.
Consequently, a new school was opened on 6 September 1972 on the site of Warren House on the Howth Road and two years later a senior block was built, costing a total of 175,000 pounds, turning it into the two storey, three acre secondary school we are in today. The school was also blessed by Archbishop Ryan when the new school opened.
In 1976, an Assembly Hall was built to be a place for many recreations and Saint Fintans National School was built and the national school was under the direction of Rev. Gerald Diffney and Mr. Charles McGinley.
To find out more regarding the history and past principals of Saint Fintan’s High School, Sutton, the school magazine interviewed Dermot Quinn, head of the Historical Society of Howth,whose brother Brendan was one of the original 48 boys who came to Saint Fintan’s High School back in 1943.
Dermot explained the origins of the name St. Fintan’s High School. It was named after the local saint and also because Sutton in Gaelic is called ‘Chill Fhionntáin’. Reverend Brother P.J Walsh came up with the unusual name High School (as many CBS were usually just called Secondary School, CBS or College) because of “The High Standards of St. Fintan’s, of course!”
We have had a lot of principals in the past 75 years of Saint Fintan’s High School.
Originally the school was run by Christian Brothers, until 1986, when a non Christian Brother became Principal of St. Fintan’s, Bill McCartney. Below is a list of all the principals of Saint Fintan’s since 1943:
Reverend Brother P.J Walsh (1943-1948)
Reverend Brother T.N Mac Donnchada (1948-1954)
Reverend Brother R.Q O’Driscoll (1954-1960)
Reverend Brother J.C Finn (1960-1963)
Reverend Brother Ó’Muineacháin (1963-1966)
Reverend Brother P.V Russell (1966-1971)
Reverend Brother Christopher Kierans (1971-1973)
Reverend Brother
Reverend Brother John O’ Kelly (1973-1975) P.J Walsh, 1st
Reverend Brother Thomas Purcell (1975-1980) Principal of St.
Reverend Brother John C Burke (1980-1986) Fintan’s High
Bill McCartney (1986-1998) School
Dick Fogarty (1998-2006)
Ray Quinn (2006-2010)
Mary Fox (2010-
Saint Fintan’s could not be any more proud to have a school filled with both academic and sports achievements for the past 75 years...and there are many more to come.
By Dario Regazzi
Posted in News and tagged Anniversary
← Sports Review 2017/2018Grease – The Musical →
St. Fintans Presents “All Shook Up” The Music of Elvis Presley
Annual Ladies Lunch – 31st May 2019
French and Spanish Trips
VSware
St. Fintan's High School,
Dublin Road,
Phone 01 832 4632
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Microsoft Announces Windows 10 Pro for Workstations
August 10, 2017 Windows 10
Microsoft has announced Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. This is a higher-end version of Windows 10 Professional for expensive PCs with powerful hardware. The included features are already available on Windows Server, but are being brought over to a desktop version of Windows.
This article describes the features Windows 10 Pro includes, and why you would want them.
ReFS (Resilient File System)
Microsoft’s new resilient file system, ReFS for short, “provides cloud-grade resiliency for fault-tolerant storage spaces and manages very large volumes with ease.”
This feature isn’t technically exclusive to Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. You can use it on any edition of Windows 10 along with Storage Spaces. When used along with Storage Spaces, ReFS can detect when data becomes corrupt on a mirrored drive and quickly repair it with data from another drive.
However, ReFS can only be used on Storage Spaces on normal editions of Windows 10. Windows Server 2016 systems can format drives as ReFS without using Storage Spaces, and this offers some performance advantages in certain situations—for example, when using various virtual machine features in Microsoft Hyper-V. But, to really benefit from ReFS, you’ll need a PC with multiple storage drives.
At the moment, Windows 10 can’t actually boot from ReFS, so there’s no way to format your system drive as ReFS. This means ReFS can’t fully replace NTFS. It’s unclear whether Microsoft is fixing this limitation for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, or simply allowing users to format any drive with the ReFS file system.
Windows 10 Pro for Workstations supports NVDIMM-N hardware. NVDIMM-N is a non-volatile type of memory. This memory is as fast to access and write to as normal RAM, but the data stored in it won’t be erased when your computer shoots down—that’s what the non-volatile part means.
This allows demanding applications to access important data as quickly as possible. The data doesn’t need to be stored on a slower disk and moved back and forth between memory and storage.
The reason we don’t all use NVDIMM-N memory today is because it’s much more expensive than normal RAM. It’s very high-end hardware right now, and if you don’t have the expensive hardware, you can’t take advantage of this feature anyway.
Faster File Sharing
This edition of Windows 10 includes SMB Direct, a feature also available on Windows Server. SMB Direct requires network adapters that support Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).
As Microsoft puts it, “Network adapters that have RDMA can function at full speed with very low latency, while using very little CPU.” This aids applications that access large amounts of data on remote SMB (Windows network file sharing) shares over the network. Such applications benefit from faster transfer of large amounts of data, lower latency when accessing data, and low CPU utilization even when transferring a large amount of data very quickly.
Once again, you need high-end hardware that isn’t available on a typical consumer desktop PC to do this. If you don’t have network adapters that support RDMA, this feature won’t help you.
You can check whether your network adapters are RDMA-capable through PowerShell. Right-click the Start button on Windows 10 and select “PowerShell (Admin)” to open PowerShell as Administrator. Type “Get-SmbServerNetworkInterface” at the prompt and press Enter. Look under the “RDMA Capable” column to see whether they support RDMA. On a typical desktop PC, they almost certainly won’t.
Expanded Hardware Support
Microsoft is allowing Windows 10 Pro for Workstations to run on devices with “high performance configurations”, including server-grade Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors that would normally require Windows Server.
Windows 10 Pro currently only supports up to two physical CPUs and 2 TB of RAM per system, but Windows 10 Pro for Workstations will support up to four CPUs and 6 TB of RAM.
Once again, this feature will only aid people building expensive, high-end professional PCs.
How Do We Get Windows 10 Pro?
This new edition of Windows 10 will be available when the Fall Creators Update is released.
Microsoft hasn’t actually mentioned a price tag for this product. It’s intended for high-end workstation PCs. Microsoft isn’t going to sell it alongside other editions of Windows 10 in retail stores, and they have no reason to. All the features only benefit people who require support for expensive, high-end hardware. High-end workstation PCs will ship with Windows 10 Pro for Workstations installed, and it will likely be available to businesses and other organizations in volume license agreements.
While Microsoft is adding another edition of Windows 10, most people won’t need to even know it exists. But it’s another way for Microsoft to segment the market for Windows licenses, allowing them to charge more for a version of Windows 10 that will be required on very expensive workstation PCs.
Microsoft Announces Windows 10 Pro for Workstations Reviewed by Muhammad Anwar on August 10, 2017 Rating: 5
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‘I feel like half of me is gone,’ brother says of twin killed in train derailment
Cindy E. Harnett / Times Colonist
Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer, top, and his twin brother Jeremy Waldenberger-Bulmer on Jeremy's wedding day. Daniel was one of three men killed Monday in a train derailment near Field in southeastern B.C.
Photograph By Family photo
A Victoria man was one of three killed Monday when a runaway Canadian Pacific freight train derailed and plummeted more than 60 metres near Field in southeastern B.C.
Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer, 26, had just moved to Calgary from Victoria to become a railway conductor, following in his twin brother’s footsteps. He started work with Canadian Pacific in November as a trainee.
“I’m always excited to go to work and it made him realize that maybe he should try it out, so he applied and got hired,” his brother, Jeremy Waldenberger-Bulmer, said from Calgary.
Daniel was living with his brother, Jeremy’s wife Meika and their 19-month-old daughter, Tenley, while starting his new life in Alberta.
“He was loving it and knew he would make a lifetime career out of it,” Jeremy said.
“We had big plans of living out our careers with CP Rail and retiring together to golf all over the world. …
“That was our thing to do. If we weren’t golfing together, we were watching golf.”
Monday’s tragedy never factored into the twins’ imaginings for their future.
“Daniel was my twin brother and I feel like half of me is gone now,” Jeremy said. “He was training and he loved the job so far. He was excited to have a life of railroading.”
The westbound train, carrying grain, had been parked for two hours when it began rolling on its own, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said Tuesday. Board investigators found that the derailment was not the result of anything the crew did.
The 112-car train with three locomotives had been stopped at Partridge, the last station prior to the entrance to Upper Spiral Tunnel.
Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer, conductor Dylan Paradis and engineer Andrew Dockrell, all of Calgary, had just boarded for a shift change and weren’t yet ready to leave when the train began rolling down the tracks, picked up speed and eventually derailed.
Imagining his brother’s terror and the lack of control intensified Jeremy’s grief, though knowing his brother and his colleagues weren’t to blame for the derailment brought some cold comfort.
“It does make me feel better it wasn’t anything the crew did, but at the same time, yes, it [hurts] to know it’s just a freak accident and started moving on its own,” Jeremy said.
“It’s just something that shouldn’t happen because there are so many safety measures to prevent things like this.”
Jeremy said he had the privilege to work with conductor Paradis and engineer Dockrell. “When Daniel got paired with Dylan [Paradis], he requested that Dylan remain his coach because he looked up to him and loved everything Dylan was teaching him,” he said. “My heart goes out to everyone grieving.”
The twins were born and raised in Grande Prairie, Alta., where their mother, Cari Waldenberger, still lives.
Waldenberger said in a phone interview from Grande Prairie that the only way she will get through the grief is knowing “he’s in heaven and his soul is with God.”
"I am just going to miss him so much; miss him horribly," she said, describing Daniel as wise and well-liked and “so thoughtful.”
She said she doesn’t want to be angry or blame anyone: “It was a horrible tragic accident and that’s what it was, an accident.” Three men are dead and nothing the investigation finds will bring them back, she said.
Waldenberger said Daniel remarked on how impressed he was with in-classroom and on-the-job training.
She said he lived a full life, but one that was too short.
“I absolutely adored my son,” Waldenberger said. “It’s hard to explain how much you love your children. My sorrow is really deep. I’m still in shock. You don’t imagine something like this could happen.”
Daniel worked two jobs while in Victoria to afford the high cost of living. He envisioned being able to retire in Victoria after a long career at CP.
The twins' father, Albert Bulmer, lives in Moncton, N.B. On social media, Bulmer said: “He will be sadly missed by me his father and ‘mentor’ as he loved adventure and challenge as I do.”
Jeremy said his brother lived in Victoria for three years to experience “Island life” and loved being by the ocean. He worked for 4Refuel, a diesel-delivery company, and made several good friends.
Like all siblings, the Waldenberger-Bulmer twins fought sometimes, but they were also inseparable, Jeremy said. “Daniel lived an amazing life. He got to experience a lot of things in the short time he was with us,” he said.
“He always brightened up the room and was always able to put a smile on people’s faces. He has so many friends that are going to miss him.”
Jeremy said his daughter is calling around their house for “Unco Dano,” not knowing he’s not coming home.
Jeremy said his brother was hoping to go to the Waste Management Phoenix Open golf event in January 2020. He now imagines him golfing in heaven: “I hope he’s got a brand-new set of clubs up there and is golfing the best game of his life.”
ceharnett@timescolonist.com
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'Those committing crimes against Zimbabwean citizens should be prosecuted'
25 January 2019 - 19:12 By Ernest Mabuza
People arrested during protests wait to appear in the magistrates court in Harare, Zimbabwe, on January 16 2019. The Southern Africa Litigation Centre has called on the Zimbabwean government to take action against the police, security forces and Zanu-PF officials who have committed crimes against civilians.
Image: REUTERS/Philimon Bulawayo
Zimbabwe's government has been urged to investigate crimes committed against the civilian population by the police, armed forces and some Zanu-PF members since January 14.
The Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC) said those found responsible for crimes such as torture, murder, and crimes against humanity must be prosecuted.
“Should the government of Zimbabwe fail to investigate and prosecute suspected offenders, SALC will not stand by, but take steps towards holding those responsible for the commission of the crimes accountable,” the centre said in a statement on Friday.
The centre said it was concerned about reports of serious human rights violations and the commission of atrocities following country-wide protests against the hiking of fuel prices.
It said the government’s response towards the protests had been systematic, widespread and disproportionately brutal.
The centre said it had received credible reports that the police and security forces had used live ammunition against its own citizens.
“There are credible reports that doctors have treated 78 confirmed cases of gunshot wounds.
“There are also confirmed reports that the police and government security forces continue to use lethal force against citizens in various Harare neighbourhoods, including Mbare, Glenview, Kuwadzana, and Chitungwiza.”
The centre said there was strong evidence suggesting that torture, extrajudicial killings intimidation, raids on homes for suspected leaders of the protesters, indiscriminate traffic stops, displacement and arbitrary detentions were taking place on a daily basis in the country.
It said there were also reports suggesting that wounded victims were being detained while they were in hospitals and taken to custody.
Those who had been indiscriminately detained were also being denied access to legal representation by the authorities.
“These reports point towards gross human rights violations and raise serious concerns that Zimbabwe government officials are committing serious international crimes including torture and crimes against humanity.”
The centre said Zimbabwe had an international obligation to investigate and prosecute the crimes committed by the police, security forces and Zanu-PF officials against its citizens.
“Should Zimbabwe take no steps towards fulfilling its obligation, the international community has an obligation to intervene in order to hold those responsible for the commission of the crimes accountable.”
The centre said that as a regional body struggling to hold governments accountable for the commission of international crimes, including acts of torture and crimes against humanity, it would take steps towards holding those individuals who were committing the crimes in Zimbabwe accountable.
WATCH | Zimbabwe protests - what has happened so far
Zimbabwe was plunged into violent and angry protests in January after president Emmerson Mnangagwa announced steep fuel price increases.
Zimbabwe activist pastor seeks bail as hundreds face trial after protests
Zimbabwean activist pastor Evan Mawarire will ask the High Court on Wednesday to free him on bail after his detention on subversion charges following ...
Mnangagwa returns to Zimbabwe after protest crackdown
Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa has landed back in Harare, state television said Tuesday, after cutting short a foreign tour over nationwide ...
Zimbabweans in SA fear for their loved ones back home
Zimbabweans living in South Africa say the tense situation unfolding in the neighbouring country is frustrating as they struggle to stay in touch ...
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Outrage as poachers walk
13 July 2015 - 09:38 By SIMON BLOCH
Political interference is being alleged after three rhino poachers who were involved in a shootout with police and anti-poaching rangers walked out of the Ingwavuma Magistrate's Court without having to spend time in jail. The DA has called on the Hawks to investigate the "leniency" of the sentences.DA police spokesman Dianne Kohler Barnard said she was outraged and called for an investigation into rhino trial courts in KwaZulu-Natal after multiple allegations of interference and undue influence being exerted."[This] speaks of very high-powered political interference to me, but obviously it needs to be investigated by the Hawks," Kohler Barnard said."We cannot as a country claim to be taking rhino poaching seriously. [A fine of] R2000 a month for someone who could be pulling in hundreds of thousands of rands from selling rhino horn to criminal syndicates, is not a deterrent."Central to the case is Madoda Gumede, 35, brother of a prominent Zululand traditional leader and son of a former Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife board member, the late Simon Gumede.Gumede is leader of the Mduku community, which runs the Makhassa reserve next to Phinda.Madoda Gumede, and his two co-accused, brothers Jabulani, 39, and Sigidi Ndabadaba, 36, from Nbela, were arrested in May 2013 for rhino poaching in the Phinda Private Game Reserve after a shootout with police and the Nyathi anti-poaching unit. An unidentified poacher was fatally wounded.At their bail application the men were each released on R300 bail each.They were charged with conspiracy to hunt rhino, and unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition.The men testified against each other in court.Madoda and the Ndabadabas were convicted of conspiracy to hunt rhino illegally and fined R60000, which they are allowed to pay in instalments of R2000 a month. They will serve seven years in jail on default of payment.The magistrate wholly suspended for five years Madoda's six-year sentence for illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition.Evidence had been led that it was Madoda Gumede who had supplied the large-calibre CZ .375 hunting rifle, silencer and ammunition.David Mabunda, acting CEO of Ezemvelo, said: "We are delighted to see that rhino arrests are resulting in increased conviction rates but we would have preferred to see harsher sentences at Ingwavuma, bearing in mind the sentence handed down in Mtubatuba Magistrate's Court only three days earlier."In that case, Cimona Ngovela, a Mozambican, was charged for trespassing and illegal possession of a weapon. Sentenced to an effective five years in jail, Ngovela was given one year for trespassing, and four on the weapons charge...
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UAHC Subsidiary American Sustainable Rubber Company, LLC Scientific Advisor Dr. Katrina Cornish Receives Bioenvironmental Polymer Society Lifetime Achievement Award
CHICAGO, June 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- United American Healthcare Corporation (OTC: UAHC), an emerging technology holding company, today announced Dr. Katrina Cornish, scientific advisor of its wholly-owned subsidiary American Sustainable Rubber Company, LLC ("ASR"), received the Bioenvironmental Polymer Lifetime Achievement Award for her outstanding leadership and research contributions in developing next-generation bio-based materials by processes that are safe and environmentally friendly.
The Bioenvironmental Polymer Society (BEPS) recognizes scientific excellence and service to the society. The prestigious lifetime achievement award is given to BEPS members who have made outstanding contributions that have advanced the scientific field and/or technological development of biopolymers, bio-based materials, or bioplastic/materials related to bioenergy. The nominee is recognized as a leader in his or her field and holds a position of full professor or equivalent (i.e., GS15, senior scientist, and/or engineers) for two years or longer.
"I am honored to receive the Bioenvironmental Polymer Lifetime Achievement Award," said Dr. Katrina Cornish. "It is a great achievement to be recognized for my research and work by the Bioenvironmental Polymer Society and to be among the recipients who have won in years past. I look forward to continuing my work and research in natural rubber and sustainable materials."
Dr. Cornish currently leads a program on alternative rubber production, bio-based fillers, and exploitation of opportunity feedstocks from agriculture and food processng wastes for value-added products and biofuels. She has authored over 267 papers and holds about 20 patents.
"Dr. Cornish is the original researcher who demonstrated that natural rubber could be sourced from genetically-modified TK dandelion plants, which we plan to leverage to help achieve our goal of producing natural rubber domestically on a commercially-viable scale," said Timothy Madden, President of American Sustainable Rubber. "I congratulate Dr. Cornish on receiving this lifetime achievement award; her expertise is why we are honored to have her as scientific advisor to American Sustainable Rubber."
For more information on the new, wholly-owned subsidiary, please visit AmericanRubber.com. Additionally, interested parties can subscribe for updates and more information.
About American Sustainable Rubber Company, LLC
American Sustainable Rubber Company, LLC is an indoor agriculture firm pursuing proprietary technology to produce natural rubber in the United States at a commercial and sustainable level through the production of genetically modified crops.
About United American Healthcare Corporation
United American Healthcare Corporation ("UAHC"), through its subsidiary UAHC Ventures, LLC, pursues strategic investment opportunities in various emerging growth industries. UAHC subsidiary Pulse Systems, LLC, is a contract manufacturing company that provides services to the medical device industry and American Sustainable Rubber Company, LLC ("ASR"), is an indoor agriculture technology company focused on creating a domestic solution to natural rubber production.
Forward Looking Statement:
This press release contains forward-looking statements related to, among other things, the anticipated future success of genetically modified dandelions and the likelihood of its commercial success. Although the Company believes that it has a reasonable basis for forward-looking statements contained herein, they are based on current expectations about future events affecting the Company and are subject to risks, uncertainties and factors relating to its operations and business environment, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond its control. These risk factors include those risks detailed in the Company's filings with OTC Markets Group Inc. These risks may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements in this press release. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by the foregoing cautionary statements. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update, amend or clarify these forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities law.
CMW Media
Kathleen Gonzales
kathleen@cmwmedia.com
investors@uahc.com
View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/uahc-subsidiary-american-sustainable-rubber-company-llc-scientific-advisor-dr-katrina-cornish-receives-bioenvironmental-polymer-society-lifetime-achievement-award-300871808.html
SOURCE American Sustainable Rubber Company, LLC
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The World Is Run By Fools, And We Let Them
November 16, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:25 pm Finance Tagged with: Abbott, Cameron, Dumb, Dumber, G20, Growth, Harper, lies, propaganda, Putin
Dorothea Lange Negro woman carrying shoes home from church Mississippi Delta July 1936
Dumb and Dumber To, the sequel after 20 years, was released recently. Unfortunately for Jim and Jeff and the Farrelly brothers, unintended humor will always be funnier than the scripted kind, no matter how hard Hollywood tries. Case in point: the Dumber slapstick was easily upstaged over the past few days by the G20 summit in Brisbane.
Not only did the pedantic Anglo-Saxon power hungry freak show of Harper, Cameron and Abbott (nobody even noticed Obama) give Vladimir V. Putin a good laugh with their empty chest thumping, entirely spin doctor scripted and entirely aimed at their domestic media and audiences, these so-called leaders also came up with no less than 800(!) measures they claim will boost global economic growth by 2.1%, or $2 trillion. Over 5 years, or some useless and opaque number like that (2018?).
It would seem to be painfully obvious that what the world needs really urgently badly today is not so much economic growth, but growth in the dendrites, synapses and neurons in the heads of both our leaders and of those who put them where they are, ourselves. No use holding your breath. As things are, none of us are any smarter than either Dumb or Dumber.
As Brussels and the leaders of the allegedly healthy economies in the North sacrifice southern Europe on the altar of their megalomania, the G20 does the same with emerging economies and the even poorer rest of the world. The formerly rich part of the world has gotten stuck in its own dreams and faulty models, and the only place left to eke out any semblance of growth is weaker nations. The Roman empire revisited.
If the G20 nations could have ‘grown’ growth at a 2.1% clip with the sort of ease with which their reports were issued this weekend, they would have done so already, all along, long ago. The fact that they haven’t, it doesn’t get any simpler, implies that they can’t this time either. It’s all hot air, and perhaps that’s too positive still, make that tepid.
Still, when the Anglo-Saxon dipshits are together they have the guts to make such claims, just as when they’re together they have the guts to ‘shirtfront’ Putin. Canada’s Harper reportedly shook hands with Putin and told him to get out of Ukraine. Nobody present wanted to quote the reaction he got, but I’m thinking a simple ‘You first’ is a distinct possibility. None of these guys have anything on Putin, and they all know it. So does he.
Meanwhile, their home media have cooked up the Putin is Bad story to such heights that they can’t be seen as doing nothing, even if proof for any of the allegations concerning what Russia is supposed to be guilty of is still sorely lacking. The Anglo-Saxons need enemies to make their stories stick, so the ‘he probably shot down that plane’ line is awfully helpful.
And that dumber-ass approach is the same one they use for their economic, what shall we call it, ‘policies'(?), it’s the exact same thing. It’s the surface that counts, not what’s underneath it. It’s the storyline, not the veracity of it. Who in the west still doubts that Putin is a bad man? Very few. Though he hasn’t done anything for which the west has provided any proof.
It’s a tale in the spirit of Little Red Riding Hood, and just as credible. The 2.1% growth story doesn’t even attain that level of credulity, because it’s made up out of nothing at all. It would sound cute to say that the nonsense that emanated from the G20 summit is unrivaled, but it’s not. These boyos rival their own emptiness at every single occasion they get.
All they do is make sure that their access to the public (our) coffers is used to garner profit for their paymasters, at the cost of the taxpayer (again, us). That’s both their mission and their MO. And we all know that once you’ve been PM or FM and you served your superiors well, your life will be comfortable ever after.
That said, there is no vision, there is nothing. There’s a desire to amass power, and then to hold on to it and serve the bankrupt system, but none of it has anything to do with the people these guys and dolls are supposed to represent. And it can only lead to things like what the London School of Economics claims in a new report:
How The UK Coalition Has Helped The Rich By Hitting The Poor
A landmark study of the coalition’s tax and welfare policies six months before the general election reveals how money has been transferred from the poorest to the better off, apparently refuting the chancellor of the exchequer’s claims that the country has been “all in it together”. According to independent research to be published on Monday and seen by the Observer, George Osborne has been engaged in a significant transfer of income from the least well-off half of the population to the more affluent in the past four years.
That whole growth target is nothing but a way to justify more of what the LSE has noticed. A way to take away more money from the poor, through austerity, and through so-called reform IMF-style, after which the conclusion will be that the policies have failed, but the reality will be that the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. In the eyes of the G20 policy makers that will mean a success, even if it will be 180º different from what their public utterances have been.
We’re not only being fooled all the time and wherever we look, we’re being fooled by a bunch of stupid spin-scripted programmed assclowns. But we are the ones who put them where they are. As long as we hang on to our existing procedures for electing our leaders, only megalomaniac assclowns will float to the surface.
And they will, to a man, use their positions to rob us blind while pretending to have our best interests at mind. It’s what allowing money to enter your political system will always lead to: you can elect only made men. Which leads to Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Obama, and Jeb Bush or Hillary. What about how this works is not clear?
The OECD even wants to do the G20 one better, they want 4% growth. I’ll tell you one thing: the western world will NEVER have a 4% growth rate again. Or at least not this century. And not before many millions of Europeans and Americans have gone down in hunger and misery.
We Need To Ramp Up Global Growth: OECD
The global economy should be growing at a much faster pace, the chief economist of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warned on Sunday, as world leaders agreed on hundreds of measures they hope will boost expansion. “As the emerging markets become a greater share of the global economy, we really ought to be seeing the global economy growing at 4% or more, so the tone is dour,” said OECD Chief Economist Catherine Mann, speaking to CNBC at the G-20 summit in Brisbane over the weekend.
Growth of 4% is well behind the group’s projected global gross domestic product (GDP) of 3.3% for this year. In its latest Economic Outlook, published earlier this month, the OECD warned of “major risks on the horizon” for the world’s economy, such as further market volatility, high levels of debt and a stagnation in the euro zone recovery.
Mann’s comments come as world leaders at the G-20 agreed on measures they said will equate to 2.1% new growth, inject $2 trillion into the world economy and create millions of jobs. The Paris-based OECD has previously outlined a target of adding around 2 percentage points to global GDP by 2018, relative to the 2013 level. [..]
Mann was optimistic that job creation would increase in tandem with global growth, as countries ramped up infrastructure investment. “We know that there’s usually a relationship between growth and jobs. It’s not always a tight relationship. There’s always an issue about the distribution, where the jobs are being created, what sectors, what countries and some of the disconnect there can be,” she said. “Mismatch can be a problem, but I do think we are going to see job creation go hand in hand with global growth.”
Need I say more after reading that? The lunatics are guiding us off the cliff. I know most people feel there’s nothing they can do to change the course their countries and governments have taken, but I also think that perhaps all these people need to realize they don’t have much of a choice anymore. If getting up from your couch for your own sake isn’t enough of a incentive, how about doing it for your kids and grandkids? How about doing it just because it feels right, because silently supporting assclowns while gobbling up cheese doodles in your comfy chair should never have been your thing? Didn’t you once have promise?
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Caio Fonseca
Described alternatively as a modernist and an abstract expressionist, American painter Caio Fonseca layers forms and slabs of color on his canvasses to create works of fundamental energy. Fonseca’s paintings are often suggestive of the lids of pianos or of the curves of stringed instruments. A pianist himself, he has said that he paints Baroque music, and there is a Baroque sense of order and harmony to his work. The blocking of different coats and textures strikes a tension between the ordered and the lively, a contrast that forms the core of Fonseca’s oeuvre.
The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Brooklyn Museum of Art in Brooklyn, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among others, all include selections of the artist’s work in their permanent collections. He is represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City.
Ultra Mar, 2014
Color aquatint and spitbite aquatint etching with chine collé
and strings.
Paper size: 37 1/2" x 37"
Ultra Red, 2014
Three String Etching Giallo, 2006
Color aquatint, spitbite aquatint,
soapground, sugarlift
and softground etching
Paper size 39½" x 50½"
Seven String Etching No. 6, 2001
Color aguatint, spitbite and
sugarlift etching with
softground, chine collé
Hosho, string and hand stamping
Somerset soft white textured paper
Paper size 37 1/8" x 46"
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CORVETTE RACING AT LIME ROCK PARK: Anniversary of Victory No. 100
Thread: CORVETTE RACING AT LIME ROCK PARK: Anniversary of Victory No. 100
Team brings class championship lead to GT-only event
Lime Rock site of Corvette Racing’s 100th all-time victory
Gavin, Milner led 1-2 team finish in GTLM
Garcia, Magnussen enter as GTLM Championship leader
DETROIT (July 18, 2017) – Corvette Racing returns this week to the site of one of its biggest landmark achievements as it continues to race toward what would be another championship at the top level of sports car racing. The team scored its 100th all-time victory a year ago at Lime Rock Park, which plays host this weekend to the Northeast Grand Prix for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
A GT-only event this year, the race gives Corvette Racing a chance at victory No. 106 after a 1-2 finish in the GT Le Mans (GTLM) category a year ago. Oliver Gavin and Tommy Milner won in the No. 4 Mobil 1/SiriusXM Chevrolet Corvette C7.R over teammates Antonio Garcia and Jan Magnussen. It was the 60th 1-2 team finish in Corvette Racing history and helped Gavin and Milner to the 2016 GTLM Driver’s Championship.
Lime Rock is one of 24 venues at which Corvette Racing has won an event. It shows the diverse array of circuits where Corvette Racing has tasted success. Lime Rock definitely qualifies with a 1.5-mile lap and seven corners – all but one of which are right-handed turns. In a stark contrast, the 24 Hours of Le Mans (where Corvette Racing finished third in class with one of its Corvette C7.Rs in June) is 8.5 miles in length!
This time it’s Garcia and Magnussen who have the points lead going into Lime Rock on the strength of two victories and a pair of additional podium finishes this year in the IMSA championship. They won at Sebring and Circuit of The Americas, were second at Long Beach and placed third at Watkins Glen. That goes along with a third-place class finish at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Gavin and Milner were race-winners this year at Long Beach and are hoping a return to Lime Rock marks a return to their winning ways. Strong efforts by both the Corvettes also would go a long way to solidifying Chevrolet’s lead in the GTLM Manufacturer’s Championship.
Odds are certainly favorable that at least one of Corvette Racing’s pairings will come away with good points. The team has won five times in 10 appearances at Lime Rock, and the lineup has a combined six victories there.
The Northeast Grand Prix is set for 3:05 p.m. ET on Saturday, July 22. FOX Sports 2 will air the race live starting at 3 p.m. ET with live audio coverage from IMSA Radio and a Corvette Racing In-Car feed available on IMSA.com.
ANTONIO GARCIA, NO. 3 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C7.R: “The traffic situation at Lime Rock changes things a little bit as we will only have to worry about a slower class and not about other classes going by us. So maybe that relaxes the situation a little bit. In a lot of ways, Lime Rock is more stressful than an event like Watkins Glen with the full field there. Because the lap is so short, the stints feel very long because you are doing so many. Every single second counts at Lime Rock. If we have to make green-flag stops, everything has to be right on. If you aren’t leading, it’s easy to lose a lap. Tire wear also is one of the key things to watch. There are many things to focus on.”
JAN MAGNUSSEN, NO. 3 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C7.R: “We still have the lead in the championship, so that is a positive. Hopefully our performance will be better this weekend than previous races. Lime Rock is a place where anything can happen. The lap is so short that any error will cost you not just positions but laps. Every part of what you do is magnified. The strategy has to be perfect, the pit stops have to be perfect and the driving has to be perfect. If we do those three things, we will be in great shape.”
OLIVER GAVIN, NO. 4 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C7.R: “Lime Rock last year was a fairy tale race last year for us. It was tough and hard… hot with huge competition as usual. To get the victory and the 100th win for Corvette Racing was magic, and it was an amazing feeling to be in the car at the end. To be perfectly honest, Lime Rock had never been particularly good to me through the years. Last year, It also was a big part of us winning the championship. Getting back to our winning ways was huge. It was a big race for how things played out for us the rest of the way.”
TOMMY MILNER, NO. 4 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C7.R: “At Lime Rock, qualifying really matters because it’s so hard to pass. That’s a bit different than most tracks we go to. With it being a GT-only race, it adds a strategy element that’s new to us. It was a cool moment (in 2016) to get the 100th win for Corvette Racing. But the attention is now on getting 106, 107 and onward. That’s the focus. It’ll be nice to go back to Lime Rock and think about what happened there last year. But that will be a quick thought and then it’s back to how do we win the next one.”
DOUG FEHAN, CORVETTE RACING PROGRAM MANAGER: “Lime Rock is another classic circuit in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. It’s the shortest track we race on, but at the same time it is one of the most difficult events for the drivers, crew and engineering team. Because of the density in the number of cars on a short 1.5-mile circuit, that can create some unpredictable situations. But there’s no team more apt in dealing with that than Corvette Racing. We’ve proven it time and time again, and we will do again at Lime Rock this weekend.”
2017 WeatherTech SportsCar Championship – GTLM Standings (After Six of 11 Events)
Manufacturer Standings
1. Antonio Garcia/Jan Magnussen – 182
2. Alexander Sims/Bill Auberlen – 179
3. Dirk Muller/Joey Hand – 172
4. Richard Westbrook/Ryan Briscoe – 169
5. Dirk Werner/Patrick Pilet – 159
6. Oliver Gavin/Tommy Milner – 151
1. No. 3 Corvette Racing – 182
2. No. 25 BMW Team RLL – 179
3. No. 66 Ford Chip Ganassi Racing – 172
5. No. 911 Porsche GT Team – 159
1. Chevrolet – 193
2. Ford – 191
3. BMW – 184
4. Porsche – 174
5. Ferrari – 112
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David Madden – FD
David is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland. He has a Coaching Certificate from Coaching Development in the UK and he has also completed a Professional Diploma in Financial Advice from the LIA in Ireland.
David qualified with EY before joining his own family’s business the Madden’s Entertainment Group in 1991, which he continues to manage today. This was a successful consumer electronics retail business with four shops which included a consumer finance company. David repositioned the business in 2007 when it was evident that consumer electronics retailing did not have a viable future on the high street. The business owned all of the freeholds from which the stores traded and David transitioned the business into a successful property management company.
David established his own consulting and mentoring practice in 2009. Since then he has mentored SME and Family Business clients across various sectors including Retail, Professional Services, Health & Fitness, Property Management and Food & Beverage. David knows and understands the dynamics of running a Family Business – it’s in his DNA. This mix of skills and experience sets David apart from others who work in the Family Business / SME space. He understands the various business issues with which owners have to grapple on a daily basis and he is very strong on the need for good governance. David has worked with his clients to improve their profitability and to optimise their business performance.
David chaired Radius the Consumer Electronics Buying Group in the UK from 2004 to 2006 which had a group turnover in excess of £300 million. He is also experienced in working in the charity and the not-for- profit sector.
Bart Kane – Regional Director
Connect with David
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FIRE > Interview > So To Speak Transcript: David Baugh
So To Speak Transcript: David Baugh
by Nico Perrino
Note: This is a unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.
Interviewer: So, David Baugh, thank you for coming on the show.
David Baugh: Thank for having me.
Interviewer: So, as you know our show is on the topic of defending my enemy. I know you’re likely to take umbrage with the specific wording of the topic choice. You would prefer it to be defending the rights of my enemy, but carrying on in the tradition of former ACLU executive director, are you near? You’re known for your principle defense of the constitutional rights of those with whom you disagree and perhaps the most prominent example of this was your legal defense as a black criminal defense attorney of an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Who was Barry Elton Black and how did you and this unlikely character come together?
David Baugh: Well, back in those years I was on the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Virginia. I was also on the legal advisory panel, which was a group of people, mostly lawyers, and whenever citizens would write in and ask for ACLU support we’d get presented these situations and we’d weigh in. We would decide whether to weigh in and they’d flash them around our offices, well Mr. Black had been arrested over in the western part of the state. He and a group on Klansmen. He was from Pennsylvania and had rented a piece of farmland and they came down to protest and as part of that protest they had a weenie roast or whatever it is on this property with the permission of the owner and at the end of it they lit this cross up, stood around in their regalia, and it could be seen for miles.
Well, a local deputy saw it and recognized that there was a Virginia statute saying you can’t burn a cross like that with the intent to intimidate. And there’s a presumption that when there is a cross burning, there’s an intent to intimidate and he arrested him. Well, after he was arrested, Mr. Black, he couldn’t find an attorney over there so he wrote into the ACLU and asked for some help. When I read it, I knew immediately – you cannot suppress or – you can’t just cut out one form of language. I mean Mr. Black certainly had a right to stand in a field and shout I hate black people. He certainly had a right to hold up a sign. Well, under the law he had the right to symbolically do the same thing.
So, he couldn’t find an attorney and it’s important that the first amendment be preserved. So, as a criminal lawyer, I said I’ll take the case. Little did I know, it was gonna be so big.
Interviewer: And what did you fellow ACLU attorneys, people on the board, think when you chimed in and said you’d take the case?
David Baugh: They were nothing but respect and assistance. I remember the Director of the Legal Advisory Panel pulled me in the room along with the Executive Director and said – Ken Willis, and said look it’s admirable you’re gonna volunteer to represent this guy. If he’ll accept our help, we’ll do it. If he doesn’t, well we offered. It’s up to you. I said sure.
So, he and I – Mr. Black and I played telephone tag for a while. Finally, we made contact and I explained to him that I was offering my services from the ACLU and I explained to him that I’m African-American and that if that made a statement he didn’t want to make, I could understand stand if he would refuse my representation. To which he responded that he had done some research on me and thought I could do as fine job as any white man, so he asked for my help.
Interviewer: What was the specific law that he was prosecuted under? Because I understand that Virginia had a sort of different kind of intimidation law that didn’t take into consideration intent.
David Baugh: Well, it did take it into consideration, but it was sort of presumed. They said you have to have the intent, however just burning the cross seems to satisfy the intent. There was also – there was a statute right after it for the same thing about burning a star David.
Interviewer: Oh, wow. And what was your biggest challenge in putting together that defense? Had you done anything like that before?
David Baugh: No, I didn’t even know the statute existed. When it came across my desk, I looked at it and I went what the hell is this? And I went to the library and pulled this statute and I thought there’s no way this could pass constitution muster. So, I mean it was a no brainer.
Interviewer: Uh-huh, but you lost at the trial court level?
David Baugh: Well, the problem we had with the tactics of the case is that normally criminal defenses fit into three categories. It didn’t happen, it did happen and there’s an explanation, or this is a bad law. Very seldomly do you assert the last one. So, from the day we took the case, Mr. Black had burned a cross and the statute says you can’t burn a cross. So, as far as factually he did that which the statute forbids. So, I told him from day one and we talked about it on the Legal Advisory Panel the trick to the trial was, 1.) Try as best I can to keep him out of jail of a five-year statute. 2.) Assume that he will be convicted. Try to get him not guilty but assume he is and build a record challenging the constitution of the statute as an attempt to suppress content.
Interviewer: And that’s what you did, right?
David Baugh: Yes, a brilliant lawyer by the name of Rod Smolla, S – M – O – L – L – A, was Dean of the University of Richmond Law School was the appellate guy from the panel and he and I talked and we talked about what kind of record he wanted, what kind of transcript he wanted. We challenged the statute at the preliminary hearing, lost. We challenged the statute pretrial, lost. He was convicted. The jury gave him only a fine. We kept him out of jail. We gave notice of appeal to the Virginia Court of Appeals, which we won and got the statute thrown out.
However, the government because it’s a constitutional challenge, the government has the right to appeal. So, the government appealed it to the Virginia Supreme Court, where we won as well and then the government – the Commonwealth of Virginia advocated or filed a motion for a hearing with the United States Supreme Court.
Interviewer: Were you surprised when the Supreme Court accepted the case?
David Baugh: Not really. Without blowing my horn, Rod Smolla’s a real smart guy and he really laid it out in such a way that it was just – for instance, the bad part about the statute is the presumption language and we didn’t even try to get that language wacked out when we argued it to the jury. We wanted that language in because we felt that language was the language that would get the statute declared unconstitutional.
Interviewer: Yeah, and where were you when the ruling came down? Where you in the courtroom?
David Baugh: When the ruling – no, I wasn’t. I was there –
Interviewer: For the argument?
David Baugh: I was there for the argument, but by serendipity I was in DC trying another case a couple years later and I received word that the supreme court was gonna hear that case that day, so I excused myself from the trial and went down and got the last available seat and sat there for the first time in my life and went in before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Interviewer: Yeah, was this case tough for you at all to take?
David Baugh: No, it wasn’t. It was a number of reasons. 1.) I was growing up; my mother taught me that a principle or a moral isn’t really yours until it’s tested. 2.) I do know from my philosophical understanding of the United States constitution that for every right or benefit that we get, there’s a corresponding responsibility. By that I mean, if you want the right to speak freely that means you have to listen to a lot of stupid crap.
In fact, if you want the right to speak freely, you have to even protect the right of others to say stupid crap. And also, the first amendment normally isn’t challenged accept by the extremes. By that I mean, there’s never gonna be a civil rights case about [inaudible] [00:09:15] or SpongeBob Square Pants. It’s always going to be a Malcom X, a Klansman, some group or identity or person who is do this – part of radical fringe and that is where these cases pop up, that is where the defense pops up.
Interviewer: This wasn’t really a new sort of case or idea for you, the idea of you defending controversial speech. You’d done it before in your career, right?
David Baugh: Yes, I have. Well, speech and defendants. I was lead counsel and won the defendants member of Al Qaeda on the US bombing in Nairobi, Kenya. I have represented for the ACLU a number of pornography cases, dirty book store cases, students arrested for showing controversial movies on campus, so no. It’s not my typical case in that I am a criminal trial lawyer. I represent people who are charged with drug dealing, murder, stuff like that. This is primarily constitutional. So, in that way it was different and the same.
Interviewer: Yeah, talk a little bit about your road to the legal profession. You mentioned you had defended students who wanted to show movies on campus. You were quite the student activist yourself, correct?
David Baugh: Well, I certainly wasn’t planning to become a lawyer. In fact, I was very hesitant when I decided to go to law school because I gonna hear it from my mother the rest of my life say I told you should’ve been a lawyer. Oh god, but in the 60’s I went to a historically black school and the Commonwealth of Virginia decided to break up some of the black schools and farm out various departments to white campuses so they could meet their integration guidelines. And I was one of the students who attempted to stop it and we did and I was expelled. Suspended my senior year – my second semester of my senior year and sat out for a couple of years, but –
Interviewer: The ACLU stepped in to help you out, right?
David Baugh: That was my first interaction with the ACLU. Well, I had been – When I was 16, I was arrested during the Nashville sit ins and the local ACLU stepped in and represented us, so I had seen them, but I didn’t know anything about lawyers. But, while sitting in federal court watching the ACLU – Arthur Samuels was the lawyer, really great guy. He was trying to get the students back in while sitting there. I was, at that time, I hadn’t graduated yet because I was suspended and I was applying to graduate school in drama and while sitting in the courtroom watching the ACLU I thought, this is important and I can do this. I ought to try and do this. So, I decided to become a lawyer while sitting in my trial.
Interviewer: Yeah, and what brought you to criminal defense law?
David Baugh: Well, like most lawyers, you don’t really pick your area. It picks you and when I was in law school my first year I was hired by a local attorney in Houston. I went to a historically black law school and I was doing – he was a general practitioner. He did personal injury, divorce, everything and I was doing a little bit of everything. Well, I seemed to have a talent for criminal and so he used to pay me to sit in court and watch.
So, I would work on cases, I would write briefs, I would go to court, I would watch, help pick juries, and so I just started doing it. In fact, I was telling someone at coffee today, when I passed the bar I went in to see Jesse Fuentes, the senior partner, and I said Jesse congratulations you passed the bar. I said, “Yeah but it was a Thursday so I gotta get off next Wednesday because I have to go to Austin, Texas to get sworn in.” He says, “You can’t go.” I said, “What do you mean I can’t go get sworn in?” He said, “You can’t go Wednesday because Monday morning Judge Pavey,” P – A – V – E – Y, I remember it so well, “Is meeting you in his chambers at 8:00 a.m. and he’s swearing you in and at 10:00 you’re picking a jury in State of Texas versus Sterock, a case you’ve been working on. So, I literally tried my first felony jury trial when I had been a lawyer for two hours.
Interviewer: What was that case about?
David Baugh: It was a aggravated assault case. He had gone to a store and they said he had shop lifted a Playboy magazine and while leaving they said they challenged him and that he put his right hand in right pocket and pulled out a knife and threatened them and escaped with his Playboy and he was arrested for assault with a knife. And we won the case because Mr. Sterock was a Vietnam Veteran who had been injured in the war and one of his injuries was he could not open the fingers on his right hand. He couldn’t put his right hand in his pocket.
Interviewer: Wow, have you ever done any – litigated any constitutional issues per say at the appellate level or have you been strictly criminal?
David Baugh: Well, actually all criminal law is constitutional, in fact I was talking to a legislator at lunch today – the one that was – and there’s an ancient Buddhist expression that I made up one night when I was drinking that is that there’s only one law and that’s the constitution. All statutes are merely the ravings of politicians. So, in my efforts to defend people charged with crimes, I’ve won motions to suppress. I’ve wont motions to dismiss. I’ve had cases where statutes had been declared unconstitutional.
I remember once – Richmond used to have a city ordinance that they used for busting gays in the park that said it shall be unlawful to solicit another to engage in any act which is lewd, lascivious, or wanton and I said, “Judge, this statute is unconstitutionally broad. These terms could be anything.” And he said, “I wanna see your brief.” And I said, “Good, because I’d like to leave.” “Why?” “Because I wanna go home because before I left this morning, my wife Jocelyn gave me a kiss that was lewd, lascivious, and wanton and I want to go home.”
He struck the statute. So, yes, I have challenged statutes before, either as written or as interpreted, yes. But that’s just in part in parcel of criminal practice.
Interviewer: Yeah, speaking of judges, you said some judges had some interesting things to say to you after you took the Barry Black case. What were some of those things?
David Baugh: Oh, god I’m so proud. There were some people who criticized, but there weren’t that many. But, among –
Interviewer: Where do you think the – where did the criticism mostly come from? Did you get any push back from like the NAACP?
David Baugh: Yeah, there was pushback form the NAACP of Virginia, but also at that time however I remember that Julian Bond wrote a great letter to the paper in support of my position and my obligation to take this case. So, that’s pretty heavy stuff, you know? Julian Bond. So, yeah and sometimes I would go into a court and you’re waiting for your case to get called and judges would say, “Mr. Baugh, I see you at the bench.” And you come up and he’d stop a trial and tell me how proud he was or she was that I took this case because you see whenever a lawyer takes a criminal case, people assume that you are condoning your client’s behavior.
If your client is charged with child abuse, they thing even when the trial’s over you put on a raincoat and you go to the playground. But, that’s not true. We’re protecting the law. So, when Mr. Black was arrested for this, I could understand how a white – if I were a white lawyer in the western part of the state, I wouldn’t have taken that case because people will say well you know how David feels about the Klan now because he’s representing that sheet wearing guy from Pittsburgh. But, that wasn’t gonna be true with me. No one’s gonna assume that I’m a closet Klansmen or I have robe in the basement. By my representation we were able to show to th world this I a first amendment issue. It’s not a Klan issue. It’s not a cross burning issue. It is a first – I’m sorry, I apologize by the way. I cross burning.
If you ever meet someone and you wanna know if he’s a Klansman or not, say cross burning because a Klansman will say no no no. Burning is destruction, it’s a cross illumination.
Interviewer: Oh, wow. I didn’t know that.
David Baugh: Yes, I remember that. My client explained to me that there was not intent to destroy. It’s an intent to illuminate. So, if you say cross burning and someone says illumination, trust me there’s a robe in the basement.
Interviewer: Wow, did you ever find some of the attention that this case got problematic? Because I read somewhere that you had thought about dropping the case at a certain point because you thought it was just getting too much attention. This black white thing, but then you said that upon further reflection you realized it was helpful because any white attorney came and ended these guys as you said, would be seen as a Klan sympathizer.
David Baugh: yeah, they would see it – the public would see that lawyer as protecting the Klan, rather than protecting the first amendment and I think that was important for the public. We have a tendency – we as citizens, have a tendency not to understand or respect our constitution. It’s wasted. In fact, something I used to say also when when I was drinking too much, Americans do not have a sense of justice but they have a sense of injustice. And so, when you take a case and you remove the Klan emotion stuff and you put an African-American lawyer in there, then we go back to the issue of should anybody be allowed to say hateful things? And I’m not the first African-American lawyer to represent a member of the Klan and I’m also – my co-counsel on the Al Qaeda case in New York was Jewish. The skokee lawyers were Jewish.
Interviewer: And we just interviewed Glenn Greenwald who –
David Baugh: I’m in awe.
Interviewer: Yeah, well he’s appearing on the same episode with you and he spent the early part of his legal career defending neo-Nazis, a guy by the Matthew Hale despite the fact that Glenn has a Jewish background and is also gay.
David Baugh: In his defense, I must that say Glenn did not defend the neo-Nazi, he defended the American principle that says that in a true free society every idea has to be discussed if for no other reason than for saying that’s a stupid damn idea, we have to throw it away. But, we need to discuss every idea, even neo-Nazis because while we have a right to speak freely, that doesn’t mean we have a right not to be comfortable by the speech of others.
Good speech – people say things that make us uncomfortable. I say things that make people uncomfortable. Anything about the Washington Redskins. And that is my right and as long as I’m not resorting to – as long as there’s not a threat of imminent bodily injury or death, we have to encourage those sorts of ideas to be discussed. Part of being an American is the obligation to listen to language that makes you uncomfortable. If you’re going to be a citizen, if you’re going to speak freely, you have to be able to tolerate bad ideas.
In Brandenvurg versus Ohio, which was an earlier cross burning case where Elinor Homes Norton, excellent African-American lawyer from DC now the representative, defended the Klan in Brandenvurg versus Ohio and in that one the Klansmen were sanctioned and arrested for saying that blood will flow in the streets, and all this, and all this, and all this. And I mean it was really vicious and the Supreme Court came down in Brandenvurg versus Ohio and said look they can say it until the cows come home, but until somebody starts crossing the line and applying these – bringing these threats to fruition or getting them close to it, it has to be protected.
So, and there’s a lawyer name Griffith out of Galveston during the 60’s whom I’ve never met but I’ve read some of his stuff, he – in the 60’s the State of Texas issued subpoenas to the Klan for their membership lists and the Klan tried to find a lawyer and they couldn’t find one, so they went to the ACLU and this lawyer, Mr. Griffith, was the attorney who represented them – African-American from Galveston and ironically he won the case by using another case where in the early 60’s the State of Georgia had demanded the NAACP turn over their membership list and suing that NAACP defense case, he protected and prevailed on the Klan membership. So, see the principle applies to whatever side of the spectrum you’re on and that’s a classic example, the Galveston Klan case.
Interviewer: That guy sounds sort of like a free speech hero to you. Do you have any – as we finish up here, do you have any other free speech heroes?
David Baugh: Well, I have many of them. I have many of them you would never know.
Interviewer: And those are the people that I like to know about.
David Baugh: Well, I remember one thing – two things that struck me that really made my hat too small, they swelled my head. 1.) My father was a war hero. My father was a Tuskegee Airman fighter pilot and they were doing a photoshoot at a local school and –
Interviewer: For any of our listeners here who might not be familiar with Tuskegee Airman, can you just give a quick primer on them?
David Baugh: The Tuskegee Airman was an experiment in World War II where due to FDR down to Roosevelt, they decided to take African-Americans and make a black fighter squadron and the official position of the department of the war at that time was that black people where too ignorant and cowardly to engage in combat and for that reason most blacks were not allowed in the infantry. They were not allowed in any unit that had combat. They were also presumed to be too ignorant to know the complexities of military machines. Well, FDR under pressure from the black press established a black training unit and a black squadron. So, the 99th squadron where a group of African-American men who went to training in Tuskegee.
They succeeded. They became combat pilots. They went to World War II. They had an enviable record. When it comes to – for many years it was thought they never lost a bomber to enemy aircraft fire because they were so dedicated and they stayed so close to it. And I’ve met some of them and they had some wonderful stories and he was – in fact, of the 20 men in his class, my father’s class, four became pilots. The washout – the rigors were unbelievable, so he was sent over to Europe. At that time, you had to fly 50 combat missions before you could be rotated in the fighter pilot, 25 for the bomber pilot.
Well, because the experiment on the Tuskegee airman was expected to fail, there weren’t enough men in the pipeline, so my father’s – he flew 135 mission because they just weren’t there and they had – and then after he rotated the back, the 99th squadron was so successful it was later expanded to the 99th, 100th, 301st, 302nd, and it became the 332nd fighter wing which is larger and it fought through to the end of the war. But, interestingly they were over there and they were fighting however, when they got on the ships to come home a couple of them talked about when the shipped docked at Fort Dix in New Jersey – when they got off the ship – they’re war heroes and they go on the [inaudible] [00:26:58] and there’s a sign that says colored troops to the right, white troops to the left.
Interviewer: Wow.
David Baugh: So, anyway he was – and so they were talking to him and they said well Colonel Baugh, did you ever think when you were over in a war getting shot at that you’d be recognized as a protector of freedom in a segregated country? My father said, no I just shot at people who shot at me. My son, the lawyer, does more to protect freedom in a day than I did in my career.
Interviewer: Wow, that’s quite the endorsement.
David Baugh: And then another time I was pumping gas on a cold night in Richmond, Virginia and I was pumping gas. This young man came by and he was in a chef coat and he had his girlfriend and I’m sitting there pumping gas and he said, “You that lawyer defending the Klansman.” And I said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna get into a constitutional discussion.” I said, “[inaudible] [00:27:54].” And so he told me that he admired me and his girlfriend or wife said, “Why would you do that?” And this gentleman said, “No, you don’t understand what Mr. Baugh does. This case is just like his car; it’s just another ride to work. That’s what he does. That’s what he supposed to do.”
And I’ll also say this, that usually it’s those scary things that are the right thing to do. Although, this was not scary. It was interesting. It was interesting that I knew that my client – he and I were never gonna be friends and I didn’t want to be his friend. I just want to save him and one of the reasons we turned out – we were getting calls from television shows. They want us to appear on stage together and I turned them all down for two responses. 1.) Whenever your lawyer puts on the news, it’s for the benefit of the lawyer not the client. And 2.) I told them that you want us to get together under the chance that maybe he’ll have some epiphany and think I’m wrong and we’re gonna have some great kumbaya moment and take a warm shower and it’s gonna be a Miss Daisy thing.
And that’s not what this case is about. It’s not about us liking each other. It’s not about my sharing his views or turning him over. He has – not only does he have a right to say these things. He has a right to be a bigot and it’s my job to protect his right to be a bigot. So, no we’re not – I mean we were getting – my answering service was so impressive. They were calling me and telling me who was calling. Oh, I remember I have a place up in the in the country where I go up and hide out and the London Times called and they wanted to send a reporter to interview me. And I said, well that’s nice guys but I’m not being here. I’m going up to the country and hide out and they asked for the address and they sent a reporter to just outside Charlottesville to my cabin and she got lost and she showed up at the cabin.
I ended up making her lunch and she interviewed me for one of the London papers. So, I remember having a conversation with an Irish lawyer. I remember talking about how the Irish never had anything in the cuisine that I would want to eat and we had a nice discussion about fried Mars bars. It was a – I had no idea that it was going to jump into the media the way it did.
Interviewer: Yeah, well David, I think that’s all the time that we have left.
David Baugh: I’m sorry to be so windy.
Interviewer: No, that’s what we love. We love the stories behind these cases and it sounds like you’ve got some incredible ones and hopefully we’ll be able to bring you back at some point to discuss some of those other first amendment cases or free speech cases.
David Baugh: Everybody has incredible stories. You just have to – every day you have an opportunity to be a hero. Everybody does. Question is how do you take it?
Interviewer: Well, we’ll do our best over here at fire, David and you continue to do the great work that you’re doing and thank you so much for coming on the show.
David Baugh: Thank you, it was very hospitable. Thank you.
Interviewer: Thank you.
David Baugh: Good day.
Interviewer: Good Day to you.
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Energy and Resources Obama won’t rush Keystone decision, White House says
Obama won’t rush Keystone decision, White House says
Protesters rally against the Keystone XL oil pipeline as U.S. President Barack Obama's motorcade arrives at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, July 11, 2013.
Yuri Gripas/REUTERS
Barrie McKenna Economics Reporter
Published February 2, 2014 Updated May 11, 2018
Barack Obama is refusing to give Ottawa the quick answer it wants on the Keystone XL pipeline in spite of a State Department report that dispels the U.S. President's main climate-change fears.
The White House said Sunday it will wait at least another 90 days to make a final decision as it awaits vital input from other government departments and agencies, raising the possibility that the U.S. President may avoid a decision on the controversial project until after the November U.S. midterm elections for fear of alienating Democratic voters.
On Friday, the U.S. State Department answered Mr. Obama's main concerns about climate change by concluding that the TransCanada Corp. pipeline would not significantly boost greenhouse gas emissions or Canadian oil sands output.
But White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, Mr. Obama's top adviser, insisted the President is still looking for more guidance and won't be rushed into a quick decision. Keystone XL would carry 830,000 barrels a day of diluted bitumen from Alberta's oil sands and light oil from North Dakota's Bakken fields to the massive refining complex on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Western oil producers are eager for expanded pipeline capacity to access new markets and avoid bottlenecks in the U.S. Midwest, but there has been significant opposition from environmentalists.
"The Friday report is an important input into the process. We'll hear from other cabinet secretaries," Mr. McDonough told NBC's Meet the Press.
"We have one department with a study. Now we have other expert agencies … The president wants to make his decision based on the most sound science," said Mr. McDonough.
Asked about the risk of a decision stretching beyond the election, Canada's Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver borrowed a hockey analogy, telling CTV's Question Period that he hoped Mr. Obama won't "rag the puck."
In an e-mailed statement, Mr. Oliver acknowledged the decision is political and not tied to the findings of any one report. "I think everyone understands that it's the President who is going to decide on this, irrespective of the process," Mr. Oliver said.
Nonetheless, he said Ottawa expects "an expeditious decision."
During a recent visit to Washington, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird was even blunter about what Canada wants. "The time for a decision on Keystone is now, even if it's not the right one. We can't continue in this state of limbo," he said.
The release of Friday's report triggers a 90-day review period in which other U.S. departments and agencies can weigh in on various issues, including environmental effects, energy security and the economy. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has no firm deadline for making a final recommendation to Mr. Obama on whether the project is in the U.S. national interest.
Mr. McDonough hinted at those other issues, pointing out that the U.S. is quickly becoming energy self-sufficient and expressed concerns about climate change's role in the continuing California drought.
Some industry analysts worry a final decision on Keystone might now be delayed until after the U.S. mid-term elections in November, leaving the issue in the hands of Mr. Obama's successor.
"A final decision isn't expected until this summer and could well occur after November's congressional election," Kevin Hebner of JP Morgan Chase Bank in New York said Sunday in a research note.
Meanwhile, a leading pipeline opponent said the State Department report is tainted by a conflict of interest. Tom Steyer, a billionaire Democratic Party donor, urged Mr. Kerry to conduct an independent review of the "defective" Jan. 30 environmental report on the pipeline.
The final environmental impact statement on Keystone "has suffered from a process that raises serious questions about the integrity of the document," Mr. Steyer wrote to Mr. Kerry in a letter, according to Bloomberg News.
Mr. Steyer is the former chief executive officerof the hedge fund Farallon Capital Management LLC and a major donor to Mr. Obama, who is being pressed by Democratic donors to reject the pipeline amid more signs it is headed for approval. TransCanadaCorp.'s pipeline would carry Canadian oil sands crude to U.S. refineries in Texas.
Mr. Steyer said the impact statement is flawed because a TransCanada contractor, Environmental Resources Management, was hired to write the report. The company made "problematic representations" in conflict of interest disclosures about its oil industry ties, the letter claimed. "It is critical that an independent and transparent review … commence immediately," wrote Mr. Steyer, founder of the NextGen Climate Action.
A TransCanada official was not immediately available for comment.
Harper to increase pressure on Obama for Keystone approval
Keystone decision feels like Alice in Wonderland experience Subscriber content
Conservatives counter U.S. critics with pro-Keystone ad
Jan. 20: Neil Young replies to the Globe's pipeline column
Pipeline politics far from over
Harper to appear in anti-Keystone ad during Obama’s primetime speech
U.S. Republicans turn up pressure on Obama over Keystone
Even a ‘no’ on Keystone pipeline is better than silence: Baird
Kerry refuses to be forced into early Keystone XL decision
Southern leg of Keystone XL opens in U.S.
Follow Barrie McKenna on Twitter @barriemckenna
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Change Generation
Workplace Relations Commission
Solas ordered to pay €20,000 to a 60-year-old worker asked if he should 'take it easy'
The state training body has carried out research on difficulties facing older people.
By Fora Staff Thursday 25 Jan 2018, 7:46 PM
Jan 25th 2018, 6:27 PM 35,892 Views 39 Comments
http://jrnl.ie/3817424
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Image: Solas/Youtube
STATE TRAINING BODY Solas has been ordered to pay €20,000 to a worker after the agency was found to have discriminated against the man.
The Solas employee, Dave Barry, took a case to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) after he was asked in an interview if he should be “taking it easier”.
Barry had more than 20 years experience working as an instructor in information technology. In April 2014, he applied for the position of assistant manager in the Limerick Training Centre.
The centre is now run by the Limerick and Clare Education and Training Board but was run by Solas at the time.
Barry, who was 60 at the time of the interview, said that he was asked: “Do you think at this stage that you should be taking it easier?”
He said that, while he answered, the question deflated him. He interpreted it as a reference to his age and that the interview panel thought that he should be not be going for promotion five years before his compulsory retirement age.
The job eventually went to someone who was aged 38 at the time and who was the youngest candidate.
Not credible
In its submission to the WRC, Solas denied that the question was asked. It claimed that Barry was asked: “What motivates you to take on this role at this stage in your career?”
It claimed he was asked this because Barry “was not portraying his previous experience to his advantage at the interview”.
The WRC found Barry to be a “compelling witness” and “fully accepted his evidence that the question was asked in the way he suggests”.
“Unlike the respondent his memory of what was asked never deviated.”
The equality officer said Barry had lots of experience doing different types of interviews, and so it was hard to believe that he was not performing well at the interview.
She said that, as a result of this conclusion, she found the reason the question was supposedly asked to be “less than credible”.
“Therefore I find that the question – ‘Do you think at this stage you should be taking things easier?’ – in the context of an interview for a promotion is a discriminatory question on the ground of age,” the equality officer said.
“I can also easily understand how it would deflate the complainant for the rest of the interview.”
She also noted that Solas have conducted research that shows being older is one of the barriers towards participating in further education.
“Therefore they should be even more conscious of avoiding age-discriminatory practices with their own employees,” she said.
She added: “I find that the respondent has discriminated against the complainant regarding access to promotion.”
Solas was ordered to pay Barry €20,000 in compensation for breaches of the Employment Equality Acts.
The State body was also told to “conduct a review of its policies and procedures in relation to its employment policies to ensure that they are in compliance with these Acts”.
A spokeswoman for Solas said that the organisation accepts all the findings of the WRC.
“We take it very seriously and we are working our way through the recommendations,” she said.
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Written by Paul O’Donoghue and posted on Fora.ie
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Addiction, Guest Posts, Surviving
Everyday Objects
By Elsa Williams
It is the spoon I always hesitate before picking up. It’s mixed in with the rest of the mismatched flat wear in the drawer. But if I need a spoon for one of my daughters, something for applesauce or Ovaltine, I rummage a little longer to find a different one.
The spoon is Oyster Bay, a discontinued pattern popular in the 70s. It looks more or less indistinguishable from the rest of our old, scratched up flat wear. But for me, it has always had a double meaning. A wholesome meaning– cereal, ice cream, coffee – and a secret, forbidden meaning. Not just “drugs”, but heroin. Not just “doing” heroin, but injecting it.
The story starts with a different Oyster Bay spoon. Twenty four years ago, my friend Lila was holding up my roommate’s spoon and giving me a wicked grin.
I had invited Lila and a couple friends over for dinner. And I had asked her to please, please not say anything about drugs. I didn’t want to risk getting kicked out of my apartment, or even drawing too much attention to myself. The rule in the flat was that everyone stayed out of each other’s business, but one of my roommates had taken it on himself to forbid me to have any of my junky friends in the house. He was sullen and mean and seemed a little unhinged, and if he decided to make a stink with the landlord, he probably could have gotten me kicked out. But I wasn’t going to ban Lila from my apartment.
Lila had been my closest friend and my lifeline at school, the one person who understood me. When I got back to school that fall and found her consumed by heroin, I felt lost and abandoned. I was trying to find a way for us to still be friends.
I hadn’t understood what a wide zone there was between “experimenting” and full-blown addiction. Lila was chipping, doing heroin without a physical dependency, but that didn’t mean it would have been easy for her to quit. She was in love with heroin; it was the only thing she wanted to talk about.
Lila and our two friends were sitting around the rickety kitchen table while I tried to figure out how to make garlic bread in a toaster oven. Almost everything in the kitchen belonged to one or the other of my roommates, and I hadn’t thought much about the spoons, until Lila picked one up, and announced, “What a marvelous spoon. The bowl is so large. Think of how much it could hold.” Then she put it back down on the table and, vamping it up, leaned down to check how flat the bowl sat.
I winced, and tried not to egg her on.
Twenty one years ago, I was painting a picture of that spoon.
Lila had dropped out of school, and I felt unmoored. Lila always seemed to know what to do, even if it was a terrible idea. I decided I would take the same painting class she had. I went to talk to the instructor to see if she would let a biochemistry major like me into her class. I always got better grades in art classes, and they helped keep my GPA up. But I also wanted to do this thing that Lila cared about.
Feeling burned by Lila, the teacher asked me, “You’re not addicted to anything are you?”
I said, “I’m fine,” which wasn’t entirely true. Lila and I had started getting high together two months before she left. Now I was the one who was pining for heroin. It was seeping into everything, including all my painting assignments, a series of still lives that were supposed to be about the breakfast table: a spoon, a coffee cup, a small plate. The spoon was taking over.
I wasn’t a gifted artist like Lila, but unlike her, I showed up to class sober, and I did the work. I spent a lot of time studying the spoon from different angles, trying to capture every curve and reflection. The bowl had a teardrop shape. The handle had a fine line down the center and a little scallop on the bottom, like two very thin fingers had been pressed into the metal and drawn up its length. The handle was thick and solid, but the edge tapered into a thin graceful line around the bowl.
I thought I was being clever, hiding the secret meaning of the spoon, but it was obvious to everyone, including my painting teacher. One painting in particular had started out grey, but a little bit of yellow had turned it poison green. The spoon, bent by its reflection in the mug, dominated the picture.
The instructor sighed when she told me, “You obviously have some things you need to work through,” but she didn’t try to intervene. At the end of the class, she said, “When I first saw you, with your green hair and your leather jacket, I was worried. But you really put in the work.”
I moved out of that apartment before the end of the semester, and, as much as I wanted to take the spoon, I didn’t. I didn’t want to be a thief as well as a junky.
Twenty years ago, I was scrubbing the back of a different Oyster Bay spoon before my baby brother came over. This spoon belonged to my boyfriend Michael, from a small collection of things his mother had been able to give us for our apartment. I was in graduate school, and we were trying to make a home together, but drugs were taking over. I had been doing heroin off and on for three years, and I was trying very hard to keep everything from spiraling out of control. But I don’t think Michael could imagine himself surviving to 40, to 30, to 25. He would be dead from an overdose within 6 months.
I’d always been protective of my brother, and I didn’t want him to see any of that. I was cleaning the apartment from top to bottom, sweeping up piles of cigarette ash, and pulling orange syringe caps out from between the sofa cushions. And scrubbing the black scorch marks off the back of our spoons. The needle exchange gave out bottle caps to use as disposable cookers, and we should have been using those. But spoons had a certain old school glamour.
When I quit for good, a year after Michael died, I packed the drug spoons away, along with a scant couple boxes of Michael’s things. His mother wanted the flat wear back, and she wanted his leather jacket, and she wanted me to apologize for her son’s death. I was grappling with my own guilt and complicity, but I could not accept her conviction that everything was my fault. I never gave her the apology she needed, but eventually I gave her his leather jacket.
Fourteen years ago, I gave the drug spoons to Goodwill. I was sorting through my things, after moving in with the man who is now my husband. I wasn’t sure why I had held onto the spoons. It seemed like a dangerous kind of memento, sure to raise questions if my future mother-in-law found them, so carefully wrapped up with my most precious objects. But I pulled the Oyster Bay spoon out of the Goodwill pile. It was the one spoon that had other meanings: the quiet contemplation of the breakfast table, the careful observation of painting, the accumulation of little things that add up to making a home.
Sobriety has been a process of leaching the drug associations from everyday objects, including the veins in my arms. And I was hoping that even a former piece of drug paraphernalia could find a place in our silverware drawer.
Elsa Williams is a biomedical scientist living in Medford, Massachusetts with her husband and two children. She is working on a memoir about her early 20s and blogs about feminism and harm reduction at worn-smooth.tumblr.com.
Jen’s book ON BEING HUMAN is available for pre-order here.
Join Lidia Yuknavitch and Jen Pastiloff for their WRITING & THE BODY RETREAT. Portland April 5-7, 2019. Click the photo above.
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Skimpy bikinis have been a major component of marketing women's sports, raising some objections. In 2007, fans voted for contestants in the WWE Diva contest after watching them playing beach volleyball in skimpy bikinis. In the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Games, inclusion of bikini-clad athletes raised eyebrows, while a controversy broke out around bikini-clad cheerleaders performing at a beach volleyball match. Bikinis stirred up a controversy at the 2006 Asian Games at Doha, Qatar, and the Iraqi teams refused to wear such clothing. In the 2007 South Pacific Games, players were made to wear shorts and cropped sports tops instead of bikinis. In the West Asian Games 2006, bikini-bottoms were banned for female athletes, who were asked to wear long shorts. String bikinis and other skimpy clothes are also common in surfing, paving the way for some hooliganism in the past.
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21 All-Time Best Quotes by Charlie Munger
February 13, 2019 Kritesh Abhishek AceInvestors
Charlie Munger, 95, is a name that doesn’t require any introduction for those involved in the investing world. If you are new to investing, you might have heard Charlie as Warren Buffett’s right hand. However, even individually, Charlie Munger is considered as one the world’s wittiest investor.
Anyways, let me first introduce Charlie Munger to the newbies. Charlie Munger is an American investor, businessman and a self-made billionaire with the net worth of over $1.7 Billion (as of Feb 2019). He is the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate headed by Warren Buffett. And like Buffett, Charlie Munger is also an active philanthropist and has donated millions of his personal wealth for good causes.
Interesting, if you look into his background, Charlie Munger never took any course in investing, finance or economics while he was in university. During World War II, Charlie studied meteorology at Caltech to become an army meteorologist. Later, he earned a degree in law from Harvard Law School.
Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett met in 1959 during a dinner party and got along immediately. Although they knew each other for a very long time, however, they built their informal partnership by investing together only in the 1970s. Later in the 1980s, both started the present structure of Berkshire Hathaway and have been running in profitably ever since by building wealth for themselves and their investors. Here’s what Warren Buffett thinks of his business partner Charlie Munger:
“We’ve got an extremely good partnership and business is more fun — just as life is more fun — with a good personal partner and to have a great business partner. You know it’s just — we’ve accomplished more but we’ve also had way more fun.” -Warren Buffett
Charlie Munger’s wisdom is an asset for all the investing community. The knowledge and success that he has gained in the past many decades is quite inspirational. Therefore, in this post, we are going to highlight twenty-one evergreen quotes by Charlie Munger that every investor should know. Let’s get started.
Charlie Munger Quotes on investing wisdom
“People calculate too much and think too little.”
“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience — both vicarious and direct — on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and fail in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on Wealth Creation
“The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the waiting.”
“What are the secrets of success? -one word answer: ”rational”
“It takes the character to sit with all that cash and to do nothing. I didn’t get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.”
“To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.”
“All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on Importance of learning
“There isn’t a single formula. You need to know a lot about business and human nature and the numbers… It is unreasonable to expect that there is a magic system that will do it for you.”
“I paid no attention to the territorial boundaries of academic disciplines and I just grabbed all the big ideas that I could.”
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.”
Also read: 31 Hand-Picked Best Quotes on Investing: Buffett, Munger, Graham & More.
Charlie Munger Quotes on Circle of Competence:
“Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.”
“If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?”
“I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.”
“We have three baskets: in, out, and too tough. … We have to have a special insight, or we’ll put it in the “too tough” basket.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on life rules to live by
“Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.”
“Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets — and can be lost in a heartbeat.”
“Just because you like it does not mean that the world will necessarily give it to you.”
“Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand — you must learn to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds.”
“Take a simple idea, and take it seriously.”
Suggested Readings on Charlie Munger
Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition — Compiled by Peter D. Kaufman, CEO Peter Kaufman, Poor Charlie’s Almanack is the greatest collection of Charlie Munger’s speeches and talks.
Charlie Munger: The 4 Steps of Investment
How to invest like… Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man
Warren Buffett’s partner Charlie Munger: Avoid these 5 things that ‘guarantee’ a life of misery
Charlie Munger’s Six Secrets to Winning Big in Investing
Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More
Kritesh Abhishek
Hi, I am Kritesh, an NSE Certified Equity Fundamental Analyst and an electrical engineer (NIT Warangal) by qualification. I have a passion for stocks and have spent my last 4+ years learning, investing and educating people about stock market investing. And so, I am delighted to share my learnings with you. #HappyInvesting
Tags:Charlie Munger quotes charlie munger quotes investing Charlie Munger quotes wisdom quotes by Charlie Munger
Rohit Kumar Verma says:
Very nice and learning tips for every investor, Thank you
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This Movie Is So Good It Hurts
Teresa Wiltz
Still of 12 Years a Slave (Francois Duhamel/Fox Searchlight Pictures)
(The Root) — You don't go to see 12 Years a Slave expecting a good time at the multiplex — the title alone is enough to disabuse anyone of that notion. No doubt about it, it's a hard, hard slog, disturbing and despairing, gnawing at the spirit long after the last credits have rolled off the screen.
You should see it anyway.
The filmmakers have said that 12 Years, which opens in limited release on Friday, is the first film to tackle slavery head on. And while that isn't technically true — Django Unchained, Glory and Lincoln are a few that come immediately to mind — this is, without question, the most visceral, you-are-there treatment of the subject that I've seen. Where Quentin Tarantino's Django was the ultimate revenge fantasy, all blood splatters and Grand Guignol theatrics, 12 Years seeps into the psyche. You can't watch it without getting caught up in feelings of fear and mounting dread.
An example: A slave is being punished. He's strung up to a tree and left there hanging for hours upon hours, balancing on the tips of his toes, the only things keeping him from a snapped neck. All around him, life goes on. The only sounds are a symphony of cicadas in the Southern heat — and the man's grunts as he struggles to keep his feet on the ground.
You can't shake this off.
Directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years is based on the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black New Yorker who was drugged, kidnapped and sold into captivity in 1841. As the title suggests, Northup labored on plantations for 12 years before he finally won back his freedom. He was one of the lucky ones, living to write about his experiences years later. That memoir is the basis of this film. The realness of Northup's story lends the film a sense of urgency.
It's interesting that many of the people involved in the making of this very American story aren't Americans: McQueen is a black Brit of West Indian parentage; Ejiofor is Anglo-Nigerian; Michael Fassbender, who plays the deranged slaver Epps, is German-Irish; and Lupita Nyong'o, who plays Patsey, the unwilling object of Epps' sexual obsession, is Mexican by way of Kenya.
Perhaps it takes an outsider to truly take on this topic. But then again, Colonial-era chattel slavery had international reach — and still has impact today. And as the film demonstrates, slavery infected everyone who participated in that "peculiar institution," from the enslaved, who had no say in their own lives, to the slave owners who mortgaged themselves to the hilt so that they could own other human beings.
After Solomon is put in chains, beaten and shoved onto a boat heading for a Louisiana slave market, he quickly learns that all it takes is one false move, or one brave one, to end up dead. You protest mistreatment — yours or others — at your peril.
"If you want to survive," another enslaved "freeman" tells him, "Tell no one who you really are. And don't tell anyone you can read or write — unless you want to be a dead nigger."
"I don't want to survive," Solomon tells him. "I want to live."
That desire to live drives Solomon as he's transported to a strange new world, a lushly beautiful one filled with malevolence, where people do what they can to get by amid all kinds of horror. There's Eliza (Pariah's Adepero Aduye), whose children were sold away from her, and so, all she does is cry 24-7, sobbing loudly for all to hear and signaling her distress, much to her mistress's disgust. But her emotions are the only thing that Eliza can control. Then there's Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodard), a savvy slave at a neighboring plantation who learned early on that the way to a slaver's heart was through his crotch.
In this unsettling world, there are moments of kindness, but the kindness can be capricious, changing in an instant. Take Ford, the seemingly good-hearted slave owner (Benedict Cumberbatch of Sherlock), who sells Solomon to a much meaner master.
"You're an exceptional nigger," Ford tells Solomon, "but I fear no good will come of it."
McQueen is a director who's not afraid to go there. His 2001 film, Shame, also starring Fassbender, was a disturbing look at the despair undergirding one man's addiction to sex. In McQueen's hands, Solomon Northup is a fully fleshed-out person — not a hero, but an ordinary man trying to survive under truly extraordinary circumstances. The tools in McQueen's arsenal: extreme close-ups, silent images of black men wearing muzzles, scarred backs and faces and missing limbs, interspersed with hazy flashbacks to Solomon's previously prosperous life with his wife and family, where white people called him "Mr. Northup" rather than "nigger."
There are times here when the cruelty the slaves encounter seems way over the top, beyond reality, particularly once Solomon ends up on Epps' plantation and the crazy really kicks in. It's a lot of a lot.
Despite the excessive violence, though, there is an air of restraint to 12 Years. Much of this is thanks to Ejiofor, who acquits himself admirably in the role of a lifetime. All of the performers — from newcomer Nyong'o and Woodard to Paul Giamatti as a greedy slave trader and Brad Pitt (who produced 12 Years) as the lone abolitionist — are uniformly stellar. But this is Ejiofor's movie.
Late in the film, Solomon, who'd always held himself slightly aloof from those who were born into slavery, stands by a makeshift grave. A slave has dropped dead on the job, right there in the cotton fields, and there's just enough time to dig a hole and sing a song before sending him on to glory. A woman belts out, "Roll, Jordan, Roll," and the others join in. Solomon stands silently at first, resisting. And then the camera homes in tight on his face as he surrenders. His face contorts, his mouth opens and he sings — a man desperately trying to find some peace in hell.
Teresa Wiltz is a journalist based in Washington, D.C.
Teresa Wiltz is senior staff writer at Stateline, the journalism outlet of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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The next day, I attended an event sponsored by Winthrop’s student vets and I learned of a non-profit organization based in Columbia called the Hidden Wounds Foundation. It serves as a safety net for returning veterans who need services from the Veterans Administration but are waiting to receive them.
Hidden Wounds recognizes the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder among vets and provides help to those who are struggling. (Did you know once every hour a vet takes his or her own life?) The organization’s work providing post-service treatment and help with adjustment to civilian life is clearly saving lives and deserves more attention.
Our student vets presented a generous donation to Hidden Wounds and read the names of the N.C. and S.C. casualties of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, now called Operation New Dawn. It was truly poignant. The names were read as willow oak leaves swirled about, falling from a nearby tree. How difficult it must have been for those veterans to offer that roll call to all of us in attendance.
What struck me the most over the course of these activities is that the educational community has a true obligation to serve these students well. And we start by listening to them, really listening to them. Then by asking them what we need to do better, how we can help them and what they need to succeed.
That’s what we did at Winthrop, and that’s why we now have a student veterans organization, the veterans center and a core group of student veterans who have begun to feel not like outsiders in the student ranks but fully engaged and appreciated for the perspective and life experience with which they enrich our campus community.
With another Veterans Day now behind us, it would be tempting to set these initiatives aside until next year. But there are more than 2 million service members and their families who are eligible for benefits under the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008. All of them deserve the opportunity to fully benefit from a college education and career preparation. When they succeed, we all benefit from a better educated workforce and a more globally competitive economy.
At Winthrop, we are proud of what we’ve done, but we can and should continue to advance our student veteran services. As part of our campus visioning process, we are re-evaluating credit for military education and experience and have plans to better track student veterans’ admission, retention, academic performance and graduation rates.
We know what we measure we can improve, and in so doing, we can make an even greater impact on the student veterans we serve. Serving their individual needs and the greater workforce-development needs of our state will continue to be a priority for us.
Our commitment goes beyond being patriotic. It’s about doing what is right — for all of us.
Dr. Comstock is president of Winthrop University; contact her at president@winthrop.edu or read her blog at blogs.winthrop.
edu/president/.
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Shaw Air Force Base mourning third airman death in two weeks
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